Compose this: a life. A life in full recognition that you’ve only got so many hours in a day (it isn’t twenty-four), so many hands (two, if you’re lucky), so many brains (one, if you don’t count collective consciousness), and so much energy.
Post-Midem follow-up, I am discovering, is a job. The first week back, you crash and burn, and this explains why one of my newfound friends, a British songwriter, holed up at her parents’ place to go through the Midem contact materials and confesses to being “so behind on my email it’s ridiculous” while future co-creator Daniel, a producer from Argentina, took his family to Brazil for holidays after his time in Cannes before setting himself on fire. The work after Midem is all-consuming, and this is fast becoming a hyphenated article. What’s that all about?
Perhaps it reflects the hyphenated lives we lead. I tried to write a ‘normal’ bio for JFDI, not wanting to categorize myself as uncategorizable, and it became much easier to string a list of nouns punctuated with ‘jill-of-all-trades’ to sum up what I do, which is considerable. Graeme Murray, a UK painter of angels, left a message on my MySpace page telling me something that fixed me with a smile all the day after. “Categorizing music is folly. Musica Laetitiae Comes Medicina Dolorum (music is the companion of joy and a medicine for suffering).” Hyphenated categorization seems easier when describing a life.
My days are filled with teaching high school students in trouble. I devote lunch-hours and afternoon free periods to turning the pages of research articles. At night, I write essays on the cultural policies of Australia, the UK and US, and Canada. Never mind trying to cram in late work for my sustainable tourism course, which I’ve, most gratefully, received an open extension for. I need it and hate myself for it already. I edit university papers for university students of foreign lands rarely now, as there is no time for this.
I’ve contacted my CD manufacturer here to ask about bar codes and digital codes for the CD, and she’s doing that for me. MBop has emailed and so has Planetary Group to invite me to look at their online digital package for music promotions. One would better service the UK, while the other does the US market. Baby steps, I am reminded. Except that I need to be running in leaps and bounds.
The Indian firm that I am signing a management deal with is waiting for my bio, album summary and passport copy, and this is big—very big. I found out today from a Pakistani-Kenyan immigrant that the for-now-unnamed company’s reach extends to South Africa and East Africa, as well as the Middle East and South Asia. Numbers like 8000 CD’s were being bandied about in one of our meetings and I couldn’t register that in my brain, but am starting to wonder just how long the arms of this prestigious company are. I phoned my friend and E. Indian guru-ji Usha Gupta today to give her the heads up. I’ve been pestering her to record an album for years, and with me for the past two. We spoke about a project this past summer, and so tomorrow we’ll bandy about ideas and start that process of researching.
Something needs to go. My roommate tells me the degree: put it on hold. Except the next two courses after this one are arts law and finance for arts organizations (which grossly seems like a repeat of the hellish arts accounting course I suffered this past summer; or maybe it’s the next level up; whatever…it involves grant application writing, something I’ve done and probably need to do again).
Composing a life, for me, means feeling the vibrations and listening to the half and quarter tones. It means gliding up and down a fretted neck with fingers greased by the sweat of travel. It means toting around a diary and writing poems and jagged thoughts in it from time to time, so I went to the Orderly Bazaar (www.orderlybazaar.com) and put down a silly, wiggly little poem even though I’m now thinking that I need to prioritize here.I get reminders from time to time that I should be penning my book, still, and I know I should be. So all of this primes the pump, and I teeter dangerously back and forth between ‘arteest’ and pragmatist. Something in me wants to cut loose and go the way of Leonard Cohen in his early days: write poetry on a Mediterranean island. Compose an album of chants. Cross-fuse the prayers of different cultures for this friggin’ torn-up world we live in. Darfur, still ignored. Aung San Sui Kyi, still imprisoned. Palestinians, still living in apartheid-like conditions. Women, still marginalized and beaten and burned and—mercy, mercy me—killed for the ‘honor’ of some family that doesn’t know any better.
Composing a life is putting the notes and pieces together and framing them in such a way that they make sense. A friend has asked for two years now for my pictures from Saudi Arabia and has offered to pay me for some of my collection. I have long intended to get going on this project. Another friend, Robert Gillies of Scotland, is working on a YouTube video review of Bakhoor. I have no idea when he might finish; he’s off to college in the U.S. right away. But he’s a lovely fellow and he promised me he’s still keen to do this. Wow. I call that a ‘harmony’.
Composing a life means living it the way you most desire to live it. I guess I’m doing that, daily, most of the time. Yet a tired body and mind indicates…it’s time to tighten the strings and get in tune.
PS. Let me mention also that I’m starting a B&W photo serial project here. All part of the JFDI ethic. Stay near. This I find fun.
