There I was, finally (finally!) about to start writing on here again - just very gently - and something came along almost immediately to derail my train of thought.
How long has it been? This quasi-edifice I constructed - it disintegrated so long ago now that my regular involvement in it almost feels like another life. I have never lost interest in B's music, though my listening has waxed and waned over time, and I never entirely lost the intention to resume writing about it; but as one year bled into another, and my life seemed to be falling apart around my ears... then rebuilt itself (or allowed me to rebuild it)..., I just never got round to doing anything about it. The online "scene" around free jazz and creative music - which had subsisted for a few years in the mid-to-late '00s - had dissipated little by little anyway. For whom would I now be writing, other than for myself? etc, etc, round and round ad nauseam...
... and then I found I had a few things I wanted to set down after all, so with the annual occasion of the Birthday Card to prompt me, I planned to cobble together a couple of posts.
Within a couple of days of stating my intention to do that, I went online to recheck a detail on Restructures, and - got a bizarre error message. The site, purportedly, had been taken offline. I thought at first this had to be some sort of mistake, or perhaps a hack. Quite apart from anything else, I had only just been using it a few days earlier (the Braxton discog itself had not been updated for some time, but of course it was still a goldmine of useful info, and every so often I would find myself clicking through it again). It was - right there. It couldn't now suddenly be gone... I had not been in touch with Jason G. for years, but I still had a contact email for him, so dropped him a very quick line, not knowing if he would ever see it. Within a couple of days, I had a response: there was no mistake. He actually had taken the site down.
The precise reasons for that are not something I feel I can go into here, because it's JG's decision and his business. But what he told me came as a nasty jolt, and shook me up a bit. I did some digging, and I think I found what it was that had led him to do as he did. I would have to say: I would not draw the same conclusions from it as he apparently did. But, again, it's his decision and I have to respect that.
What it leaves me wondering is about a sort of "anti-synchronicity" surrounding this blog, and the intentions it represents (or more specifically, "this blog, and the intentions my involvement with it represents", since it was not actually my blog to begin with). I go all that time without posting on it more than once a year, rendering the blog little more than a sort of dusty memorial to itself; and then, I decide at length to resume posting on it, and almost simultaneously, this happens. What the actual fuck? But then, when I really started to think that through, I began to realise that this was just the latest reiteration of something which first cropped up years ago.
Several times, blockages appeared which made it hard to work on this. Most notably, I found myself inheriting another collector's carefully-amassed treasure-trove of live recordings... at a time when I could not possibly hope to give them even a fraction of the attention they deserved (and at a time, for that matter, when I no longer even owned a cassette-player). Previously, I had been gifted a complete set of B's Tri-Axium writings and his Composititon Notes - and had not had time or space for those either. There were several other obstacles of similar stripe, at several points along the way. With my own attention having moved away from such matters, I had forgotten about them. This latest cosmic irony with the Restructures site, and the consequent loss (to everyone) of the Braxton discography, got me remembering all over again.
There are schools of thought which make much of coincidence, and there are those who say that when one discovers one's true vocation or life-path, it's as if all obstacles just melt away. What, then, am I to make of this? Have I created all such energetic blockages myself? Cos if not... it seems I am being told -have repeatedly been told - to steer well clear.
That feels wrong, though. I suspect that the "lack of cosmic path-clearing" can be traced directly back to B's contacting me for the first time, saying that he hoped his doing so would not interfere with what I was doing. It wasn't his fault... but it did. That's all down to me, though, and my long-established inability to see things through.
I may never see this through properly either, and I certainly have long since missed the opportunity to make it into what I originally hoped it would become. But... does that really matter?
I still intend to post, pretty soon. I just needed to have this little argument with myself, before doing so...
