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04-29-2007 08:59 PM
Hooked up with Jools (aka Julia) on Friday night and we went to an old favourite of mine. 'The Acorne'. Carpeted floors (less noise) and fantastic real ales are the order of the day here complete with slightly odd bar staff.
The guy who is really in charge of this pub is called Jack. Jack Merry to be precise, which I always thought was a pretty fine name for a publican. Shame about his choice in bar staff. He runs three pubs in York, all of which I have spent considerable amounts of time and money in. I fell out with Jack about three years ago because of a particularly obnoxious barhand he employed; the kind to keep you waiting at an empty bar; the type to make remarks under his breath and then wonder why at the end of the night you suggest that any repetition of said activities would result in more than a swift cuffing behind the ear.
That earned me a warning from Jack and the opportunity to 'bar' myself from his main venue 'The Tap & Spile'. I took his Pepsi challenge as I figure it's his loss and not mine especially as I can still go the Acorne and thumb my nose at him in his absence.
Anyway, Jools and I had a thoroughly enjoyable evening debating our various positions on atheism and agnosticism and their relative applications to working magick. We have quite similar views though the stumbling block is a difference of opinion on a macrocosmic intelligence. Still, it's good that two people are able to indulge in difference without taking it personally.
I kipped over at her joint after buying a few beers as a 'take out'. Got fantastically big pizzas and continued the conversation which led to the role of a hedgewitch in modern life. I told her to watch the Adam Curtis film called 'The Trap' and maybe it would make sense.
Got upon Saturday feeling utterly wretched. 8% German beer always seems like a good way to end an evening but the morning after the night before somehow shows you the error of your ways.
I spent a lot of my time on Saturday researching where techno / drum & bass / electronic music is at in the ten years since I've been actively involved in the 'scene'. Not that much has changed though the styles have evolved. I hope to use some of this as inspiration and maybe a starting point for how to remix a couple of tunes I have. I also have an idea about taking the Miles Davis tune 'Seven Steps to Heaven' and making an electronic. beat version. It will be difficult, not least because there are so many changes in the tune which doesn't lend itself so well to the more repetitive aspects of 'beat' music, but we'll see.
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04-26-2007 01:40 PM
It's been a football (soccer) week this week. Man United played at Old Trafford against AC Milan and I must say that although I'm an Arsenal fan, I'd quite like to see ManU (or ManUre if you will) win the Champions League simply because;
a) Arsenal are no longer involved
b) They play exiting football
c) Anything but another boring Italian side or Chelsea as champions
Chelsea played Liverpool at Stamford Bridge and it was like watching paint dry. Ho hum.
Revision, revision, revision, revision etc (repeat to coda)... I'm starting to dream about mortgages, I'm worried but I have to pass my exams.
I've also begun to cut out the alcohol. I have to admit that of late, my intake of wine especially has not been in line with my expectations of what I want to get out of life. I quit weed last year and as a result (and a totally inability to get to sleep) drank a little more than I would ordinarily. It's time to reduce the intake and watch my waistline receed also.
In good spirits, feeling quite optomistic about life at the moment.
It's been a football (soccer) week this week. Man United played at Old Trafford against AC Milan and I must say that although I'm an Arsenal fan, I'd quite like to see ManU (or ManUre if you will) win the Champions League simply because;
a) Arsenal are no longer involved
b) They play exiting football
c) Anything but another boring Italian side or Chelsea as champions
Chelsea played Liverpool at Stamford Bridge and it was like watching paint dry. Ho hum.
Revision, revision, revision, revision etc (repeat to coda)... I'm starting to dream about mortgages, I'm worried but I have to pass my exams.
I've also begun to cut out the alcohol. I have to admit that of late, my intake of wine especially has not been in line with my expectations of what I want to get out of life. I quit weed last year and as a result (and a totally inability to get to sleep) drank a little more than I would ordinarily. It's time to reduce the intake and watch my waistline receed also.
In good spirits, feeling quite optomistic about life at the moment.
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04-23-2007 12:17 PM
Alan Barnes was ace. It was like stepping back in time to the early 60's. Howden has a fantastic venue considering its size and location. It's really way out in the sticks of the East Riding of York. It's extremely flat, like Holland (being as its in the vale of York).
The venue was upstairs in a concert room complete with stage and about twenty five tables. The line-up was a quintet including a trumpet player called Bruce Hall, and a fantastic backing section.
The thing about people who can really play is they transport you to somewhere else when they perform and these guys took me on a hell of a journey. Alan Barnes is comparible to Tubby Hayes in terms of sheer technique and inventiveness. The overall style was hard be-bop with some beautiful slow numbers to add contrast. I bought one of his latest CD's which featuers another sax player Scott Hamilton who has a style very similar to Stan Getz. Alan plays alto and baritone on the album with some original compositions along with Jazz standards.
I hope I get another chance to hear these guys play.
Sunday was a lazy day. Got up late, went to my parents in the afternoon with some of the newspapers. Listened to the album I'd bought and the snooker. Ronnie O'Sullivan took a young talented Chinese player to pieces over 7 frames and he looks like he's playing for fun.
Went home later on, did a little study and then watched a couple of episodes from 'most haunted' inline at veoh. That program is so rubbish I can't help but watch it - what a life lol.
I'm in the office this morning and everyones in. We just had a women from BBC radio York come into the shop wanting soundbites. She reckons the British are a nation of people who never take sick days and wanted my view. I told her that I'm self-employed and don't get paid if I take sick days which is as good an answer as she's likely to hear all day...
Alan Barnes was ace. It was like stepping back in time to the early 60's. Howden has a fantastic venue considering its size and location. It's really way out in the sticks of the East Riding of York. It's extremely flat, like Holland (being as its in the vale of York).
The venue was upstairs in a concert room complete with stage and about twenty five tables. The line-up was a quintet including a trumpet player called Bruce Hall, and a fantastic backing section.
The thing about people who can really play is they transport you to somewhere else when they perform and these guys took me on a hell of a journey. Alan Barnes is comparible to Tubby Hayes in terms of sheer technique and inventiveness. The overall style was hard be-bop with some beautiful slow numbers to add contrast. I bought one of his latest CD's which featuers another sax player Scott Hamilton who has a style very similar to Stan Getz. Alan plays alto and baritone on the album with some original compositions along with Jazz standards.
I hope I get another chance to hear these guys play.
Sunday was a lazy day. Got up late, went to my parents in the afternoon with some of the newspapers. Listened to the album I'd bought and the snooker. Ronnie O'Sullivan took a young talented Chinese player to pieces over 7 frames and he looks like he's playing for fun.
Went home later on, did a little study and then watched a couple of episodes from 'most haunted' inline at veoh. That program is so rubbish I can't help but watch it - what a life lol.
I'm in the office this morning and everyones in. We just had a women from BBC radio York come into the shop wanting soundbites. She reckons the British are a nation of people who never take sick days and wanted my view. I told her that I'm self-employed and don't get paid if I take sick days which is as good an answer as she's likely to hear all day...
0 Comments
04-21-2007 04:53 PM
Met up with Jools last night for a drink (or three). We went to a local pubin York call 'The Last Drop Inne'. She's a witchy witch, very knowlegable and great company.
We spent quite a bit of time comparing notes about how we 'bend reality' and largely agreed. Quite interesting really because we approach the subject from totally different perspectives. What I found was that although we might have different names for things, we are basically describing the same processes.
I powered up my Novation Supernova II synth, Wavestation and the PC all setup on the inputs of the 16 track. I haven't had time to midi everything up yet (too busy revising), though I must say that the appegiater BPM setting means you can manually time sequences in with a drum pattern on the pc and then play something else on the wavey. Just noodling at the moment getting used to all the machinery.
I'm off to Howden tonight with my parents to see a Jazz saxophonist called Alan Barnes. Very gifted player apparantly and a big fan of the hard be-bop sound which is my own personal favourite. Should be good.
Met up with Jools last night for a drink (or three). We went to a local pubin York call 'The Last Drop Inne'. She's a witchy witch, very knowlegable and great company.
We spent quite a bit of time comparing notes about how we 'bend reality' and largely agreed. Quite interesting really because we approach the subject from totally different perspectives. What I found was that although we might have different names for things, we are basically describing the same processes.
I powered up my Novation Supernova II synth, Wavestation and the PC all setup on the inputs of the 16 track. I haven't had time to midi everything up yet (too busy revising), though I must say that the appegiater BPM setting means you can manually time sequences in with a drum pattern on the pc and then play something else on the wavey. Just noodling at the moment getting used to all the machinery.
I'm off to Howden tonight with my parents to see a Jazz saxophonist called Alan Barnes. Very gifted player apparantly and a big fan of the hard be-bop sound which is my own personal favourite. Should be good.
0 Comments
04-20-2007 05:07 PM
Heh, so I've finished the boot camp thing now. Quite intense but nothing like as intense as when I had to study for my Unix System Admin certificates. I'll never forget the sadistic nature of a particularly uninterested tutor at Nortel who took a savage delight in teaching the TCP/IP course at several paces faster than anyone could really hope to keep up with. Wiping out diagrams from the bottom up on his marker board knowing full well that we were still trying to jot them down with little hope of finishing them.
The financial course was fast paced but once you've got your head around with-profis, non-profits, unit linked, level term, decreasing term, bonds, equities, preference shares, ordinary shares, term assurance, whole of life, fixed interest, index linked... pah.
It's a funny thing, all taxi drivers at Leeds station are dark skinned muslims. I kid you not. I remark on this simply as an observation. Where I come from there's a little more diversification to your average cab driver but it's all good I suppose.
There's always that moment when I get into a cab where I feel that I should say something, engage the cabby in some kind of conversation. Each day with the variously different personalitied cabbies I had rather different results. The weather is always a pretty neutral, 'safe' topic of conversation, so who would have guessed it would provoke such different paths of conversation?
The first cabby just thought it was nice for it to be so hot in England for April. This guy really just wanted to get me to my destination and that was it really. The second cabby (on the second day) told me he thought it was because we in the West use solar cycles to calculate our calendar and that if we used the superior Islamic method on lunar cycles it would be seen that there wasn't actually any global warming going on at all (I didn't have the heart to tell him about leap years...).
Amazing that he quickly jumped from there to Iraq / Iran, green products being forced upon us, loose change (the film) and that we in the west were the product of a luciferian empire stretching back hundreds of years. Pretty interesting from my point of view. He jotted a name down on a piece of paper for me at the end of my journey. The word was 'Dajjal' or 'anti-christ'.
The third cabby quickly left the script on how hot is was in April to tell me that the hotel area I was taking my class in was actually a hotspot for curb-crawling prostitutes in the evening. He was complaining about being stopped my the police late at night quite often and I asked him if he had experienced much racially driven hassle. No he told me. He came over from Pakistan 26 years ago and felt that the way to succeed in this country was to blend in. Fair enough, but you couldn't expect three more different reactions from the same set of basic sentences.
I've been studying today, got my exams booked. The first one is 9th May and is probably the hardest. I've taken two mock exam papers this afternoon and passed both. The first at 90% and then 84% at the second attempt. There's a lot to learn and I just hope I can cover enough ground to pass first time.
Heh, so I've finished the boot camp thing now. Quite intense but nothing like as intense as when I had to study for my Unix System Admin certificates. I'll never forget the sadistic nature of a particularly uninterested tutor at Nortel who took a savage delight in teaching the TCP/IP course at several paces faster than anyone could really hope to keep up with. Wiping out diagrams from the bottom up on his marker board knowing full well that we were still trying to jot them down with little hope of finishing them.
The financial course was fast paced but once you've got your head around with-profis, non-profits, unit linked, level term, decreasing term, bonds, equities, preference shares, ordinary shares, term assurance, whole of life, fixed interest, index linked... pah.
It's a funny thing, all taxi drivers at Leeds station are dark skinned muslims. I kid you not. I remark on this simply as an observation. Where I come from there's a little more diversification to your average cab driver but it's all good I suppose.
There's always that moment when I get into a cab where I feel that I should say something, engage the cabby in some kind of conversation. Each day with the variously different personalitied cabbies I had rather different results. The weather is always a pretty neutral, 'safe' topic of conversation, so who would have guessed it would provoke such different paths of conversation?
The first cabby just thought it was nice for it to be so hot in England for April. This guy really just wanted to get me to my destination and that was it really. The second cabby (on the second day) told me he thought it was because we in the West use solar cycles to calculate our calendar and that if we used the superior Islamic method on lunar cycles it would be seen that there wasn't actually any global warming going on at all (I didn't have the heart to tell him about leap years...).
Amazing that he quickly jumped from there to Iraq / Iran, green products being forced upon us, loose change (the film) and that we in the west were the product of a luciferian empire stretching back hundreds of years. Pretty interesting from my point of view. He jotted a name down on a piece of paper for me at the end of my journey. The word was 'Dajjal' or 'anti-christ'.
The third cabby quickly left the script on how hot is was in April to tell me that the hotel area I was taking my class in was actually a hotspot for curb-crawling prostitutes in the evening. He was complaining about being stopped my the police late at night quite often and I asked him if he had experienced much racially driven hassle. No he told me. He came over from Pakistan 26 years ago and felt that the way to succeed in this country was to blend in. Fair enough, but you couldn't expect three more different reactions from the same set of basic sentences.
I've been studying today, got my exams booked. The first one is 9th May and is probably the hardest. I've taken two mock exam papers this afternoon and passed both. The first at 90% and then 84% at the second attempt. There's a lot to learn and I just hope I can cover enough ground to pass first time.
0 Comments
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