mental mixer shuffle

it's been a mental day... driving up to gloucester with S & T, missing our turning, finding our way with the fosse way... arriving, meeting lovely but slightly mental L (he suffered in the gloucester floods), testing all 28 line inputs, all 28 mic inputs... checking out the lovely (odd) EQ, learning a mad amount about mixing in the few hours that we were there talking to him...

to agree... to get it in the van... to see L rip up his floor to get to the loom (cables) he was giving us... to almost get out of gloucester and remember he was giving us the bass to put it on...

to meet mad, mad weather, (fog, snow)...

to get back and carry the massive thing to the bottom of our stairs... (they're coming back tomorrow and we're taking it to it's new home)...

and then to find dinah, who had my solstihannimous present which was/is an ipod shuffle... bearing the words "With Love From Loobs To Moobs xxx"...

e=mc squared

does mariah carey understand what this equation means?

in any way?

does she get asked about it in interviews..? is there a clause in her contract that she is not to be asked what it means?

or does she in fact have an interest in physics and is perfectly able to explain not only what the equation means but the ramifications of the special theory of relativity...

it's hard to hear it but here is einstein talking about e=mc squared,

we went to see the film with the music tonight... it's such a strange thing writing music and then seeing it in it's place, it always freaks me out a bit, added to which i have this flu/cold thing which means i'm a little out there, you know how slight feverishness can do...

ah, that's nice, i recently moved a whole bunch of mp3's from my old computer to my new seemingly bottomless hard drive and after einsteins voice my itunes decided to play me a skryabin study, (this is because i had ordered my itunes by song length)... this new phone of mine is ushering in an mp3 renaissance which is lovely,

there's music on this hard drive i had forgotten all about, but i miss my little ipod shuffle, the new pone wants to be as great as the little shuffle but the experience is just not as good yet as the shuffle with itunes used to be... if only the little fella would work again...

x

reshuffle

stood in the apple church...

with A who used to be my student who has replaced my shuffle for me...

he dropped out of the course and i was worried that he was avoiding me because of the shuffle thing...

but no...

and now i have it back... this beautiful shuffle that lights up my life...

anyway, off to meet T for a songwriting session down south...

x

playing with voices

it's possible my ipod shuffle died today... i was thinking about using different people's voices in my improvisation and i emptied the shuffle so i could play the voices through it and it... well... i don't know, it doesn't look good now but you never know, it may come round...

so i did use the voices, william burroughs, hakim bey, archie shepp, daniel pinchbeck, neil young...

speaking, although william burroughs was also taking a tape recording of his voice and pushing it backwards and forwards over the tape head... well... it was the 60's - or maybe the 70's...

the improvisation was the 32nd in the weekly series, i've just watched it... the voices work well... i think...

google is being weird, it's been uploading for half an hour and it's got almost nowhere, so i won't be putting it in this post...

it's the longest of the improvisations @ 27.44 minutes, i wonder if anyone will have the patience for it...

mind you, unless it's another symptom of google's weirdness (which it probably is) it looks as if 92 people watched my 3rd cutup film yesterday and 138 people watched last week's improvisation... yesterday... all in all the report tells me that my videos were watched 1969 times... yesterday!

either i've suddenly got a lot more popular or google is suffering from something... the improvisation blanket page over on my newly updated longcat.net has been behaving strangely yesterday and today...?

...

T came round today for some help with his HTML... i told him what i know which is something but not much... in fact my HTML knowledge should be increasing fairly soon being as i now have longcat.net to play with... tinkering with HTML for blogger or myspace has kept me fairly well oiled but most of the work is done by their respective templates...

my own blank website...

maybe i'll reluctantly get a piece of software to do it for me...

ok, big day tomorrow...

x

arkestra

gigging tonight with T's band, 1st one, kind of a warmup, at the south london pacific bar where we've been rehearsing...

and before that i might meet up with felinity over near hampstead heath where she's going to a party...

now felinity is kind of at the centre of this following story, because she has had a shuffle longer than me and always puts songs onto it randomly...

i'm much more straight than her in this way, i choose my music... usually...

but the last couple of shuffle loads have been random fillings because i was thinking about the amount of music i have and the small percentage of it that i actually play...

so this afternoon i was cycling back from waitrose (close enough to home to warrant a headphones/no helmet approach to cycling - foolish yes) and a miles evans/gil evans track had just finished, whole band with wind sections and everything... another very brassy tune came on which i didn't recognise and a voice said over the top:

Sun Ra and his arkestra - ... - 16 December 1971

exactly 36 years ago today...

beautiful track with deep resonant horns, afro percussion, crazy rambling trumpet over the top...

in other news i was looking at a report of the viewings of my weekly improvisations on googlevideo and i made a list, comparing what would be a reasonable expectation against the facts...

a reasonable expectation being that the older the video the more views it has...

so week 1 would be at the top of the list and week 25 would be at the bottom..

and although week 2 is more than week 1, other than this at the ends of the list things do pan out as expected, but in the scheme of things, week 8 appears 3rd in the list, when it should be 8th...

so i had a look at week 8 and it was the 1st one i did on the landlord's grand piano... and it is pretty cool... so i've uploaded the mp3 to my mypace...

ok, off to meet felinity and play the gig...

x

a story

i hope i have the energy to write this... i wanted to tell this story last monday but couldn't give away to dinah which shop i'd been to to buy her presents...

then i wanted to tell it on wednesday after she'd had the presents but had to wait until there was either a happy ending or not... all will become clear...

so, in parts:

prologue:

last saturday (over a week ago) i was rehearsing at the south london pacific bar with T, a couple of people floated in and out, it was my 1st rehearsal with T and it rocked...

part 1 - not recognising people straight away:

on monday (a week ago) i went to manolis's, at 1st i didn't recognise who was in there, ate my breakfast, then worked out that two of the three people in there drinking red wine i'd met there before, the inventor and the designer...

so i chatted to them for a little while, glad to have bumped into them again, but didn't stay too long because i was travelling down to radio days, a vintage shop near waterloo that producerG had told me about, to buy presents for dinah's birthday...

it absolutely chucked it down on the way and i got soaked... when i arrived in the shop one of the guys in there helpfully hung up my jumper which was very wet... i started looking around the shop trying not to drip too much...

i was buying the 2 items that i got from there (a magazine from 1948 & a silver brooch) & was listening to one of the two guys talking to another customer about music... i ask about it and he offered me a flyer... for the south london pacific bar...

i tell him i was only in there on saturday and it turns out that both men in that shop had been in the bar on the saturday... one of whom (who owns the shop with his partner) had dreamily complemented us on one of the tunes we were playing...

small aside - apple cathedral:

i left there, cycled into town to get the 3rd item for the birthday (black holes and revelations by muse) and to pop into the apple store to see about my ipod shuffle, broken...

in the apple store i see one of my new students and he takes my broken shuffle from me, woefully beyond it's warranty, and says he might be able to sort something out...

part 2 - the losing:

fast forward to wednesday, day of the birthday, my beautiful girl turning 25, she loves the presents and we go out in the evening to a pizza place in crouchend which has cocktails... she is wearing the brooch...

we have a delicious time, drinking and eating, the cocktails are great, the food lovely... we stumble out of there a few hours later and we're happily wending our way along the road when dinah notices that the brooch is gone... she had been aware earlier that it was a bit fragile...

so we went back to the restaurant but they can't find it, we go up and down the road about three times scouring the ground for it... dinah is upset... it's sad but there is more birthday frivolity ahead so i make her laugh as we get home, opening a bottle of cava... drinking more... completing the lovely birthday...

small aside conclusion - keyboard class:

i try and ring the restaurant each day but they don't seem to answer their phone, friday comes and i have a keyboard lesson with the student who works for apple...

he hands me a small package, my musical world is returned to me... happy day...

part 3 - conclusion:

so i finally got through to the restaurant tonight, just before M was coming round to have a look at my fender rhodes and they had the brooch... i cycled over there to recieve it, put it in the same box i'd originally given it to dinah in and left it on her table with a note to look inside...

the prodigal broach, now more valuable than before for having been lost and found...

there - you have my week of losing and finding... meeting people again... getting a new shuffle...

x

riches

The moon orbits the earth. As it passes it pulls at the earth's waters with it's weight, it's gravity, creating tides. The tides were on this planet long before we were, coming in and going out with noone to see it, like traffic lights at a deserted intersection, performing their slow dance divorced from the purpose we gave them, just patterns and movement, animating a lifeless world.

each sentence alternating with a cutup version of the spoken words... this is currently the opening passage for the film... it's been floating around on various bits of paper for ages and i wanted it to live in cyberspace...

a couple of nights ago i had a dream that included me blogging about it with the post title riches... it involved meeting god... or somesuch entity...

i remember floating around in a pre-god stage with many waves or ribbons of water arcing up in the shape of daffodil leaves with someone there concentrating on the water until one arc became solid and i was immediately holding it as it drew me upwards...

the meeting with god was entirely unmemorable, or perhaps i just skipped it in my dream, suddenly i was in an after-meeting-god room with several people i knew, including one of my housemates who i don't get on with... the dream became about avoiding sharing a car with this man even though he was organising it so that we would share... luckily a man halfway between stumpy & brinded (brinded always reminded me of stumpy) came along and swapped seats so that this situation was avoided...

i shaved this afternoon - which i mention only because i bought that beard trimmer on the same day that i bought my ipod shuffle which today ran out of batteries... dying as i knew it would die...

sad

x

inventory of my dying ipod shuffle

i can't charge it or change the tunes that are on it...

i've read a bit about other prople's similar troubles and it seems that it's died... once the battery goes down it will be dead, i'm going to try and get it changed for a new one at the apple store next week... but it's way beyond it's warranty... mind you it seems to be a common problem... anyway, by way of mourning this little creature that has given me a whole lot of pleasure since 23rd march 2005 i will hereby give you an inventory of the tunes currently residing on my almost dead ipod shuffle:

longcat weekly improvisation's: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, dual improv, 6, 7, cutups & 8...

about half of a Howe Gelb radio show with John Convertino on KXCI radio...

4 tracks downloaded from Chukimai's Myspace page... (i love her music)

John Martyn's Grace & Danger album from 1980...

L. Shankar's Eternal Light album from 2000 (with Zakir Hussain & T.H Vinayakram)...

The brightblack morning light's self titled 2006 album...

Archie Shepp's Attica Blues album from 1972...

so it's not a bad eclectic selection of tunes to see out this beautiful little things's natural life...

x