kagablog

http://www.theauteurs.com/notebook/posts/1331

sounddesign

Sound is music. There is no border in sound.
Everything you hear can be used as a musical component.
Jane often uses recorded sounds as a base for creating unique musical instruments which can consist out of any sound you can think of.

This process is totally integrated in her approach when it comes to writing , producing and directing films. Music, sound and images totally come together as one.

Several films in the art circuit that have sounddesign by Jane, were very succesfull and gained prizes all over the world.

check:

-Mother Dao, the turtlelike.

a film by Vincent Monnickendam. One of the most succesfull documentaries ever made in Holland. The film won several international prizes and was widely praized for its extraordinary sounddesign.

For this film I travelled for 9 weeks through the indonesian archipel to record authentic sounds.
Out of these sounds the whole soundtrack and score was created.

-Western 4.33

a film by south african filmdirector Aryan Kaganof formerly known under the name Ian Kerkhof. This film has won several international prizes.
Amongst them No1 t the yearly african filmfestival and a special juryprize at the milan filmfestival.
The remarkable sounddesign of Western 4.33 was reckognized in reviews by several international filmmagazines.

- A dreamscape, gambling in the usa

a 90 minute poetic interpretation of gambling in the usa.
This documentary was shot in super16mm. On location completely recorded in MS stereo.

check out jane’s website here

Composer Michael Blake has been described by musicologist Stephanus Muller as “the most important and most influential South African art music composer to have worked in South Africa since the advent of democracy” (introduction to a Colloquium, 21 September 2009, Stellenbosch University). “Yet his biggest contribution”, Muller goes on to say, “is his probing and highly original aesthetic, setting a standard of creative daring, musical refinement and conceptual interest that, inasmuch as it is still relatively unknown, will almost certainly be recognized as a major contribution to South African cultural life in future”. At about the same time, film director Aryan Kaganof hailed Blake as “South Africa’s most famous unknown contemporary composer” (Art South Africa, Summer 2009). Famous (or unknown) to whom? and influential and perhaps even infamous to whom?

Michael Blake was born in Cape Town in 1951. He took piano lessons at the South African College of Music from the age of 9, and began composing soon afterwards. He studied at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg (BMus, 1970), afterwards attending summer courses in Darmstadt and Dartington with Mauricio Kagel, György Ligeti and Peter Maxwell Davies (1976). In 1977, he launched the first New Music concert series at the Market Theatre in Johannesburg with his ensemble Moonchild. His first works attracted the attention of veteran South African composer Arthur Wegelin, who described him, prophetically, as “a musician with talent and initiative and the potential to become a prominent composer in South Africa’s musical life.” That potential was however soon forestalled by his departure for Europe (the spectre of active military service drove many white males abroad), where, at the invitation of another South African composer, Stanley Glasser, Blake studied music theory and analysis at the University of London Goldsmiths College (MMus, 1977).

Blake spent twenty years in London (1977 to 1997), as a freelance composer, pianist and teacher. He was part-time lecturer at Goldsmiths College, where he founded and conducted the Goldsmiths Contemporary Music Ensemble. From 1979 to 1986 he was the keyboard player in the electroacoustic group Metanoia, and its co-director. In 1986 he founded the ensemble London New Music for the performance of experimental music, and the group gave regular concerts at the South Bank, Institute for Contemporary Arts and elsewhere. LNM undertook British Council-sponsored tours in Europe, and broadcast regularly for BBC Radio 3 and European radio stations, premiering new work commissioned by Blake from his contemporaries — Gerald Barry, Matteo Fargion, Christopher Fox, Chris Newman, Howard Skempton, Kevin Volans — as well as playing non-mainstream (‘downtown’) composers he considered important — Cowell, Crawford Seeger, Ives, Wolpe, John Cage, Morton Feldman, Bunita Marcus, Barbara Monk, Christian Wolff and Walter Zimmermann.

Described in the Musical Times as “one of the two leading protagonists [along with Kevin Volans] of the South African art music scene”, Blake has divided his time between composing, teaching, and promoting the work of fellow composers. At the beginning of 1998, he moved back to South Africa and settled in Grahamstown where he taught composition at Rhodes University and established the (now) annual contemporary music festival, the New Music Indaba. Blake was its director from 2000 to 2006. At the 1999 meeting of the International Society for Contemporary Music held in Bucharest, Blake made a successful bid for South Africa’s re-entry into the ISCM after an absence of nearly four decades, and was President of the ISCM South African Section, NewMusicSA, for six years. In this capacity he has represented South African new music at a number of festivals and meetings worldwide. It is this double life as an ‘influential’ entrepreneur that perhaps elicited Muller’s comment, and by the same token, has kept knowledge of his work as a composer somewhat out of the public eye, as Kaganof notes.

It was the former quality that enabled colleague Grant Olwage to single Blake out as “one of the ideas-men of the South African music scene” (in the Preface to the book Composing Apartheid): Blake’s vision for the New Music Indaba was to have the widest possible audience listening to the most challenging music of our time, and discussing it critically. As a teacher of composition, he believes that the ability to compose is innate in everyone and just needs to be cultivated: through exposure as much as by teaching. Always interested in young composers, Blake was struck after his return to South Africa in 1998 by the lack of opportunities for young black composers in the education system. He therefore established a “Growing Composers” project within the New Music Indaba in 2000, inviting some of the most distinguished composers and cutting-edge ensembles from Europe, America and Africa — many of whom were personal friends — to give classes annually in Grahamstown. The success of these events has elicited praise from both the academy and South African government, and the fruits of it in the form of new works by for example Sibusiso Njeza and Lloyd Prince have been heard as far afield as Amsterdam and New York.

Some of these “growing” composers have gone on to receive commissions for subsequent Indabas and have contributed to festival projects. Most notable among these is “The Bow Project” (2002-5), a concert series over four years where works were commissioned as responses to traditional African bow music — still performed in South Africa by a few (rare) players. Music by these players, as well as recorded performances, were transcribed by seventeen composers, who then wrote short string quartets based on the transcriptions: traditional bow meets new bow. Commissions also went out for projects like the bicentennial “Reimagining Mozart” (2006) — eleven new works provided responses to, and were programmed alongside, classics by Mozart. These projects saw established jazz composers and improvisers such as Carlo Mombelli and Paul Hanmer encouraged to ‘cross over’ into the world of classical chamber music.

An improvising musician himself, Blake has made guest appearances with Dutch saxophonist Luc Houtkamp (at the Unyazi Electronic Music Festival, another project of NewMusicSA, launched in October 2005) and with jazz pianist Nishlyn Ramanna. He has also been commissioned, by Trevor Steele Taylor, to create live improvised scores to ‘classic’ silent films screened at the Grahamstown Film Festival.

From the mid-1970s onwards Blake’s musical language was partly the result of an immersion in the materials and playing techniques of African music, and he composed a series of pieces loosely collected in what he calls his “African Notebook”. These explored mbira music for example, and sometimes produced new variations or mapped the figuration onto arrangements of music by Bach and Purcell. By the time he settled in London, this had become a more substantial “African Journal” to which more than 24 different pieces (and numerous alternative versions) were added over the next two decades until he returned home in 1998. Several of these have become his most performed pieces, in particular Let us run out of the rain (1986) and French Suite (1994). Martin Scherzinger, in the Cambridge History of Twentieth-century Music has described these as “understated translations of African music into Western idioms [that] deftly negotiate the borderline between quotation and abstraction, and, in the process, interrogate the opposition between the two” (609).

When Blake completed his doctoral composition portfolio at Rhodes University in 2000, one of the external examiners was the distinguished African scholar and composer J.H. Kwabena Nketia. Nketia begins to marry the idea of Blake’s influence as an agent of compositional influence with the idea that he embodies that change, in his remark that the compositions in the portfolio (which included representative works from the period 1986 to 1999) were “particularly valuable both as models that can be explored by African students of composition and as an approach to the creative dimensions of sounds and structures in African music”.

Since 2000, Michael Blake’s work has revealed a previously unknown depth and postmodern sensibility. As he puts it: “when I woke up in the new millenium I knew I wanted to do things differently”. This watershed in Blake’s life is exemplified in two works: String Quartet No 1, written for his long-standing friends and collaborators the Fitzwilliam String Quartet in 2001 and premiered in Cambridge for Blake’s 50th birthday celebrations, and Ways to put in the salt, an uncompromisingly stark interpretation of African bow harmonics written in 2002 for John Tilbury. In these and other works that followed, an African sensibility is subsumed into the fractured narratives that have become a feature of his recent work. His Piano Concerto (2007) is one such work, and it is notable that even in the cultural climate of the new South Africa where ‘challenging new composition’ is met with even more of a deafening silence than it is in the cash-strapped north, the premiere was seen by critics as a major event on the South African musical scene and a resounding success with audiences.

A passion for unusual timbres and instrumental combinations saw the realisation of two more commissioned works in 2007: Shoowa Panel for vibraphone and marimba (premiered in South Africa) and Rural Arias for singing saw and eleven players (premiered in Vienna). A composer who thinks on his feet and perhaps more than anyone approaches Adorno’s notion of a ‘musique informelle’, Blake draws as much on the visual arts of Africa and the West — African weaving, abstract painting, undergound cinema, silent films — as he does on African musics and American and English experimental music aesthetics. He is “a cool wrangler of the disparate” to quote Jean-Pierre de la Porte, who suggests that Blake is South Africa’s Jasper Johns. Martin Scherzinger points to the same quality when he says, “In Blake’s late musical style, one might say, a breezy mobility thus mingles with filmic montage.”

Since 2003, Blake has been collaborating with independent South African film-maker Aryan Kaganof. The fruits of this relationship so far include short ‘visual realisations’ (in the spirit, but not the style, of Kenneth Anger) of Blake’s Reverie (Kaganof’s Reverie), D.S.I.M.L. (The Hermeneutic Traffic Circle), Ways to Put in the Salt (Martin Heidegger’s Prologomena to a History of the Concept of Time Transcribed for Solo Piano by Michael Blake and Executed by Jill Richards), French Suite — First Dance (Il Strategio del Ragno — The spider’s stratagem), and Three Toys No 2 (Notes on Melancholy). The two have also collaborated on the original score for the first cellphone feature film, SMS Sugar Man, and two documentaries about Blake’s work: Untitled: A Portrait and String Quartet #3.

Blake has now produced work in every medium — stage, orchestral, chamber, keyboard, instrumental, vocal, and choral. He has worked in film (including original scores for ‘silents’ by Gustav Machaty and Maya Deren) and dance and in 2009 he completed the draft of an Afrikaans digital opera in seven scenes, Searching for Salome, based on Etienne Leroux’s 1962 novel Sewe Dae by die Silbersteins — Seven Days at the Silbersteins.

An ongoing concern with providing uncompromising repertoire for young or amateur players has over the years seen Blake create works for the major grade examination boards (Trinity College, Associated Board, University of South Africa), pieces for youth choirs and orchestras such as the Soweto Buskaid String Orchestra, and, most recently, Postcolonial Song, an ‘open score’ commissioned for the groundbreaking network of ensembles in the UK called CoMA (Contemporary Music for Amateurs).

Blake’s compositional output of well over 100 works to date has been performed widely in Europe, North and South America, Australia, and Asia, including New Music festivals in the UK, Belgium, Slovakia, Germany, Austria, Cuba, Argentina, Australia and South Africa. Many works have been recorded for radio and television, and several CDs including Blake’s work have been released, among them the complete solo piano works 1994-2004 played by Jill Richards (2008). He has collaborated with many well-known European ensembles and soloists including the Fitzwilliam String Quartet, Trio Basiliensis, Musica Aeterna, Ensemble Bash, Ixion, the Stockholm Saxophone Quartet, Stuttgart Kammerorchester, John Tilbury, Daan Vandewalle, Antony Gray, Lesley Schatzberger, Yasutaka Hemmi, Darragh Morgan, and Mary Dullea. Since his return to South Africa in 1997, Blake has worked closely with Jill Richards, Robert Pickup, Magda de Vries, and Musa Nkuna. In recent years, he has received commissions from the Arts Council of England, the National Arts Council of South Africa and the Southern African Music Rights Organisation.

Michael Blake has given solo and (often with Jill Richards) piano duo recitals throughout Europe and the Americas and, since his return to South Africa, at universities around the country; he has particularly championed music by South African, American and British experimental composers. In 2007 he formed the Michael Blake Ensemble for the performance of his own work by the best South Africa players. He has been a guest lecturer at universities in South Africa, the Janacek Academy in Brno, the National Conservatory in Buenos Aires, the University of Toronto, Goldsmiths College, and a visiting composer at Bucknell University, USA. He was lecturer and composer-in-residence at the University of South Africa in 2007-2009.

Courting controversy since his student days, when he organised a week of performances of Stockhausen’s Aus den sieben Tagen to celebrate Wits University’s golden jubilee, Michael Blake at once inspires and irritates, forcing listeners out of their comfort zones and debunking the mysteries of composition. A mover and shaker, and a composer with “nothing to prove and plenty to say”, as critic Mary Jordan put it after Rural Arias was performed at the Arnold Schoenberg Centre in Vienna, Blake is now shifting his focus much more towards composition, and away from his entrepeneurial role.

A recent major work, the thirty-minute 2008 Piano Sonata (subtitled the ‘Choral’) sets up a series of interlocutions between two disparate twentieth century traditions — Southern African choralism and American experimentalism, in particular Charles Ives’ monumental Concord Sonata. As the latest manifestation of a project that started ten years ago when Blake began working with local choirs at the New Music Indaba, the ‘Choral’ Sonata pays tribute to the founding fathers of a tradition often overlooked in wider music and intellectual circles. Composed at the request of Flemish virtuoso Daan Vandewalle, who considers it “the first big sonata of importance in the 21st century”, this work is set to be heard in South Africa, Ireland and more countries in 2010, and recorded for CD release.

New works and premieres in 2010 include Marimba Etudes (for Magda de Vries), Horn Sonata (for Shannon Armer), more pieces in the piano series Fractured Landscapes (for Antony Gray) and String Quartet No 4 (for the Fitzwilliam Quartet’s fortieth birthday collection). Meanwhile tune into Johannesburg radio station Classic FM during drive time where you are as likely to hear Michael Blake’s music, as at New Music festivals and in concert halls on all five continents.

my mother whispers a prayer in my ear
reminds me of the years
she spent taking confessions
from dem
eastern european jews
as they grow older
and die in her arms.
their stories of loss
redemption..
weary moments
of lucidity
telling an immigrant
nurse named
esmeralda dolores,
their last confessions
of escape
and sacrifice.

..how she sang soul’s
to sleep

“if i can help somebody
as i travel along
if i can cheer somebody
with a word or song
if i can help somebody
when they are going
wrong
then my living
would not be in vain”..
( repeat)

.. watching as the last breath
leave the body..
all this.. she says
she has seen
..been
a part of..
all this and more..
i repeat quietly
in reverence ..to their souls..

You may not recognise his face, but you’d certainly recognise John Lasseter’s work: Toy Story, A Bug’s Life, Cars, Ratatouille and Wall-E, to name just some of his writing, directing and producing output.

Lasseter was a co-founder of Pixar Animation Studios, and a pioneer of computer animation. In fact, Pixar pretty much invented computer-animated movies – developing from scratch the process that almost every Hollywood studio now uses. It refined its craft with a series of award-winning short films throughout the 80s, and broke into features with Toy Story in 1995 – the first full-length computer-animated movie.

“It began way back when I first started, in 1983, working with the Lucasfilm computer division, which became Pixar,” Lasseter says. “There inevitably comes a time when they say: ‘Hey, we have this new computer and it’s 10 times faster than the ones you’re using.’ So everybody logically thinks: ‘OK, that means you can do what you’re doing, only 10 times faster.’

“[But actually] what happens is that it takes the same amount of time, but it becomes 10 times more complex. We have more computer power than you can imagine now, and still our movies take the same amount of time to create.”

Stars and Cars

Each feature is a four-year process, and the animators have to lock down the technology about two years before completion. “That’s when you have to say: ‘We don’t know how to do this, or the movie really requires us to do this’,” he says. “In Cars, it was the reflections on the cars and windows; in Monsters Inc, it was the fur; and there’s the underwater stuff in [Finding] Nemo. There was a tremendous amount of complexity in Wall-E.

Yet this complexity is not the result of clever technology, rather, it was achieved by imitating the way a film camera captures what it sees.

“That was Andrew Stanton, the director, working with Roger Deakins, the great cinematographer,” he says. “[The team] actually had lessons – learning technically what happens with the set of lenses that a cinematographer has to use on a classic Panavision 35mm camera. They studied the way this master cinematographer shoots things. That’s why [Wall-E] looks as if it was shot.

“But that’s classic Pixar. What we’ve always done, since the very beginning, is we have studied what is that unique limitation of the way things look, and we’ve modelled that into the computer.

“That’s why Pixar films have always had this movie feeling about them. For instance, we invented motion blur for computer animation. The way that a 35mm camera works is that it has a disc that spins – its 180-degree shutter. Half of that disc is clear, and half is solid. As it spins, half of the time it’s exposing the frame, and the frame is still. And when the disc is blank is when the frame advances, and it holds there and is exposed. So there is a look that 35mm has in the way that it blurs, because of this framing. So we studied that and we modelled that into our system when we created motion blur, to get that same look. This was on the first short I created in 1984, The Adventures of André and Wally B. It looked so real, even to myself. But it’s not real because our eyes don’t see motion blur. It’s a limitation of the [film camera's] lens.

“This understanding of the limitations of how films are actually made, and then modelling that within the computer, is classic Pixar. In live action, you get that for free, but we had to create it.”

Pixar’s visual creativity has developed over the years, from the simple geometric shapes used in early shorts such as Luxo Jr (the lamp that became Pixar’s mascot) and the Oscar-winning Tin Toy, to the more advanced character renderings in Toy Story, Monsters Inc and Ratatouille.

“One of the key things is the speed of the computer being used in an interactive way – by the animators, or the lighters, or the art department,” continues Lasseter. “Because the more complex that a model or something that you’re doing is, the less it can be interactive, because it’s so computationally expensive to do that. Pixar is the only studo that really has a major investment in research, where we’re creating our own modelling and animation system, and we have a new system coming online now. It’s been years in development, and one of the big issues was this interaction.”

Yet, as computers become more powerful, and Hollywood relies more on CGI special effects, does the technology ever get in the way of telling the story? Lasseter thinks that sometimes, it does – but for others, not for Pixar.

“One of the things from the beginning that we recognised is that these are just tools,” he says. “That the technology never entertains an audience by itself. And for us, since we invented much of computer animation, we have a pretty good sense of what our tools can do.

“Like Toy Story – we couldn’t do humans very well, so we kept them in the background, you just see feet and hands and stuff like that. But we could do plastic well, so making a film where the main characters were made of plastic was perfect.”

The next film technology with which Pixar is leading the way is 3D, which has seen a huge resurgence in the past 18 months. Pixar’s next release, Up, out in the UK in October, has been made in 3D – as will all its features from now on – and there will be 3D versions of the first two Toy Story films in advance of next year’s sequel.

“We’ve been interested in 3D for a very long time,” Lasseter says. “In 1989, Pixar made a short film called Knick Knack in 3D. I realised very early on that what you’re creating inside the computer is a three-dimensional environment. And I’ve always felt sad that you could only see a two-dimensional window into that three-dimensional space.

“We did quite a bit of research in holography, in lenticular imagery, to try to get a true three-dimensional view of the world and objects we were creating. I was doing a lot of amateur 3D photography – in 1988, when I got married to my wife Nancy, we took 3D wedding pictures. But there were no theatres you could see 3D in – you have to do a special setup with a silver screen and polarised projectors and all that stuff – and it was a pain that no one got to see [Knick Knack] in 3D.”

Extra dimension

“Theatres started recognising that with digital they could do 3D far more easily than with film. And what’s exciting about that right now is that you can’t get it at home. That’s why theatre owners have been investing heavily in it.”

And Lasseter believes 3D could help cinemas beat the economic crisis.

“They make a little premium on the 3D ticket, so it is beneficial for them to do it. You know, going to the movies has always been recession-proof. It’s fairly cheap entertainment, it’s classic escapism. So in all the recessions and depressions in the last 100 years, movies have done quite well.”

Bolt, which opened in the UK last Friday, was made from the beginning as a 3D film. It’s also the first computer-animated film from Walt Disney Animation Studios, of which Lasseter was appointed chief creative officer in 2006, when Disney bought Pixar.

“There’s one technological advance in Bolt that Pixar’s never done before: there is a softness and an interesting quality to the backgrounds,” he says. “The artists at Disney said: ‘Is there a way in computer animation that we can make the backgrounds look more like they’ve been painted?’

“I got to know some of the classic Disney matte painters such as Harrison Ellenshaw and his father Peter – and when you look at some of Peter Ellenshaw’s matte painting from Mary Poppins, which are some of the best ever made, you’re shocked at how rough they are, how impressionistic. But with film it just clicks in there. When you see a matte painting where everything is too perfectly rendered, it doesn’t look real for some reason.

“This new technology in Bolt makes the world believable – not really real, but believable. When you stop a frame and study the backgrounds, you realise wow, that’s pretty painterly – and you have never seen that before in computer animation. There is a beautiful, rich quality to Bolt that no one’s seen before in computer animation.”

With technology still advancing, what does Lasseter think Pixar will be able to do five or 10 years from now?

“It’s hard to say,” he says. “It’s getting to the point where the limitation is in the imagination of the filmmaker: if he can imagine it, chances are that he can make it. Which early on in computer animation was not the case.

“Clearly, the most difficult thing to create is a human being. That’s why, when we’ve created human characters such as those in The Incredibles, we’ve kept them fairly stylised. To create a character that’s totally believable and realistic is always going to be the challenge. But it depends on the story you’re trying to tell.”

this interview first appeared on guardian.co.uk

my ex two exes ago calls me up out of the blue and goes on this rant:
“i’ve got friends who don’t know how to burp
i’ve done buckets, i’ve spent a night in jail
and while we’re on the subject of
ruthless solutions let me tell
you my mother never
burnt the food”

now listen chick it’s thirty seven minutes past three am
and i don’t want either my wife or my daughter to
be woken up by your inane chatter so lose
this fucken number and forget we ever
gave each other the time of night!

she whispers back, icily, “well
i always prefer to err on the
side of boredom.” click.
hangup. what
happens
to
these
chicks
after they
hit thirty? what
happened to me?
it’s all downhill, downhill
and kisses don’t work no more…

The raptors in the surrounding jungle were pack-hunters who usually moved in prides of about seven females to one male. These numbers of course excluded the young, who trailed behind them as they made their sweeps along the river. These gangs were constantly bickering with one another, and you could hear them hissing and squealing for miles when territorial disputes broke out. These particular predators stuck to the waterline and subsisted off the children of large herbivores, who grazed along the river. Occasionally however, one of the young males would challenge the alpha male of a pack for dominance. Often the loser was not killed – merely humiliated publically before the females before being sentenced to permanent exile. Usually it was the former alpha male who lost out to the young blood. Unable to turn to his former mates, who now spurned him callously, the emasculated ex-dominant would flee into the jungle to lick his wounds. These exiled males would survive for a time determined by their own personal strength, becoming scavengers, existing without fixed migratory or nesting patterns. Unable to feed on the prey available to packs, they had to resort to smaller specimens for food. Sometimes one would stray too close to a village along the river and people would start disappearing. It happened rarely, but when it did, the people on the river would naturally turn to the strongest and most feared for assistance. Sometimes messengers would come to Paradise Discothèque at all hours asking for Florix. Florix had been born and raised in the Outzone. In his youth, he had loaded guns for the big game hunters of the old colony and ridden out in gunboats as a soldier. He knew the most of the varmints in the wood and also how to kill them. The jungle had opened up to him more than most and he could never resist the challenge of putting down a renegade beast.

Paradise Discothèque had got a transmission in that night regarding a raptor, which had been taking children from a settlement down the river for the last couple of weeks. Florix cracked out his machine guns and a box-full of grenades. He called The Typhoid Surf to drive him out in ‘The Shark” and they took along old Gus Henry and a slapper for backup. The ride out to the place took about an hour and a half, in the pitch-black. The headlights scrubbed illuminated vegetation through the blinders, but even then it was pretty much zero visibility. The slapper had a working knowledge of the area and kept them out of gullies and sink-holes with deft efficiency. He used a psychic slap-back method, which was not unlike sonar and often had a look on his face like someone had made him chew up a lemon. He called it concentration, but people still laughed behind his back. They reached the settlement just before midnight and it was nothing to speak of really – just a few shanty cabins and a small loading dock on the river with no name. The people spotted the headlights and started coming out of the ‘shine shack to take a gander at what was happening. Old folks, Jungle Indians and crying mothers started trying to put flower garlands around Florix’s neck when they saw that he had come. He took it all in his stride, like the stage performer that he was, with a gruff courtesy that always seemed out of date. It was strange seeing him act like that, particularly since he never wore whiteface make-up out on hunts. Seeing him without make-up was rare and gave him a human quality, which somehow managed to invoke a hideous sadness in those that knew him. The Typhoid Surf brought this melancholic aura up with Florix one day, but the Pierrot simply laughed at him. ‘Show me a clown doesn’t do that,’ he would say dismissively. The Typhoid Surf and the boys didn’t say anything while Florix was out with the villagers. They just sat in the car smoking cigarettes and checking the guns. A woman brought them cold fruit punch and they thanked her, spiking it with monkey-rum from Gus’s hip flask. When Florix was done questioning the villagers about the beast, he got out his night-vision goggles and scanned the tree line for heat signatures. He then saddled up the guns and explosives and then set out into the jungle alone. He had put down over a hundred raptors over the years and was intimate with their nature and nocturnal habits. Somehow he was always able to bag the monster without so much as a scratch – even though he only ever carried short-range weapons. The boys stayed frosty in ‘The Shark’, waiting for a possible distress signal, measuring out their rum punch to avoid getting too slurry. The Surf had in Appleseed’s tape, the one with ‘MY LOVE IS’ on repeat. She had started out as a conversationalist in the neon pits and it was the song she always used for backdrops and kissing episodes. He listened to it from time to time when the memories came back at him, making him either crazy or stupid.

Chirrup was dancing chorus in one of the big shows that night and couldn’t take off her headdress to use the walkie-talkie. She managed to find time between scenes to get to the public access videophone and put in a call to The Typhoid Surf. It was total chaos backstage, curtain calls every few seconds due to the insane level of elaboration which Florix insisted upon. The music from the orchestra pit was also driving her insane, even though the door of the glass booth was closed tight. She watched the men in dungarees disassemble stage sets while she told The Typhoid Surf what had happened earlier.

“Why didn’t she just press the panic button?” he spoke into his wristwatch, watching her tiny face pixellate in the bad pick-up.

“Chick’s a section 8 babe. Fuck knows why she does anything. But the guards won’t lift a finger and I want to help a sister out.”

“So where’s she at now?”

A stage manager with a clipboard came past suddenly and started banging on the booth, gesticulating wildly at the stage. Chirrup shooed him off in exasperation, yanking closed the tattered velvet curtain.

“Robots trucked her off to med-bay,” she replied testily. “Probably out by morning.”

The Typhoid Surf pinched at his stubble, as he sometimes did when he was pondering.

“Listen Chirrup,” he said. “The Smile can’t get wind of this little event.”

Gus and the slapper both went quiet when they overheard him say this. They stepped discreetly out for a cigarette, to avoid hearing any more.

“He has a special hard-on for that piece of tail. If he hears about this he’ll do a tap dance routine for sure. I’ll pull the photo-booth record of this eight ball and go pay him a visit. How’s that sound?”

“Kiss kiss sailor. That’d be just peachy.”

“Right then. I’ll see you after the show. We’re eating dino-steaks tonight. Over and angst.”

He tweaked off his wristwatch and got out the car to join the boys for a smoke.

“Trouble in Paradise?” Gus quipped.

“Just another doughnut asking to get bit.”

He lit up a cigarette and they observed the trees for any sign of movement. The situation on the phone had created a delay-reaction irritation in The Typhoid Surf and he turned to Gus.

“You know that chick Smiley found living out in the Nec’s?”

“The whippersnapper, sure, sure.”

Gus stood expectantly, but The Typhoid Surf had gone quiet and surly again. They went back to watching trees while some villagers mooched around, waiting.

“Wonder what Smiley see’s in that fucking cupcake,” The Surf muttered after awhile, almost to himself.

“She’s heading straight for the wall if you ask me.”

dennis brutus passed away yesterday, 27 december 2009. these photos of him were taken at the horror cafe in johannesburg on saturday 28 may 2006

Dennis Vincent Brutus, 1924-2009
by Patrick Bond

World-renowned political organizer and one of Africa’s most celebrated poets, Dennis Brutus, died early on December 26 in Cape Town, in his sleep, aged 85.

Even in his last days, Brutus was fully engaged, advocating social protest against those responsible for climate change, and promoting reparations to black South Africans from corporations that benefited from apartheid. He was a leading plaintiff in the Alien Tort Claims Act case against major firms that is now making progress in the US court system.

Brutus was born in Harare in 1924, but his South African parents soon moved to Port Elizabeth where he attended Paterson and Schauderville High Schools. He entered Fort Hare University on a full scholarship in 1940, graduating with a distinction in English and a second major in Psychology. Further studies in law at the University of the Witwatersrand were cut short by imprisonment for anti-apartheid activism.

Brutus’ political activity initially included extensive journalistic reporting, organising with the Teachers’ League and Congress movement, and leading the new South African Sports Association as an alternative to white sports bodies. After his banning in 1961 under the Suppression of Communism Act, he fled to Mozambique but was captured and deported to Johannesburg. There, in 1963, Brutus was shot in the back while attempting to escape police custody. Memorably, it was in front of Anglo American Corporation headquarters that he nearly died while awaiting an ambulance reserved for blacks.

While recovering, he was held in the Johannesburg Fort Prison cell which more than a half-century earlier housed Mahatma Gandhi. Brutus was transferred to Robben Island where he was jailed in the cell next to Nelson Mandela, and in 1964-65 wrote the collections Sirens Knuckles Boots and Letters to Martha, two of the richest poetic expressions of political incarceration.

Subsequently forced into exile, Brutus resumed simultaneous careers as a poet and anti-apartheid campaigner in London, and while working for the International Defense and Aid Fund, was instrumental in achieving the apartheid regime’s expulsion from the 1968 Mexican Olympics and then in 1970 from the Olympic movement.

Upon moving to the US in 1971, Brutus served as a professor of literature and African studies at Northwestern (Chicago) and Pittsburgh, and defeated high-profile efforts by the Reagan Administration to deport him during the early 1980s. He wrote numerous poems, ninety of which will be published posthumously next year by Worcester State University, and he helped organize major African writers organizations with his colleagues Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe.

Following the political transition in South Africa, Brutus resumed activities with grassroots social movements in his home country. In the late 1990s he also became a pivotal figure in the global justice movement and a featured speaker each year at the World Social Forum, as well as at protests against the World Trade Organisation, G8, Bretton Woods Institutions and the New Partnership for Africa’s Development.

Brutus continued to serve in the anti-racism, reparations and economic justice movements as a leading strategist until his death, calling in August for the ‘Seattling’ of the recent Copenhagen summit because sufficient greenhouse gas emissions cuts and North-South ‘climate debt’ payments were not on the agenda.

His final academic appointment was as Honorary Professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal Centre for Civil Society, and for that university’s press and Haymarket Press, he published the autobiographical Poetry and Protest in 2006.

Amongst numerous recent accolades were the US War Resisters League peace award in September, two Doctor of Literature degrees conferred at Rhodes and Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University in April — following six other honorary doctorates — and the Lifetime Achievement Award of the South African government Department of Arts and Culture in 2008.

Brutus was also awarded membership in the South African Sports Hall of Fame in 2007, but rejected it on grounds that the institution had not confronted the country’s racist history. He also won the Paul Robeson and Langston Hughes awards.

The memory of Dennis Brutus will remain everywhere there is struggle against injustice. Uniquely courageous, consistent and principled, Brutus bridged the global and local, politics and culture, class and race, the old and the young, the red and green. He was an emblem of solidarity with all those peoples oppressed and environments wrecked by the power of capital and state elites — hence some in the African National Congress government labeled him ‘ultraleft’. But given his role as a world-class poet, Brutus showed that social justice advocates can have both bread and roses.

Brutus’s poetry collections are:

* Sirens Knuckles and Boots (Mbari Productions, Ibaden, Nigeria and Northwestern University Press, Evanston Illinois, 1963).
* Letters to Martha and Other Poems from a South African Prison (Heinemann, Oxford, 1968).
* Poems from Algiers (African and Afro-American Studies and Research Institute, Austin, Texas, 1970).
* A Simple Lust (Heinemann, Oxford, 1973).
* China Poems (African and Afro-American Studies and Research Centre, Austin, Texas, 1975).
* Strains (Troubador Press, Del Valle, Texas).
* Stubborn Hope (Three Continents Press, Washington, DC and Heinemann, Oxford, 1978).
* Salutes and Censures (Fourth Dimension, Enugu, Nigeria, 1982).
* Airs and Tributes (Whirlwind Press, Camden, New Jersey, 1989).
* Still the Sirens (Pennywhistle Press, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1993).
* Remembering Soweto, ed. Lamont B. Steptoe (Whirlwind Press, Camden, New Jersey, 2004).
* Leafdrift, ed. Lamont B. Steptoe (Whirlwind Press, Camden, New Jersey, 2005).
* Poetry and Protest: A Dennis Brutus Reader, ed. Aisha Kareem and Lee Sustar (Haymarket Books, Chicago and University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, Pietermaritzburg, 2006).

He is survived by his wife May, his sisters Helen and Dolly, eight children, nine grandchildren and four great-grandchildren in Hong Kong, England, the USA and Cape Town.

i’m here in the dark
scribbling
these ransom notes
again..
awakened
to all my
faults.
up against
my ribs
rage
of light
and
light rays.

I

For the child, adoring cards and prints
The universe fulfils its vast appetite.
Ah, how large is the world in the brightness of lamps,
How small in the eyes of memory!

We leave one morning, brains full of flame,
Hearts full of malice and bitter desires,
And we go and follow the rhythm of the waves,
Rocking our infinite on the finite of the seas:

Some happy to escape a tainted country
Others, the horrors of their candles; and a few,
Astrologers drowned in the eys of a woman,
Some tyrannical Circe of dangerous perfumes.

So not to be transformed into animals, they get drunk
On space and light and skies on fire;
The biting ice, the suns that turn them copper,
Slowly blot out the brand of kisses.

But the true travellers are they who depart
For departing’s sake; with hearts light as balloons,
They never swerve from their destinies,
Saying continuously, without knowing why: ‘Let us go on!’

These have passions formed like clouds;
As a recruit of his gun, they dream
Of spacious pleasures, transient, little understood,
Whose name no human spirit knows.

II

It is a terrible thought that we imitate
The top and the ball in their bounding waltzes; even asleep
Curiosity tortures and turns us
Like a cruel angel whipping the sun.

Whimsical fortune, whose end is out of place
And, being nowhere, can be anywhere!
Where Man, in whom Hope is never weary,
Runs ever like a madman searching for repose.

Our soul is a brigantine seeking its Icaria;
A voice resounds on deck: ‘Open your eyes!’
A hot mad voice from the maintop cries:
‘Love… glory… fortune!’ Hell is a rock.

Each little island sighted by the look-out man
Becomes another Eldorado, the promise of Destiny;
Imagination, setting out its revels,
Finds but a reef in the morning light.

O the poor lover of chimerical lands!
Must one put him in irons, throw him in the water,
This drunken sailor, contriver of those Americas
Whose glimpses make the gulfs more bitter?

Thus the old vagabond, tramping through the mud,
With his nose in the air, dreams of shining Edens;
Bewitched his eye finds a Capua
Wherever a candle glimmers in a hovel.

III

O marvellous travellers! what glorious stories
We read in your eyes as deep as the seas.
Show us the caskets of your rich memories
Those wonderful jewels of stars and stratosphere.

We would travel without wind or sail!
And so, to gladden the cares of our jails,
Pass over our spirits, stretched out like canvas,
Your memories with their frames of horizons.

Tell us, what have you seen?

IV

‘We have seen the stars
And the waves; and we have seen the sands also;
And, despite shocks and unforeshadowed disasters,
We have often, as here, grown weary.

The glory of sunlight on the violet sea,
The glory of cities in the setting sun,
Lit in our hearts an uneasy desire
To sink in a sky of enticing reflections.

Never did the richest cities, the grandest countryside,
Hold such mysterious charms
As those chance made amongst the clouds,
And ever passion made us anxious!

- Delight adds power to desire.
O desire, you old tree, your pasture is pleasure,
And whilst your bark grows great and hard
Your branches long to see the sun close to!

Do you ever increase, grand tree, you who live
Longer than the cypress? – Nevertheless, we have carefully
Culled some sketches for your ravenous album,
Brothers finding beauty in all things coming from afar!

We have greeted great horned idols,
Thrones starry with luminous jewels,
Figured palaces whose fairy pomp
Would be a dream of ruin for a banker,

Robes which make the eyes intoxicated;
Women with tinted teeth and nails
And cunning jugglers caressed by serpents.

V

And then, what then?

VI

‘O childish minds!

Never to forget the principal matter,
We have everywhere seen, without having sought it,
From top to bottom of the fatal ladder,
The wearisome spectacle of immortal sin:

Woman, base slave of pride and stupidity,
Adores herself without a smile, loves herself with no distaste;
Man, that gluttonous, lewd tyrant, hard and avaricious,
Is a slave of the slave, a trickle in the sewer;

The joyful executioner, the sobbing martyr;
The festival that flavours and perfumes the blood;
The poisonous power that weakens the oppressor
And the people craving the agonizing whip;

Many religions like ours
All scaling the heavens; Sanctity
Like a tender voluptuary wallowing in a feather bed
Seeking sensuality in nails and horse-hair;

Prating Humanity, besotted with its own genius,
Is as mad today as ever it was,
Crying to God in its furious agony:
“O my fellow and my master, I curse thee!”

And the less senseless, brave lovers of Dementia,
Flee the great herd penned in by Destiny,
And take refuge in a vast opium!
- Such is the eternal report of the whole world.’

VII

O bitter is the knowledge that one draws from the voyage!
The monotonous and tiny world, today
Yesterday, tomorrow, always, shows us our reflections,
An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom!

Must we depart? If you can do so, remain;
Depart, if you must. Someone runs, another crouches,
To deceive that vigilant and fatal enemy,
Time! Ah, there are some runners who know no respite,

Like the wandering Jew or like the apostles,
Whom nothing aids, no cart, nor ship,
To flee this ugly gladiator; there are others
Who even in their cradles know how to kill it.

When at last he shall place his foot upon our spine,
We will be capable of hope, crying: ‘Forward!’
As in old times we left for China,
Eyes fixed in the distance, hair in the winds,

We shall embark on that sea of Darkness
With the happy heart of a young traveller.
Do you hear these voices, alluring and funereal,
Singing: ‘This way, those of you who long to eat

The perfumed lotus-leaf! it is here that are gathered
Those miraculous fruits for which your heart hungers;
Do come and get drunk on the strange sweetness
Of this afternoon without end!’

By those familiar accents we discover the phantom
Over there our personal Pylades stretch out their arms to us.
‘Swim to your Electra to revive your hearts!’
Says she whose knees we one time kissed.

O Death, my captain, it is time! let us raise the anchor!
This country wearies us, O Death! Let us make ready!
If sea and sky are both as black as ink,
You know our hearts are full of sunshine.

Pour on us your poison to refresh us!
Oh, this fire so burns our brains, we would
Dive to the depths of the gulf, Heaven or Hell, what matter?
If only to find in the depths of the Unknown the New!