February 11th, 2012 by Cal
It was this time of year again. I went skiing with two friends this year. We went to Les Menuires this time.
It was our first time there. It is a nice place with lots of appartments near the slopes. Unfortunately the shops and restaurants were in the main part of town and we had to walk a distance or take a shuttle bus to get there for food.
This year I was quite loyal by tracking my location using my mobile phone:
It was a good vacation with decent quality slopes this time, and nice weather.. for the most of the time. My friends had some lessons on the slope this year. They were quite content with that. I will probably have some lessons again next year!
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January 5th, 2012 by Cal
Yesterday morning when I came back from work I found this lying on my doormat. I order a lot of CDs on the internet, but I could not recall ordering this one. Seeing that it was send to ‘Pays Bas’ and that is a Joe Hisaishi CD it was a no-brainer to me to know from whom it was from. Alchemist you are an awesome dude and thanks a lot for your present!
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December 9th, 2011 by Cal
As the most of you probably know I have a thing with film music. In the digital age I still prefer my music on those shiny little discs called CDs. After picking it up, I rip them to music files and put them in a box. But it always nice to have a ‘hard’ backup on CDs. The four CDs below are my latest addiditons.
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October 28th, 2011 by Cal
This weekend I went to meet some StreamingSoundracks.com friends for another meet and greet in Ghent. Reason for this is that Ghent hosts every year the World Soundtracks awards. The weekend consisted of having fun with good laughs, good dinners and a lot of good Belgian beers.
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October 6th, 2011 by Cal
A friend of mine told me about My Movies. With my Android it was pretty easy to scan in all my movies using the phone’s camera. Now I finally have all my movies on my phone. It happened to me multiple times in a DVD store that I did not know if I had the movie or not. This resulted in at least one duplicate movie. Quite scary how many movies I have… Some of the “movies” are boxes, so I have more than the total amount that is showing right now. There is also a good collaboration with IMDB. So lot of extra information can be found as well with the movies in the collection.
If you are curious about the movies I have go visit Caliburn’s My movies collection. The password is my first name in all small caps. And you need to press the open button. Pressing the enter key after entering the password will not work.
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October 4th, 2011 by Cal
My heart died a little today:
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September 5th, 2011 by Cal
You probably need to be a film music expert to understand the title… :-) A friend of mine has connections in Japan. He arranged the following CDs for me:
They are:
- Cowbow Bebop by Yoko Kanno
- Final Fantasy VII Advent Children by Nobuo Uematsu
- Nausicaa Valley of Wind by Joe Hisaishi
I have been looking for them for quite some time. But for us Europeans they are too expensive. The Bebop will be in my car for quite some time. To Alchemist: thanks for getting me these CDs!
For those who do not know: The Seat belts are the artist performing on the Bebop CD.
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August 14th, 2011 by Cal
As could be read on my twitter and facebook. I did an interview for the Dutch film music magazine Score. My friends on StreamingSoundtacks.com asked me to provide an English translation for this interview. I did an exact translation as possible. If you can read Dutch please go to http://www.score-magazine.nl, register and download the magazine (No. 163) yourself instead of reading this English translation. They deserve our support.
The other article about me was about the Krakow festival. Translation of that is not really needed. It is about the same I have written down here on my blog.
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July 3rd, 2011 by Cal
After the busy day yesterday, we took today more slowly. After our standard breakfast and some internet in the lobby we left to the shopping centre. We had a very large lunch at a Mexican restaurant. We shopped for dvds and cds in the Saturn. Saturn had free wifi, so there I found out that Ad has been promoted to ambassador for StreamingSoundtracks.com. So I was the one who could inform him and congratulate him. Afterwards it was time for the pool.
Before the concert we ate hamburgers with a beer. We took the taxi this time to make sure were on time for this concert. That was a good thing. We met Umebayashi again and he asked Ad for his email address. Ad was happy the rest of the day. The concert started with a short movie: it was a parody on James Bond. The reason for this is that John Barry composed a lot of Bond scores. The next part of the concert was hommage to Bernard Herrmann. Music was played from for example 7th voyage of Simbad, Citizen Kane, The day the earth stood still and Taxi driver with a solo for saxophone.
During the break we had a chance to meet up with interested fans and other friends. We had to hand out the last business cards we had. Let us hope it will result in a couple of new active members. After the break the short Bond movie continued, and the hommage to John Barry started. Music was played from Born free, Midnight cowboy, Dances with wolves, Goldfinger, Diamonds are forever and it ended with The Lion in winter. Overall a satisfying performance.
Fortunately after the concert we had chance to say goodbye to most of our friends. A lot of them we will see again in Ghent in October!
To conclude this festival. Overall Ad and I had a good holiday were we got some things done for SST. In the evening we had nice concerts in absolutely gorgeous locations. We have spoken to a lot of people. Composers, agents, festival organizers etc etc. Unfortunately the organisation of Filmucite did not have time to speak to us about the collaboration next year. Which was one of our main goals of being there. But overall we we had a good exposure for SST and had a very good time on Tenerife. My next report will be in October in Ghent. Thanks for reading.
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July 2nd, 2011 by Cal
Today Ad went to the airport to collect a rental car. When he returned at the hotel we went for a drive. We took a nice mountain road to the vulcano El Teide. The journey was very cloudy/foggy but when we were above the clouds we had a nice view over the mountains. Too bad the view to the ocean was blocked by the clouds. At a visitor centre we decided to eat some lunch.
After continuing our trip we drove through a nice vulcanic landscape. We stopped at a lot of points to take pictures and go for a small walk. We ended our scenic route in Playa Las Americas, the place to be for the common tourist who is visiting Tenerife. We had beer (non-alcoholic for Ad) at the beach served by a Belgian/Dutch waiter. It was a totally different experience than we were having in Santa Cruz. It was just rare to find any local population over there, it were all tourists, while in Santa Cruz it is the other way around. Ad and I preferred Santa Cruz more ;-) Afterwards it was time to return the rental at the airport and to return to our hotel.
We ate dinner at the same place as yesterday, because they were fast yesterday with delivering our food. After dinner we met our score loving German friend Andreas and went for a quick ice-cream. That resulted in being a bit too late at the Audiatorium. Luckily we got in right before the opening. Robert Piaskowski (director of the Krakow film music festival) and Anna (Diego’s wife) did the opening. The Polish composer Bartosz Chajdecki worked together with Diego in Krakow. During the opening he was shown on the big screen. Thanking Diego for his work in Krakow and wishing him all the luck for this concert. It was great to be reminded again about our Krakow experience.
The concert started with Umebayashi’s work. Music from House of the flying daggers, 2046, Curse of the gold flower and others were performed by a choir, orchestra, chinese percussion instruments and a lady singer. Umebayashi is a very nice friendly guy. As a bonus he writes pretty good music. I was glad that during the break I could give him my hand and thank him for his work.
After the break it was time for Patrick Doyle’s work. Music was played from Hamlet, Much ado about nothing, Thor, Harry Potter and others. The concert was concluded with Patrick’s music from Henry V. The audiotorium is an awesome place to hold concerts in. Overall the performance was good, Diego and the composers did an outstanding job. Afterwards we had some drinks with our new French friend Rafael we met at the concert.
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