cent's 2010 manifesto {cough}

(deep inbreath) (pause) ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhmm.., - what a strange year that turned out to be.

as far as this place is concerned... well, just look at the number of recent posts compared to the corresponding months of previous years. that really tells its own story. "promises" have sort of been made, and by no means kept. many of the crucial reasons have already been cited (in those same few etiolated posts). the really obvious one (i.e. parenthood) is at the root and heart of it all, of course. and then there's also...

lemme tell you a story a minute... a guy got back into martial arts training after a longish gap, but having previously trained with masters; found a perfect place to train alone and (mostly) undisturbed, out in the elements in an enchanting/-ed setting, and accordingly got right back into it... it hijacked his attention for some few weeks, meaning that he carried it around in his head on an hourly basis, waking and sleeping; and this manner of being was in fact habitual to him on such occasions, that is to say, when experiencing the (re)discovery of a subject of great interest. such fires tend to burn fairly fast.

anyway... in this state of heightened awareness*1, the way forward seemed pretty simple, but naturally it turned out to be nothing of the sort - at least so far. actually there are encouraging signs of movement at last... but that's behind the scenes, nothing we need to get into here. no, this is about trying to give some sort of explanation as to why my blogductivity flatlined for a while back there. the taiji thing - the point is that the braxtothon was of course born of the same obsessive internal monologuing, would have been very difficult without it in truth; these things, there are many of them, or at least several, and the awful paradox/dilemma for me is that i can only shine the torchbeam in one temple at a time, must inevitably cycle between them*2 yet have not (yet) in any way mastered the art of reporting back regularly and faithfully. so much that is noticed goes untransmitted.

now - that way lies madness, eventually (succeeding divorce and general estrangement, not a good companion for detailed martial arts training and prolonged meditation thereupon... i'm sure we've all seen that movie) so at this point i am striving to wrest under my control this facility/tendency/curse, and be able to turn it on and off in careful moderation. this will in theory allow me to report back better as well. (in due course i will have to start other blogs or do something similar. anyone who's good with this stuff, give me a shout at braxtonhead@gmail.com)

this is the one site which i guarantee to keep going, regardless of what others i might set up in future - the central processor - the thread. this has less to do with (near-) promises i have made, whether to some people in general or to one man in particular, though those are cogent reasons in themselves; it concerns rather the feeling i have often had about this blog representing the hardest i have tried to do my best - at least most of the time (my inability to offer anything of the sort recently is my fundamental reason for not posting) - it's beyond my choosing, it needs continuing.

at this stage there seems little point in actually writing those damn vignettes i was dangling on a stick throughout the autumn and into winter; for what it's worth, there were gonna be three of 'em, to wit:

1. a return to the paul smoker album QB, specifically to one track, pretty sure it's one of phil haynes', which really could well have been one of the first ripples in the younger john zorn's pond of masada, and was interesting too from the pov of the braxtophile (though for largely negative reasons iirc); started this but was already taking too damn long over it (funny how the "short ones" so often turn out to be the most rambling and uncontainable...), never finished it, may write it up for eartrip one day, perhaps...

2. the promised controversial two-parter, beginning innocuously enough with a quickie about the cygnus ensemble's delightful rendering of the first species gtm composition 186 - and using it then as an entry to the matter of audiophilia (or rather of audiophiles, since it must surely be necessary to distinguish the two!) - it's not a high-fidelity recording, as found online*3, hence offered the perfect pretext for examining this important (i still maintain it's important) issue; but no, i'm not now going to write this one at all, at least not for the foreseeable as it inevitably would be taken as a personal attack on at least one person, and a number of you (putative readers) will understand my reluctance to be accused of that at this time.

3. some relatively simple blather about one of the duets with evan parker. the show (boot) was posted online last year and i sat down to write the post on numerous occasions. never got very far (and i still don't really know why. "ought" to have been easy enough). but i may actually go ahead and do this one at some point, mainly 'cos i chose the photo months ago ;-)

- like i say, not much point now in beating myself up about posts i never did, or pretending that they are still at the top of the queue. first business really is that frigging dortmund monkey which still haunts my shoulders and upper back. the rest of it... it'll resume in its own time but i will try to post at least once a month, and try to make it substantial when i do. thanks for listening :)

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c x