richard ford

it turns out he was just like old friend DR... (PD to some)...

i woke early, went over to beneath the trelick tower...checked out the lesson i'll be teaching in a few weeks, the man who's currently teaching it is off touring by then...

perfectly nice...

then home, found the sports writer which had been missing for a little while... got on my bike, went down to aldwych... bvsh house...

had a fine old time... asked my question.. which i think has a better chance of being aired on the show than last time's question... because it drew an interesting bit of conversation...

he signed my copy of the book, i had a glass of wine, played the thing i often end tunes with on the steinway grand in the room...

then once outside i bumped into him again, he was waiting for his car to take him to the hotel, i offered him a backy, but he said his prostate might give him trouble, he said my prostrate might start giving me trouble too...

i asked him how old he was, hoping he'd say he was 72... because i met the 18 year old me on the train down to brighton on friday night & it made me realise i was surely going to meet the 72 year old me as well fairly soon...

(18 years old (ish), half my age, doing mechanical engineering (mathy) @ university, plays piano, has a stud cat... (we had a female stud cat)... so the 72 year old i'm going to meet will have been doing roughly what i'm doing now... 36 years ago...)

he said no he was 66... oh well, nobody's perfect...

it also turns out that there's a 3rd book to the frank bascombe books (the sportswriter, independence day...) called the lay of the land, which he was writing just as i started reading him... back in 2002...

so that's very exciting... i've got independence day ahead of me, then the 3rd...

so i was totally high on life as i cycled away from bvsh house... went over to le fam pevo to deliver some books josiah wanted them to have (baby stuff)... had a gradually calming down evening with those lovely folks...

it turns out EQ is just about to pop... by friday apparently...

now i'm home & i've got my 1st huge tuesday since the holidays ahead of me...

oh & i met a nice woman on the tube... as you do... (in the 1st half of the day, the 2nd half all bikey)

x

baby bird

7 days have passed since it ended with me & emivore and i'm trying to slightly ritualise this moment, kiss the memories as they pass so as not to be haunted by them...

i saw baby bird yesterday, i didn't have to work over in homerton so after CM in the morning i went over to SP of stepney and Kwo's to meet with the 2-week old...

grace, josiah & M came up as well so it was quite a big visit, grace was irrepressible and i found myself bearing the brunt of her while the grown up's talked...

the baby is wonderful and sp told me a story that i love - that perhaps one day i'll retell here, but not yet...

me & dinah are in communication again, i don't have a huge amount of space for her in my head just now but at least we're talking...

and the sons of anarchy are in my life... i got hold of the 1st season, thinking that the series currently on 5 USA was the 2nd... i was going to catch up with them and then watch them weekly...

they arrived on thursday and i've watched everything but the last episode now,

just checked though, and 1stly the 5 USA thing is this 1st series, so i've already over taken them, and it's shown on wednesday's @ 10, which is when madmen is shown over on BBC4, so that's not going to happen, it looks like i'm going to get hold of as much SOA as i can and consume it madly...

it has helped me this week, what with my small but definite heart break...

also i'm buying the thing i wanted... retail therapy which for once i can afford... but won't be able to afford anything else for a little while...

x

rain and no rain neve joy

last night around midnight, cycling by the thames, the houses of parliament on the other side of the river... lowtide, mad, mad rain pouring on me... joni mithcell's hegira in my ears... as though the river was so low because all the water was falling from the sky...

tonight, around the same time, (a little later), no rain, clear, crisp sky, a bite in the air... carl craig in my ears...

last night, coming in and having to take every single item of clothing off, not even my T-shirt escaped the wet... a hot shower, careful arranging of things on radiators...

similar shaped days today and yesterday... well, yesterday and the day before yesterday if you're reading this on thursday... me being in the early hours thereof...

saw spski yesterday, he of job interview fame, lovely to hang out with him, popped in for a tea around 2...

today i was supposed to meet one of the actors from the show i'm doing, to go through his big number... he didn't show, wasted 90 minutes of my life, time i could have spent fetching the proust which has arrived at the bookshop...

then, yesterday and today, i spent a couple of hours being a session piano player for the students @ CM, yesterday with MM running the class and today with yimkin in that position, yesterday i recorded my weekly improvisation after, today i recorded some current compositional ideas...

had a bleak moment or 6 around 6 o'clock and i was very glad of that piano to play... came up with some melancholy drenched thing... worked on the "dreamt i was bach" piece, just learning how to play it on the piano...

yesteday i went and got spski again, dragged him out of the flat to get a curry, today i met yimkin, (who had in the mean time been @ ginger B's studio) and we got a curry -

yesterday on my own but meeting T (and M) there, today with yimkin in tow... i went to the studio... down in kennington... new home of my rhodes...

yimkin & me got something working in the system, UAD plugin's which i thought we had but which weren't showing up... the PULTEC of which i'd heard tell and several NEVE plugins's - channel strips or EQ's... so very sexy...

i'm going to put this weeks improvisation through some of it... in fact that all worked really nicely, recording @ CM and then opening exactly the same file in the studio...

good times ahead...

much work to do on the studio but it's going to be so, so sexy...

of course it's quite alot of time away from my dinah which is sad... this week she's a studio widow... last night dripping wet me found her asleep on the sofa...

tonight she'd gone to bed by the time i got in...

and that's where i'm headed now, hammersmith work tomorrow and i'd like to cycle in, i wonder how the distance compares with the studio schlep? hmm... and weather..?

i'm rehearsing with the spanner jazz punks tomorrow night so if i cycle i'll have to get back here and then strap the keyboard on and hit the tube...

anyway, must sleep, i want to get that proust in the morning, and in fact that would be beautiful, the whole tube journey to hammersmith (barons court), to try and start this proust, then head down to the studio, do my thing with the improvisation, then skip over to the rehearsal...?

which to choose? bike or tube?

x

just before dawn

joni mitchell wrote that song about clouds, but wasn't she living in california by then?

you don't know about clouds until you've missed a number of celestial events because you live in england...

me & dinah had this notion that we were going to cycle off with a tent and be lying out under the stars right now gazing at the meteor shower...

a pinch of salt should be taken with this notion i must admit but had the weather been with us it could have happened...

but no, not even just cycling about the deserted streets gazing at the sky in the east...

or on a high point in the city, like that high bit in hampstead heath.. (although that's probably quite gay at night...)

not to be...

clouds got in my way...

x

PS - spski came round, he had news...

notable deaths workers day polling

a new blog (to me) that i'm liking, colourful, photos, arty, lives in paris but pops to london...

and although they both happened a little while back (days, weeks?) i want to bid a fond farewell to humphrey littleton and to albert hoffman, the former for his love of music and the latter for his mind expanding drugs...

go well gentlemen... go well...

so i cycled to near where we used to live on the off chance i'm still registered to vote there, and i am... although they moved the polling station which foxed me for a little while...

i leftlisted all the way with a 2nd vote for ken in the mayoral.. then i rang up spski and popped in for a cuppa, encouraged him to vote (doing my bit to keep out the BNP) as he hadn't seen his voting slip for the same reason i hadn't seen mine - the moving out and the not being on speaking terms with the old household... i assured him he didn't need it and in fact neither of us had our identification looked at in the polling station...

he showed me some pictures he'd taken (this is his, can you see the lady in the light that i can see?) and i made sure my video's worked on his machine, he's gazing at the dawn project for me with a view to a narrative emerging... although his ideas at the moment are all about where and how to show it...

he also showed me this video which has a couple of seconds of him (@ 1:10) in the bear film we made back in february...

i told him about my plan for phase 2 of the filming which i'm now thinking i might have to wait for the autumn equinox for... what with the length of the days now... i want a camera pointing at the green man's face as the sun 1st hits him, then maybe 5 seconds of video every 10 minutes until the sun leaves him...

right now i think the sun 1st says hello to him around 5am and i've no idea when it leaves him but the day closes around 7ish... not that i'm ready with the camera yet, i suspect i'm going to have to source another one, unless i can find a way of remotely operating floopy's one that i used for the main dawn shoot...

anyway... i floated back here a little while ago but dinah's still out drinking after her opening night of henry the leper... i have a day off tomorrow which will be the improvisation and maybe an esoteric thought or two...

x

mad route planning

not too much sleep ahead of me, then the dawn project, then back here (not to floopy's) to shower & break my fast - (very necessary) - then i'm cycling on this route:



to hammersmithwork...

that'll be interesting,

my whole day bookended in theory by spski who thinks he's meeting me for the 2nd time @ the dawn project, and is definately coming round to ours in the evening...

that'll be interesting x

funny

now, despite the fact that i hate comic relief and everything about it, i bring your attention to this way too late probably,

the deadline is 6pm GMT today and it's only for british bloggers,

are you funny?

i got out of bed late again today, but made it to the spot @ 7:47am instead of 7:30, the sun was hiding behind some cloud which didn't suit my purpose so much but i took the pictures and video - just my own camera video so not for the project just to see - and raced home down the long hill that i'd just cycled up 15 minutes before,

spski was around when i got back so we spent a few minutes together before he went to work, very nice too,

he's a great deal more nutty in the morning...

x

paying for a really funny night

Wfloopy(shaman) came round last night to play chess... bringing a number of marvellous longplaying records with him...

spski was around in the early part of the evening and he's always good fun... really lovely to spend time with him actually, don't seem to see him much these days even though we live together...

so me & W played chess... 3 games, 2-1 to me... dinah coming home midway through a particularly good abdullah ibrahim which she made very clear was not her thing...

anyway, the night ended with the 3 of us smoking & playing cards... our southern accents came out and we laughed & laughed...

W finally heading out to my record of peggy lee... clicking our fingers as we escorted him to the door... living out the ridiculous nonsense we'd brewed up by then...

by smoking in the evening always gets to my sleep... it's amazing... insomnia... guaranteed...

so today i've been a little shaky...

went to see the bill viola thing @ st olaves in london bridge... very good indeed... wonderful video artist...

just now i've been tinkering with my film... took a wrong turn and now i'm struggling to fix it... awkward space i've got myself into...

but i'm leaving that to go get my girl... have to find the energy somewhere... i'm sure once i'm on the bike it'll be fine...

laters

x

the african queen

i shed a tear near the end for Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn... filmfour being on freeview now is really rather nice, ghostworld the other night and today this one, except of course it's tempting to just stay in there watching films... the road to perdition is on now... tom hanks, i don't know... anyway i have my own film to make...

which reminds me i did my weekly inprovisation today, 5 minutes on the fender rhodes... deliberately short being as last weeks was so long... it's up on youtube but i'm going to wait until googlevideo has it, before i put it up here...

balthazara just came in, very affectionate, defleaing oh so imminent (wow, so many words i have trouble spelling all at once)...

the film is coming on apace, the music is at least beginning to look like a whole piece now, much work to be done polishing... very hard to play as well... and then i've got to write the vocal bit, i know roughly what i want to say but saying it... the piano piece is so hard i find it quite demoralising... (there's another one)...

didn't go to the circus tonight because of a misunderstanding between me & spski, kind of annoying but i'm complicit in it, he phoned about 50 minutes before the show to tell me he had got another ticket but i didn't get the message until too late, and anyway i'd settled on the african queen by then...

x