kagablog

It is said that behind every successful publication stands a unique, strong-willed individual, someone whose distinctive personality helps to define it.

Sean O’Toole investigates whether this is true of Scope, Loslyf and FHM

Sometime in the mid-1980s. The men’s toilet (“Whites only”) in a small engineering works on the bad side of Pretoria, out west – near the cement factory and the sewerage farm. Stacked on the musty windowsill above the cistern, a stack of magazines; their pages are stiff from the sun. Only two titles to choose from: Scope and Car. Where the latter reads like a heart surgeon’s manual, neat graphs and test results undressing the new Golf Gti Mk1 and Ford XR3, the former, well, it is something else. It is a magazine.
Aside from the women in swimsuits, and this is a big aside, because that is where you invariably start and end, but aside from these women, all of them blessed with a fleshy plenitude and hard to pronounce names (like Siobhan), there are stories to read, pictures to look at, worlds to inhabit. Stories about punk rockers in Durban, some of them with agitprop anti-apartheid ideals, others just dronklappe – perfect material for a standard nine prepared English speech.
More conventionally, and besides the run of the mill travel stories and journalistic features, the magazine also includes record reviews. Reviews of vinyl long-players, the more outré stuff (The Birthday Party’s Mutiny EP and Diamanda Galas’ Litanies of Satan) diligently clipped out, each read and re-read, the act of reading a conscious substitute for never being able to hear or own the music. It is Pretoria, after all.
Strange, without even needing to Google their names, I can still recall most of Scope’s album reviewers: Richard Haslop, Martin Hendy, Jay Savage and Ian Kerkhof. Two of these writers are now dead. Hendy died in the 1980s, Kerkhof in 1999. Not that Kerkhof is really dead; he died symbolically, shedding the husk of his old self to become Aryan Kaganof. You might know him as the author, most recently, of the book JJ Uselessly. It is his third novel, the first to be picked up by a mainstream publisher. The importance of Scope, and the discrete community of individuals that this Durban-based publication was home to, should not be overlooked.
“My friend Martin Hendy was a passionate music lover,” explains Kaganof on his blog (www.kaganof.com/kagablog/). “I met him at the Durban Chess Club in 1980. We became firm friends. Martin introduced me to so much great music I can’t even begin to enumerate how important he was for my development.”
The odd thing about magazine cultures, though, is how ephemeral and fleeting they are. In 1983, Kerkhof left South Africa to pursue filmmaking, his friend Hendy committing suicide a few years later; Haslop now writes a music column for Business Day; and Scope, well it got tossed into the proverbial dustbin of history as South Africa started the task of rewriting itself.

***

1995. A corner café on Pretoria’s Mitchell Street, not far from Iscor’s billowing smokestacks and the two concrete cooling towers nearby. While waiting for a toasted Dagwood, a quick detour to the magazine rack. Sure, Car and Scope are still up there, but by now the latter feels dated and ill defined, too gentrified to really titillate – a bit like Gentlemen’s Quarterly before it re-branded itself as an acronym. As it is, there are choices now. Aside from For Women, which is, quite literally, for women, there is Loslyf, which is targeted at people who want the words surrounding the guava to be tough like biltong. And then, of course, there is Hustler, first of the big franchise titles to colonise the post-colony.
Never mind what they say about our independence and all, way back in the infancy of our democracy Hustler was South Africa’s biggest selling magazine, shifting roughly 200,000 copies a month. It was an unlikely success story for a publishing house that started out in the early 1980s producing sewing, cooking and music magazines. Founded by Joe Theron, his JT Publishing also unleashed the idiosyncratically local Loslyf, a magazine bearing the dubious honour of being the country’s first Afrikaans porn mag. The first edition caused something of a fuss, what with the kalgaat photos of a naked meisie standing in front of the Voortrekker Monument, the spare text explaining that she was descendent of Great Trek leader, Andries Hendrik Potgieter.
In her recent book History After Apartheid (2004), the historian Annie Coombes remarks that years of state censorship and the emergence of an Afrikaner lower-middle-class constituency provided the necessary context for this bit of tomfoolery. Add to which the opprobrium of a gang of middle-class Afrikaner dissenters and intellectuals who provided the bulk of the editorial staff, notably Ryk Hattingh.
Before he became editor of Loslyf, Hattingh was a sub-editor on the Vrye Weekblad, a left-leaning newspaper founded by Max du Preez. In many ways the intellectual precursor to the hugely popular Bitterkomix duo of Conrad Botes and Anton Kannemeyer, whom he later also collaborated with, Hattingh’s anti-establishment views were sharpened by a well-honed literary sensibility. His 1988 play, Sing Jy Van Bomme, won him numerous awards, and as publisher of Hond, an Afrikaans language literary imprint, he released material by writer Koos Prinsloo, amongst others.
The marriage of dissident literary thought with magazine publishing, which Hattingh briefly championed at Loslyf, is certainly nothing new. Hugh Hefner did it at Playboy, this before he became a parody of the very idea of a playboy. Then there is Daniel Defoe. In 1703, the author of Gulliver’s Travels and Robinson Crusoe started The Review, the world’s first English magazine. A committed political pamphleteer, Defoe was even briefly imprisoned for his negative views on the Church of England. His magazine, which ran without interruption until 1713, established the template by which many magazines are still defined, namely the magazine as compendium of comment, criticism and opinion, the magazine as vehicle for influencing public taste.
If Defoe made it okay for literary men to job in the land of pulp, Hattingh’s decision to follow in this mould certainly represented nothing new in South Africa. Mike Nicol, a Cape Town-based novelist and crime writer, worked for Leadership during the 1980s, commissioning writers such as Zakes Mda. Recognising the peculiar role that magazines have played in this country’s creative writing, Nicol also wrote A Good-Looking Corpse (1991), a non-fiction account of the black writers, amongst them Can Themba, who came up through the ranks of the magazine Drum.
Even David Goldblatt, who earlier this year was awarded the prestigious Hasselblad Award for Photography, cut his teeth in magazines. From April 1964 until February 1965, he worked for South African Tatler, described as a society magazine for South Africa’s anglophile elite – think Style magazine. Goldblatt functioned as both a journalist and photographer, publishing his own feature articles, taking photographs, and even doing a series of fashion shoots.
That magazines are a useful training ground for arty types goes without saying. Still, you can’t do them forever, not if you want to stay sane. Nowadays, aside from writing books, Nicol teaches creative writing at UCT, and Goldblatt is internationally famous and exhibiting apace; neither works in magazines. As for Hattingh, who once said, “all writing is rewriting,” he opted to bugger off to New Zealand, where he now reportedly owns a shoe shop.

**

2006. Exclusive Books. Located on the posh side of Pretoria, now Tshwane, the Menlyn Park branch of this upscale bookstore is tucked away in a large mall that can’t make up its mind whether it’s an ocean liner or an architectural wonder. Unlike the windowsill in that factory toilet all those years ago, or the single magazine rack in that greasy corner café, there are magazines aplenty in this bookstore. Hundreds.
Amongst the upstart local titles: Blink (or more correctly, BL!NK), a magazine pitched at “the quintessential suave Mzansi male”. According to its founding editor, Simphiwe Mpye, Blink rejects the word buppie – “primarily because it implies that that person is a black clone of something created in a white world”. Looking over to that white world, which in print still vastly outnumbers the black world, it is hard not to miss Men’s Health, GQ or FHM. It is possible to collectively summarise all three in a nutshell: imported ideas slickly repackaged with a bit of local content. So much for the trailblazing efforts of Scope and Loslyf. Ah well, globalisation won.
When I interviewed him early last year, FHM’s editor-in-chief, Brendan Cooper, didn’t much like me calling his magazine Hustler-lite. “FHM is an up-market, premium men’s lifestyle magazine and is the market leader in this category by some distance,” he stated. Formerly the editor of SL, Cooper has handed over the practicalities of editing FHM to Hagen Engler, a self-described “grease monkey in the workshop of verbal wizardry”.
Like Kaganof and Hattingh, Engler is an interesting proposition. Possibly less literary than the other two, in the posh sense of the word at least, he has nonetheless managed to garner an impressive cult following with his stoner fiction. Formerly from Port Elizabeth, Johannesburg-based Engler, a journalism graduate of Rhodes University, started out writing on a PE newspaper. He is still widely remembered for his 1998 snapshot of the euphoric excesses of early post-apartheid South Africa, published under the title, ‘Ten Reasons Cape Town Can Fuck Off’.
Amongst those reasons: “Everyone’s off their tits from drugs. It’s common knowledge that the only people in Cape Town who aren’t alcoholics, smackies, E-freaks, charlie-junkies, goofballs, acid-heads or nexus-fiends are Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the Tunisian high commissioner.”
The goofiness of his fiction and commitment to a vernacular expression might not appeal to everyone, certainly not the establishment, but when has establishment buy-in ever been the sole criteria by which to judge a work of fiction. This in part explains Engler’s notion on “punk publishing,” itself just a synonym for “doing it yourself”.
In an interview with Michelle McGrane, English Poetry Editor of the South African literary website, Litnet, Engler elaborates: “In the punk publishing way, you write the book, edit it yourself, typeset it, print it, distribute it, plan a media strategy and sell it.” Of course, the applause that accompanies DIY publishing is rarely deafening. Which, ironically, accounts for why Engler is at FHM. Asked if he was not concerned that people might misread him as a writer while being a part of FHM, Engler responded: “I don’t mind. If people care enough to actually hold any opinion about me, then I’m thrilled.” No doubt Kaganof and Hattingh would agree.

[bio] Sean O’Toole is a Johannesburg-based writer and editor. He has never written for Scope, Loslyf or FHM

jose and kobi

silent words shuffle into cautious lines
scoring ice with impermanent design.

you and the poem teeter alone
on the pond, a balancing act -

arms outstretched, your red overcoat
smells of mothballs and smoke,

underneath one thick glove
a cigarette burn chafes.

untried muscles tremble
tied to second-hand skates,

you enter into something
which cannot be named.

all roots and prayers left ashore,
words in mind gracefully align

with a strange sense of lightness,
nothing to hold.

cold air from your nose
swirls in your throat - then

you turn, and more or less
glide, half degas dancer

striking out toward the centre.
the winter sunshine dazzles you.

U.G.KRISHNAMURTI: NEITHER KNOWLEDGE NOR WISDOM
THERE IS NOBODY THERE

By

Jean-Michel Terdjman

What U.G. is telling us is not contradictory, incoherent or illogical. It may seem so because we don’t know how to take it. We don’t know how to take it because what has been called his “teaching” is no teaching at all. U.G. is always enunciating mere statements of fact, in their rawest possible form. He does not provide us with the context, the perspective necessary to see how they fit. The reason this is so is not that he is trying to wake us up from our stupor (in my opinion, he has no agenda whatsoever), but simply that he has no reason of his own to do so. What he says is absolutely true, yet, at the same time, is an expression of history (he says it in English and not in Chinese, and he speaks English with a foreign accent) and of his personality (he is lazy, and full of energy and aggressive inclinations, very gentle with the heart of a butcher, and an anti-Semite to boot — not out of conviction, of course: just to remind his Jewish friends how illusory their self-identification is). In other words, U.G. is not a creature from outer space: his actions and his utterances, like ours, are expressions of total conditioning. Like us, he is an event in nature.

* * *

Does U.G. bring us anything of value? He says himself that he cannot help us, and that there is nothing to do in any case. Yet, most people like his presence, and keep going to see him. They ask him questions, and keep listening to his pseudo-answers. We don’t learn anything “positive” from him (in the sense of “positive knowledge”), and yet we keep coming back for more of the same.

U.G. does not teach us anything. He is not noticeably wiser or more knowledgeable than anybody who might have applied himself to the pursuit of knowledge and wisdom, and who might have been reasonably successful at it. His knowledge of the world is derived from weekly magazines. He is not averse to repeating their clichés, as well as any preconceived idea, accepted value or unexamined opinion that is lying around and that strikes his fancy or stimulates his esprit de contradiction. Anybody who has been around him for a while knows that he can be either gentle or quite mean, indulgent or harshly critical. It would be tempting to find a hidden agenda, a grand design in all his idiosyncrasies. But he himself denies it. There does not seem to be any reason to doubt his statement. The most reasonable conclusion is to accept the fact that he is just like anybody else: HIS BEHAVIOR, LIKE THAT OF ANY OTHER MAN, IS THOROUGHLY CONDITIONED BY HIS ORIGINS, HIS UPBRINGING, AND THE CIRCUMSTANCES OF HIS LIFE.

So what is it that makes U.G. so special and so different? It is not what he is, but what he is not, that can give us an answer. U.G. is a mind-body unit, like the rest of us. Unlike the rest of us, there is no sense of self that goes with the mind-body unit. Unlike the rest of us, U.G. does not have a general idea of himself as an individual self, except in the most practical and mundane way. As a result, he does not have any of the grand schemes that we concoct for ourselves when we start believing (very early in our life) that we exist. His mental processes, for reasons that I (not being a brain physiologist) do not understand, are no longer functioning in the usual time-space framework. More importantly, this individual does not know that he exists, and could not care less. Not being aware of himself, he can be aware of a lot more things around him than we usually are. When I say that he is not aware of himself, I do not mean that he does not know that a body is there, that he does not know his name, or that he is not aware that somebody is talking to him. I mean that he has no sense of himself as an I, as an entity separate from the rest of reality, with a purpose and a destiny. U.G. IS his perceptions, thoughts, etc. He does not just have them. The difference between U.G. and me — or you — is that when things happen, they happen to ME. For U.G., they just happen.

There is no accounting with U.G. Things come and go, they don’t leave a trace in him, not because the memory is failing, but because there is nobody there to reflect upon them.

Everything is an event in nature: the cat scratching himself, the sun rising over the horizon, a supernova exploding, and my thinking about U.G., and typing my thoughts. Each one of my emotions, thoughts, desires, movements, decisions, etc., is an event in nature, and is a part of the overall chain of causes. Yet, in an amazing and very arrogant way, I decide that I am “a kingdom within a kingdom” (Spinoza). That is, I perceive myself as an independent and autonomous center of consciousness, creator of its own thoughts and decisions and cut off from the world.

There is no way to escape this illusion. Any bit of consciousness that “I have” about anything is automatically accompanied by the sense of the I. Events in nature (the sun shining in the sky, this noise there, this car passing) do not just happen: they happen to me. Ideas, emotions, desires, that “I have” do not just happen: “I have” them, “I think them”. This is where U.G.is different from the rest of us: the “software” of the general idea of the self has been erased in him. “He” does not exist. Only the mind-body unit labeled U.G. exists.

U.G. is there as a personality (a conditioned mind-body unit), not as a person. A non-person is a natural event which has no agenda. He is not specialized in any particular field — or, if he is, does not care to show it — and therefore cannot teach us anything. That does not mean that he talks in vain, or that we listen in vain: having somebody constantly reminding us of the bare-bone facts cannot be that bad. But it would be nonsense to expect anything concrete from U.G.: neither knowledge (knowledge is irrelevant to what we want) nor liberation. Liberation is what the ego wants. But U.G. cannot give it to us because we are already liberated. That is, we are already in our natural state, existing as events in nature (where else or how else could we exist?). The problem is, we are already liberated, but we want to know it. We want to experience liberation. Unfortunately, the natural state in which we are cannot experience itself, or know itself. Only the sense of the I — the absolute illusion of the ego — can know itself or think itself. The ego is a byproduct of mental activity, of thought, of the act of knowing, and it wants to know itself beyond knowledge. This is like the reflection in a mirror trying to be a concrete material object in three dimensions. The quest for liberation, the desire to know liberation is, of course, doomed and self-contradictory, yet, at the same time, very pleasurable, because by so doing the ego experiences itself, thus increasing and reinforcing itself. As Spinoza says, everything in nature wants to persevere in its own being, and to reinforce it.

Is U.G. “free”? No more than you and I. His conditioning is as thorough as anybody’s — all events in nature exist in the chain of causes. But there is nobody there to experience either the desire for liberation, or the imagined freedom that is supposed to come after the cessation of desire. U.G. is neither free nor in bondage, because he is not. How about us? Our objective existence is no different from his. Our subjective sense of the self creates the concepts of freedom and bondage. We may think equally that we are free or in bondage. Like U.G., we are neither. Just events in nature.

The above passage is excerpted from THE USELESS SELF, a series of reflections on the illusion of the ego, soon to be published in a bilingual (French-English) edition by Les Deux Océans, 19, rue du Val-de-Grâce, 75005 Paris, France (Fax: 33-1-43-29-79-73).

by Tomoko Mukaiyama

concept

‘wasted’ is the title of installation work of 12.000 white silk dresses with stains of menstruation bloods on by 12.000 individual women all over the world with different cultures, religions, tribal and age. The installation is a labyrinth of 12.000 pieces of fragile and feminine silk dresses. The dresses are hung in matrix way in the space, so the public walk thought between the waving dresses and bundled with mist of silk. People have to find their own way in there literally and figuratively.

The work is the celebration of being female and male in global scale.

The work will bring various issues, such as envelopment, fertility, populations, public health, religion, taboo, sex and finally gender.
However the work won’t indicate any answer to those arguments, it gives equally a key to everyone to start thinking about us.

strategy

Mukaiyama is going to develop her network and set up as 12 bases in Amsterdam, Einthoven, Sydney, Johannesburg, Seattle, Moscow, Jakarta, Tokyo, Nagoya, Sapporo, Hanoi and Saigon.

Each bases is supposed to get in contacts with 1000 women who are participating and responsibilities to complete her part in the work. 12 bases need to use their own communication network to recruit 1000 women.

Once all the participations are there, we send away 12.000 dresses to 12.000 women through 12 bases.
This act is a clearly manifest, should bring arguments in each regions.

12.000 individual women take process of making their own dress with blood.

The principal of ‘wasted’ is to build esthetic and sublime installation of 12.000 beautiful dresses with stains of our own symbol of power.

motive

‘wasted’ has multiple layers of meanings: culturally, socially, intellectually, artistically, politically, and personally.

Not only installation itself but also working process will challenge to encounter with different cultural, religious, tribal, and legal restrictions and similar taboos.

guideline.

2006 winter
Designing dress, making samples
Choosing silk material testing on absorption of blood.
making network
Researching on the market with material and producing dress.
Appling grants and sponsorship.

2007 spring
Setting up the network. Amsterdam, Einthoven, Sydney, Johannesburg, Seattle, Moscow, Jakarta, Tokyo, Nagoya, Sapporo, Hanoi and Saigon.
Last check on dress design. Order copies in Vietnam.

2007 summer
Make a list of 12.000 women
Sending dresses
Install ion plan

2007 winter
Sending dresses
Install ion plan

2008 spring
Collecting dresses
Preparation of exhibition

2008 summer
Presenting work

Tomoko Mukaiyama

Next to her established career as a concert pianist, Tomoko Mukaiyama started her activities as visual artist about 10 years ago.
With her experience as a stage artist , her first object was to make installation for the concert space.
Together with architect duo digital PBX ,[ Amsterdam x Tokyo] has brought another dimension to the concert hall.
‘Communication’ between performer and audience has been always Mukaiyama ‘s frame work. Conceptual project [for you] , which is a unique piano recital for an audience of one, has made various issuers to music sociology, music esthetic and performing tradition. [for you] has been performed in Haarlem, Tokyo, Hokkaido, Toronto and Amsterdam.
In 2005 her video work was presented as installation-performance ‘haar/haar’(her/hair). It premiered in the Aichi
Art Center in Nagoya and then toured in Sydney, Seattle and Amsterdam.
Sydney Opera House has exhibited her architectural installation with glass, sound and light ,[ you and bach] during Biennale of Sydney 2006.
Her next project ‘wasted’ – installation work of 12.000 white silk dresses will be seen in 2008.

As a performer/pianist she has been invited to perform with Ensemble Modern, London Sinfonietta, Ensemble Intercontemporain, and
the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. She has collaborated with
cinematographers, designers, architects, dancers and photographers,
such as Ian Kerkhof, Marina Abramovic, MERZBOW and Kim Ito. Her collaboration work with Jiri Kylian/NDT [Tar and Feathers] will be performed all over the Europe season 2006-2007 and 2007-2008.

With the deaths of David Rattray and other prominent figures like Taliep Petersen there has been a huge public outcry and several campaigns, on radio and via SMS, to stop crime in South Africa.
Stop Crime! Stop Crime! It’s a lovely sentiment, but its really as senseless a cry as Stop War! Stop War! Who is going to listen? Who is going to act? The government? The police? What if they are, or work with, the very criminals they are supposed to catch? How far up the food chain is one prepared to go?
There are even scandals involving the National Prosecuting Authority and cases of corruption within the Scorpions, two bodies which were set up to check on those who enforce the laws in South Africa. It’s a case of “who is watching the watchmen?” and the answer seems to be: no-one. The accusing finger cannot be lifted. It’s stuck in the pie.
Crime is not something new here: both blacks and whites robbed the Bushmen of their land, many centuries ago. The colonists and their missionaries robbed the indigenous people of land, culture, identity and religious practices.
The world’s top powers continue the tradition of down-pressing Africa, with unfair trade laws and crippling debts, and they have a very real interest in keeping key areas in Africa destabilized, so they can rob the continent of its resources. Let’s pay the warlords in Somalia, then stand back and say, look, Africa can’t rule itself. These are all massive crimes. Don’t think South Africa escapes the influence of these processes.
Multi-national corporations dictate policy to governments. And they are only motivated by one thing, which is making money. They do not care about people or the environment, never have and never will.
Here is an example of what “crime” really is to me: the Mohlohlo community in Mapela, near Potgietersrus, has platinum on their land. Anglo Platinum makes a billion Rand a year from mining on their land, yet they pay the community only R5 000 a month to mine there. Huge amounts of waste are dumped on the land; and yet, in January 2007, Anglo decided it wants to mine more of their land. When women in the Mohlohlo community objected, and defended their arable land by standing in the way of Anglo’s bulldozers, the police were called in to beat them up and take them away. Is this not crime?

We know that cellphone companies charge excessive rates, if we make comparisons to rates charged in most other countries (it was cheaper for me to phone home from India than from the other side of Joburg). Banks charge us for every transaction, while in other countries they pay you to leave their money with them. No one objects to these crimes.
Closer to home, are we not robbed on a daily basis by supermarkets over-charging us for food and commodities? What about mechanics, who brazenly rob us when our cars need repairs? And, why do we pay someone to park outside a restaurant?
At the bottom end of the scale, crime is something most citizens themselves commit, under the definition of the present laws. Millions of people smoke dagga every day, drive drunk, avoid paying taxes, litter, smoke in public places, pirate CDs, break traffic laws.
Criminals are not some kind of foreign creatures, who exist in a dark, foreign dimension. Crime is something we all accomplices in, partake in and accept through our complicity ¬- except when it is violent, and hits us personally. Then we cry out. Stop crime!
Who are we appealing to, when we say this? Crime is what makes the wheels go round, what our whole world is based on. It’s a shared responsibility.

i dreamed i saw two pairs of footprints
trailing through the sands of time…
i dreamed i saw two sets of steps:
one pair the master’s, the other, mine…

and I said: “but lord –
why when times were hardest for me,
why are there only one pair of footprints, then?
why did you abandon me in the hour of my greatest need?”

and he turned to me…
and in a voice as crystal clear as dawn,
i heard the voice of our lord say:
“hmm…aah…well…look –
…sorry about that.”