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

yr2wk43 rhodes & filter improvisation

@ 7:53 pm last night i emailed an mp3 of the film music over to the film-maker, it was my intention to then go over to floopy's to check out the track on his great speakers... then take the uncompressed file to M directly,

but i spoke to M the film-maker and he said he had no time and it sounded fine, and then this morning i slept right through 11 O'clock when i was due to be over @ floopy's whose sound card had broken anyway...

so it's done, the door is closed, it's being shown @ 6:00 this very evening...

the improvisation took place before i'd finished the composition and of course it took about 3 or 4 hours to deal with... i always think i can deal with it in an hour or so but it's never true these days x

starlight comes down

when my old friend J came round for dinner and a floor to sleep on last night i had written half of the music for the 2:36 film that's being shown tomorrow night...

i've now progressed by around 45 seconds and i'm at the crucial 10 or so seconds where it all goes on...

i'm surprisingly calm... this may change...

looking at a larger time scale i am waiting for musical instruments, as reported over there my GEM piano module is at least 2 weeks away, probably 3 weeks... i've tracked down a klangbox version of the B4000 hammond organ emulator in rotterdam and i'm buying that once i get paid on friday, very few of them in this continent is what i think...

and i didn't get an improvisation in last week, so i'll be doing that today, in amongst the composition and the recording...

tuesday afternoon cycle ramble

spur of the moment little cycle investigation of some green i could see to the north east of us here...
....................................................................................................................................

a sometimes grey, sometimes bright april afternoon...

4 mile kind of triangular journey

yr2wk42 rhodes, hammond, voice & face

cut with a few shots of the snow, the improvisation that i had to do twice for cubase crashing reasons...

dinah back now x

spring indeed!

adverts, indian food, horror, poo

i don't know, adverts, as if i get enough people looking at this blog to make any money out of it... i may well change my mind because it may just irritate me no end seeing the google ads at the top of these posts, this being my home page... but it's there for now, public service ads until they judge what kind of blog this is and assess what kind of ads to put there...

if it makes you sick please put a note in the comments before you leave me forever...

in other news i woke up today (saturday) with a hangover from the small amount of cheap white wine bought in a bar last night and i had no dinah to look after me and make me tea, she being away for the weekend, so i went back to bed, rising around 18:30, feeling more human...

went over to jai krishna around 10ish to eat of their delicious fair, dinah not a fan of indian food and it's not so close anymore so i hardly go at all these days, i was phoning them to make sure they were still open and i ordered my food over the phone to speed it up because they were close to closing...

"masala dosa with no peas" and once i said "no peas" she knew who i was and sounded pleased... always nice...

i just saw 30 days of night and it was pretty great, fantastic turn from danny huston as head vampire and josh hartnet wasn't half bad...

improvising tomorrow - untless i can't sleep in which case i'll do it tonight on headphones, yawning though now @ 1:30 am which is a good sign...

and i'm making a bid for balthazara shitting outside, the litter tray has been outside the backdoor since yesterday and although there were light showers today i changed the litter and hopefully it won't rain until tomorrow now, i don't really have a solution to the litter tray being outside in the rain, but i'm determined to leave it out there for a few days and certainly not to bring it back in...

we were trying this when she went missing a few weeks ago, and when she was back we relented and brought it in the flat again, but not this time, some kind of shelter out there, not that she's used it in the 36 hours or so it's been out there, she's probably already using the garden... either that or she's shitting in the corner of my room i can't get too because it's stuff mountain again, i'll probably find it all in a few days once the smell alerts me to it...

anyway, bed x

spring

what a lovely day...

got up hellishly early for my last schools visit of the season... on top of the summertime clock change last weekend which i still haven't got used to...

cycled back slowly and deliciously in this glorious spring day, said goodbye to my beautiful girl who has gone away for the weekend and chilled a little bit with B who was round papering the hall...

then M & O came round for a song writing session which proved to be very productive, we took a tune that was an idea and turned it into a tune... another meeting next week to get it down...

what a lovely way to spend one's time, allbeit pining for dinah all the while x

waiting for delivery

i've got a new phone arriving today... updated version of the phone i have now...

i've been complaining about this current phone for months now and i've finally got around to upgrading it... hopefully the new one won't be as ridden with faults as this one...

so it means i have to stay in until it comes,

2 weeks ago i ordered a new sound module, updated version of a sound module i have now...

it hasn't come because the italian company who make it are well known for their great products and their terrible distribution and service, the german company i ordered from aren't really to blame, they're waiting for a deliver from the italians... but today i discover that they have a date for the next delivery and it's the 1st of may!!!!

today is the 1st of april... i ordered the thing, and paid for it... on the 18th of march...!!!

i know...

can i wait that long? on ordering it i'd hoped it would have arrived before the recording we did last friday @ the townhouse, up until today i was hoping it would arrive before the session in a few weeks to record more keyboards onto those tracks...

is it worth getting my money back and spending more money from someone else to get the same thing?

i probably won't... i'll probably forget all about it until it arrives and it'll be a nice surprise...

oh how i love new things...

when they arrive

x

yr2wk41 & wedding tune

recorded sunday afternoon...

also - for a little while one of the tunes i wrote for D & M's wedding has been on my mypace, the one meant for the moment when the congregation are leaving the room...

well i've swapped it for the piece from the same wedding where the bride is entering the room... i think it's great, it's over there now x

townhouse blues

it's been quite the week let me tell you...

monday, tuesday, wednesday we were in a rehearsal room in shepherds bush, the 2nd 2 days with AS, he giving us direction, shaping the tunes, preproduction...

then on wednesday J (the drummer) came over to mine with his van and we picked up the rhodes and took it the the studio - the townhouse - where we were going to record...

thursday was work... no dawn project in the morning so a kind of a lie in... then over to the townhouse in the evening to set up...

friday we were in there from 9am, recording the tunes...

saturday me & dinah played/sang a couple of tunes for T's "archangels in action" day and i saw there will be blood in between,

then today J has just left, he picked me up about 3 hours ago and we drove over to the townhouse once more to pick up the rhodes and my gigging keyboard...

and the thing is, that session we did on friday is the last session ever to be recorded in studio 1 @ the townhouse because universal who own it have decided to sell off the whole place... we played @ the marquee on the last night it was open, we recorded the last session @ the townhouse... fantastic studio... huge waste... great session...

x

yr2wk40 guitar, looper, rhodes & voice improvisation with Matt Mars

google being dumb so this took a few more days than it should have done x

lost and found

i got back from work on thursday and dinah told me that she hadn't seen balthazara all day...

which freaked me out a fair bit... neither of us could remember if we'd seen her that morning...

in a moment of half-sleep that night balthazara was near me but just out of reach, but this was just my brain giving me what i wanted,

so friday morning brought no cat return and me, dinah & spski went out for the very last dawn project, (videoblog to follow) and afterwards i took a picture of balthazara round all the houses whose gardens back onto ours, there's a kind of a rectangle of gardens behind our house that stretches quite far back and we thought she must be stuck in a garden, or had been taken in by a household somewhere in the rectangle...

near the southernmostpoint of the rectangle i was talking to a woman who hadn't seen her and had no cat of her own, i asked if she could hear the meow i could hear and she told me i must be imagining it...

i could still hear it but it didn't sound like balthazara, i wanted to ask her neighbours if they had a cat but they weren't in... i couldn't see the cat whose meow i could hear.. it foxed me... i moved on...

no joy and a little later i made the rounds again with a leaflet to put through the letterboxes of the households i hadn't spoke to someone in and again passing that corner i heard the meow...

i stepped back to see if the cat was on the roof, i looked all around but i couldn't see it.. and again i thought it didn't sound like balthazara...

so friday passed and i came off my bike while cycling across a park (right over the handle bars)... the front brake had messed up (still is messed up)... no return of the cat...

i became sure that she was in one of the gardens near our end of the rectangle and i spent quite a long time sat on the shed at the back of our garden rattling dried cat food in a tupperware box and calling her but the sun went down and she was still out there...

bear in mind that on thursday night there had been horrible rain and wind and the wind had carried on, is still there now... really nuts wind... the idea of her out in that weather was driving us a little mad...

the worry of it, constantly there in the background... over at floopy & T's i looked at their cat and i felt tears coming, partly to do with the little sleep i'd had before the dawn project that morning...

so this afternoon we were due to go filming with K-wo & spski and we both went out to walk the streets looking for balthazara before hand, a couple of neighbourly individuals allowed us to go through to their gardens, close to where i was sure she would be, but no avail...

so i said to dinah we should check out the meow i'd heard the day before and we went down to that house... finally finding someone in who also let us look in their garden, but the garden was much further down than i thought she would have got to and lo and behold she wasn't there...

and on leaving the house i once again heard the meow, when i pointed it out the man in the house said:

"oh it's not a big cat is it? there's been a big cat running around the front here..."

so i said no it can't be her, (always in denial about how fat our beloved cat is), dinah went through that front garden to the hedge and i went round to the neighbours front garden, same hedge, and dinah said:

"i can see a cat's arse"

"is it her?"

"it might be"

...

and it was...

and i picked her up and took her home where she now is, she ate an awful lot of food and i apologised to her for not getting her until 26 hours after i'd first heard her meow...

me & dinah went out to highgate woods to film (me in a bear suit) and all is right in our world once again...

x

Dawn Project videoblog week 53

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yr2wk39 piano improvisation

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kat flap

on sunday floopy was round with his tools and he put in a cat flap for us....

balthazara has been very wary of it...

day by day since then she's got closer to it, sniffing it... and this morning just after the dawn project i saw her pushing it open with her nose, just a bit, but enough to show she could easily push it all the way..

then tonight dinah brought my attention to the sound of the catflap and whether balthazara had just gone out... we had a look and it became clear she really was outside and she'd used the cat flap...

(this makes me very happy)

(her poos have been getting much bigger)

and then over on the other side of the river, my sister felinity has moved in the last few days into a new flat with her G, i'm popping over there next wednesday to check it out...

all this while our own flat is gradually nearing completion...

and week 53 of the dawn project this morning looked just like week 1 had, beams of refracted sunlight searing across the screen...

stupid early mornings abound but life is good x

film making & tv

last night i watched a program about stephen hawking on the telly...

it was irritatingly slow and it kept trying to inject drama unnecessarily but it had a few good facts in it, in two of the advert breaks i'd que'd up those two great OK Go youtube video's and this one filled the break perfectly, whilst this one was a little short...

so film making, i'm at it...

3 more week's of filming for the dawn project, (making 55 weeks in all) and i've begun putting them together, at least the 1st stages of it, lining them up, it's a lot of work...

and i'm a few week's into this film making course now and as i'm leaving i'm talking to the camera teacher guy and it becomes clear that he is newlandlordE's lodger...

my new film making camera teacher is my new landlord's lodger...

that's out there...

and finally madmen.. just caught an episode and it could be great, it has that HBO class about it, thoughtful... (it might not be HBO made though)...

promising x

yr2wk38 saxophone, drums & piano

which i recorded with the 2 P's down in their greenwich home on tuesday, journeying there i was cycling along Bird In Bush Road and Green Hundred Road crossed my path and i thought, what a great pair of names for a crossroad:



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yr2wk37 shifting harmonic hammond organ & rhodes

recorded yesterday x

phew

that is enormously pleasing, having gone round to floopy's to play the tape in the camera, with it telling me when each shot was taken... then back to here to fix my file which is supposed to know all about all the film shots... then to find what was wrong, fix it, find another problem with the same file, fix that, then find yet another problem and fix that until finally it all adds up and i'm happy...

i love that...

off out to spski's in a bit for a leap day party x

too much footage

and it was going so well...

yesterday was mental as well as monday and tuesday, this life is pretty hard the moment,

so anyway, i was looking at my dawn project footage and i noticed a folder marked 17th january... so i had a look and inside were shots i took on that day for the dawn project, on a DVD camera belonging to hammersmithwork... shots i hadn't counted before, and yet without these shots i was happy that i had enough weeks, accounted for all the shots...

but no... and i still don't really know what's going on, it was very dark around that time so maybe i'm thinking one of the other shots is a main dawn project shot...

oh dear...

in other news i cycled all the way to the school in langdon park today, i go there to support one of my students who is on placement there, it took me just under an hour and it's a great ride, mostly on waterways, 1stly the river lea and then the limehouse cut, i love cycling x

working

on saturday i went out and bought a GB of RAM and 500GB of extra hard drive, got them both home and neither of them worked, £100 not yet working...

floopy was round and after awhile he came into the room and lent his magic presence and magically the drive started working,

the RAM just wasn't having it, so on monday i had a mad day of floating back and forth in this great city and i was passing close to the shop where i'd bought the RAM (well, i'd bought it at a computer fair but the people i bought it from have a shop is kensal green), so i popped in and changed the RAM, got it home and it didn't work...

went off to continue my mad day... tuesday also mad, not quite as mad as monday but i was much the worse for wear by tuesday so it wasn't until wednesday that i tried to work it out again, went through the steps i'd been through before...

and magically it worked...

so i went about moving all the dawn project footage from floopy's camera onto my new drive, i even managed to capture directly onto the new drive via my old computer and the network but it lost a few bits so i went back to capturing on the old computer and moving it over later,

and guess what? this morning i went out for week 51 of the dawn project (i know), came back, plugged the camera in, and it's already over in the new drive, just an hour or so after the shot...

this pleases me immensely...

rehearsing tonight with T's band after hammersmithwork... mental day again..

oh and i've begun a beginners film making course, tiny 6 week thing, very local... x

yr2wk36 hammond, rhodes & voice improvisation

this organ has been making me happy all week, i've begun 3 or 4 new tunes recently with the help of this lovely software beast x

lunar eclipse

when i was in hotel full of cops, we played at a festival that was celebrating a total solar eclipse....

me, B & J, J who was in the band and B who we lived with.... we were sat on a little rise somewhere in the festival and smoked, while, under a cloudy sky, we noticed a very slight dimming of the light...

that was our eclipse...

then last year at some point me & dinah were @ floopy & T's where they used to live near crouch end, the camera had only recently been bought (the one i borrow for the dawn project) and we were in their garden filming it... but before it happened a big old sky full of clouds came over and that was that, i think we did a zither instead...

so this brings us to tonight, i'm awake, it's 3:45 am, the moon will be just about to become visible again, taking a couple of hours to be full again...

and once more... clouds x

what are you gonna do?

x

in other news i'm trying to write something for M, whose band i've joined and who has some chance of getting signed...

it came from playing on the lovely virtual hammond organ that i have in this here computer...

and i want to be rocky, but it sounds very calm and laid back when i play it, now i'm straying from the chords i've got into another section and it's coming over all funky... JTQ almost...

oh... the challenges of writing something that i want to be something... rather than just letting it go where it wants to go...

hard life (not) x

8000th

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glenside, pennsylvania,

our 8000th visitor was looking for longcat encryption when they stumbled across this place...

well even though you're gone now mr/mrs/miss/ms 8000 i'm glad you passed by x

ghosts of CM past & yr2wk35

this was recorded on tuesday but it's been such a mental week that i've only just got it done... i think it's lovely...

off tonight to celebrate unclefilmo's 40th, it's been awhile...

and then yesterday, on my way to south bermondsey to rehearse with the band currently called perfectly elastic people i bumped into an ex-student of mine from CM, name or R... it took me a little while to remember him as he said hello just after i'd got on the train and i'd just had to wait 10 minutes with the keyboard on my back to buy a ticket (oh south london rail network... when will you embrace oyster pay as you go...?)... but once i'd worked it out he was not much different to how he'd been, a young man now as opposed to the teenager he'd been before...

and then on my way home from south bermodsey i got an answerphone message from one GS who trained to be a teacher with me all those years ago.. i have yet to ring him back... he is truly lovely...

two people from my teaching past i haven't seen in years... nice x

rehearsing showcasing

it's been a crazy week, from friday onwards, rehearsing with a new band then gigging at the Marquee Club, then more rehearsing towards tomorrow's showcase in front of a producer and a music industry type...

all this on top of a mountain of marking i've become expert at avoiding and of course the dawn project which rolls into town tomorrow morning quite possibly very misty or that's what i'm hoping...

also improvised with G on tuesday, probably the one person (other than me) who has played more often than anyone else in the collaborative improvisations...

but my life is too mad to allow space for editing video so it will have to wait a little while before it goes up...

x

yr2wk34 rhodes, synth & voice improvisation

presleep

about to sleep, up tomorrow morning for a rehearsal with M's band, playing @ the Marquee Club in covent garden tomorrow night, we're headlining, sometimes a dubious pleasure but we'll see...

and it's the last night they're open, we'll be the last band to play on that legendary stage...

and my improvisation is as yet un-edited which drives me a little nuts...

x

yr2wk33 piano & voice

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