yr3wk32 with john sinclair

yr3wk32 with john sinclair from longcat on Vimeo.

recorded on wednesday, the day after the inauguration of barack obama, the day after the crazy gigs @ cafe oto...

i also recorded his voice for the lullabye project, slightly tricky as it's a very effective lullabye and he'd been gigging for a couple of days,

listening to my lullabye in his ears he found it hard to stay awake... we found a way round it...

EQ, old, old friend who hasn't been in my life for a few years came round to record on the lullabye too yesterday, i want to get josiah on it too, and dinah.. redo my bit...

it'll be in baby spanner's ears in a week or so...

gigging tonight with the spanner jazz punks (different spanner) in crouch end... cut down version of the band...

then EL & maybe JPW coming tomorrow for next week's improvisation, slightly early...

what a nuts week, starting last sunday i was improvising, gigging, improvising, recording, now gigging, improvising once more...

it's a good way to live one's life...

x

no drugs

part 2 of the john sinclair extravaganza in dalston...

it was a crazy night... i took down my moog but didn't really do it justice... a little bit of playing but it was mainly piano...

john coming round tomorrow for an improvisation, possibly EL coming on friday for an improv as well (which would be next week's one), along with old, old acquaintance E maybe coming round to record on the lullabye for brand new baby spanner x

in the taxi with john & JPW (bass - twice part of the improvisation) i realised i really wanted to smoke drugs, mainly to do with the adrenalin of the gig, so i got in, knowing i have some, somewhere, but i'm so not addicted to such things that it's been weeks since i last saw the stuff and i couldn't for the life of me find it...

so no drugs for me i'm afraid...

dinah had a little wine for me, that took the edge off...

and no doubt some time when i really need it those smokables will come running to the rescue...

glad to play with these musicians these last couple of days...

and john sinclair is simply marvellous x

ok go big brother MC5 John Sinclair

that made me ludicrously happy...

i so love that video anyway, and i was very impressed that they got it right (enough)...

also because felinity introduced that video to me (i think) and she is my favourite person (who isn't my girlfriend) who watches big brother...

i'm deep in the manual cutting up of improvisations...

in the alphabet, A through to O represent either 4 or 8 clips (104 in all), i'm just starting F...

(C, D, E & F are the only 4 ones, all the others are 8)

it's proper mental...

me & my beautiful girl went to the RFH last night to see the MC5, Primal Scream & John Sinclair...

our favourite bit was at the end where both bands came on together and it really kicked off... then a few tunes in our friend john walked on, bearded as ever... read "What is Jazz?" to a partly bemused audience and walked off again...

it was genius...

D & N, old friends who currently manage john got us the tickets and also got us backstage afterwords, i spoke with wayne from the MC5... also met a saxophonist from funkadelic who i hope to get into an improvisation in august...

it was quite a night...

x

great telly & sketchup

so many things happened today, J came round and painted the living room ceiling, i finished one round of marking and dropped it off, dinah finished her last bit of coursework and dropped it off, i dropped off my bike at the menders, to be picked up tomorrow,

i bumped into N & his lovely daughter C, popped over to his to see john, (the only name in this place), toyed with the idea of doing this week's improvisation with him but decided against it later, a little too soon since the last one...

walked back to here and got distracted on the old railway line, the one that is a school, many estates, allotments... found a path i'd seen on google earth, leading to a green space just the other side of the bridge from that school by downhills park...

kind of strange and not as far away from the world as it could be but nice enough...

then home and i watched the last 2 episodes of the wire series 1 which was genius...

chilled a tiny bit with J then me & dinah hung out, eventually watching fargo, then the last episode of madmen series 1 both of which were also genius...

and finally sketchup which i've had for a little while but never really looked at, i caught sight of a sketchup file somewhere and opened it up... some nonsense i'd very roughly done the 1st time i used it...

so i've been using it, the 2nd time now, and it's great... i'm building something, like a house, quite burroughsesque... a building in his city of the dead is probably what it is... that place he describes in my education - a book of dreams...

x

ubuntu working

so finally, i think i've cracked it, thanks to this piece of advice, i'm currently in the new computer (still XP) which is getting internet from the old computer running ubuntu...

windows is a little stupid sometimes, after i had made it work, but before i'd rebooted my new computer (which is what makes it work here) my googlemail notifier in my new computer worked... but firefox didn't...

anyway it all works now, just have to sort out the soundcard in ubuntu, then once i can capture video like i can in vegas (which is one of the more important functions of the old computer - apart from networking)... maybe i'll kiss XP goodbye on that computer...

but how sad that sounds... it will make me much happier to say... i'm kissing goodbye to XP altogether... but for now cubase & vegas in XP rule my life...

in other news a lovely ex-student of mine had a look at the 100th and was surprised to see john sinclair there, the same weekend that he met john, (being today)... i'm not sure what the connection is but these people in my past life who turn up in strange places in my current life... it's great...

the wire continues to be great, i've got 5 series to get through in all and i just hope they're all as good as this 1st one...

x

reading in bed

waking up slowly, being brought tea by one's lover, reaching for the book that you've almost finished, lying in bed in that languor finishing that book...

one of life's pleasures...

i dropped off cities of the red night to john who is in the bunker and now i'm home preparing to meet the boys (M&O) for some song writing x

PS - writing this from ubuntu - although no solution just yet

the wire

it's all about american tv sometimes...

there's an actor in the 1st series of the wire who i think is the same actor who played a poetic sniper on a roof in the 1st series of kill point that i watched recently...

the wire is the better of the two programs... both of which were given to me by virgin media, although they only gave me the 1st episode of the wire, i'm watching the rest through other means...

it's really good... HBO know what they're up to...

i'm also nearing the end of cities of the red night that i'm reading before lending to john sinclair... i was hoping to finish it on the train home from work tonight but it's not quite all done yet... great writing...

oh and ubuntu, last night in amongst many attempts i got the system to work, internet sharing on our little network...

this morning it didn't work... have to work out what it was that i did right... once it's working i can spend a bit more time in ubuntu, for now, every minute i'm on it dinah can't have the internet and that's no good, but once that side works i can be in it all i like...

x

the improvisations

so, on the occasion of the 100th weekly improvisation i guess i want to say what it does for me...

and also what it doesn't do for me, for now, and that is make me any money, you never know, one day i may make a little something from it, D, who is currently managing john sinclair in england asked if i had a donations button on my website, "what if someone wanted to give you £1000? you should make it easy for them to do so"...

also i've been meaning for a year or so now to setup the buying(/selling) of mp3's of the improvisations on longcat.net, not that i know anyone would buy any but i think it's worth making it available, that cd is still for sale, (probably always will be) and i've sold exactly zero of them... partly through not promoting it enough and partly because the beauty of the improvisations... one of the beauty's... is that it's free...

just me doing what i do offering it to the world, take it or leave it...

so let's just talk a little about what it does...

every week i improvise... for my creativity this is great, even if what i do is often in a certain mode/mood and i don't always stretch myself, just playing, creating that space around me to play each week, this is beautiful...

every week i'm on camera... in terms of a future playing music for money it can't be bad to get more familiar and relaxed being in front of a camera...

every week i record and produce the music... my production skills have improved no end through this experience and will no doubt improve in fits and starts as long as i carry on... i'm no recording genius but i'm slowly learning how to get the sound i want...

every week i film and edit video... very similar point to the sound production, my editing has improved and will continue to improve... routinely doing something each week is a great discipline...

and following on from both those points the improvisation has encouraged me to invest in better stuff, my soundcard being the best example, camera's i'm still using the original camera i bought for myself back in april '05, along with the camera i got for christmas from dad and floopy's camera on loan on occasion, so no investment there yet but it could happen...

the improvisation encourages experimentation with instruments... kind of similar to the stuff point... but the space i give myself to fail, that i post whatever falls within the improvisation each week, not all of which is absolutely gold... in a way this means i can be more relaxed about delivering a perfect performance and take the odd risk in instrumentation as well as in harmony... not that i do this often but it's in there...

i seek out musicians to play with, this improvisation with john was the 16th collaborative from the 48 i've done in the 2nd year - so 1 in 3 since i decided to play with others... i'm playing soon (i hope) with a guitarist i met through a room booking dispute (well, no dispute really, it was his room i was just using it)...

i find it hard to quantify what it means for anyone else, i get comments over on deoxy every now and again and sometimes on my myspace blog where some people find the improvisations, also the odd individual in my life will mention it to me, mostly complimentary, not always...

i can see how many people have viewed each video and this is something, even if it's just a furtive obsession with numbers, as of now this improvisation (week 5, all that time ago) has been watched the most on googlevideo with 1749 views, a modest amount given almost 2 years of availability... i'm still amazed though that this improvisation, just a week later but on the more volatile youtube has so far been watched 13,599 times... that strange popularity the reason i got that cd out there for sale... sadly those youtubers don't like to spend money...

a growing body of work can't be argued with either... 100 weeks and i don't know how many hours... all still available to watch... 32 of them were watched yesterday...

the improvisation blanket and the random improvisation pages on my website i religiously update every week and they get very few hits... i'm fond of both of them, the random because it does what it says on the tin, and the blanket because it's just lovely seeing them all laid out like that... i'm aware though that it's a bit mad going to that page on my computer and we've got pretty good broadband in this house, it must be painfully slow on some computers..

ok, so it's not an exhaustive list of what's good for me about the improvisations but it's enough for now...

"congratulations on hundreds more to come" as john graciously put it... i'm digging the hundredthness of it x

yr2wk48 rhodes, poetry & song with john sinclair

www.radiofreeamsterdam.com

www.johnsinclair.us

x

john sinclair

me & dinah met him on tuesday night round N's...

D was there and we got into a great talk about books, burroughs, joyce, i said i'd lend john "cities of the red night" by burroughs and the next day i found it and started reading it... also that night we arranged to record the 100th improvisation before he left the country again...

so today (saturday) i cycled over to N's, picked up john (left the bike there), walked back here...

floopy brought his camera over and hit it off with john, dinah & floopy hung out later while me & john improvised... T came round just before john left and they started talking about 1968, hornsey art college, allen ginsberg & the queen of may...

i walked john back to N's, picked up my bike and returned...

the improvisation is a corker... uploading now... that man's laugh...

he's gone back to amsterdam now but he's back on friday and i'm going to finish "cities of the red night" and drop it @ N's before then...

happy days

x