wrapped in a blanket with zombies

dinah is out with school friends digging the halloween pub vibe...

i've been finishing off an experimental film i started a couple of weeks ago which i'm really happy with...

in fact, here it is (if i can):

last night floopy was round and we smoked and played cards until quite late, as usual the smoke got my head rotating and i couldn't sleep, loads of ideas for the film, for today's lesson...

so in the end i got between 1 & 3 hours sleep, i taught well, but in a meeting afterwards i was pretty dead, bumped into lovely M on the way back, he teaches in an amazing building i've been watching being built on my way into work these last few months...

so all afternoon i was editing, titling,

then i watched sigar ros on virgin central, the last day to catch it as the month brings different free tv things,

at one point a brass band wanders through the concert, it was lovely and it made me cry, lack of sleep partly to do with that...

so earlier on, after dinah had left and my film was rendering, i found "dawn of the dead 78" in instalments on dailymotion, so i watched a few instalments, shifted over to the sofa for the last part of dead set which was daftly gory but still very good i thought... 00's zombies who can run...

now i'm back with the 70's zombies, waiting for dinah to come home and for my film to be embeddable...

x

slightly teo

Yr3wk19 hammond, bass & drums
Uploaded by longcathadroncollider

slightly teo because for the 1st time ever in the weekly improvisation i took several bits and glued them together,

like teo macero used to do on miles davis's albums... also he died in february and it's nice to name check him...

this was recorded last thursday but it took until now to get it together... partly because i did a gig on saturday... with the spanner jazz punks... which was great, dinah came and she was invited onto the stage by the magician to great success...

we just had a skype conversation with spski... out there... but actually quite appropriate for him, we were visual but he wasn't...

and then telly...

on E4 every night this week they're showing a 5 part horror/big brother thing created by charlie brooker, he of biting tv review fame... and it's really great, instead of the credits at the end of each episode it just says deadsetcredits.com, it's outrageously cool, davina mccall is a zombie in it...

so that's great (dinah not so keen) and i'm also watching newsroom from the beginning of series 1, (always a good place to start), it's canadian, good so far x

home again

a little while ago, dinah changed the sheets on the bed as she does each week, and balthazara chose those freshly cleaned sheets on the bed to vomit on...

so she's been banned from the bedroom, except at night when we're in there...

and it's been breaking my heart...

that bedroom and that cat belong together...

then yesterday dinah agreed that if i was to deal with all aspects of a possible future balthazara vomit in the bedroom scenario then she could go back to unaccompanied access to the bedroom...

contented cat x

Yr3wk18 piano, voice, harmonium

Yr3wk18 piano, voice, harmonium
Uploaded by longcathadroncollider

x

primordial soup

there was a drier in the bedroom, various bits of laundry, cushion covers, underwear, the like...

it's one of these standing up ones, that get thinner as you pull them out, the same kind of mechanism to those cartoon extend-a-hands...

anyway i woke up holding on to it, as if it were the answer... i think that if i'd put it down while i was still asleep it would have remained standing, but being as i woke up as i was holding it it all went wrong and i got back into bed with it lying awkwardly on the floor...

i've been reading a copy of scientific american that floopy & T found when they were moving and assumed it was mine (it wasn't, but it is now), and it's concerned with theories of the early universe...

the words primordial soup came up, and now i'm writing a tune based on a cycle of 5ths going up to exactly the point where another cycle of 4ths will bring it back down to the same place...

this on the rhodes, i'm going to add harmonium & voice later...

it's primordial, and currently quite soupy...

i've got a tin of lentil soup in the cupboard and you know what, i'm going to primordially eat/drink it...

x

dawn project

floopy was round last night, he of mental driving from london to oxford on friday night, oxford to liverpool saturday, liverpool to shrewsbury to london yesterday...

we played a bit of death match then some cards, smoked a bit...

he got in a cab around 4am and i was typically too mentally active to sleep, i played love is lies on later with jools holland (with horns) in my head, always a good creative space for arrangement/composition...

then i realised i wanted to see the world, check out the dawn project and the green man... sadly the sun was a bit misty when it finally got going this morning so not a perfect experiment... but great to be out there, i miss the dawn project, that time for myself in the disused railway, taking video of whatever i fancy...

i was cycling to work on thursday, along the canal and i didn't have a whole lot of time to get there but it was just such a killer day, how could i not stop and take pictures/video?

x

love was lies

i realise that i'm quite affected by the autumn, a mild depression has been around me for a week or so...

and then yesterday morning i suddenly wanted to sing "love is lies" the desperately sad song i wrote over 4 years ago about the situation between me & E, long since over and in fact i haven't set eyes on her for at least a year, if not 2 or 3 years now...

so i had that lovely thing happen where i can remember some of the music/lyrics and i sing what i know, then gradually the whole song comes out of my memory - bit by bit...

i've been singing it for two days and in fact i'm evolving the arrangement of it also, this is because i'm thinking of an album and i'm putting this song into the album - i think...

it's a good day to do it because i'm doing all kinds of crazy things inside my computer so it's good to leave it alone while it thinks...



i'm currently moving all of "berger" (all of my hard drives are named after writers) over to "cortazar", from one 500Gb drive to another 500Gb drive...

once this is done i'm going to convert "berger"'s file system from FAT32 to NTFS - this will mean i can have files that are over 4Gb, something that i tend to have these days what with videos floating about, until now i haven't been able to move such massive video files over to "berger" and i didn't know why...

i'm hoping that once "berger" is NTFS - as "cortazar" is - i'll be able to plug them both in through the eSATA PCI card that came with "berger", currently "cortazar" is not connected by eSATA - it's connected with USB2, which is much slower...

of course making "berger" NTFS might mean the eSATA PCI can't see it either which would mean i'd have to convert "cortazar" to FAT32 as well to make it work with the eSATA card, although eSATA PCI cards can't be too expensive, maybe i should just get another one...

anyway, techyness aside, the other news is that floopy & T have left their house over near seven sisters, they've got a place closer to us which becomes avilable in 3 weeks and in the mean time floopy has got himself a workspace up in enfield where all their stuff now is, cleo (hunka munka) has gone up to liverpool to be with dinah's sister F, T is going to spend the 3 weeks in wales and floopy will be sleeping over @ spski's probably, while working in enfield...

once they're in the new place floopy will continue working in enfield and there are even plans beyond the new place, but they're not certain...

i spent wednesday last week helping floopy move stuff up to enfield and spski did the same on thursday & friday...

it's a mental time and i'm almost jealous of the change - strange but there you have it...

jai shri krishna improvisations galore

Yr3wk17 rhodes & sax with Dan Spanner
Uploaded by longcathadroncollider

well, it's been awhile seen i posted my improvisations, so these 3 videos are the last 3 week's improvisations, i was going to wait until dailymotion had sorted out them out but for some reason they haven't yet dealt with the 1st 2, but they sorted out the 3rd one (this week's),

probably because the following 2 are both over 20 minutes long, so maybe it's a different department who does them, i wonder if they will ever sort them out? anyway here they are:





i went into jai shri krishna yesterday, after having seen it existed when me & dinah were on the top deck of a bus going out for for a meal and drinks the night we'd been kissing for 3 years (also the day i did the 1st of these 3 improvisations - the one at the bottom)... it's in turnpike lane and it makes me so happy it's there, the original jai being just too far to get to from here...

the food was good, not exactly like jai's but close and fair enough, it's got to have it's own identity...

anyway, laters... x

no improvisation but science

it's been a funny week for the improvisations, very synthy...

last thursday i recorded last week's improvisation, i lost a day or so through that LAME mp3 mess that was inflicted on me, then then finally it was ready to upload on sunday, standard fair really, i've fallen into doing the improv on sunday fairly frequently recently...

the video was/is 24 minutes long, i uploaded it to dailymotion, who have a 20 minute limit, unless you specify that it's creative content, in which case someone has to check that it is, and then you can publish it...

well i didn't realise this at the time, i was just confused that i couldn't put it anywhere even though it was up there, also i'd uploaded it to googlevideo and they'd just lost it, it didn't show up anywhere in their system, so i thought, forget googlevideo, this is why i'm moving over to dailymotion anyway...

but after a few days of dailymotion not confirming my video (i think they take anything between 3 & 6 days - that's a guess), i decided to upload it again to googlevideo - who magically found the 1st one i uploaded, so that's now adorning my myspace and longcat.net, but i think i'll wait until the dailymotion one is done before i put it up here... dailymotion will be the better quality of the two...

so yesterday i did this week's improvisation, partly spurred on by the thought of losing the NORD synth, and partly consciously doing it early in the week to give dailymotion more time to sort themselves out so i can publish it by sunday,

and this one (rendering now) is 22 minutes long, over the dailymotion limit so the same thing will happen with this...

i'll start uploading it tonight and dailymotion will hopefully get it through before sunday...

in general, what with my working week being so empty at the start of the week it does make sense to do it this way,

the new...

rehearsed again with spanner jazz punks last night, it could well be great with them... gigging in some kind of circus cabaret with them on the 25th of october

x