As I'm writing the first Secession Records update for 2008, Secession's 10th year, I'm listening to the festive sounds of Kaapse Klopse, a kind of music indigenous to Cape Town, and generally performed during what is locally known as the Coon Carnival. Rolling drums include a snare, bass and toms. Trombones and other horns play the melodies.

The band is playing on one of the two piers on Kalk Bay and the few swimmers on the nearby beach are dancing and yelping from the shallow water. Seals twist and turn up near the fishing boats which seem entirely remarkable to be floating at all!

I've been in Cape Town for just on two weeks with at least another one to go. I've had the good fortune to see the Restless Natives play at one of the more famed of venues, The Armchair Theatre, and meet one of the founding members of the infamous local bands, Bengula. Our first podcast for 2008 features an interview with Alex Bozas and this should be released soon after I return to Australia.

For all your Secession goodness, go to Secession Update / 26 Feb 2008, now archived on the brand new Secession wiki! Just when I thought I would be spending less time online I have two wikis and about five blogs to write for. This doesn't include MySpace, Flickr and Last.FM, the only social networking sites I've got any time for these days.

It was the watermelon and fresh lime juice that first attracted me to Lino, a small cafe situated on a veranda down a side street off the main road of Kalk Bay, Cape Town. It didn't profess to have the "best coffee" in the Bay, but it did list a "long black" on their chalk board at a time when I was tired of explaining what one was.

Lino is run by James Hope who not only reminded me of Simon Lamont from Annandale's mid-80s permaculture cafe, Lurlene's, he was the only second person I've met in the world who knows where Mongarlowe is and has been there!

In a tribute to Lino and the lovely, generous, talented and wayward people I've met there, I'd penned this piece starting off with a tone poem in the style of Kurt Schwitters.

Lino, lie low, linoneum...
Lino, leano, linguistic...
Li... No!
Li... Lee... arnardo... Lino!
Leno, lipo, lineage...
Li Li Li Li ... No... Lino...
LiLiLiLiLiLiLiLiLi ... Yes? No?
Yeh... LINO!

Lino is an idea.

More than an idea, it is an engine of difference...
the making of different things
that which supports diversity of trade, of opinion, of needs
and in doing so offers visitors a safe place in which to absorb change,
in comfort, with style,
with little more than coffee and delicate cakes baked at 250 degrees max!

Lino is a hub, a rolling salon or soirée,
never quite fixed,
never quite complete...
it's not a work, but lives in progress...

Not just anyone can create, sustain and deploy a Lino...
The Linoist is at the edge of anything
and has been everything...
The Linoist has put their life on hold for the people they have cherished,
and you have shaped your life as a schnitter would wood...

The Linoist would have dreamt of sea beams in alpha centori
and sea planes landing in Kalk Bay...

The Linoist was born in the 20th Century too late
and lives through the 21st Century too early

You are, the Linoist, in fact, in your time,
the right time, Lino Time...

For fear of sounding cliché dear friend,
it is now or never...

You are your name-sake...
A line of hope... Lino!

Andrew Garton (21 – 22 Feb 2008, Kalk Bay, Cape Town)

Here's a not so good photo of the oil-can guitar I'd seen at the African Music Store.

Chris Rainer, a musician from Cape Town now living in Melbourne said, "those oil can guitars are pretty cool yes. good price too here they' re about 800 dollars. they're handmade actually just outside cape town."

Given they're priced at around RAN2000 for the top of the range, that's an excellent deal in AU dollars (around $277).

Am now in Cape Town central checking out the fun zones which I'm astonished to find are utterly filled with tourists!

I hadn't expected Cape Town to be a destination of such repute to draw so many pastel colours to it! Irksome! A less than welcome honey pot for the street sellers, beggars and homeless...

I found respite in a music store where I purchased CDs and salivated over a hand-made electric guitar constructed from a discarded oil can! Quite well made too. Sporting in ebony fretboard and what appears to be hand-made electronics it is certainly a unique instrument to be sure!

Have found cheaper net access for the weekend down in Observatory where I'm spending the weekend... overall the economics here are weird... it is certainly cheaper to rent a room for a night that it is to use the net for an hour in some places and far cheaper to rent a car than use metered taxis if you're wanting to travel after 8pm when the train line shuts down... even then, it's not recommended to travel via rail after 6 when it's known to roughen up!

I've a few more tabbed tunes downloaded and ready to print off and learn... "Love you till Tuesday" for instance, a little known Bowie tune that's about as sweet as the mango juice most places serve up for breakfast here.

Composed whilst walking over Robben Island, on the ferry back to Cape Town, in a car to Cape Point and finally in Chartfield Guest House, Kalk Bay, Feb 2008.

You rise from the sea
suspended between it and the sky
above and below where poets have trawled...

You have held the mighty and the fallen,
the fighters, the lepers
and held fast the moist air...

The moist air falls leaden onto the silent walls, gates, wire, lime mines...
a pall of velvet air heavy on the voices buried in concrete and toil,
in the rocks and sand,
eroded but not forgotten...

Dry and gnarled the sparse trees,
their weathered limbs ache for sun high to the sky,
beyond the perimeter walls where every Mandella stood their incarcerated ground...

You held the banished there,
fed, if but sparsely, the brave and exiled there,
knowing nothing of their misery and pain,
for were they to have wings they would have come and gone as frequently as the tide.

Home for some,
prison island we will remember you by,
bye bye Robben Island.

And on this day that I came to you,
when he was freed,
hope for the many that would follow,
you invite now the curious, the wanderers, the followers who would,
if only briefly, scuttle upon your broken top-soil,
through the freshly painted prison museum,
resonant still with the potency of isolation and inhumanity there...

Dignity does not become you with ease,
your cartography, the points at which we know how to find you your only crime,
for we have sullied your beaches and desecrated your wind borne land
where hope burnt eternal in spite of the oppressors of men,
them too men who saw you as their place of thankless duty,
to demean others of their species divided,
and further still, much further still, from you,
left behind, bye bye Robben Island.

Andrew Garton
11 February, 200