My friend Simon Weller shot this photo for me when he was in South Africa recently. I had wanted to blog this for a while, but was wanting a rad photo of it first… thanks to Simon, i now have a rad photo. Ryan Bolton at The Little Shop of Horrors did this for me earlier this year. Its a ‘dead’ swallow, holding onto a heart with the text “until we meet again 1939 -1996″ in remembrance of my father. He would have been 70 just the other day, so happy birthday to you Dad. I now always have you with me.

Zebra & Giraffe played at Back 2 Basix in Westdene on friday with our fellow music makers Fire Through the Window. They are a really cool band, and really cool people and i cant wait to play again with them in Durban next week. Rudi Jeggle shot some rad photos, despite not been able to get close to the stage and this is what it looked like…

I’ve only ever used my blog to promote the band, and photographers and the likes but i thought i would give a shot at actually blogging. Greg had the best status the other day about blogging, “never have so many people, had so much to say, to so few people” or something along those lines. It really made me think about why we do this kind of thing, and how people react to blogs and what it means to us. Its a real 21st century phenomenon to me, but i like it. Is there a philosophy to blogging? Having a philosophy to anything, for me, is something really hard to pin-point. I know i pick up my guitar, and play it in a certain way, execute certain things I’ve learnt, and create a sound that i like to hear, but do i have a philosophy to playing?

I like to think people ‘just do,’ and don’t spend to much time creating a reasoned method to ‘doing.’ But i also like to think that it might take a little more ‘something’ than just nothing. In a film inspired by Bob Dylan’s life, Im Not There, the narrator comes up with 7 rules for going into hiding. The last being: “never create anything, it will be misinterpreted, it will chain you and follow you for the rest of your life.” Is it possible to create something that will not be misinterpreted? Maybe with a philosophy to creating, one could be free of misinterpretation….but somehow i doubt that. As far as i can see Jimi Hendrix had no philosophy to playing and writing, and probably remains the most misunderstood person ever.

I take in the faces that i see, how they react to what we do…and i see a bunch of lost people looking to find a philosophy that they could apply in their lives. If only they knew that they have it together more than any of us. Hermeneutics of course, attempts to look into this phenomenon. To me, it can be described as a process of interpretation. How we gain meaning from certain works of art, or how we understand this meaning. So the question i put forward is, ‘does one gain less meaning from something that is made without an approach/philosphy?’

What does Hermeneutics, Jimi Hendrix, Jack Daniels, Bob Dylan and blogging have to do with any of this? Nothing! But they’re all on my mind.