kagablog

we are not going to exist forever in this world, and the most fortunate thing that can befall a woman is to die young.

marquis de sade
120 days of sodom

the towers are high
in a Babylon sky
a thunder, the sound of
blood raining down
of those who defy.

(the sun sets)

soldier slits night’s throat

when fear is the wounded one
crawling slowly, closer, black.

your love grows teeth

bittersweet
the red of colour

where are you now soldier?
dead
walking

going home.

Aryan whispers the text through once.

All the good people
let you down
Eventually
Eventually

All the proud people
On their knees
Eventually
Eventually

All the dead people
Risen up
Eventually
Eventually

Mantombi begins to play on the umrhube.

Warrick joins in on an acoustic percussion instrument.

David sings the text in isiXhosa accompanied by Zim on flute.

Bonke abelungileyo
Baya Kuphoxa
Nakanjalo
Nakanjalo

Bonke abantu ababphakamileyo
Amadolweni
Nakanjalo
Nakanjalo

Bonke abafileyo
Bayo ovuka
Nakanjalo
Nakanjalo

Warrick and David stop.

Zim duets with Mantombi.

Aryan re-states the text in a whisper.

End

(isiXhosa translation by david mayekane)

recorded and mixed by daniel eppel for the soundtrack to “welcome nelson”, produced and directed by craig matthew, 2010

this review first published on rareoopdvds.com

What an alcoholic is, primarily, is numb.

*

The problem for the drug addict or alcoholic in recovery is not so much the physical craving as what to do with time.

*

Alcohol and drugs waste your time and it’s your time you’re wasting.

*

The seductive power of alcohol and drugs lies in their effect on being-in-time. That is, the bleakness of “nothing-to-do” is radically transformed into an ongoing entertainment of the moment.

“Endless now”, instead of posing its ruthless questions about the meaning of Being, is neutered and covered in the illusory sheen of a jouissance that appears to have glamorous, meaningful, depth.

More, even, than meaning, the addict and/or drunk, is granted the existential elixir of life, ie. this is enough; the moment of Being-in-time transcends itself. In this sense all alcoholism, all addiction, is a manifestation of spiritual longing. It is a thirst for God.

Alcoholism and drug addiction are expensive and time-consuming. They are neither of them anti-social nor counter-cultural practices. In fact both alcoholism and drug-addiction are the highest form of participation in a system predicated on over-consumption and over-production.

The so-called “free” market economy of excess inevitably stimulates addiction and alcoholism, not merely as a by-product of its momentum, but in fact as a necessary and unavoidable component of its machinery.

The great white lie of the war on drugs is entirely unsurprising when we consider what the building blocks of the edifice of democracy were; genocide, slavery, hypocrisy, ruthless suppression of dissent, and willful denial of real conditions at every turn.

*

I was looking for God in a bottle.
I had to drink To the bottom
to find out God was looking for me

elsewhere

*

aryan kaganof

“Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this reason, rather than its rarity, that it is not only apolitical but anti-political, perhaps the most powerful of all anti-political human forces.”
~ Hannah Arendt

University of Salford and Islington Mill, July 1-3 2010

Organising Committee: Dr Michael Goddard, Dr Benjamin Halligan and Professor David Sanjek

“If there are people that are dumb enough to use Metallica to interrogate prisoners, you’re forgetting about all the music that’s to the left of us. I can name 30 Norwegian death metal bands that would make Metallica sound like Simon and Garfunkel.” - Lars Ulrich

“… this music can put a human being in a trance like state and deprive it of the sneaking feeling of existing, ‘cos music is bigger than words and wider than pictures… if the stars had a sound it would sound like this.” -
Mogwai, “Yes! I Am a Long Way from Home”

Noise Annoys. Is it not a banal fact of modern, urban existence that one person’s preferred sonic environment is another’s irritating, unwelcome noise - whether in the high-rise apartment, on public transport or the street, or almost anywhere else? The contingent soundscape of jack-hammers and pneumatic drills, mobile phone chatter, car sirens and alarms, sound leakage from nightclubs and bars and - moving into the suburbs - lawn-mowers and amateur renovation projects, neighbouring kids and dogs, represents a near-constant aural assault. As a pollutant, noise can legally attain noxious levels; it is both potentially biologically harmful and psychologically detrimental.

But what exactly is noise and what conditions these relative thresholds in which sound crosses over into noise? Or are these more organised and polite sonic phenomena merely varieties of noise that have been tamed and civilised, and yet still contain kernels of the chaotic, anomalous disturbance of primordial noise? As a radical free agent, how is noise channelled, neutralised or enhanced in emergent cityscapes? As a consumable, how is noise - or lack of noise - commodified?

Such questions are particularly applicable to contemporary forms of music which, based as they are on a variety of noise-making technical machines, necessarily exist in the interface between chaotic, unpredictable noise and the organised and blended sounds of music and speech. Does modern noise seek to lead us to new, post-secular inscapes (as with psychedelia and shoegazer), or defy the lulling noisescapes of processed background muzak with punitive blasts of disorientating, disorderly noise? And why the cult of noise - in term of both volume and dissonance - in which low cultural practices (metal, moshing) meet those of the avant-garde (atonalism, transcendentalism)?

This conference seeks to address the contemporary phenomenon of noise in all its dimensions: cultural, political, territorial, philosophical,
physiological, subversive and military, and as anomalous to sound, speech, musicality and information. Possible topics include but are not limited to:

* Psychedelic and Neo-Psychedelic Musics

* Punk and Post-Punk Musics

* Experimental Musics from Avant-Classical to Digital Noise / Raw Data

* Industrial Musics and Cultures

* Krautrock and German Noise

* Shoegazer, Nu-Gaze and Post-Rock

* Noise as Cultural Anomaly

* Noise, Chaos and Order

* Noise and architectural planning

* Noise and digital compression

* Noise Scenes from No Wave to Japan-Noise

* Noise and electronic music pioneers (Delia Derbyshire, Varèse,
Stockhausen)

* Noise and Territory

* Sonic Warfare

* Noise and Urban Environments / “Noise pollution”

* Noise and Subjectivation

* Sonic Ecologies

* “White Noise”

* Noise and Political Subversion

* Noise and hearing impairment / deafness

* Psychic / silent noise

* Noise and mixing, particularly in nightclub environments

* Noise in Cinema, Video and Sound Art

* Noise, Appropriation and Recombination

* Noise and Affect

The conference will be organised by the Centre for Communication, Cultural and Media Studies at the University of Salford in cooperation with Islington Mill, Salford and will take place from the 1-3rd of July and will include both an academic conference and noise gigs featuring amongst other groups, The Telescopes and Factory Star and other special guests tbc. Confirmed keynote speakers include rock historian Clinton Heylin, author of From the Velvets to the Voidoids and numerous other works on (post)punk and popular music, Stephen Lawrie of The Telescopes, and Paul Hegarty, author of the recent Noise/Music.

In addition to conventional papers, noise, sound and video art proposals are also welcome.

To participate in the conference please send a 400 word abstract and biographical note to Michael Goddard, m.n.goddard@salford.ac.uk and Benjamin Halligan, b.halligan@salford.ac.uk by 28 February 2010.

For some perverse reason I am awake at 4am. But worse than this, the metallic grey false dawn light is tainted with the soundtrack of maudlin 70’s love song, “The Day Before You Came”. It’s ricocheting around my skull. Some woman is warbling it over and over in precisely the overly sentimental way that two years of singledom has resulted in me hating. I stare resentfully at the monochrome beige curtains until I subside into the last hour or so of sleep, dreading the technicolor immediacy of the dreams I know it must bring. My last waking thought is, ‘Well maybe it is.’

When the alarm rings at 6am, I am waist deep in amorphous green/blue goo, wielding a strangely light-filled broad sword and baying at the top of my lungs while joyfully cleaving heads from the bodies of weird alien beasts. It takes several bleats from the cellphone alarm to calm my racing heart. I open my eyes slowly. The familiar dimensions of the bedroom assert themselves upon my unwilling consciousness. It might have been crazy, but slaughtering those beasts was fun. Do I want to return to the mundanity of my four, somewhat dirty white walls, beige curtains and hideously mis-matched bedding? I am groggy from the sudden intensity of the hour or so’s sleep. It takes me ten minutes to remember waking up previously. It is only in the shower that I recall the song, and sing, ‘This is the first day of the rest of my life’ ironically under my breath to myself. I soap my pits, my balls, my arse; vigorously scrub my leg, chest and back surfaces and my arms, before hosing myself off in the pungently chemical city water supply. Invigorated I step from the shower, whip a razor across my chops and look to don my armour for a day in the world.

Popular wisdom would have one live each day as if it was your last. And while I relate to the sentiment, I cannot see that having sex all day every day is really going to make for much of a life. But the idea of noting the exact nature of every passing mote of time and detail registers a harmonic in me. To make every detail important and to celebrate it. A series of tiny, static nows that are examined and remembered, as opposed to bundled into minutes and hours which are devoured by the processes of being alive and making plans to live. My Buddhist under-mind smiles as my reptilian mind recoils and I am left smiling humourlessly at the idea of holding down a job while making every moment of life holy. But I feel that if this is the last day of life as I know it, because it is the day before she arrives into my existence, maybe I should be recording it. Maybe I will need it later to remember what it was that I left behind. One always needs to know where one came from.Primarily to stop you from heading back there I feel, but mainly in order to have some sense of progression. Nature tends towards inertia, decay, but consciousness strives for change. My body and mind war with each other over these drives while I hold down the job that buys us the luxury of time to have the debate. It would be nice to have some other source of meaning in the ritualised actions of my days.

None the less, I am mindful as I drink my fruit juice and chew my banana. I count every stroke of my toothbrush as I clean my teeth. The sun feels comfortingly warm on my back as I close the door to my flat and walk to my car. In fact, the sky is a clear crisp blue that looks like brand new tissue paper, begging to be wrinkled. The sun is bright and my shoes make a musical scrunching on the concrete. Bird song drowns out the traffic noises from the main road. I press my remote control and with a smart chirp, the car springs open, deactivating the alarm and the immobiliser. I reflect for a second that, on the last day of my life as I have known it, it would be so much more perfect if I didn’t have to think about the mundanities of actually staying alive.

When the day is the last , the sky takes on a whole other texture. Trees stand out in stark relief, more like sculptures than paintings against a background. Cars shine and gleam as they pass by in the road. By the time I have driven to work I am aware of two things. One I am very, very wide awake. And conversely, interestingly, I am tired. My head feels like an over-full letterbox. The combination of the two sensations is like an effervescent multi vitamin going off in my heart. I am elated, I am clear headed. The fatigue feels GOOD. I sit at my desk wallowing in this for a few minutes while my machine boots up, the virus scan runs and the updates download. Every single day begins like this. I have not altered my routine; I have merely paid attention to it. What an interesting world I live in. I haven’t spoken to another living soul, and already I feel more at home in the tiny corner of the world I have carved myself. I don’t feel like I an peeping out from between curtains at a parade anymore, I feel like I am handing out cookies from my front door as the participants file by, smiling. Ridiculous, I think.

If I was to die tomorrow, this day would have been wonderful. I haven’t had sex, I haven’t got high, and I haven’t bought any toys. I just started taking mental note of everything. Looking right at things instead of through. It’s not possible to live like this everyday, is it? You’d take so long to do anything. You’d be sidetracked and unfocussed. Right now though, I am not sure I care much about those side effects. I decide to make a cup of coffee while my email downloads. My day is ordinary. I have two or so hours now to write some reports, to reply to emails, answering queries and so on. Then I have a couple of calls to make, quotes to chase, information to gather. Then I have a lunch with a client, and the afternoon has been cleared for admin. I need to catch up on paperwork. I look at my to-do list as I sip my coffee. I know most of the people I am about to call. My client is male. I know all the staff here. If this is the day before she comes, I am not sure where she is coming from. Realising my mistake, I look at tomorrow’s diary. Pretty much more of the same. I am not doing anything after hours on either night. I am just living this life. This life that until today I had thought was mundane. If tomorrow she is in my life, what is she going to see? My boredom and repetitions of the same actions and ideas? Or my new excitement at the colour and depth around what I do with my time? What would I like her to see? If today is the day before she comes, isn’t there a good chance that I already know her, I muse. I mean, my dairy shows no opportunity for meeting anyone new. Will I bump into her in the check out queue at Pick ‘n Pay? At the ATM? Will we do the strangers tango in some public place, each starting in the same direction as the other until we laugh and look into each others eyes? Will one of my phone calls result in an unexpected meeting, and it’s her? Will… Ah. Ja, whatever.

The time until lunch flies by. And even though I am focussed on my work, I am conscious of writing my emails differently, I am conscious of patience; of perspective of the time I have to do things. Before I know it, my outlook calendar pops up my 30 minute reminder to go to lunch. I stand; pick up my folder and notes for the meeting. I look around my office, straighten papers on my desk, push the chair in, walk out and close the door. Its autumn and the crispness of seasonal change has crept into the highveld air. It’s not cold, but I am not moving in a pool of heat and oil like two weeks ago. I note the sensation of cooler air across my lungs. My chest seems to expand easier, I suck in more oxygen, my eye sight sharpens, as if the water content of the air has dropped and my vision tweaked accordingly. The short walk to the car is full of sensations: the feel of things through my shoes, concrete, stones, cracking of dry leaves. I look around the car park but I am the only one here. A Hadeda squawks by in the sky, calling for its mate. The car alarm pips twice. I open one door and slide back inside its familiar cocooning.

I am early for the meeting, having left too much time to get to the restaurant. As I walk in, I note the hostess. She is tall, brunette, beautiful. I think for ten seconds. I am 40 years old. She must be 25. I shrug and approach the front desk. She smiles at me.
“Good afternoon sir. Do you have a reservation?”
The smile is perfect, but her eyes maintain the same constant glow. There is nothing in front of her that she is waiting for. “Yes, for 1pm,” I reply and give her the client name. She picks up 3 menus and escorts me to the table.
“Would you like something to drink while you wait?” she asks.
I order a glass of water, lemon, no ice, and she leaves to relay my order to our waiter. I look around. The joint is half full and there are women dotted around the room at various tables. I tally up how many fall into the right age bracket and so on before stopping myself. If this is the last day of my life before she comes, isn’t it true to say that she is a factor about which I don’t know? Again, is it someone I know or not? I just don’t know. Then she is just as likely to be 21 as 45 and therefore any sectioning of the women I see might be to begat the process. I sigh and sip my water. I’ll just talk to everyone.

Ten minutes later a woman approaches my table. She is about 30-ish, attractive, and smartly dressed. I was engrossed in my cell phone and didn’t notice until her body cast a shadow over my table. I look up, see her and smile.
“Hi.” She says
“Hi.” I reply, wondering what this is about.
“Um, you’re not Victor are you?” she asks, realising that I am clearly not expecting to meet someone I don’t recognise.
“No.” I reply, but realising her predicament, I add, “But I get mistaken for him all the time.”
She smiles, clearly uncomfortable, but grateful, “Oh, I am so sorry, thank you,” and heads off to the table a few down from me where another man sits alone. This one is right, she sits.
The client arrives and all chance to observe the world around me is obliterated. The meeting proceeds.

As we are wrapping up, another woman approaches our table, an ex colleague of my client’s assistant, they talk, hurried introductions are made. Our eyes meet, she looks away. 2 minutes later she is gone and the bill is paid and we are walking out the restaurant. At the door, we part and I turn and bump into another patron on the way in. It’s a woman. We both apologise, pat each other reassuringly, hurry off away from the scene as quickly as possible. Back in my car, I tally up four new faces. Some I considered, some I did not. There was no electricity and no-one seemed to want to stay to find out more, and I felt compelled to detain no-one. I shrug, start the car, head back to the office.

The building is quiet. It is nearly 4pm, and I have an hour to get on with some admin. The brighter ones have set up 4 o clock meetings so as to be able to go straight home. I pull the tray of paper towards me and start to process. At five thirty, one of the PA’s on the floor pops her head in to say she is leaving and I am the last one left. I start, looking at the time.
“Oh,” I remark inanely to her smiling face, “lost track of the time! I will be leaving now too then.”
“OK” she smiles; “I’ll start turning the lights and things off then.”
I smile back and start to shut down my machine. Once that is complete, I grab my jacket and car keys, lock my door behind me and fall instep with the PA as we leave the office. She’s been here a while, but I don’t know her name. She nice though. Not that one is ever interested in colleagues, way more trouble than it is worth. I smile at the thought. My last working day before she came is now over and I am walking out the office ticking women off an imaginary list. She catches me smiling.
“What’s so funny then?” she asks with a smile of her own.
I laugh, “Oh nothing really, I just feel a bit silly for losing track of the time there.” I reply, putting any words into the spot between inverted comma’s so as not to have to say what I am thinking.
She laughs, “Well, don’t worry, my lift is often late for the same reasons!”
We reach the exit to the building, and there is no car outside for her. “Like today,” she adds, “No lift yet.”
It’s getting dark, and we don’t work in a very nice part of town. I volunteer to stay until her lift arrives.
She looks at me as if gauging my reasons. “You really don’t have to you know.” She says soberly, “I can stay inside the building until she arrives.”
“I know,” I say, “But at least this way you’ll have some company.”
We wait together for a companionable 15 minutes, exchanging inane small talk until a blue Honda Civic pulls up. We push through the doors into the street, and she opens the door, hops smartly in and winds down the window, “Thank you for waiting with me, it was kind of you!”
“And I am sorry you had to,” chirps another voice from the driver’s side.
I bend over so as to be able to see in through the window.
“I…” I manage.
The driver blushes
“It was my pleasure.” I choke out.
“Sorry,” says the driver, still blushing and looking up and down fast. Then our eyes lock.
“I’ll be early tomorrow, just to be sure,” she says to me.
Her sister laughs
“I’ll be out here waiting.” I say
She smiles and bites her lip slightly.
“I’ll be here,” I repeat.
She throws her head back and laughs, engages gear and drives off. Both women wave.
here? There seem to be a few too many words for such a punchy ending - DONE]

Tomorrow, I think, what am I doing tomorrow?

order the book here

2008

At some point in the 1980s - I can’t remember exactly when - curiosity led me to pick up The Illustrated Weekly of India from a pile of newspapers and periodicals that constituted my parents’ daily reading. The middle pages contained photographs of two totally naked women, one Indian and the other blonde. The last pages were given over to the erotic fiction of Khushwant Singh; a young sahibís afternoon tryst with a sweaty female construction worker whose navel smelled of damp mud. And I was hooked.

The Illustrated Weekly existed in an incredible time. A middle-class family in Bangalore could sit down together and read this, an intelligent popular magazine that was equal parts sensational, sensual and just plain strange. (And definitely edited by Men). No one seemed to notice that I was about fifteen years old, or that my other reading consisted of such lusty classics as Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa and Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch, the latter unwisely chosen on the basis of certain misleading clues on its cover.

The finer traditions of The Illustrated Weekly are continued today by the wildly popular Crime & Detective. A cornucopia of all things criminal and carnal, my favourite section is the soft-core photo-story (”With the pen of my desire, I want to write the story of our intimacy on your alluring body. Would you permit me?”) But those with an instinct for baser things - such as “New Writing from India” - will be offered little satisfaction in the magazine marketplace.

This is a puzzling phenomenon in a country with a thriving, linguistically diverse publishing industry (Though I only speak for the Indian language I know best, English). It wasn’t always so. Imprint and Quest paved the non-academic highbrow way until the mid 1970s, when they gave way to New Quest. The 1960s also saw the emergence of a slew other magazines, most important of which was A.D. Gorwala’s celebrated Opinion. Anglophile intellectuals in India often subscribed and contributed to Encounter, of Spender-Lasky fame, and later, of CIA-funding notoriety.

The Illustrated Weekly shut shop in 1993. Kai Friese’s India Magazine created a distinct cultural excitement until it was jettisoned by careless proprietors in 1999. New Quest soldiers on as a staid shadow of its former self. To be sure, contemporary intellectual life still has some wriggle-room in English-language media. Outlook magazine has hosted a number of public spats; Biblio intermittently winks at its non-octogenarian fans; Economic and Political Weekly steadily publishes the dignified academic left; the Journal of Arts and Ideas, while it existed, pushed the academic envelope to include cultural studies; the Sarai Reader pushes the cultural studies envelope to include critical accounts of popular media and street life. And so on.

Imagine my excitement then, on discovering a copy of Civil Lines back in 1994. Finally: a literary magazine. Here was Dharma Kumar, dryly alarmed at her daughter’s history lessons: “‘Ancient India was very civilized. Men took daily bath and used eye make-up.’” Or the sublime short fiction of Telegu writer Caso, published in translation. And the warmly comical literary journalism of Sheila Dhar. Mukul Kesavan, a founding member of the editorial collective, was probably only half-joking when he wrote in the introduction to its fourth instalment that “besides carrying pieces by the already famous (Khushwant Singh, AK Mehrotra, Amitav Ghosh, Allan Sealy), Civil Lines also published the early works of Manjula Padmanabhan, Ruchir Joshi, Raj Kamal Jha and Susan Vishwanathan. They’ve all gone on to write and publish successful and celebrated books of fiction… and Civil Lines basks shamelessly in this reflected glory.”

A magazine that is really a journal and is actually a book. No wonder that it exhibits an unflappable insouciance in the face of taxonomic transgressions. In his introduction to the fifth instalment, Mukul writes, “Civil Lines advertises itself as New Writing from India. This is misleading (as most advertisements are) because in its short life Civil Lines has been host to old writing newly translated, writing by not-Indian writers, writing by Indians Elsewhere and so on….But to return to the question of content so that anyone who plans to write for Civil Lines (or, for that matter, to read it regularly) will have some sense of what it is likely to publish. Civil Lines will publish good writing by desis (loosely defined to include all kinds of south Asians), it will publish anyone (Indian or otherwise) whose work has something to do with our part of the world and (just to make things really precise) it will publish anything the editors like.”

So far, so wonderful. For many years, Civil Lines sustained my belief that writers actually existed in India. Then it fell off the map, transforming from a publication into something that might be best described as a fervent hope. Five issues have been published (in 1994, 1995, 1997, and two issues in 2001). The astute will observe a trend, and perhaps, also the bucking of it. The astutest will recall that we are now in 2008. This march of time - and the mild indifference of this publication to march along - indicates that at least one challenge facing Civil Lines is the new “New”. Or whatever; you get the idea. It’s all a bit confusing and how it will work out is still a mystery. But having thrown in my lot with the folks who make up the editorial collective, I can happily report that Civil Lines 6 is imminent and no longer merely immanent.

this article first published by chimurengalibrary.co.za

Realism for the dispossessed means apartheid; deprivation: physically, culturally and mentally. Realism means being a non-person, existing by the grace of the whites. Realism means entrenchment in ethnocentricity.

Vernie February
Mind Your Colour, 1981