kagablog

this interview originally appeared on dave’s blog on monday june 26

buy uselessly now (in south africa) (in united kingdom)

After enjoying a laid back weekend of unparalleled fun and relaxation, I decided in a fit of bonhomie and what have you to interview Aryan Kaganof for the blog this morning. What follows is quite, hilariously funny and an important reading. i have not edited this e-interview at all, to protect either myself or Aryan.

 The Interview:

DC: After so many years of self publishing and independent publishing, why an established publishing house for this novel?

AK: Strictly for the money.

DC: Compared to a large amount of your previous work in other fields as well as writing, this novel is the gentlest and least controversial you have released. Does this indicate some kind of sea change in your attitude to the world at the moment?

AK: Well I’m a lot gentler and less controversial now that I’ve had the lobotomy.

DC: Uselessly and his father The Devil are cast as somewhat amoral anti hero types in the novel. Why? Do you think the traditional mythic hero figure has outgrown its use?

AK: I was going for verisimilitude.

DC: There is a lot of prejudice, misogyny and moral flexibility in the novel. Is this a reflection of yourself or of the environment we find ourselves in?

AK: This question reminds me of a poem I wrote recently:

the poetry magazine did not publish poems
that were racist, sexist or homophobic
and therefore
I did not submit this one

DC: Bearing in mind your own personal history with you father, some may be looking for much in the way of autobiographical content in this book. Is this true, or did your experience merely provide a jumping off point for the narrative and plot?

AK: When people ask about the autobiographical thing my standard reply is “everything I write is fiction, except for the stuff I make up”.

DC: Ultimately, are you happy with the novel? Do you feel that it addresses the core issues you wanted to cover? What are those core ideas?

AK: I’m always suspicious of authors with core ideas. Like Adorno, I believe that the novel IS the core idea. If I could have expressed it in any other form, in any other medium, in a more compressed way, more “core” so to speak, I would have done so. Uselessly is the core expression of the novel Uselessly.

DC: The market for art, books and music of an intellectual, left of centre nature is very small in South Africa. How are you finding working in this environment compared to your experiences in Europe?

AK: I agree with your statement which is one reason why I want to get out of the intellectual, left of centre ghetto. Those dull, dour, badly dressed leftists with the anti-capitalist rhetoric are the first people to queue up when there’s a sale, frenziedly grubbing for discounts. Essentially the leftists are resentful because they have never figured out a way to earn enough moolah to afford the goods at full retail. I broke with the left when I read the Unabomber’s Manifesto. It’s one of the most important documents of the twentieth century. He analyzes the phenomenon of the “chinless left”. That book woke me up with a start. Every so-called “revolutionary” toying around with “otherness” should read that Manifesto.

DC: How do you feel we are doing out here as artists? Are we coping with the demands of our environment? Are we keeping up conceptually, practically?

AK: I think south Africa is the most wonderful place to be living in as an artist. We are not interfered with by the government by way of tedious, creativity stifling subsidies and grants, and we are not messed with by big corporations who want to buy us up and own us and we are not even messed with by that vast, amorphous mass known as “the people”, who, are too busy watching ball games on television and beating their wives up, to be concerned with our trinkets.

DC: Is it possible that the unique circumstances that are South Africa are the breeding ground of something totally new and dynamic in the field of art and music? Or is that to over state the possibilities of the rapid change that our society is undergoing?

AK: There is incredible stuff happening in this country. Just one example, our most radical contemporary music composer Michael Blake is presenting his new composition Wringtones at the National Arts festival in Grahamstown. It’s a 5 minute composition for violin that will be performed by the Japanese virtuoso Yasutaka Hemmi, who is flying out for the concert. This is a piece that invents a genre “thrash classical” that simply hasn’t been heard before. It brings to mind great hardcore bands like the Bad Brains, Spy Vs Spy era John Zorn, as well as the apocalyptic thrash improv of Killing Time (Fred Frith-Bill Laswell-John Maher). It’s utterly wild. It reflects Joburg – the urban environment, car jackings, the constant paranoia of our life here, but also the exuberance, the buzz of Jozi. It is the most ruthlessly virile urban African music I’ve yet heard. Utterly distinctive. Utterly from here, but free of all simplistic “African” cliches - that curio shop mentality that pervades so much of the saccharine garbage pretending to be “music” in this country (Pops Mohammed etc). I recommend all readers of your blog go see the concert during the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown next week.

 DC: You are a film maker, writer, poet, singer/musician and artist. How do you find the mental energy and space to handle all of these things?

AK: I stopped doing drugs  six years ago and decided to quit finding excuses for not achieving my full potential.

DC: Do you ever worry that maybe by crossing genre so much you are depleting the effectiveness of your work, and that maybe you agendas would be better served if extrapolated to the nth degree in one discipline?

AK: It’s an interesting question, because I believe that it is the genre crossing that is the work’s effectiveness. I’m highly disciplined in all the media I work in. I believe discipline is the key to any artist’s success and development.

 DC: You seem obsessed with your Valiant and your Glock. What is with these two things?

AK: Beautifully designed machines that represent the peak of their respective disciplines.

DC: Who else out there do you rate as doing really interesting work, be it film making, writing or music?

AK: Michelle McGrane recently sent me a copy of Houellebecq’s novel The Possibility Of An Island that I enjoyed reading and I was also deeply moved by Anita Brookner’s Leaving Home. I’m not much of a reader these days, too busy with my own work, although I read The Little Prince (by Antoine De Saint-Exupery) every year in order to remind me what it’s all about, in case I forget.

I got rid of all my cds, dvds, books etc about five years ago, and I live in almost complete silence, filling it up with my own creations. Every now and then a cd finds its way to me and most recently it’s been the mechanical music of Gyorgy Ligeti, who passed away a couple of weeks ago. It’s extraordinary music, way ahead of its time and I think we will be hearing a lot more of it, and its ramifications for other composers, in the future.

I almost never go out to see movies anymore because I hate malls. The most interesting recent South African film I’ve seen is I Love You Jet Li directed by Jaco Bouwer and written by Stacy Hardy. Massive talent on display there and if I was a film producer I would give that team a blank cheque and let them get on with it.

DC: What other projects are you working on right now, and what can we expect from you next?

AK: I’ve recorded a couple of songs with that great unsung hero of South African music, Neill Solomon. These are part of an album of song versions of poems by Beat poets. (Alan Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac etc) that he is producing. Am also working on my solo cd project and it is my greatest dream to do a duet with Koos Kombuis who really is a much more interesting South African novelist than that over-rated Kangaroo fucker J.M.Coetzee.