kagablog

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Dimitri Voudouris
NPFAI.1 / PALMOS / NPFAI.3 / PRAXIS
Pogus

Dimitri Voudouris was born in Athens in 1961 but relocated to South Africa quite early on, where he studied pharmacy, science of religion, philosophy and socio-cultural anthropology (whatever that is). He came to composition quite late, it seems (in the 90s), and describes his approach as being based on “research of cognitive psycho-acoustic behavioral patterns in humans” – though I dare say that would apply to just about any composer, whether s/he realised it or not. NPFAI.1 – that stands for “New Possibilities For African Instruments” – comes with a rather dry, detailed set of notes explaining how the sounds of a kundi (bowed harp) and an m’bira (thumb piano) are processed into 15 different sonic layers, manipulated and recombined. There’s also a forbidding-looking diagram of the “sound field construction” which is well nigh impossible to understand without a powerful magnifying glass, but presumably designed to impress, as if the music wasn’t impressive enough. NPFAI.3 gets busy with the sounds of a tenor marimba (tuned in Xhosa just intonation in case you’re interested), applying granular, algorithmic and subtractive sound synthesis to end up with 13’30″ of intriguing swoops and squiggles. To what extent it triggers archetypal images and thought patterns in accordance with the composer’s Jungian intentions depends, I guess, on how closely you listen. Palmos is slower, longer (33’34″ in fact) and easier to get lost in, weaving sounds sourced from a Hammond organ, an oboe and a bandoneon into a rich and carefully worked texture of great precision and beauty. But the best is saved until last: Praxis commemorates what Voudouris describes – alarmingly – as the Croatian genocide (the Croatians’ systematic victimization of Orthodox Christians during the recent war), processing recordings of an Orthodox church service in Johannesburg into no fewer than 556 “sound compartments” which combine considerable complexity with real affective power. It’s this kind of mixture of serious science and raw emotion that we associate with another famous Greek exile, Iannis Xenakis, and Praxis could stand alongside any of Xenakis’ electronic works with pride.–DW

this review first appeared in the april 2007 issue of paristransatlantic.com

“I’m done dying for the past/
I’m done dying for the last time”

I need to run around the block screaming. I need to take deep breaths, gasping for air and
I need to yell from somewhere deep inside, from the loudest play with in my lungs.
This is so much harder than I thought it would be.
I’ve forgotten what it’s like to be in love. I’ve forgotten how vulnerable it makes me, and how acutely sensitive to small things.

My grandfather died last year. My good friend died last year too.
Growing up, my dad never thought there was much excuse for crying other than death.
For six months, I did very little except worry and cry. I’m sure I laughed too, but I hardly remember.

When you are sad, you are vulnerable, and when you are vulnerable, you do stupid things. You hand out yourself to strangers like flyers on the street. You give away your kind glances, your special compliments, your terms of affection, to anyone hoping for something. Your words become meaningless, even to you, but you are always hoping that they’ll begin to mean something. Some people chose restraint and mistrust.
I chose an open heart, open legs, a mind so open I could believe anything at any time.

I am not a good girl, I just sometimes play the part. Long skirts, big smiles.
I am not a bad girl either but for six months I almost convinced myself that I was one. I got more tattoos.
In actual fact they are small and you have to know me to see them, but it was the principle of the matter. I dyed my hair purple in places. They are actually extensions, made from real hair, that last three months and fit in so smoothly that they look real.
Anyway, whether my hair is really purple or not is also the issue. The point is that I wanted it to look purple. I wanted to be bad. I wanted to be someone else. I was sick of being myself. I was sick of not knowing what that meant.
I am not a slut and I never was one. I hate the word, how can it make anyone feel anything other than bad? I am not a slut, but after he died, I handed myself out a little too much and I lost track. It wasn’t the sex, I didn’t so often have sex, I couldn’t do it, too neurotic, I’m too uncomfortable, I couldn’t go quite that far, but I made out with people.
They told me their stories and I stored them somewhere deep in my mind. Now when I try to pull them out, I’m not sure who is who. The thought occurred to me at the time, that all these stories were so similar, that people who are bad, or do bad things are so similar to other people who do these things.

I am in love. I am in love with someone who treats me so well, who thinks about me so much, who makes me feel so good, that I sometimes feel bad.
It was what I hoped for always, what I wanted, but on some days, like today, when I feel bad, when I feel filled with doubt, all the small things I do wrong scare me.
All the tiny things I could have done plague me. My mind feels filled with an obsessive line of questioning, with annoying fears that won’t go away. I can’t even process them, much less articulate them.
I finally have a kind of security I never had, but always wanted, and for some reason, as much as this fills me with joy, it occasionally fills me with fear.
I would do almost anything not to lose something I spent so much time trying to find.
I hate being filled with doubt, and I believe in a relationship, you’re supposed to be yourself, you’re supposed to be able to share these things.
The nicer he is sometimes the more I’m filled with fear. The more you have sometimes the more you fear you could lose. It’s so strange how the mind works sometimes.
Like I should be happier than I’ve been in a long, long time, and I am, mostly, but sometimes I’m unbelievably afraid. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.
I sometimes want to ask him if he’s aware that he’s in love with a crazy person.

she kicked him out of house and divorced him
she thought she got rid of him for good

she was wrong
an owl began to show up
every saturday night
about the time her boy friend would come
and hop into her bed

hoot! hoot! hoot!
loud and presistent
the owl proclaimed
on the tree by the bedroom window

obviously
her ex-husband reincarnated into an owl
and he wasn’t even a buddhist

An installation of wall paintings in the artist’s retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2000. His method was to paint directly on the walls, creating works that might not outlast the exhibition.

by michael kimmelman

Sol LeWitt, whose deceptively simple geometric sculptures and drawings and ecstatically colored and jazzy wall paintings established him as a lodestar of modern American art, died yesterday in New York. He was 78 and lived mostly in Chester, Conn.The cause was complications from cancer, said Susanna Singer, a longtime associate.

Mr. LeWitt helped establish Conceptualism and Minimalism as dominant movements of the postwar era. A patron and friend of colleagues young and old, he was the opposite of the artist as celebrity. He tried to suppress all interest in him as opposed to his work; he turned down awards and was camera-shy and reluctant to grant interviews. He particularly disliked the prospect of having his photograph in the newspaper.

Typically, a 1980 work called “Autobiography” consisted of more than 1,000 photographs he took of every nook and cranny of his Manhattan loft, down to the plumbing fixtures, wall sockets and empty marmalade jars, and documented everything that had happened to him in the course of taking the pictures. But he appeared in only one photograph, which was so small and out of focus that it is nearly impossible to make him out. His work — sculptures of white cubes, or drawings of geometric patterns, or splashes of paint like Rorschach patterns — tested a viewer’s psychological and visual flexibility. See a line. See that it can be straight, thin, broken, curved, soft, angled or thick. Enjoy the differences. The test was not hard to pass if your eyes and mind were open, which was the message of Mr. LeWitt’s art.

He reduced art to a few of the most basic shapes (quadrilaterals, spheres, triangles), colors (red, yellow, blue, black) and types of lines, and organized them by guidelines he felt in the end free to bend. Much of what he devised came down to specific ideas or instructions: a thought you were meant to contemplate, or plans for drawings or actions that could be carried out by you, or not.

Sometimes these plans derived from a logical system, like a game; sometimes they defied logic so that the results could not be foreseen, with instructions intentionally vague to allow for interpretation. Characteristically, he would then credit assistants or others with the results. With his wall drawing, mural-sized works that sometimes took teams of people weeks to execute, he might decide whether a line for which he had given the instruction “not straight” was sufficiently irregular without becoming wavy (and like many more traditional artists, he became more concerned in later years that his works look just the way he wished). But he always gave his team wiggle room, believing that the input of others — their joy, boredom, frustration or whatever — remained part of the art.

In so doing, Mr. LeWitt gently reminded everybody that architects are called artists — good architects, anyway — even though they don’t lay their own bricks, just as composers write music that other people play but are still musical artists. Mr. LeWitt, by his methods, permitted other people to participate in the creative process, to become artists themselves.

sol lewitt in 2001

A Dry Humor

To grasp his work could require a little effort. His early sculptures were chaste white cubes and gray cement blocks. For years people associated him with them, and they seemed to encapsulate a remark he once made: that what art looks like “isn’t too important.” This was never exactly his point. But his early drawings on paper could resemble mathematical diagrams or chemical charts. What passed for humor in his art tended to be dry. “Buried Cube Containing an Object of Importance but Little Value” (1968), an object he buried in the garden of Dutch collectors, was his deadpan gag about waving goodbye to Minimalism. He documented it in photographs, in one of which he stands at attention beside the cube. A second picture shows the shovel; a third, him digging the hole.

Naturally, he was regularly savaged by conservative critics. By the 1980s, however, he moved from Manhattan to Spoleto, Italy, seeking to get away from the maelstrom of the New York art world. (He had had a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1978.) His art underwent a transformation. Partly it grew out of what he saw in Italy. But it was all the more remarkable for also proceeding logically from the earlier work.

Eye-candy opulence emerged from the same seemingly prosaic instructions he had come up with years before. A retrospective in 2000, organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which traveled to the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, concluded with some of these newly colorful wall drawings. (Mr. LeWitt always called them drawings, even when the medium became acrylic paint.)

His description for a wall drawing, No. 766 — “Twenty-one isometric cubes of varying sizes each with color ink washes superimposed” — sounded dry as could be: but then you saw it and there were playful geometries in dusky colors nodding toward Renaissance fresco painting. “Loopy Doopy (Red and Purple),” a vinyl abstraction 49 feet long, was like a psychedelic Matisse cutout, but on the scale of a drive-in movie. Other drawings consisted of gossamer lines, barely visible, as subtle as faintly etched glass.

Some people who had presumed that Mr. LeWitt’s Conceptualism was arcane and inert were taken aback. He began making colored flagstone patterns, spiky sculptural blobs and ribbons of color, like streamers on New Year’s Eve, often as enormous decorations for buildings around the world. It was as if he had devised a latter-day kind of Abstract Expressionism, to which, looking back, his early Conceptualism had in fact been his response.

Sol LeWitt was born in Hartford, on Sept. 9 1928, the son of immigrants from Russia. His father, a doctor, died when he was 6, after which he moved with his mother, a nurse, to live with an aunt in New Britain, Conn. His mother took him to art classes at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford. He would draw on wrapping paper from his aunt’s supply store.

wall drawing #752

Finding His Way

At Syracuse University, he studied art before he was drafted for the Korean War in 1951, during which he made posters for the Special Services. After his service he moved to New York to study illustration and cartooning. For a while he did paste-ups, mechanicals and photostats for Seventeen magazine. He spent a year as a graphic designer in the office of a young architect named I. M. Pei.

Meanwhile, he painted, or tried to. For a while, he hired a model to draw from life and copied old masters. He felt lost. An aspiring artist in New York during the waning days of Abstract Expressionism, an art squarely about individual touch, he thought he had no particular touch of his own and therefore nothing to add.

But then he took a job at the book counter at the Museum of Modern Art, where he met other young artists with odd jobs there, including Dan Flavin, Robert Ryman and Robert Mangold. He noticed the nascent works of Flavin and also absorbed early art by Jasper Johns and Frank Stella. Minimalism, a yet-unnamed movement, seemed like a fresh start. Mr. LeWitt was meanwhile intrigued by Russian Constructivism, with its engineering aesthetic, and by Eadweard Muybridge’s photographs, sequential pictures of people and animals in motion, which he came across one day in a book that somebody had left in his apartment. From all this he saw a way forward. It was to go backward.

He decided to reduce art to its essentials, “to recreate art, to start from square one,” he said, beginning literally with squares and cubes. But unlike some strict Minimalists, Mr. LeWitt was not interested in industrial materials. He was focused on systems and concepts — volume, transparency, sequences, variations, stasis, irregularity and so on — which he expressed in words that might or might not be translated into actual sculptures or photographs or drawings. To him, ideas were what counted.

At the time, linguistic theorists were talking about words and mental concepts as signs and signifiers. Mr. LeWitt was devising what you might call his own grammar and syntax of cubes and spheres, a personal theory of visual signs. It was theoretical, but not strictly mathematical. Partly it was poetic. He began with propositions for images, which became something else if they were translated into physical form by him or other people.

He also liked the inherent impermanence of Conceptual art, maybe because it dovetailed with his lack of pretense: having started to make wall drawings for exhibitions in the 1960s, he embraced the fact that these could be painted over after the shows. (Walls, unlike canvases or pieces of paper, kept the drawings two-dimensional, he also thought.) He wasn’t making precious one-of-a-kind objects for posterity, he said. Objects are perishable. But ideas need not be.

“Conceptual art is not necessarily logical,” he wrote in an article in Artforum magazine in 1967. “The ideas need not be complex. Most ideas that are successful are ludicrously simple. Successful ideas generally have the appearance of simplicity because they seem inevitable.”

Relishing Collaboration

To the extent that Mr. LeWitt’s work existed in another person’s mind, he regarded it as collaborative. Along these lines he became especially well known in art circles for his generosity, often showing with young artists in small galleries to give them a boost; helping to found Printed Matter, the artists’ organization that produces artists’ books; and trading works with other, often needier artists, whose art he also bought. Some years back he placed part of what had become, willy-nilly through this process, one of the great private collections of contemporary art in the country on long-term loan to the Wadsworth Atheneum, his childhood museum and the one that again was in his neighborhood after he moved, in the mid-’80s, from Spoleto to Chester. He lived there with his wife, Carol, who survives him, along with their two daughters, Sofia, who lives in New York and works at the Paula Cooper Gallery, and Eva, a senior at Bard College.

It was said that Mr. LeWitt didn’t like vacations. His pleasure was being in his studio. He explained that he had worked out his life as he wanted it to be, so why take a vacation from it?

To the sculptor Eva Hesse, he once wrote a letter while she was living in Germany and at a point when her work was at an impasse. “Stop it and just DO,” he advised her. “Try and tickle something inside you, your ‘weird humor.’ You belong in the most secret part of you. Don’t worry about cool, make your own uncool.” He added: “You are not responsible for the world — you are only responsible for your work, so do it. And don’t think that your work has to conform to any idea or flavor. It can be anything you want it to be.”

Gary Garrels, a curator who organized Mr. LeWitt’s retrospective for San Francisco in 2000, said: “He didn’t dictate. He accepted contradiction and paradox, the inconclusiveness of logic.”

He took an idea as far as he thought it could go, then tried to find a way to proceed, so that he was never satisfied with a particular result but saw each work as a proposition opening onto a fresh question. Asked about the switch he made in the 1980’s — adding ink washes, which permitted him new colors, along with curves and free forms — Mr. LeWitt responded, “Why not?”

He added, “A life in art is an unimaginable and unpredictable experience.”

this article first appeared in the new york times

urban archeology like aboriginated bone reflex action,
like i fell of the wagon.. again. disappeared clear into the nordic
blankness.brave new worlds of mental phantoms.i’m trying to sleep, she
exclaims, from the noontime chambers of klimpt lit fields with blue
gold circles.
now her halo hair glows like a beastly smile, you are a horribe man,
she calmly says turning over like a volcanic eruption.yesterday i was
great father confidant/lover. today i am a horrible man.

“i am trying to sleep echoes in the whole hole.

in defence of my homemade sanity, i flip and push each word up the
landscape of memory like a sisphian icon. ravenous greed of our
emotions,chemically altered, chemically adjusted, imbalanced like
hitchokian psycho’s who rob graveyards of memory,retrieving long
buried bones of past experiences.

reflex action, bones like skeletal forms arise with thumping feet,
kisisng shoes, kissing floors,earth running for shelter.

the cranial lobe is the storehouse,the selfsame spot of the poe-ish sensability.
buried alive laying in coffin beds of blue gold circles each alone,
together, apart, trying to put parts together again.

yes i fell off the wagon of my be-calmed life,among the noontime people.
fell so far don’t know how to get out. still trying to put together
parts that form wholes, to our life long dwelling place.
words like immortality bedevil me, and i hear my 93 year old granny
listing the names of those waiting to die.

Cinema is a multi-dimensional art form as Jean-Luc Godard states: ‘There are several ways of making films. Like Jean Renoir and Robert Bresson, who make music. Like Sergei Eisenstein, who paints. Like Stroheim, who wrote sound novels in silent days. Like Alain Resnais, who sculpts. Like Socrates, Rossellini I mean, who creates philosophy. The cinema, in other words, can be everything at once, both judge and litigant.’4 Godard’s list of the alternative ways of film making could be expanded by one more specific mode: cinema as architecture.
The interaction of cinema and architecture – the inherent architecture of cinematic expression, and the cinematic essence of architectural experience – is equally many- sided. Both are art forms brought about with the help of a host of specialists, assistants and co-workers. Regardless of their unavoidable nature as the products of collective effort, both film and architecture are arts of the auteur, of the individual artistic creator. The relations of the two art forms could, for instance, be studied from a multitude of viewpoints: how different directors depict a city, as Walter Ruttman in Berlin, der Sinfonie der Grossstadt (1927) or Fritz Lang in Metropolis (1927); how buildings or rooms are presented, as in German Expressionist films with their fantasy architecture suspended between reality and dream; over the real architectural projects of these architects of notable buildings. An architect who made superb projects both as a designer of buildings and set designer was Paul Nelson. His project Maison Suspendue (1936-38), a house in which individual rooms are suspended withing a steel-and-glass cage like bird nests, is as fantastic as any of the ideas expressed through the art form of projected illusion. Vice versa, one could speculate on the kind of buildings the wizards of cinema architecture would have built had they not decided to devote their architectural talent to the service of the illusory art of cinema.8

Furthermore, we could take the influence of cinema on today’s architecture as our subject of study. Vincent Korda’s visions of multi-storey atria in Things to Come, for instance, have fully materialized, five decades later, in John Portman’s gigantic hotel projects. Portman’s projects are an example of an architecture which cold-bloodedly serves the economic interests of the developer, utilizing means of persuasion deriving from stage sets designed for cinematic spectacles. The thematized architecture produced by the Walt Disney Corporation during the past decade with the help of a host of international star architects, also reverts to the strategy of illusion and seduction familiar from film. But even artistically more serious architecture today often seeks its inspiration and visual strategy from the language of movies. Jean Nouvel, for instance, declares cinematic imagery and experience as a significant inspiration for his architectural work:
Architecture exists, like cinema, in the dimension of time and movement. One conceives and reads a building in terms of sequences. To erect a building is to predict and seek effects of contrast and linkage through which one passes (…). In the continuous shot/sequence that a building is, the architect works with cuts and edits, framings and openings (…). I like to work with a depth of field, reading space in terms of its thickness, hence the superimposition of different screens, planes legible from obligatory joints of passage which are to be found in all my buildings (…).9

Juhani Pallasmaa

live at the armchair theatre, observatory, cape town
tuesday 3 april 2007
righard kapp’s electric guitar experiments were a joy to behold
a powerful, organic, seething mass of tension and genuine freedom – this band is cooking!

notes

1 Afrikaans slang, which roughly translated means “I’m saying, brother”.
2 Falco and Hamma are two of my informants.
3 Narrowing down a topic to write on has necessitated focusing on a particular category of people, and particular individuals within that category: there is virtually no mention in this paper about “black” or “white” hip hop headz although there are plenty of them with whom I have spent time. I only discuss the experiences of “coloured” people in this work. From my observation, they form the majority of Cape Town’s active hip hop adherents, and the striking parallels between their experiences and those of minority groups in New York, where hip hop arose, fascinated me. It is important to clarify here that I focus on the fission lines created by apartheid-imposed racial categories, not because they are the only salient divisions in Cape Town, but because they are the terms in which most people I have dealt with largely describe themselves, so internalised as principal identifying characteristics have they become. What grabbed my attention is that, precisely because they see these racial boundaries as intractable, many young Capetonians of all “races” explicitly look to hip hop as an alternative source of common communitas which is able to sidestep, if not dissolve, these phenotypical factions, enabling “trans-racial” interaction otherwise unsanctioned socially.
4 The 1951 Population Registration Act officially divided South Africa’s population into three race categories, namely: “black”, “white” and “coloured” (for some purposes Asians or Indians were further differentiated as a fourth category)(West, 1988: 101 – 104). The Act’s definition of “coloured” as an ostensible “race”, descended from European settlers, Malay slaves and indigenous Khoisan people, was highly contested by those to whom it was applied: they were from a kaleidoscope of different ethnic and social backgrounds. The boundary between “white” and “coloured” was very nebulous, the reality being that there was a continuum of skin colour “gradations” from light to dark. People could apply to be reclassified “white”, possible should they pass a test of “whiteness”, which, among other things, ludicrously demanded that a comb placed in the hair should fall out (that is, the hair was sufficiently “Caucasian”).

5. A quintessentially modernist “town planning” approach, compartmentalising the city into rigid zones according to land-use, complemented the state’s vision for “separate development” of each discrete “race” (and the maintenance of white privilege) (Parnell & Mabin, 1995: 55). District Six, the birthplace of my informants Falco and Ready D, and many of those involved in hip hop, is situated on the edge of Cape Town’s city centre, on the lower slopes of Devil’s Peak. It was a rather shabby but highly commingled domain in terms of “racial” diversity. Its multiracial existence was not tolerated by the apartheid state. The 1950 Group Areas Act, coupled with the suburb’s contiguity to the central business district, so that, according to “town planning” logic, it should be reserved for businesses, gave the ironically named Department of Community Development the sanction, in 1966, to remove residents and relocate them to new “coloured townships” such as Mitchell’s Plain and Bonteheuwel, to be constructed on the Cape Flats, a barren area on the outskirts of the metropolis. Their old homes in District Six were demolished for redevelopment as a white business and residential area.
6 “Piece” is graffiti slang derived from “masterpiece”, meaning a large mural executed alone or with a few other spraycan artists, usually incorporating pictures and characters. “To piece” is to paint a piece.
7“Tagging” is marking a public area with one’s tag name, often in a hermetic, barely legible but trademark style. The riskier and more highly visible the location, and the more complicated the tag, the more prestige garnered for the tagger. Depending on conditions, a tag might consist of a scrawl in thick marker pen on a bus shelter, or a giant “chromie”, a two metre high rendition of one’s tag name in silver spraypaint outlined with black, painted under a bridge over the highway.
8 Pronounced “Humma” – phonetic rendition of the Afrikaans word for “hammer”.
9 “Kak” is an Afrikaans word that translates as “shit”.
10 “Ja” (pronounced “yah”) is the Afrikaans word for “yes” used in informal English by most South Africans.
11 “Brasse Vannie Kaap” can be translated as “Brothers of/from the Cape”. “Brasse” means “brothers”, not in the sense of the relationship of biological kin by blood, but of friends with a kin-like closeness in spirit.
12 By focusing on this relationship, I am not implying that the New York/USA scene is the sole influence on Capetonian hip hop. South African headz are in contact with others in diverse locales worldwide, including Britain (see Gilroy, 1993 for a discussion of UK hip hop), Germany (South African and German graffiti artists have forged particularly strong links with one another), Senegal and Tanzania (via a web page on African hip hop co-authored by people from South Africa, Tanzania and Senegal and hosted on a Dutch server – http://www.africanhiphop.com/).

13 Armoured vehicle used by the South African Defence Force.
14 George Lipsitz (1994: 17-27) gives a powerful account of the demonisation of urban American minority youth in public and state discourses of moral panic. He argues that these hegemonic views made them “scapegoats for the chaos created in national life by deindustrialisation and economic restructuring” (1994:19) and legitimised their harassment and arrest on the grounds of merely “looking suspicious” – which often required a categorical judgement clearly discriminatory on the basis of race (Rose: 1994:113). Comparable tales from apartheid South Africa of gratuitous harassment and detention of youth by the state’s armed forces abound (for instance, Chikane (1986), in the context of Soweto).
15 According to Biko (Fatton (1986: 74)): “Black Consciousness is an attitude of mind and a way of life… Its essence is the realisation by the black man of the need to rally together with his brothers around the cause of their oppression – the colour of their skin – and to operate as a group to rid themselves of the shackles that bind them to perpetual servitude. It is based on a self-examination which has ultimately led them to believe that by seeking to run away from themselves and emulate the white man, they are insulting the intelligence of whoever created them black. This philosophy of Black Consciousness therefore expresses group pride and the determination of the black to rise and attain the envisaged self… At the heart of this kind of thinking is the realisation by blacks that the most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.”
16 For example, there has been a marked resurgence in Islamic fundamentalism. Those who subscribe to Islam rather than another faith such as Christianity push this set of religious identities to the fore as their principal distinguishing characteristic.
17 Two of the first clubs in Cape Town where hip hop events were held.
18 Slang for “excited”.
19 Marijuana.
20 “Ho” is American ghetto slang for “whore”, but the word is also used in addressing any woman disrespectfully.
21 “Prophets of da City”, Ready D’s group.

22 Gamtaal is the vernacular spoken by many “coloured” people in the Cape. Its expressiveness and irreverent humour lie largely in the creolised, onomatopoeic forms of English and Afrikaans words it uses. “Gam”, pronounced with a glottal fricative ‘g’, is translated as “outcast”, and may according to Ridd (1981: 199) be an Afrikanerisation of Ham, Noah’s son who was cast out into the wilderness. Falco agreed with Ridd’s etymology of “gam”, but said it was not possible to translate effectively into English. He described it approximately as connoting “something raw” and “low”, uncouth and crude. “Taal” is the Afrikaans word for “language”.
23 Lexically hip hop reflects the logic of “changing sames” too. The alteration of this word’s spelling reflects an understanding of iteration: “reprazent” is a homophone of “represent”, making reference to all other instances of its utterance through its identical sound, yet simultaneously, through altered spelling, it highlights the specificity of its use in this context.
24 A “battle” is like a showdown, where rival crews pit their skills against one another in public. Graffiti artists, deejays, emcees and breakdancers battle others in their genre. Battling is an integral part of garnering recognition and status for oneself and one’s crew in hip hop. Battles can be planned competitions, such as the international b-boying “Battle of the Year” held in Berlin, Germany, or spontaneous challenges issued at live events such as parties. In either case they are taken seriously by both participants and audience.
25 “Y’know”.
26 “Bombing” is setting out to cover an area prolifically with tags, pieces or “throw-ups” (quickly-executed names consisting of one layer of spraypaint plus an outline) in one session. It is often done by a crew of writers.
27 Afrikaans for “pills”. Slang for Mandrax tablets/ “buttons”.
28 Rough and boisterous (yet generally not aggressive) dancing, where people intentionally bump into one another.
29 Alias of rapper Marshall Mathers/Eminem, an artist extremely popular worldwide at the moment.

more of johan thom’s extremely disturbing videos on his youtube page

Chapter Four

The Rivers Of Pheeling

I

Jennifer floats in the rich, loose currents of the sea. Her golden hair flashes and spools through the crystalline chaos of the rock pool. Flashing glints of sunlight refract around quartz encrusted boulders as the muscular ebb of the water pulls her through space. She rolls lower, beneath the frosted surge, flicking herself out of reach of the rock with a natural assurance of all aquatic forces. The bright mineral iciness penetrates directly to her core, warming her savagely against the world. The grain of the water is light, fanned by sunny translucencies, ribboned with kelp. Shafts of luminosity dance through the swells, illuminating a blurred figure beyond her. X swims into focus, hovering beside her underwater form. Until they are being trawled and pulled synchronously by the heavy flux of salt and light. She reaches out and touches his cheek in a moment of stillness. Then the ebb topples, detonating wreaths of bubbles and kinetic force around them, swirling them energetically apart.

Seagulls mewl and scrape down the bones of blurry sand. The dunes elongate out into wilderness on either side, chalked in by the brushings of a glassy sea. A lonely cottage of white timber stands alone on a vague rise. She had stayed here once before when she was thirteen. Her parents had rented the cottage for two weeks that spring, when the flowers came out. She had a sister, who came along. But age had opened a gulf between them. Her sister was now more interested in the magazines she’d brought than in an exploration of the surrounding areas. Jennifer had spent the majority of that time alone, wandering amongst the empty, alien reaches of a lunar coastline. She passed the days swimming through the sprawling system of globular rock pools and meandering caves. At night, silvery crescents of phosphorescence would blush frostily beneath the ruthless glint of the stars. She would take her blanket down to the beach with a thermos of chocolate and watch the pulse of the waves. She remembered hating the cottage vehemently, nagging each day to be taken back home. But then, when they had eventually left, she had missed it. For years after, that desolate place haunted her. It made tiny, potent guest appearances in her dreamings. She had always meant to go back of course. And later in life, when she found herself living within a day’s drive of the place, she had marked it out as one of the first things she would do. But like so many things, she had left the cottage lying, shelved clumsily beside the mould of other vague intentions. It slowly became a hollow shell of a memory, its magic stripped because of its sudden accessibility. She forgot it the way a child forgets the existence of fairies. She was shocked to find it still existing. She wasn’t sure what it was in him that had made her think of that place. The idea came to her while she floated in the tub that first night, watching his face. The cottage had surfaced from nowhere and prompted reality. She had slept like the dead the next day. He dozed on the couch, waking her wordlessly with tea. She drank it in silence as they watched each other. Words seemed to have died suddenly, leaving neither holes nor traces. Their silences were full, potent and criss-crossed with vitality and meaning. She called in sick and two days passed. He played nurse, cooking soup, watching television and sleeping on the couch. Nothing was really discussed. She needed nursing and he wordlessly supplied it. She dug up the phone book on the third day and tried to find the cottage in and amongst the detritus of memory. She discovered that it was still there, moonlighting as a holiday chalet for some retired couple. When she heard that it was lying vacant for several weeks, she made a reservation for that very night. She owned a tiny, black sports car which she almost never used. Time had stopped. She dressed quickly, packed a tog bag and told him he could borrow a tracksuit. Within an hour they were on the road.

Merzbow Beyond Snuff

Aryan Kaganof, Japon / Afrique, 1997-2005, 22 minutes

« There’s no such thing as noise »

Ce document éclectique cherche à promouvoir le travail de Merzbow, un excellent musicien Noise qui s’intéresse aux suicides de jeunes japonaises. On peut y entendre une excellente démonstration de la virtuosité du bruiteur ainsi que des images d’une jeune fille qui se tranche l’abdomen avec un couteau, étend ses viscères sur le sol et patauge dans son sang. On y apprend aussi la différence entre hara-kiri et seppuku.

Dérangeant et étourdissant. Il faut assurément voir ce film à plusieurs reprises pour en comprendre parfaitement le propos mais les images choquantes qu’il contient risquent d’en décourager plus d’un. Merzbow Beyound Snuff constitue exactement le genre de film déstabilisant que j’espérais voir dans le cadre de cette soirée.

Pandrogeny Manifesto

Dionysos Andronis et Aldo Lee, Grèce / France, 2005, 11 minutes

« The body is the logo of the self »

Ce court métrage porte parfaitement bien son titre. Construit autour d’un dialogue entre Genesis P-Orridge et son amant/amante, il explique comment et pourquoi deux personnes s’efforcent, vêtements et chirurgies esthétiques aidant, de se ressembler le plus possible. Il y a l’homme, il y a la femme et puis il y a un troisième corps réunissant les attributs de l’un et de l’autre. L’objectif avoué du chanteur est de ressembler physiquement le plus possible à ce troisième corps idéalisé.

Je ne suis pas familier avec le groupe Throbbing Gristle dont Genesis P-Orridge est le chanteur. Après ce film, vous n’en connaîtrez pas vraiment davantage sur leur musique. L’argumentation du couple est suffisamment solide pour qu’on respecte leur choix mais pas suffisamment convaincante pour que je me rendes à la clinique dans les prochains jours.

these reviews first appeared here