MY SUGAR-COATED STREET

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From Paris

Well, not really Paris. More like the back of beyond, a sub-urb, a soulless banlieu where cars, presumably driven by humans, have taken over what used to be landscape and little shops, cafes, people-ish things. Instead there are motorways, roundabouts, traffic lights, bridges under which hapless pedestrians (people actually walking) risk life and limb to cross to yet another traffic island and thence make their weary way to....the Super Market! The only place for miles where something for supper may be found though it is fairly sure to consist mainly of additives. I'm only slightly exaggerating.

Enough. I'll write less robotically in a couple of days. I've finally managed to get an internet connection. My sister is more or less okay: the operation was a success in removing the malignant intruder but has left her like a boxer after a particularly brutal fight where the other guy won. Still her wondrous fighting spirit remains undaunted. Praise the Lord and the surgeon and Annie.

Images are some I've been mousing as a kind of journal while practicing being without my beloved graphic tablet.

ROME MOVIE

is here so go there and let me know what you think. It's about 18 minutes long and because of having to compress it so much, it's become rather blurry. But please stick with it anyway because there are some good moments, especially on the roof when my niece's beautiful hand gestures, slowed down, seem to be conducting the music or pointing like a frescoed angel.

I go a bit bonkers when I start editing film so I never got to bed at all last night and today has been the same. It's a rivetting and infuriating process, demanding 100% obsessive compulsion. Having removed all my original video soundtrack, keeping only some voices in the children's park, airport noises in Fiumicino and the landing at Heathrow, I had to choose music to insert in the gaps. That was the most fascinating task of all, seeing how places, faces and things are transfigured by merely giving them a new sound.

Wouldn't it be lovely if for at least a day, no one spoke at all, and all ordinary noise would be turned off, replaced by music intuitively chosen to accompany the movement of people and objects in space?

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