Sometimes We're Not Prepared for Adversity

Some nights, this incredible mist creeps in over the ocean and fills Cape Town with such thick fog that you can barely see six feet in front of you. It clears a bit when you climb a hill, but you are immediately plunged back into it as soon as you head for lower ground. This was the situation as I was driving home from seeing Mark Fransman's band Strait and Narrow play at the Green Dolphin. The show was great; Mark laid down his soul-styled vocals and socially-conscious raps, and the horns filled in with vintage hard bop lines, harmonized to maximum cool. This week, they are playing at the Grahamstown National Arts Festival - a ten-day extravaganza of progressive, risk-taking music, theater, film, and dance. I am going, to play, to conduct interviews, and to keep my ears wide open.

In other news, I had a large amount of cash disappear from my room last week. After searching the whole place several times, emptying shelves, replacing things, and emptying them again, I have decided that it is not there. Robbed? Again? The house has not been broken into, and I live with only two other people, a Xhosa woman and her 14-year-old son. They offer no information. Thoughts of going home early preoccupied me until recently. No, not now. Yes, now! But in the end, to leave is to lose more than to stay, and there has been quite enough loss already. It is nice to know that I don't have to stay here, but I can choose to stay here - to make of it what I will. And I will make something of it. I am poised to enter a phase of fast-moving festivity, ending the period of hibernation which has preceded it.

What else? I hang out in the UCT music library on any of our frequent rainy days. A gem: That music is tied up with identity should not surprise us. Identity is, in every context, a performative activity. So music, through "performative identifying," can allow us to express a politics, which is essentially an identification with one given group or another. I hang out with church people and talk about the problems and contradictions in the Bible. I teach brass lessons to teenagers at the Athlone Academy of Music. Athalie and I are starting to rearrange some of Bertold Brecht's work with an eye to Capetonian culture. Mac and I are putting together an album, bit by bit.

I like the way laundry looks when it hangs on the line. It has nothing to prove. Not trying to be anything it isn't.