Curatorially Yours

I've not managed to be particularly creative on my week off, as yet. Perhaps its no surprise, after all it takes a while to shake off the day job, then a while longer to do the things you'd put off until you'd got a few days off, and then still longer as you "get your house in order." In my case, this seems to be an endless, enjoyable, but inherently pointless, curatorial role. I've written so much, and - going back a few years - recorded so much music that I spend a sizeable amount of time being my own librarian. With my music, a decade ago, I systematically put all my recordings on DAT so I'd got a decent digital copy - in doing so I scoured cupboards for old tapes, and ended up with over 25 hours of stuff. Inevitably, over the last 2 or 3 years, and somewhat less systematically, I've been putting it on CD, and some of it on the internet. Its one of those tasks - like digitising old photographs, or turning your cine films into video (or video into DVDs) - that has to be done at some point, but there's no particular rush. Of course, nobody else will ever do it for me (or for that matter, could.) It seems as if I've spent more time archiving the damn stuff than writing and recording it. But, as stories of old Beatles photos found in lofts prove (or this week, Marlon Brando's screen test for Rebel Without a Cause), you can never be too systematic. Not that my musical experiments have much intrinsic worth - they have a lot of personal value of course, and that's enough - had I turned into Jeff Buckley or Kurt Cobain, then they'd be in an expensive boxset in HMV of course, but I didn't so they haven't (and I lived to tell the tale - I wrote a song about Kurt, and a poem about Jeff - and his dad - so they're not just random names pulled out of the hat.) But I was at my parents at the weekend and my dad was (a) putting photographs from the christening on to the computer, mere hours after taking them and (b) rooting around in a box of old photos from the attic from the '50s. You see where I'm coming from? Unless someone prints off those christening photos, and stores them somewhere - say, in a suitcase, in an attic - then how long before they're lost and forgotten? A year? 5 years? Wherever I go, I guess I can put my old CDs, handmade magazines, and manuscripts in a box somewhere, and it will last - potentially forever - whilst these data disks, these hard disks... I'm not so sure. So curatorial me, will not only be backing up "My Documents" this week, but buying a few lever arch files and the like, and printing off that short little poem about Tim and Jeff Buckley. If I can only find where on my hard disk I've put it.