You give amazing head love

Can't say I'd ever heard of Phil Perry before coming across a 1991 promo CD-single of his recently on an obscure blog (turns out it had been posted on the excellent Finest Def Mix blog back last September too, but I'd missed it).

Phil seems to have spent much of his career in the shadow of other singers, doing background vocals for Roberta Flack, Patti Austen or Will Downing. On his website you can sign up for the four-day Phil Perry Fan Cruise in the Bahamas and listen to his latest album Ready For Love which include the songs Ready For Love, Melody Of Love and The Strings Of Love. His previous album was called A Mighty Love. The album before that - Pure Pleasure - featured the songs After The Love Has Gone, When It Comes To Love, Love Don't Love Nobody and (whoah! calm down boy!) Love It Love It. See a theme here? Phil loves love.

The 1991 remixes of Amazing Love were done by the stone cold classic team of David Morales, John Poppo, Eric Kupper and Terry Burrus and it seems incredible that they were not thought good enough for full proper release. The chorus go "You give amazing love, no-one does it better and that's the truth. You give amazing love. Seems I just go crazy for your amazing love", and for some reason I just can't help replacing "love" with "head" every time I sing it. Try it!

Call me wicked, but there's something so earnest about Phil's singing that just needs a bit of derision. Despite that, and even though the song sticks to a pretty standard formula, the voice and production really lift it. I immediately (dare I say it) loved it.

So what do I do when given several mixes of the same song that seem to end too soon? I have to tinker with them, and it proved trickier than I thought. Firstly, the mastering is slightly different on the two mixes, meaning that I had to do some subtle filtering in parts to hide the crossover between the two. I extended the rhythm intro (far too short) on the Club mix, used the acapella from the Serious Moonlight mix for extra drama at the beginning and tagged an instrumental part of the latter to extend the former and make a satisfying 7'34" mix. I could have added even more from the Jazzy Instrumental, but often a good mix isn't just about the length, it's about keeping the energy going, keeping it concise, keeping things interesting. Hopefully my re-edit does all those. I took great pleasure doing it, and I hope you'll like it.

Click here to download my re-edit.

Back to the pool

So I've finally got back into swimming. Today was the first time in about two years. There's a municipal pool two minutes from my house and the annual subscription will cost about the same as one month at the gym used to cost me (before I stopped going). I reckon I'll get better results, quicker.

So what inspired me to go again? Perhaps it was coming across this photo of Olympic diver Matthew Mitcham? Looking at his average, so-so, kinda alright body made my vaguely gelatinous fluorescent midriff look not good at all. I comfort myself by saying that he's not actually a swimmer, but a diver. That's, like, not even a proper sport.

Photo by Adam Pretty taken from The Advocate article here.

Anyway, I got through my brisk kilometre of breast stroke and now I have panda eyes from the goggles and an aching shoulder: I have this tendinitis that just won't go away, part of the reason why I can't do the crawl. The other part is that I flail about, swallow water and don't move forward. Lessons didn't help.

A painful shoulder, yesterday. Found on pain.health-info.org

So, twice-weekly, a kilometre at each session. That's the plan. By the summer I'll either be highly toned or partially crippled. Luckily, both have the their admirers.

I am a photographer (they tell me)

I love taking photos, and despite only having the most basic of material, I do occasionally get some shots that I like. Friends sometimes say that I have a good eye for colour and framing, but when I look at the great stuff on Flickr and don't feel that I'm doing anything that special.

Anyway, this month I am part of the Hôtels Paris Rive Gauche photo project called A Hotel Photo, An Artist's View. The project allows one photographer a month to spend one night in one of the chain's hotels and submit one photo and one piece of text. At the end of the year, all the photos form the previous year are exposed in Paris and in the running for a €3,000 prize (although I won't be eligible because I know, er, certain people at the company).

I didn't have any spectacular ideas for my photo, but I thought the end result (above) was quite fun. A lot of other photographers seem to have women draped over beds. No surprise I didn't go down that road I suppose. Here's the test shot that convinced my that the idea would work. Love the combination of army trousers and Totoro slippers!

I only know basic Photoshop, so for compositing the proper photo I got help from pal Manu and his new venture altstudio.be

If you go to the page presenting the photo on the hotels' website, you can read my text and ridiculous CV ("born in 19blah") and see a mini online gallery of 12 other photos that each photographer is asked to select to represent his/her work. It was actually quite tough making the selection, and I thought you might like to see the other 14 that just didn't get in. The gallery is here.

P.S. The above two photos both contain cat sick