kagablog

there you are.. with your moonface smiling
a new universe spinning on its axile.

they say stars fall when the voices of the soul
are in communion with the universe..

the pain of robbery and the toil of loss often puts one on a collison
course with the reality of seeing realness..
being real and becoming a vessel for the muse to speak and become
through channels not of our own making..

may we all be fortunate to have such direct communication.
with the asteroid of our own waking.. crashing into the darkness.

your ride has not been easy and it seems that even now the glimmer and
dazzle of the daybreak is illusive as god is illusive in a universe so
fraught with its own hiccups.

my own wayward scribbling now fails to give me the direction to speak
or write sit or stand and be rightly. connected .
earth in hand.
as the musing on the muse goes
it is a matter of thy will be done
all those kingdoms come and go
and all that remains is the flesh
making real what has been said
and seen in visions

I hope you find that balance of will and power.
that the universe throws you
the breaks that you need to expediently
reach that peak and not this here
valley of dry bones cracking against a veil wall of stone..
that the fossils fossilized by circumstance and time
will blow away and bring a new dawning in your rising..

we pray to all the gods at once for such divination such inclined
belief in the unknown and the unseen..
the unseemingly quieted light and line of beliefs..
erasing the negative to reach a positve place of
growth.

my own amening is a tired hossana oglalla song to any god
listening and counting as the stars fall from the heavens
mortalized by the x and y of it all.

..deep and wide and deeper yet
we are awashed with the sparkle
of time past
time present..

i understand the struggle
to find rest.

the struggle to remove
dead skin and be born again.

how I made “mandelbrut physically assaults isabelle schiltz” : I went to all of isabelle’s (youtube ?) videos, and played them back, one by one, recording all of the audio from them onto a cassette tape. after filling the tape up with all of my “isabelle raw materials”, I proceeded to manipulate those raws with my audio effects (pedals, homemade devices, junk,etc) , and recorded that process onto another cassette tape. then I re-processed that cassette tape with additional effects, manipulations. so its all made 100% out of isabelle’s performances, I didn’t add any additional instruments or materials, only isabelle feeding back on isabelle feeding back on isabelle.

..answers
questions
noise as stiff
as silence
beaten heavy

so little we
remember

was it you who
said that god is
only a call away
that she be ready
to reach out,
as blindmen
cannot love
too quiet
beauty

..the story, you said,
is a long one.
why am i here
like this.

you say
the west is encamped round
madness

counting science,
as if were courage

why should they listen now,
so late

so weary at night,
again we are strangers
in a strange land

heavy snow pushing the grass flat..
the perversity of seperation/
isolation
is power,the enemy?
destroyer of dawns
cool flesh of valentines

i tell you brother
it is here

A SHOWCASE OF JOBURG’S
HOTTEST EMERGING YOUNG FILMMAKERS

SUNDAY, 25TH JANUARY
6.30 PM FOR 7.00 PM

AT PRIVATE PRACTICE

NO. 195 JEPPE STREET (ENTRANCE ON BREE…See map below for directions)

Featuring

Rotten, by Kalumbu Kapisa. Through a haunting poetic voice-over, this neo-realistic film meditates on a young man’s discovery of his father’s second life in the criminal underworld, and how he copes with the discovery while holding on to his own identity.

Fuzzy John by Russel Grant is a film documenting the ever growing movement of the same name. The film shows young people running around the much neglected and onimous city centre of Johannesburg in a way never done before. The film premiered in November 2008 at the Wits Tele Awards. The film was met with much love, walking away with Best Cinematography, Best Sound, Best Director, and lastly, Best Film.

Tamandani Kapisa’s Creature of My Habit is a taste of revolutionary filmmaking at its very best. A modern day equivalent of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, the film vies to be a seminal text of black South African experimental filmmaking with its haunting images of the working man caught up in the rat race, and his struggle to escape from unfulfilling labour.
FOLLOWED BY A Q&A WITH THE FILMMAKERS IN ATTENDANCE.

ENTRY R20

For more information:

Call 011 836 8911

Cell: 072 317 5145

Email: info@coalstove.co.za

Visit www.coalstove.co.za

to be a fraud you have to know what you really are in order to know what you’re misrepresenting….this is why i somehow feel i can’t be a fraud (even when i feel like one) because i don’t know what the base position is from which i could be operating in order to be pretending to be other than i am…

catherine henegan and rodriguez

im here
doin this dance
like flying
learning
like that monkey
see
monkey do,
finding man
alone like
me

i see
you laughing now reading these words
on the phone.
blah- blahing
ive learned to place it..
the anatomy
of my
restlessness.

i bless the bliss of my own ignorance..
like god
crucifying his son..
the sun
going down

76

I sometimes enjoy (in split fashion) thinking about the possibility of a future geography of our self-awareness. I believe that the future historian of his own sensations may be able to make a precise science out of the attitude he takes towards his self-awareness. We’re only in the beginnings of this difficult art - at this point just an art: the chemistry of sensations in its as yet alchemical stage. This scientist of tomorrow will pay special attention to his own inner life, subjecting it to analysis with a precision instrument created out of himself. I see no inherent obstacle to making, out of steels and bronzes of thought, a precision instrument for self-analysis. I mean steels and bronzes that are really steels and bronzes, but of the mind. Perhaps that’s the only way it can be made. Perhaps it will be necessary to formulate the idea of a precision instrument, concretely visualising it, in order to undertake a rigorous inner analysis. And it will surely be necessary to reduce the mind to some kind of real matter with a space for it to exist in. All of this depends on an extreme refinement of our inner sensations, which, when taken as far as they can go, will doubtless reveal or create in us a space just as real as the space that’s occupied by mateiral things and tha, come to think of it, has no reality.

For all I know, this inner space may just be a new dimension of the other one. Perhaps scientific research will eventually discover that everything is dimensions of the same space, which is neither physical nor spiritual, so that in one dimension we live as bodies,a nd in another as souls. And perhaps there are other dimensions where we live other, equally real facts of ourselves. Sometimes I enjoy getting lost in the useless meditation of just how far this research might take us.

Perhaps it will be discovered that what we call God, so obviously on a plane beyond logic and space-time reality, is one of our modes of existence, a sensation of ourselves in another dimension of being. This seems to me perfectly possible. Perhaps dreams are yet another dimension in which we live, or perhaps they’re a cross between two dimensions. As our body lives in length, in breadth and in height, it may be that our dreams live in the ideal, in the ego and in space - in space through their visible representation, in the ideal through their non-,aterial essence, and in the ego through their personal dimension as something intimately ours. The ego itself, the I in each one of us, is perhaps a divine dimension. All of this is complex and will no doubt be determined in its time. Today’s dreamers are perhaps the great precursors of the ultimate science of the future. Of course I don’t believe in an ultimate science of the future, but that’s beside the point.

I periodically formulate metaphysics such as these, with the serious concentration of someone who’s truly at work to forge science. And it’s possible I may actually be forging it. I have to be careful not to take too much pride in this, since pride can undermine the strict impartiality of scientific objectivity.

Intention of the theme (After Adorno).

If the aesthetic realm originally emerged as an autonomous sphere from the magic taboo, which distinguished the sacred from the everyday, seeking to keep the former pure, the profane now takes its revenge on the descendant of magic, on art. Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane, which finally took over the taboo. Nothing may exist which is not like the world as it is. Noise is the false liquidation of art. Instead of utopia becoming a reality it disappears from the picture. NOISEWOMB is a net-based staging of the reappearance, on the scene of the absent sign, of the previously silent utopia.

aryan kaganof

you are a funny bunny
heady
discharging laughter
like a bullet from a gun
tucked neatly
under your tongue.
cant say i need to say
or play these images
over and over in my head..
the one where the lion
tears the giraffe to bits
and the giraffe resisting
kicking
no voicing
as the lion tears and bite
for he has no vocal chords
to scream out
to be rescued..
long neck bowing
breaking then gone.

featuring Hannah Barnard as the girl with the gun

I am frozen white at the mouth of the orchid
twisted spine turned out claws folded in
mouths open legs astride the flesh of the flower
I am the watcher
and white death

exquisite schizophraenic

in trenchcoats at the subway
elongated in ill fitting clothes
meat cleaver’s folded back against my bony wrists
waiting at the gates
watching all the trains

I am immobile
horribly alluring
my silence is glacial
yes even my silence is silent
my pole arms outstretched to embrace the void
I am the son of all you avoid
written in these facets
in these barbs and spines
scrawled across the melody
scrawled across my head
living in the roses underneath your bed

bottled in petals
packaged in skin
immune to morality’s little sticky sting
my eyes are the windows to an absolute truth:
I am empty
I am pure
quietly I eat every skin that I lure

I am the god of nothing
I am the god of nothing
I am the god of nothing

Drum Publications Ltd.
Lagos, Nigeria
1960 & 70s

Published by Drum in Nigeria and later also Kenya and Ghana in the early 60s, African Film was just one of the many photo comics or “look books” that flooded English-speaking West Africa in the early post colonial era. Catering to the new urban youth, the series featured the mythical persona of Lance Spearman, a.k.a. “The Spear,” a black James Bond-like crime fighter as the central character.

In contrast to the racist stereotype of the uncivilised, uneducated, spear-carrying cannibal, or the eroticised “noble savage” that characterised the depictions of Africans in most Western comic books from the time, Spearman was sharp, stylish and sophisticated. Combining re-appropriated Western references with a distinctly African cultural identity, he reflected a newly defined black Atlantic modernity. Here was a comic book hero that presented a potential critique of colonialism, as well as a significant variation in how the genre classically figured normality and otherness.

While the series was criticised for its sometimes stereotyped portrayals of blackness and masculinity, it none the less had a lasting influence in fostering postcolonial pride and identity. Its combination of extreme (often cartoon-like) violence, with pastiches of early Hollywood melodramas, dashes of romance and glamour - via the street and touches of black nationalism preceded the Blaxploitation explosion in American cinemas in the 70s and its use of inventive DIY tactics to overcome budget constraints (Spearman’s trademark Corvette Stingray was often a picture of a dinky-toy) had a lasting influence on the Nollywood industry.

check out the complete chimurenga library here

it may not always be true that everybody gets what they deserve,
but it does seem to be the case that people tend to give what they
think others deserve…

they raped all the madams
one of whom was quoted
by the daily rubbish
journalist as having
said “he shagged
me stupid” to
which the car
guard
accused
of the rape
at his trial responded
“rude cow, she’s hell on
toast” (but in deep isizulu)

when the car guards invaded
the party they behaved like wallet
piranhas, exacting their vengeance
for a lifetime spent waiting for small change

I had waited by the phone like I use to wait by the door when my mother went on dates and said to watch my brother.
Sometimes the noise of the crickets and cars coming and going outside kept us up.My brother would always cling to me. Climb into bed with me as we lay perfectly still and stare at the ceiling
wondering what our mother was doing. When he got really sad he would crawl around my waist and put his head on my chest and suck his thumb.. Annoyed ..i would get up and go and sleep in front of the door.. my head and pillow placed right at the jam..

Later years his granma would yell at him for such antics saying
“ghost can step ova you when you do that.”

On these nights though.. he would rise blanket trailing and camp out in front of the door..his brother would follow. With sleep still in their eyes, they would curl up each with a leg wrapped around eachother.. that way when one moved the other knew.

When the door would open it would gently nudge the pillows and thus
waking them up and there would be ..Esmeralda, their green eyed
mother, smiling..

Ofcourse she would not call.. the long drawn silence of his own
nostalgic years left him wary of waiting..

He adjusted his head and set to the task of drawing.. making real his own salvation. The church bell rings out, half past midnight, the steady silence of night enveloped his thoughts.
The lines of ink spread itself over the white paper as the water swished and swooshed ..His brush made grimacing faces as the water soaked deeper into the papered pores.
Back and forth he went drawing himself out and out of dark rooms through long alleyways.. till at long last a face emerged with big lips and eyes closed to the blackness around it.

He stood up, held himself still, laughed underbreath stared at the phone and thought of the time they came and took him from class and deported him.. he too was waiting.. the quietness was alarming and the footsteps of his own body kept his company.

Above his head his babies were nestled in there bed.. dreaming themselves awake. When the ink had settled and the face grown, he threw salt on its wet contours.It soaked the black up immediatley and left it muddy and dark.. morning would find it crystalized and icey .. shimmering in daylight.
Done! he thought.. and moved slowly to examine another drawing,placed crookedly in front of him.
By daybreak he had finished six drawings. Eyes swollen from lack of sleep, he rose looked around, and shut the light out and left the room

That morning, he layed perfectly still in his bed and watched as the cold clouds moved past his window He wondered if she was alright. he listened to the footsteps of his babies as they undressed and dressed themselves for school..
“They spread you in the sun and leave you there ..one of a kind”.. he says to himself ..trying to take the time to adjust to the day’s light.. and his own private madness.