Gerald Maltravers-Bathysphere, retired accountant and county cricket fan

Gerald Maltravers-Bathysphere, retired accountant and county cricket fan, originally uploaded by Mr Atrocity.

More Processing Doodles

Here are three new algorithmically generated pictures using code I wrote in Processing. I'm quite fond of them, they seem to have a slightly ethereal Rothko quality.

Going On And On And On...

It's been a crazy busy week. I've been organising and running a complicated photo shoot for the studio in between doing more design work for Universal. This week I also started delivering my one hour introduction lecture on art history and theory. I've been feeling pretty sick all week with a nasty chesty cough and headaches. I think I really picked the wrong week to agree to do these talks. Today's was the second session and I felt it went better than the first as I'd learned how to pace the talk a bit better. It also went better because I remembered to take two glasses of water and a cup of tea in with me to sip as I talked. Speaking continuously for an hour to a room of thirty to forty people is really hard when your throat is sore.

It's been quite fun trying to compress as much information about lighting, colour and composition as I can into an hour. Working what to include and what to leave out has proved highly perplexing. I have sixty slides to show which I whittled down from over two hundred candidates which gives you an idea of the speed of delivery I'm aiming for. I'm always nervous that I don't have enough material prepared to fill an hour but so far I've managed to do the talk both times in a hour exactly. I have no idea where the time goes when I'm speaking, I get a third of the way through my notes, panic because I'm sure I've only been talking for ten minutes, look down at my watch and discover that it is in fact forty minutes since I began. I've done that twice now, perhaps next week when I do it all again a couple more times I'll have accumulated the confidence not to look at my watch for reassurance.

As is always the case, once the talk is over and I ask if anyone has question no-one asks any or gives any impression of having had a good time but I don't think they fell asleep so I'm still claiming it as a win.

Tomorrow I'm off to Lord's with my dad and my pal Tommy Dog to watch the county cricket final. I suspect we may not actually get to watch much as the weather forecast is pretty bad, so we may in fact be spending a day grumbling under an umbrella. Oh well, I keep my fingers crossed.

I don't have much else to say right now, I'm all tired and spacey so I think a quiet evening and an early night are in order.

Sketch Poly 2

Sketch Poly 2, originally uploaded by Mr Atrocity.

Another procedural scribble. It'll all make sense in the end, I promise.

Sketch Poly Mona Lisa

Sketch Poly Mona Lisa, originally uploaded by Mr Atrocity.

I've been working on an arty programming project for a little while and this piece is one of the waypoints on the way to a greater goal of which I'll probably write more later. What's going on here is a demo of some code I've written to "sketch" any four sided shape in as natural a way as I can create an algorithm for. In this piece what happens is that I randomly generate a four sided polygon, randomly determine how fat the line should be, how scruffy and messy the penmanship and finally how finely spaced the lines should be. The code then selects a colour from an image that serves as a palette (in this case the Mona Lisa - hence the title) and then begins to sketch polygon after polygon until you tell it to stop. I let this run for about 15 minutes. I'm rather fond of it and I plan to make some "paintings" with this technique over the coming days.

Sunday Walk

I took a walk today down through The City, over the Millennium Bridge to the Tate Modern to have a look at the Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabia retrospective. The show was as I expected: very interesting from an art historical standpoint but rather soulless. There's a couple of Duchamps I liked and some of the Man Ray photographs are delightful but overall the show was a little underwhelming. I thought I'd take a look at the Juan Muñoz also as I hadn't taken as long as I'd thought I might going around the main show. I was really surprised and impressed. There were several rooms full of body casts of a very small man in a suit in a variety of poses and amongst whom you could walk. It was a rather unsettling and wonderful experience. Here's a few photos from the walk and from the Muñoz show:

Work In Progress

Here's a little sped up video of the most recent quick sketch I've done in Colors on the homebrew DS card. I love this little application.

Tiny Art

This is a quick little post to mention the joy of a lovely piece of free software for any who have a Nintendo DS and homebrew card. It's called Colors and it's from www.collectingsmiles.com a lovely website name if ever there was one. The software leverages the DS's portability and it's pressure sensitive touch screen to make the perfect tiny pocket sketch book. It takes a little getting used to because the screen is so small but it's really quite delightful to have these tiny little jewel like painting sketches appear in front of you as you scribble away.

One of the other nice features is that the program stores each brushstroke as you make it resulting in an animation playback facility where you can watch the whole painting being drawn from scratch. It's quite instructive to see how I work. I had always thought that I obsessed over a single detail until I liked it before moving onto the next but from watching the few sketches that I've done I seem to flit about the image from place to place tweaking things as they catch my eye. I really didn't think I worked like that.

Here's a couple of sketches I did yesterday and if I can work out how to make a movie of the process of painting one I'll try and upload that too at some point:

Sunday at the V&A

In the café at the V&A, originally uploaded by Mr Atrocity.

Tinseltroos and I started today in a pretty lazy fashion. I microwaved the spare, frozen blueberry pancakes for breakfast (thank you Margaret, freezing them worked a treat) and by the time we'd eaten enough and got dressed it was noon. We walked to the Victoria and Albert Museum primarily to see the "Out of the Ordinary - Spectacular Craft" exhibit. I've posted a few photos of some of my favourites below:

Now all that remains for the weekend is to cook ourselves some supper and maybe watch a movie. I may almost be able to face Monday tomorrow.

Art for Art's Sake

I have been asked to run an advanced lighting course at work to try and take junior and mid-level artists up a notch in their lighting skills. To that end I spent most of yesterday photographing photographs (like the Josef Koudelka above) and paintings to use as slides and as lecture notes.

It's something I very passionately believe in as I was fortunate enough to go through a full art education before I ended up doing computer graphics. When I was at art college there really weren't any computer graphics courses and so most people of my generation in the industry come from fine art, photography or graphic design backgrounds if they're creative types or computer science or engineering if they're more technical. These days there's an abundance of fully computer graphics orientated degree courses and most graduates we now employ come off one or another of them. I personally do not think that this is a good thing, primarily because they leave school at 18 and go straight onto these degrees. Back in the day (12-15 years ago) if you wanted to do a creative degree course you had to do a one year "art foundation" diploma where you did life-drawing three times a week, studied art history and practiced every type of art production from print, to paint to film so that by the time you went onto your degree you were a well rounded creative person with a developed eye. This does not happen any more and I see it in the work we produce as an industry - it's all very clever and innovative but not much of it is particularly beautiful. And that's where I come in apparently.

I have to distill a year's course into 3, 1 hour sessions. I'm actually really looking forward to it even though I'm having to do it during my free time at home because work has suddenly got so busy. Once I have some sort of syllabus I'll probably post it here for review since I know that there are arty types who read this and hopefully have an opinion.

Toward A Lost Art

Ridley Scott has suggested that devices such as mobile 'phones and other gadgets that can display video are killing cinema. "We try to do films which are in support of cinema, in a large room with good sound and a big picture. But we're fighting technology" he said yesterday. It's an interesting idea and, as has been mentioned elsewhere, the televisualisation of cinema goes much further than its distribution mechanism - it is endemic in production too. Ridley Scott is certainly one of the directors who makes film for the cinema screen and, whatever the merits of his recent output, you can't say he doesn't know how to frame a shot for a 40 foot screen.

It is interesting how films can evoke different emotional responses depending upon how they are viewed.

Sticking with Ridley Scott as an example, I was used to watching "Alien" on a TV screen for years before I got a chance to see it at the cinema. When I helped run the film society at the art college I attended we discovered an anamorphic lens for the 16mm projector in the back of a cupboard and thus decided to hold a "widescreen" season in its honour. Amongst others we rented "Jaws", "Blade Runner", "Dirty Harry" and "Alien". The print for "Alien" was so old it had an 'X' certificate rather than an '18' and probably hadn't been loaned out by the BFI in a decade. After an afternoon patching up the splices on the brittle reel ends we were able to screen the film for the twenty or so students who could be bothered to come and see this classic as it was meant to be seen. I knew this film backwards, every shot, every edit and yet seeing it on a large screen made the whole experience radically different. The shots which really affected me differently on the big screen were the long tracking shots, for example those at the beginning of the film as we move through the intestines of the 'Nostromo'. On a small screen this has no impact beyond exposition but when the image is more than life-size and fills your peripheral vision the sense of place becomes palpable - one inhabits the space. The effect of having your eyes drenched in this new world is utterly transportative and you instantly become part of the narrative before you have seen an actor or heard a single line of dialogue.

I had exactly the same experience seeing "L'Année Dernière à Marienbad" on a cinema screen at the Curzon Mayfair for the first time last year - the long shots travelling though the baroque palace serve as transportation for the soul of the audience out of their seats and into the world of the film. Any narrative where a sense of place is important, or where a location almost becomes a character in its own right, like The Nostromo or the palace at Marienbad, is best served by the scale of a cinema screen; it envelops us rather than us dominating it. Similarly films where the characters' relationships with a location are important, "Brokeback Mountain" or "Treasure of the Sierra Madre" leap to mind, rely upon placing us, for empathetic purposes, into the same environment as the protagonists.

These shots are made for a cinema, not for television. Watching them on a smaller screen simply does not have the same visceral impact. It's like looking at a Mark Rothko painting reproduced in a book: it gives you an idea of what the piece is about without any of the actual substance. This is not to diminish TV, merely to point out that work designed for one format seldom translates intact to another. To give another hypothetical example: it would be like watching a soap opera on a cinema screen where the continual close-ups of heads and mid-shots would have you crawling for seats right at the back pretty quickly. This type of talking heads visual media is designed for a TV screen and that is where it works best.

So I understand what Scott says, and I largely agree. If we make films designed to be viewed on a small TV screen we will lose something that only a big screen can give us. For me, seeing Grawp in "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" on the IMAX screen where he truly appeared gigantic, gave me a greater sense of who he was as a character and what he was capable of than all the hours I spent in front of a monitor working on those very same shots.

Similarly the close up of the full size mechanical Kong's face from the 1933 version, which appears comic because of its limited movement on television, (and has been duly parodied shot for shot in the Simpsons' "Treehouse of Horror III" for that very reason) looks truly menacing when viewed on a full size cinema screen.

The ever increasing use of iPods and 'phones to watch video is not a bad thing per se. What worries me is that cinema is becoming less like cinema, it is seldom a transportative experience anymore and we seem to be headed to a world where homogeneous visual entertainment, which works equally badly via every method of delivery, becomes the norm. Indeed, if we are not careful we could lose those special qualities that each medium has to move us.

Cinema suffers a worse fate than the others though for an additional reason. Whilst modern televisions far exceed previous generations in terms of quality, going into a modern cinema no longer feels like entering a magical land of strange promise and wonder. I am not being nostalgic here. Everytime I go to the Curzon Mayfair I am reminded what "going to the cinema" really means. The architecture, the design of the seats, the interior design of the auditorium all make the experience special. Modern cinemas are nearly all tin sheds on industrial estates on the outskirts of towns and inside they look like cheaply designed and built service areas found on motorways. Even supposedly prestige venues like The Odeon Leicester Square feel cheap and tacky though the ticket prices certainly aren't. I cannot blame people for abandoning the cinema, the films are designed for TV and the theatres are tawdry. Having a projector and surround sound at home becomes increasingly affordable and why would you choose anything but that? It is a shame, and I am glad that I have been lucky enough to experience a real cinema as it is an increasingly rare phenomenon. Anyone who says seeing a properly cinematic film on TV is no different to seeing it in a theatre has clearly never watched "2001 A Space Odyssey" on 70mm in a 1950s purpose built modernist cinema. That is an experience I will always treasure whatever happens to the artform over the coming years.

Update: Once again I find myself wandering down paths previously trodden by Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell. Here, Bordwell discusses watching films on his iPod.

For the most part, I don’t watch fiction films on my iPod. I watch documentaries... I don’t watch TV at home, but I catch up with shows like The Shield and The Wire via my iPod. I watch some YouTube clips, especially the Two Chinese Students (aka Back Dorm Boys), which always give me a lift.

But I confess I’ve also put on films that work, for me, like favorite music. These are films I know well and love to look at in idle moments.

I wonder whether the desire to watch documentaries and TV is because of their talking head formatting which works well on a tiny screen? Most other iPod owners I know (myself included) also have have what I refer to as "comfort food movies" on their iPods: films we know backwards already where the tiny iPod image is really just an aide memoire to the version we carry in our heads. Here the iPod is not really subverting cinema as we aren't using the device as a replacement for cinema, it is merely a crib sheet for our memories to relive those precious moments in the dark.

From the Sublime to the Sublime

What a wonderful weekend. I spent yesterday at Lord's watching cricket's equivalent of the F.A. Cup final or the Superbowl where Hampshire took on Durham. It was a privilege to see Shane Warne, arguably the best spin bowler the game has ever seen, and yet he ended up on the losing side. Durham played brilliantly. Disciplined batting and a quickfire 78 from the irrepressible Shivnarine Chanderpaul set Hampshire a daunting 312 for victory. Two wickets from the first two balls of Hampshire's reply pretty much did for their chances and they never looked even close to making the runs. Even Kevin Pietersen failed to fire. It's good to see a young county (in cricketing terms anyway) doing so well. Congratulations to Durham on a thoroughly deserved victory.

Youth and vigour were much in evidence today also. After a leisurely day, Tinseltroos and I walked over to The Royal Albert Hall for this evening's Prom Concert. Gustavo Dudamel conducted the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela playing Shostakovich's 10th symphony (a personal favourite), followed by excerpts from West Side Story (always good fun) and finished with a selection of pieces by south American composers of whom I'd not previously heard, to whit Revueltas and Ginastera.

This group of teenagers were the best orchestra it has ever been my good fortune to see. They put many of the more famous names in classical music to shame. I have been to many classical concerts and have become used to orchestras who only seem to half know the piece they are performing. They don't hit the notes exactly together and thus end up sounding muddy and lacklustre. Their reliance on sight-reading also means they look less at the conductor who is therefore unable to get them to coalesce into a seamless whole and craft a whole sound from the mass of individuals. Not so tonight. Listening to this big orchestra was the aural equivalent of watching a flock birds change direction, as one, in flight. They were so light on their toes that the music felt as though it were coming from one giant living thing, one delightfully monstrous creature entirely at the beck and call of the effusive Dudamel.

The Shostakovich piece shifts from joy to melancholy to menace to anger throughout and they carried off these twists and turns with such dexterity and such soul and passion that I was left lost for words. They were so musical, an odd thing to say perhaps but one so often gets the impression that many professional orchestras really see what they do as just a job and if all the notes are there and in the right order that will do. Tonight's performers gave it their all. The packed hall responded in kind roaring and applauding them back for 4 encores. They were more than worth every one.

Have a look on the BBC's web-page for the listen again option for the show and see what I mean.

Update: Apparently I am not alone in thinking this.

Scribbler

I'm trying to get my creative juices flowing again. Having been run ragged by being pulled onto a project in its death throes I'm feeling pretty shattered and I need to get my artistic mojo back. To that end I'm trying to do some more drawing. I haven't done any "proper" drawing in over a year and it shows. I wish drawing were like riding a bike and you never lost the ability no matter how long you went between rides but sadly it isn't. In my experience unless I draw constantly I lose the fine control I need. My drawings look sloppy and poorly constructed; there is no tension in the line, no power to pencil strokes and the shading is scruffy. I suppose it must be a matter of pure hand/eye co-ordination. I know what I want the drawing to look like but the minute level of control of my hands that I need just isn't there at the moment. It's like playing the guitar, if I take a break from playing my hands slow down and I lose precision.

On the plus side even if I'm not over-enthusiastic about the quality of my work at the moment I at least know that it's doing me good and it is very therapeutic. As it's impossible to draw with tension in your arms and shoulders, it's almost as good as having a massage. After spending half an hour with a sketchpad I can feel my knotty shoulders unwind a little. And because you're concentrating on something else it's a subconscious effort to physically relax and it is much more effective for it. I know if I am instructed to relax I find it nigh on impossible to do so, but a little drawing really helps.

It feels good to be doing something constructive that uses a different part of my brain and who knows if I keep practicing I may get vaguely competent again.

New York - Part The Third

Sunday we took extremely leisurely. We left the hotel late and went off to find brunch before exploring the West Village. I had the largest pile of pancakes, bacon, scrambled egg and maple syrup of the whole trip. I didn't think that the bacon/syrup combination would appeal but I ate it a few times a developed a bit of a penchant for it although no-one seems able to cook scrambled egg in New York, it's always too cooked.

After failing to finish my breakfast - there were just too many pancakes, we wandered through the West Village past Le Petit Puppy, a puppy shop. Pet shops like this are now illegal in the UK and have been for nearly 20 years but there were a couple we saw with tired little pups crammed into a window display. It's possible that the dogs were on rotation for window duty but they didn't seem happy and the experience upset both Tinseltroos and myself. Fortunately once we'd got beyond the village down to the river we saw many happy dogs out and about playing. We even stumbled across a specifically doggy playground.

One of the best aspects of New York compared with London is what a dog-friendly city it is. T and I are mad-keen on dogs and one day intend to own a Tibetan Terrier whom we plan to name Sprocket, but that's a digression. The number of dogs on the streets of New York was a constant delight. I think we annoyed a few locals by asking to play with their dogs and quizzing them generally about their furry friend.

After our walk we retreated back our favourite watering hole Fanelli's for a beer or two.

Fanelli's is the second oldest restaurant in New York apparently and it's wonderful. The burgers are superb, the beer very good and the waiting staff friendly. They began to recognise us eventually due to the frequency of our visits. From what I saw, bars in New York are generally full of either preppy types who seem too uptight to have fun or serious poseurs. What I liked about Fanelli's was how laid back it was - an atmosphere like a British pub, whilst still remaining a very New York cafe.

Monday was MoMA day and it didn't disappoint. It was a delight to see Les Demoiselles D'Avignon in its centenary year; it certainly lived up to the hype and one of the most amazing paintings it has ever been my pleasure to stand in front of. We were also able to catch the Jeff Wall show which is on tour. I'd seen it at Tate Modern last year but T hadn't so it was good to be offered a second chance and I wasn't about to turn down an opportunity to see one of the best shows of last year in London. The other delight of the MoMA was that it had floors devoted to design and architecture as well as fine art. The exhibit on 50 years of Helvetica, probably my favourite type-face, was lovely to see.

On Monday night we once again opened ourselves up to the wisdom of the concierge and asked for a table to be booked at a very American restaurant as it was our final night in the city. He got us a table at a superb restaurant on 10th Avenue called Cookshop. It billed itself as "modern American" which seemed to me very akin to the "modern British" school of taking some traditional national dishes and mixing them with influences of other cultures a little but with the focus on good quality ingredients. It was a delicious meal, I had a fish bisque, a New Jersey rabbit and an apricot baked alaska. This was washed down with a bottle of Napa Valley Semillon from Ruston Vines. Well worth tracking down the 2003 vintage.

Tuesday post checking out was spent mooching around Soho until the shops opened so that Tinseltroos could go to Miss Sixty and get some jeans.

This was followed by more mooching, a final beer at Fanelli's to get out of the 87 degree heat and then at 4 o'clock we went back to Lombardi's for a late lunch to fortify us against having to eat any airport food.

The cab back through rush-hour was pretty exciting with our cabbie diving down the back streets of Queens to try and beat the rush and he got us to JFK with plenty of time to spare.

After a bit of a panic at check-in when we found that our flight had been cancelled we were allocated to another flight that took off at almost the time we'd been supposed to leave anyway so all was good. I slept from the coast of Canada to due south of Iceland and we landed back at Heathrow, safe and sound at 9 a.m. BST.

Wonderful.

DS Cosy

Cosy III, originally uploaded by Mr Atrocity.

Look what Tinseltroos has crocheted for me. So pretty.

New York - Part The Second

On the Friday morning we pootled around Soho and its environs taking a peek inside some of the shops. We met up with Lucretia for lunch prior to his jetting home to Maine that night. Ama was a very pleasant Itialian restaurant which Tinseltroos is modelling here:

The proprietor treated us to a lengthy diatribe on the failings of his employees who had apparently telephoned him thirty minutes before to say they were sick and couldn't come to work; he suspected this to be a fib and since the weather was a balmy 80 degrees I tend to agree.

Friday evening saw us visit the New York offices of a former employer so we could a) Take advantage of their lovely roof-terrace with views like this:

and b) go out for the evening with several former colleagues for pizza at the remarkable Lombardi's Pizzeria:

Lombardi's claims to be the oldest pizzeria in New York and I love New York style pizza. The consistency seems like a very light dough which has been thoroughly beaten flat meaning that once cooked it is slightly thicker than an Italian pizza base but not as bready as more deep-pan pizzas. They also had pitchers of Yuengling and Sam Adams beer which was the perfect accompaniment. Following dinner we went out for a few drinks till our jet-lag would finally leave us alone no more. Here is my Perfect Manhattan in Manhattan:

On Saturday we had breakfast in an old style New York restaurant called Prime Burger. The swing out tables and bar-top dining combined with the staff and pleasingly mechanical till made me feel as if I'd just stepped into a Damon Runyon story. They did a good bacon and scrambled egg too. Next we took a ride in the fastest elevator I've ever been in up the Rockefeller Center to take in the New York skyline. Whilst not a high as the Empire State, the Rockefeller grants you wonderful views of the Empire State which I'd rather have that a view of The Rock. The vista laid our before us was predictably astonishing. Until you get above the roof line it is hard to grasp just how big New York City is. London apparently has a greater population but that's spread over a greater area and much of it is suburb, the part you'd actually call city-like is pretty contained. In New York it extends for miles. Amazing.

After The Rock (not Alcatraz) we went up to The Guggenheim. It was disappointing truth be told. Half the gallery is closed to allow for renovation, the entire exterior is shrouded in tarpaulin meaning little of Frank Lloyd Wright's design can be seen and the visiting exhibition of neo-impressionism and divisionism was full of some of the nastiest paintings I've seen. I've never liked Seurat and to have room after room filled with him and his acolytes did not cheer me or Tinseltroos. I liked this photo I took of the entrance to The Guggenheim though:

From there we walked to the Frick Collection. Henry Clay Frick was an industrialist who had a fortune so vast he decided to build a replica of a French palace on Fifth Avenue. The building itself is a skillful pastiche but is not of much interest beyond that. What is of interest is Frick's art collection that he filled the place with. He has Holbein's portrait of Thomas More, there are Rembrandts, Vermeers, Piero della Francescas and a collection of deliciously naughty Bouchers. If the building feels a touch ersatz the art more than makes up for it.

We did one more gallery, the International Center of Photography. Having thumbed through a copy of Time Out New York I'd found that the gallery had an exhibition of the work of Stephen Shore, one of my favourite photographers, and so we decided to stop by. In addition to the Shore, which was the biggest selection of prints I've seen together in one place there was another show on African America portraiture. Whilst this could have been very tokenistic, the theme of the show was how photography had allowed images of prominent African Americans to be widely disseminated and thus how photography formed part of the political struggle for equality. The photographs chosen were incredible as were the stories of those portrayed. A very impressive show.

Here is a napping courier I photographed on our wanders through Midtown. I only include this photo because I like it:

Having had enough of culture we head back to Soho through the East Village stopping off for a spot of lunch. Inspired as I was by Stephen Shore, here is my pastiche of a famous Shore picture of a half eaten McDonald's meal in 1973:

Me And My Girlfriend Don't Wear No Shoes

It's a slightly strange time at the moment, in many ways it's a rather transitional phase in my life and yet the changes are ones I must allow to happen when it is time and cannot rush headlong into. As a naturally can-do, get-stuff-done type this is difficult. Now I'm done with Harry Potter (unless I end up working on No. 6 - ye gods) I have to begin work on another project. I am pretty much assigned to a small chunk of a large show for the next few months or so. After that it's all a bit vague but we'll see what transpires. I'm looking forward to tackling my new show as the chunk I'm working on is small enough to be done by a tiny team which will mean less bureaucracy and a greater variety of work for me to do; two things I felt were amiss with the last eighteen months. It's also a very pretty sequence and the director is known for having a good eye stylistically which gives me confidence.

All of that must come in June however. All of May is mine and Tinseltroos'. We can do what we like. The upside of working so many weekends for the last 8 months or so is that we have accrued enough TOIL to take a month off work and it cannot come soon enough. As well as holidaying in New York we also have the delightful task of finding a flat for us to live in together. My days living in a shared hose with friends are over, and I'm glad really. The times has come to get a "grown up" house and now is perfect. We're hoping to move into our place in late June so we'll be looking during May. I'm sure it should feel scarier than it does; as it stands it just feels like exactly the right thing to do.

I also have another couple of little projects to occupy my time. One is the previously mentioned bicycle project. Thanks to eBay I now have a 1978 Holdsworth Championship in a box in our back yard. It's present state is this:


It used to look like this 30 years ago:


And by June I'm hoping it will look like this:


First I need to get one of the rear drop-outs straightened and I need to clean all the old paintwork and rusty patches of before it can get enameled and the fun of rebuilding the chain line for fixed-gear, single-speed cycling can begin.

I also have my short film idea to work on. I'm storyboarding it at the moment, but the idea seems to be coalescing nicely now so I'll be able to begin shot-work in earnest pretty soon.

Things that are making me happy now are:

1. The martinis at Two Floors. They make them just right and with Plymouth Gin (a personal favourite).
2. The Proms booklet arrived so I can plan this summer's concert going.
3. Lorenzo Villoresi's "Uomo". I smell nice.
4. The sunshine and low twenties temperature in London now.
5. The prospect of dinner with my beloved at my favourite restaurant tonight.
6. The thought of re-reading "Three Men in a Boat" for the umpteenth time.
7. The full-length portrait of Catherine Parr in the National Portrait Gallery.
8. Greg Bear's "Blood Music" which I've just finished reading.
9. All the trees now have rich green leaves on them.

By the way, the title of this post is inspired by Churlita's use of song lyrics for post headings, an idea I like so much I've unashamedly stolen it. There's a prize for the first person to guess the song and band...