Thank you to neofundi and my good friend Socs - a friendship now into its 35th magnificent year - for providing such an amazing platform for me to share some of my thoughts ... and now my music.

So ... emboldened by my friends' positive reaction to my posting of one of our band's songs "My Death" yesterday, today I'm posting the vid of one of our live performances earlier this year. The song's called "East Cape Blues" and was shot exclusively on iPhone and edited on laptop by good…

Having blogged intermittently about the 2012 Grahamstown National Arts Festival; and written bits and bobs for the last year about SunshiP - the band I drum in - finally I have something to show my friends in Jozi, most of whom haven't seen me play - in fact all of whom knew me before my exit from Jozi and mid-life existentialism drove me to finally actualise the dream I've had since childhood. 

So ...

SunshiP is the band; and "My Death" is the single that appears below. The…

So its over. The ArtsFest for 2012 is done. As am I. I'd hoped to write daily updates - to put you right inside the glorious kaleidoscope that the Grahamstown National Arts Festival always is. I couldn't. This year was just too big, too much, too busy, too full, too intense, too constant. My god! Every day was so full, that by evening what had happened just that morning felt like it was days, even weeks, old.

Having worked as a wordsmith for a dozen years, I pride myself at being able…

In our little normally secluded corner of the Eastern Cape, when Fest rolls into town, everything changes. Obviously! But it's more than the obvious influx of shows and people. It's almost as if the town's DNA,and that of its people, is irrevocably altered - a kind of creative cosmic shift, where the largesse of what is all around us somehow infuses itself into our bloodstream through our pores. For a while, like plants, we grow by osmosis. For some in Gtown, Fest is the annual cash express…

... And it's nearly killed me! This has by far been the busiest festival I've had in years; and how much of a good thing I can stand, now seems to have become the sub-plot of my fight against fest fatigue. You know when a kid comes back from the zoo and starts listing? - "We saw lions, and tigers, and monkeys and leopard and ... and ... and ... Oh and ... wow and there were ..."

Check this out for the Strato Artfest zoomania days 3, 4, & 5 retrospective 

In the last three…