Sekou Sundiata - sadly departed

I am sad today. When the flu came I should have known something was in the water; one of my heroes has crossed over. Sekou Sundiata, for me, will always signify the richness of metaphor in voice, writing so complex but delivered with simple heart and emotion so that the vocabulary doesn't throw you; you just get in and he leads you to the full stop.

Sekou, thanks for the inspiration; I will miss you...

"everything in the dream is the dreamer" - Sekou Sundiata
"women believe that God is a man, but a man is very horny." - Sekou Sundiata
"last night I had a nasty dream with peaches and I woke up stuck to myself" - Sekou Sundiata
"the first picture I saw of Charlie Parker was a naked bird on a busted branch with broken wings in Abyssinia Baptist Church" - Sekou Sundiata
"somewhere in America you could buy fries to go with that shake of yours" - Sekou Sundiata
"the year the Mississippi river just sat, like a hard promise, choking on vessels of commerce" - Sekou Sundiata

Most of these quotes are from a poem called "The Sound of Memory", which is perhaps my favourite Sekou poem. Go out there and find him and buy him; all we have left is his voice, but what a voice it is!

mr hyde

Every so often I feel this little twinge of desperation, like all the things I'm doing will lead to nothing and I'll be left with dream shards that cut every time I try to move. It's like I have so much to learn and there's no time in the world and I just want to cry. I call those moments my Mr Hyde moments because if you catch me in a moment like that, with desperation and tears stacked up behind my eyes, I can snap with absolutely no provocation...

Ironically, the only thing that helps me push the feeling aside is remembering the really hard times I've lived through; the days with no food, the months sleeping on concrete, the 20-hour shifts to hold back debt... OK, it's not the ONLY thing that helps - crying hard does too but sometimes it's messy. Having said that, living alone like I do, it's often a quicker solution than dredging your memories for misery, but don't fall for the temptation of calling your mom or dad; they'll just cheer you up in that way that makes you cry even more - there's nothing as bad as someone trying to tell you you're precious and talented and a gift and clever and remarkable, when you feel like shit!

- SIGH -

OK, I let it go. I found a video that a friend of mine made when I was performing in Munich so I'm stealing it for you. (check out Ken Yamamoto if you speak German; he's a cool dude!)

click above to see it

i'm listening to patti labelle; she has a great voice for low times...

pasta

no listening, no reading, just talking... i'm away from home unwinding with some old friends 'cos my life's all twisted right now. of course, what do i get for dinner? pasta - spaghetti bolognese. you couldn't get more twisted than that - am i reading too many metaphors out here? well, the good thing is it tasted great and i ate it all. now if i could consume all my entangled problems in the same way, i wouldn't care if it came with good wine or not!