kagablog

(image by rachel kendall)

The real film never gets made. It’s the making of that’s the real film. We’re all sitting at the Castle Bar. Ludi’s glum because all the new flicks are shite. “You can’t get happy in ninety minutes anymore.” His shrug is from old school yiddish. But what he says is true, the movies aren’t authentic like they used to be and besides, most people don’t have 20 minutes to spare. It’s the ADHD generation, the kids are all wired and their parents are wired too. Mike has decided to start dumming up in order to fit in. “Don’t ask me to do normal, I don’t do normal.” Mike’s just made the world’s first smart movie. It talks back at you whenever your mind wanders, it knows when you’re bored. Mike’s delighted with his product, “I have the only 5.1 surround orb in Claremont.” Me I’m not so sure that Cape Town is ready for this blatant post-mortemist propaganda. Trevor puts his lot in with Mike, “I don’t want to go back to reality, that’s the issue.” Ludi drops his head into his hands, he hates innuendo. Mike points at me, “If you can’t beat the program delete it.” Just then Trevor gets greeted by his happiness dealer. “Call back tomorrow.” A bevvy of giggling flappers shuttle past the bar. “Are you guys waiting for one of us?” “All my life honey, come with me, my car’s parked outside of Evol.” “Not tonight Gramps.” Ouch. That stings. Suddenly I’m so thirsty my mouth’s dry as a nun’s cunt. You wouldn’t believe i’ve been ripping my tits off three nights this week, it’s not seemly at my age. These are serial overlapping hangovers under my eyes. The reaper came last night. I felt dirty after I had bribed him. But the truth is I’m not ready to die. I tried to channel fire but I got the tuning wrong. This is what I learned:

Every gorgeous young woman is a hideous hag waiting to happen. This is the problem of getting old: one learns to see through the mask of youth. Makeup is interesting because it foregrounds the mask-like operation of the face itself. The young woman’s face is a trick nature plays on men. Inside she’s already her mother, itching to nag.

first published on the blog of netfilmmakers.dk

We’re introduced to each other at the Color Bar. They dropped the “u” in “colour” to be different. Or it’s the American way of spelling. Either way it pisses me off. The name of the bar is meant to be an ironic reflection on how times have changed. Only times haven’t changed and there are no darkies or coloureds here. So the irony backfires kind of, except now I’m wondering whether they intended any irony in the first place. Then we’re introduced to each other. We both happen to know someone who happens to know someone and before you know it we’re on speaking terms. She’s one of those rof chicks that made good, got an education, became a lefty, landed up writing speeches for members of parliament. Her teeth are small and her lips are tiny but this doll can kiss hey! We duck out of the bar and round the back to where the fountain is. I’m fiddling and fondling, she calls me “my prince.” When it’s over we go back to the bar to our whiskys and she tells me about her life.
“We lived in Brixton. This oke was shooting pinks at Damelin. They were taking steroids and smoking buttons. Burry already had a glass eye at 21. He blew someone away at a robot. When they tried to break in to my porzie I called him on the cell. He happened to be up the road on a coke binge with five army generals. They rocked up wired and ready to kill. Within minutes they were slashing maniacs. There was an elegance to their slashing. Those poor would-be robbers didn’t know what the fuck happened to them. Lights out ek se.”
I like the way she talks and drinks at the same time. She talks quickly and she drinks even quicker. Her eyes are glowing manic attack, like she tripped hard on Californian Sunshines and never came down. Suddenly she grabs my hand and squeezes it very hard.
“You not gonna go all soft on me boet now are you?”
“Not me sister.”
“Orright.”
We order more whiskys that arrive very slowly. At these prices you’d expect some service as well. The long dry wait gives us a chance to peer into the abysmal hubbub around us. Most of these kids never have to wear their outfits twice. This bar caters to rich white poepals from up North who drive down here to pay R30 entry fee. It makes them feel important and rich. That’s the funny thing—they are rich but that’s never good enough—they only feel rich when they’re spending. Shit holes like the Color Bar exploit the basic psychological inadequacy of being born into bread and not having to bake it oneself. There’s lots of that kind in Joburg. Tonight they’re all sitting around us. We must seem like extras from the wrong movie to them. We’re both of us wearing last decade’s raiments. We’re comfortable. She offers me a puff of a mean looking doobie that she got from her pops.
“So your dad smokes dagga?”
“Ja, but only since he was 40. He always says ‘Give me the good stuff hey’ to his dealer. It’s funny, he thinks because he’s paying top dollar that he’s getting the good shit.”
Much like the clowns that populate this over-priced bar methinks. Joburg is a huge confidence trick. Everyone’s friendly because they want your tom. It’s tom city. At least in Cape Town nobody’s smart enough to pretend that they like you. You know where you stand. Here everyone’s your tjommmie. While you’re paying.
She asks me to dance. She’s short and I like that, it makes me feel tall. We hold on to each other very tightly and we dance the cha cha cha very slowly, neither of us wants this intimacy to end. She edges me towards the back of the poorly spelled “color” bar and soon it’s time to return to the fountain. I’m not sure if I can get it up but this chick’s thin little lips work themselves into a frenzy. It’s like taking Viagra. While she’s down there I’m thinking about hedonism and how it’s relayed. Ooh now I’m close to delivering this load. I’m not quite sure how she does it but she keeps asking questions, in between gobbling the business.
“Are you into cable?”
“I’m outside of everything. But I accepted it.”
“It’s very important that.”
She goes back to the munchies. Full throttle. Then I’m popping. That stuff tears its way out of me inna freight train stylee, forcing my head back and eyes open and I stare right into the face of my old mistress the moon who is furiously jealous and full. Back on earth the rof chick looks up when the milking is finished. Smiles with those small regular teeth glinting in lunacy’s passionate glare, mutters mysteriously “And you were beyond you.”
Then it’s all over between us. What more could we do? Or say?
When she waved goodbye I asked her her name.
“Penny.”

first published on storyglossia

It’s Charlie Manson’s birthday. He offers Sammy The Shake a drink. Sammy asks for a double of whatever Charlie’s having.

“No. Make that two doubles.”

Charlie’s amused by Sammy’s lack of tact. After a while the alcohol has loosened them both up to the point where they could pass for mates. Charlie tells Sammy that he’s just broken up with Cortado. That she was wonderful in bed but he felt the need to roam. His eyes glaze up. Sammy suspects that Cortado did the breaking up. Charlie Manson admits to treating Cortado shamefully in order to find out how much she loved him. If she really loved him. Then the truth spills out.

“She dumped me.”

Just then Cortado bursts in to the Winston. She’s come for Charlie Manson’s birthday. She kisses him full on the lips. Her lips are juicy as are her ripe paps. She stares at Sammy The Shake frankly.

“What’s it like to be famous?”

These things happen instantly. Only idiots “chat up” women.

Sammy suggests to Charlie Manson that they all move on from the Winston to a fabulous night bar on the Zeedijk called the San Francisco, which is open for an extra hour. They dash through the tedious Amsterdam rain. Cortado covers her head with her leather jacket, her melons stick out at the moon. The moon is impressed, as is Sammy. Cortado confesses to him that acting is her passion.

Charlie Manson sits in between Cortado and Sammy The Shake. Sammy leans over Charlie and asks her to sit next to him, “The view’s better.” She does. Everything’s clear now. She wants to punish Charlie. He needs to be punished. Sammy’s a form of poison. What the hell, it’s better than nothing. Charlie Manson leans over Sammy to his ex, who has ostensibly come out to “support” him on his birthday, warns her about Sammy The Shake’s reputation…

(The complete version of this story has been anthologized in the collection called Year of the Thief. Please visit www.thievesjargon.com/press for more information.)
–Ed.

this happened to me recently. i was in a bar, minding my own business when this turnip in a beanie comes up to me and he says “hey, didn’t you used to be in the film business back in the day?” i’m too old to take offence at the obvious taunt implied by his question so i just nod. he continues, “well my buddy wrote a script so maybe you can look it over and give him some advice.” i tell them both my reader’s fee and they laugh disparagingly and then i beat them both at pool.

later on i wonder why i took offence. it’s true i did make movies back in the day and the world of movie-making is a world of always nowness, it’s not a world of historical consciousness, at least not here in south africa. i suppose there was something in the turnip’s contempt that really stuck in my craw. he thinks of himself as a “film maker” as well, except the kind of “films” he makes are coca-cola commercials for more budget per thirty seconds than i ever had for all of my under-underground features put together.

he dreams of making a feature length movie. but he wouldn’t consider getting out of bed for less than thirty grand a day. i’m a freak to him, something that never learned how to get paid.

aryan kaganof

this excerpt from aryan kaganof’s sometimes it an’t easy being a gal was first published in the collection chick for a day (simon & schuster, usa, 2000)

social experiment or literature?, May 16, 2006

This review is from: Chick for a Day: What Would You Do If You Were One (Hardcover)

If you read all the ‘reviews’ above as well as the ‘reviews’ from the two literary review publishers at the top, you will see that no one really has an easy time with this book. I found it on the whole to be a kind of literary bordello since most of the writers couldn’t resist including a lot of sex. But the real merit of this book may be not on a literary level. It weighs heavier really as a kind of social experiment -asking males in a male-dominated world to take on a female identity. One mark of how seemingly universally awkward it was is that perhaps the author with the biggest reputation in the collection ends up having a dog perform sex on ‘herself’. Confusion or wild creativity? Art over editorial directive? Or wanting to one up the idea of a male taking on a female identity by exercizing the authorial consternation of trying to be even more outre? The majority of the offerings do reflect however that the authors were putting a lot of serious thought in to how to carry off the assignment well, with a high level of craft, and to deliver something satisfying. But this isn’t a book that is going to meet with an easy acceptance, not in the societies we currently occupy. The editor professes to see a largely comic bent to the writings. Kirkus’ review pompously says there is no profundity -like who bequeathed masterful profundity perception to Kirkus’ review? By playing the sex and joke cards more often than not, the authors reveal that they are more interested in pandering to what they perceive as the market for this kind of material, so I guess my biggest criticism would be that its weakness is mostly that the authors err on the side of wanting to be entertaining which does not by any means equal out to being good storytellers. Maybe the book can be said to fail on literary merits but it succeeds without much parallel in exposing an uneasiness that is all-pervasive about gender -who controls it, who gets to establish its valuations, who has a right to represent it and in what ways. So the stories may really be more like exercizes in literary discomfort, both on the parts of the authors and certainly the majority of the readers. If you are looking for insightful philosophy about gender this book is, for the most part, the wrong place, there is a torrent of that from academia. And it is that large and continuous output of theory, research, philosphy and social study without which this book most probably would not have been possible. So if you want to read this book do so to find out where we as a society can not quite seem to be comfortably. As both the controllers of our consumption of gender and as those who have to live gender out amongst ourselves. It is profound on that level. And the why of it is left as enough mystery to make this book art. It is out of print. That is just as much proof.

you can order the book here

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, incidents and dialogue are imaginary and are not intended to refer to any living persons.

Op sommige dagen maakt het niks uit of het stortregent, de lucht een groot grijs gordijn is, de wereld er droeviger uit ziet dan ooit. Je voelt je de Koning van de Wereld. Er raast een energie door je lijf waarmee je in drie tellen duizend rozen kunt plukken èn ze bij tachtig meisjes in het haar kunt steken. Je bent opgewassen tegen alles. Maar soms is de zwarte lucht in combinatie met de eeuwige regen een fatale combinatie.

Ah you you fucken arse. You with your roses and your rain and your King of the World bullshit. Fuck you man. You were supposed to be my friend. You were supposed to be that simple clean ingredient in the tragedy that made it all bearable. I trusted you motherfucker. I spent months of my fucken life listening to your stories and even went as far out of character as to believe you. I thought you were worth something asshole. You chickenshit two-timer with your cheesecake smile and all those nights full of literature. All that sweet talking was just camouflage, your tactical methodology, a means to ingratiate yourself into my trust. What do you mean King of the World? Oh yes, you’re the King all right, but only if the world is a shrunken shrivelled ball sac. That’s all you’re king of my friend, one hairy little conquest, one grisly notch extra on your sad totem pole. I LOVE HER MOTHERFUCKER AND SHE LOVES ME! Who the fuck are you with your post-modern shirt sleeves and your endless Homeric quoting? You said you were my friend. That’s not a four letter word. That’s supposed to mean something. O Jesus. Ah fuck. This is all so vulgar. And it hurts. Do you understand that O learned one? It hurts.

We dronken bier en lagen in de zon. We waren jong, we hoefden niks en wilden niks. Kortom: vrouwen? Alles was goed. We staarden hele dagen naar de horizon. Tenzij het bewolkt was, dan keken we niet. Dan dronken we alleen.

‘Wat zou er later van ons terechtkomen?’

‘Niet veel,’ zei Kaganof en dronk zijn blikje bier leeg.

Ik liet een boer. Daarna viel het stil.

‘Als we geluk hebben, worden we drugsbaron.’

‘En als we geen geluk hebben…?’ vroeg ik.

‘Dokter of bankmedewerker.’

‘Dat is klote.’

Kaganof knikte, dat wil zeggen, dat hij het ermee eens was. Het was klote om geen geluk te hebben later.

Her name was Jade. A makeup artist. I met her on the set of a short film I was doing for the NPS for the money. The script didn’t mean much to me, it was written by some vegetarian who was against violence. There was a campaign going on in Holland at the time about ‘Zinloos geweld’. It was all a load of bullshit. Geweld is altijd zinvol. But Jade agreed with the sentiments in the script. That’s why she was working for a reduced salary. It was absurd, all the cast and crew were working for reduced salaries because they believed in the ideals of the script and all of the money the producer saved on their salaries was being used to pay my salary. And I didn’t care about any of it but the producer knew he could make more profit out of the film with my name on the credits than with the name of some left-winger who believed in the project. Crazy shit. But Jade had these soft green eyes and millions of floating bubbles on her face called freckles and at the end of the day when she loosened the bun holding her hair up and that red avalanche came cascading down I was, obviously, lost. Falling in love was not my mistake. My mistake was introducing her to Kwast.

Mijn hart stond in de fik. Het probleem met verliefd worden is dat je al je idealen ogenblikkelijk overboord zet. Schreeuwde je ooit: ‘Vrouwen zijn onnozel, ik wil geen kinderen, ik blijf altijd alleen!’ Als je de prinses met het lieve zachte gezichtje hebt gezien, kun je niks meer roepen. Fluisteren en fluiten en verlegen lachen. Dàt doe je, de hele dag. En je pik achterna lopen. Noem het liefde, noem het lust, noem het Het Mooiste Wat Er Is. Idealen heb je in ieder geval niet meer. Het liefst zou je, terwijl je zeesterren in de handen van je geliefde drukt, een tweeling willen maken onder de maan in een witte gondel en een aria uit Turandot zingen (samen met de ganzen, eendjes, kikkers, krekels). Idealen?

Het fenomeen lange benen in de lenteregen kreeg een geheel nieuwe betekenis toen ik haar voor het eerst voorbij zag lopen. Jade was haar naam. Ik denk dat ze 2% Zweeds was, 8% Frans, 3% Japans, 21% Mexicaans, 5% Peruaans, 12% Pools, 17% Indiaas, 16% Spaans, 9% Siberisch, 7% Nieuw-Guinees.

Het was een lange kus. En daar was een lange avond aan vooraf gegaan. Het was in de Lava Lounge. Ze stond te dansen. En ik probeerde te dansen. God heb ik die avond meerdere keren in stilte bedankt dat er een kale vent was die alle kanten op stond te springen, zodat ik niet de slechtste danser was. Ze kwam af en toe dichterbij. Ik maakte dan wat bewegingen met mijn houten heupen en liep daarna teringsnel naar de bar. ‘Whisky.’

Ik kon mijn ogen niet van haar af houden, haar bewegingen in die strakke zwarte krijtstreep broek gingen gewoon te ver. Mannen dansten om haar heen. Werden gek. Sommigen liepen op haar af, maar konden gelijk weer vertrekken. Had ze al een vriend? Viel ze op vrouwen?

Toen de DJ een nummer opzette dat danstechnisch niet al te moeilijk klonk, begaf ik me weer tussen de springende menigte. Maar waar was zij? Was ze al naar huis? Lag ze misschien al te slapen? Met een oude knuffel onder haar arm. Plots kwam er een glimlach op mijn gezicht. Ze stond voor me. Heel dichtbij. Ik probeerde wat danspasjes. De kale man was al naar huis, nu was ik de slechtste danser. Mijn glimlach groeide. Volgens mij stond ik de polka te dansen op techno. Ik heb een half uur in haar groene ogen gekeken en een half uur harkerige bewegingen gemaakt en een half uur kaakpijn moeten doorstaan: mijn glimlach liep van mijn rechteroor, via mijn borst, naar mijn linkeroor.

Toen sprak ik haar aan.

‘Ik wou dat ik zo kon dansen,’ schreeuwde ik in haar oor. Ze viel zowat neer op de vloer. Ze greep naar haar oor om te kijken of dat er nog zat. Ik zei zachtjes in haar andere oor: ‘Sorry.’

Zij zei tegen mij: ‘Ik wou dat ik zo kon lachen.’

Toen hebben we gekust.

Als ze een paar eeuwen geleden had geleefd was er een oorlog om haar gevoerd. Dit was een vrouw waar om gestreden moest worden.

So we sat there, the three of us. My baby Jade and my buddy Kwast. I had told Jade what an ok guy he was. How well read he was but not a snot-nose like most kids of his age. I had told her about the translation he did of Homer into Dutch and how good it was, I had told her about his excellent taste, he was smart enough to recognize me, shining in the shitheap. And of course I had told Kwast about Jade, about that incredible trick she could do with her agile body that put her pussy and her mouth on the same plane and the training she had done in Thailand that gave her supreme control of her feet, how she could jack me off with them. In short, I had given everything away. I was the fall guy in a set-up scenario of my own making. Oh yeah, I was the stumper all right. There we sat, the three of us, and I suppose that both of them knew it right away. Me? I just sat there, buying them both drinks. Doubles! I tell you I was not feeling very pretty the next day when Jade told me what had happened. Nor was I feeling very smooth when Kwast denied what had happened. And after the whole ugly incident was over, guess what? The producer had to fire me from the Geweld is zinloos production because it didn’t look kosher, all of the crew and cast working for half salary or nothing while the director gets arrested for gross bodily harm on a weazel called Kwast. Which means ‘brush’. Yeah. My brush with Kwast.

Ik weet niet wat meer pijn deed: de gebroken rib die Kaganof mij had geslagen of Jade die mij verlaten had. Ik had haar gesmeekt om bij me te blijven, maar ze zei nee.

Iedereen die vanaf die dag ‘nee’ tegen mij zei, begon ik hartgrondig te haten. Ik kon het niet meer horen. Hoeveel was er al kapot gemaakt door dat kutwoord?

Er zou vaker ‘ja!’ moeten worden gezegd.

Het leven is hard. De wereld is slecht. Vrouwen begrijpen dat niet. NEE vrouwen begrijpen dat niet. Ik besloot niet bij de pakken neer te zitten, maar me te bezatten. Dat is heel goed half gelukt.

In alles wat ik deed, dacht ik aan Jade. Jade. Jade. Misschien ademde ik haar naam zelfs. Toen ik twee eendjes zag neuken op een grasveldje, wilde ik ze uit elkaar halen. Ik wilde dat niemand elkaar meer pijn deed. Ik pakte het bovenste eendje met allebei mijn handen en zette het in de sloot. ‘KWAAK KWAAK KWAAK’. Mensen keken me vreemd aan. Ik voelde me slecht. Thuis hing ik voor de teevee en wilde ik dood.

I took Jade with me to see Kwast. In order to punish him. The beating had been nothing more than an admission of pain on my part. But I revelled in the look in his eyes as we sat in his shitty little third storey apartment and drank the last of his beers. Jade understood it all. Quite honestly I think she was enjoying it. She’d had her little fling. I had rescued my pride by flaunting her in front of my ex-buddy Kwast. He lay there with his bandaged ribcage and his ugly bottle of Grolsch and I felt like telling him that only schorem drink Grolsch but at that moment a swelling of pity erupted in me and I could hear God and the Devil laughing at the both us while Jade looked on at the brothers who had fallen for her and fought for her and lost each other; and I held back my harsh words and I kneeled before broken little Kwast on his single bed and I took his hand in mine and I kissed it. I looked up at him but his eyes were locked into Jade’s, he did not see mine, that were shining with tender tears. I thanked him for his hospitality and that night Jade and I made love until we were unconscious.

Kaganof verliet mijn huis met Jade aan zijn hand. De tweepersoonsbank voelde kouder dan ooit; ik liet mijn eten staan; zelfs de Ilias en de Odyssee hielpen niet. Toen ik met m’n tandenborstel voor de spiegel stond, probeerde ik een glimlach. Een traan sprong uit mijn oog. In bed werd het er allemaal niet beter op.

De volgende ochtend lachte nog steeds niemand in de spiegel. Ik probeerde een mop over een kanarie die werd overreden door een trein, maar ik werd er alleen maar verdrietiger van: arme kanarie. Toen ging de telefoon. Het was Kaganof, hij wilde even checken of ik geen zelfmoord had gepleegd.

Ik pleurde de hoorn op de haak.

Direct daarna belde ik naar Jade.

‘Hi,’ klonk het zachtjes en hees en geil en lief door de telefoon.

Ik kon niks meer uitbrengen. Was ik zojuist nog vastberaden om haar uit te schelden, nu liet ik me al vallen op de bank. Zelfs haar stem eiste slachtoffers.

‘Hi…’ klonk het weer zachtjes.

‘Wil je met me trouwen?’ vroeg ik.

‘Wie is dit? Ben jij dit Kaganof?’

Het was drie uur later toen ik van de bank opstond. Al die tijd had ik de hoorn vastgehouden en voor me uit gestaard. Met mijn telefoon in mijn hand liep ik naar buiten, het snoer achter me aan trekkend. Het blauw uit de lucht was verdwenen. Er waren twee opties: of ik ging een fantastisch feest geven, zodat er weer werd gelachen, gedronken, gedanst, geneukt en over Homerus gediscussieerd. Of er ging nu een dode vallen. Maar wie? Jade? Kaganof? Of ikzelf? Ik liet mijn telefoon los. En nam een beslissing.

originally published in the dutch literary magazine passionate

whenever a chick calls me dude
i always have to look around
who is she talking to?
it can’t be me?
it just can’t be?
it always baffles me.
dude?

the first time i ever heard the word “dude” come out of anybody’s mouth was in new york in 1992. on houston street. richard kern was telling me about the beautiful chicks he was photographing in the nude, and he said “dude”, and it was funny because nude rhymes with dude. so that worked for me. also because it was houston street, so it made sense, dude on houston.

but every time i have ever heard that word i am at a total loss. how did that silly word become a mainstay of the contemporary international lingo? how?

You have to be prepared for the devil to happen.
That’s it.
Nothing more.
Nothing less.
There i was stuck between the documentary watchers who took it all so seriously, and the little girls in their twenties who were incapable of taking anything seriously. I didn’t know which team i belonged to. Well, honestly, I did know - I belonged to neither.

This guy leans over to the coolest chick and asks her “Are you an artist?”

Her cheesy grin says it all - “I never felt unsafe. It’s all good.”

I instantly become suspicious of chicks when they say “it’s all good.”

“You’re a very intense person” the guy says to the girl. Her eyes laser beam him. She’s only interested in what he might be carrying. That’s the extent of her interest. I’m outside of all of that. What I want doesn’t even register on her radar. It’s only the goods that count. That’s how it is with this generation of beauties.

They know they’re deadly. They thrive on it.

The only way to do this is to be invisible. Go home and change. And go to fiction. Why is it fiction and non-fiction rather than fact and non-fact? The whole world is upside down. May-Jane reminds me of Sasha Grey. But she hasn’t even heard of Sasha Grey and then I realise that she’s nothing like Sasha Grey. Nobody will ever remind me of anyone else again. I’m too eclectic. Too esoteric. My outside is really out. Not just a convenient masquerade.

I’ve become something strange: the estranged. I can’t interface with the herd. I hear myself saying “Do you wanna come sit?”

“I will” she replies. “Sure?”

But it’s all bullshit. There’s no common ground. Both of us are just winging it. Playing for redemption.

I’m always stymied by my romantic tendency. None of these bitches deserve that. It gets in the way. I’m from another planet. I cherish this aspect of myself. But it gets me nowhere.

Actually the chicks are very ordinary. And desperate for connection. It’s not gong to happen. Not tonight. Not with me.

Actually I realised very quickly that nothing’s changed. All the old rules apply. Men have to be men. And women follow.

That’s it.

More importantly: if you’re not carrying coke they will not stay with you. Simple.

so when i go to the swedish embassy to apply for my visa, this blonde lady looks at me very dubiously and she says “so are you a visiting professor, or are you visiting a professor?”

first published in migrate: the ego issue, june 2009

So here I am, throwing out short films about nothing, botched together in a day or two, improvised on the spur of the moment without a second thought in a drunken cloud of couldn’t give a damn confidence and clarity. And what do I get for it? Flown around the world from city to city, from five star hotel to luxury loft, all the free food I can eat and the free booze I can drink, not to mention busloads of teenage girls. I must be doing something right, not so?

Rewind to Rotterdam. Preparations for the premiere. A manifesto of sorts is assembled out of various sources. Incomprehensible to all those uninitiated into the obscure realm of obscurantist digital jargon. The critics love it and the document gleans the nonsensical under-underground short film an amount of overground media attention totally out of proportion to its merit. This is known as hype.

The film has been selected sight unseen for the prestigious festival by a festival director who is plied with bottle after bottle of expensive red during an exorbitantly priced Indonesian dinner. The producer is militantly obsequious, he shloughs and syphons with such alacrity you’d swear he swallowed vomit for fun. Coprophilia is a sexual perversion that is automatic in the film-maker’s world; you always have your tongue up someone’s arse in this “industry”.

There’s a talk-show after the second screening. The talk show moderator has only seen the last three minutes of the film. He starts the question and answer session with a question about… the last three minutes of the film. Then he “throws things open to the audience”. Gets away with it. There’s a Charlie Manson look-alike sitting in the front row, his forehead covered in ugly bruises and a thick, bulging brown scab. He asks the only pertinent question of the evening; “Why wasn’t there any applause?” I like this guy.

Now we’re at a Chinese restaurant. A huge group of hangers-on and desperate wanna-be’s. I’m always so confused when people want to hang on to me. Don’t they know where the real party is?

The next evening I’m in Sweden convincing the amply bosomed Camila to pay me my air fare all over again as I’ve spent all the cash on booze. She’s flabbergasted and furious. Not to mention insulted that I didn’t pitch up for the extremely important question and answer session with all those uptight Lutheran feminists. Fuck her. Fuck all these blonde Swedes with their obsessions about time and hygiene. I’m an under-underground film maker, not Noddy! She gives me the loot, hundreds of crisp krone! Yes! Wishes me luck with my “career”. Film-making isn’t a career you uptight cunt, it’s a freeloader’s paradise. My work ethic is: other people work, I’ve got the ethics!

Reading Timaeus’ dialogue on the flight back to Brussels it occurs to me that everything I think up, which I assume to be original, has in fact already been thought of and better expressed by some Greek homosexual. I remember when that Danish aristocrat Lars had his tongue up my arse it felt rather good. Philosophy is clearly the discourse of choice for men who have problems with women.

Nobody with the possible exception of Marcel Duchamp has had a worse influence on the history and development of art than John Cage. Cage singlehandedly flipped us into a world where bad aesthetics, bad taste and incompetence are not only de rigeur, they’re actually considered qualities worth striving for. How I hate all that scratchy music, it’s truly obscene.

Disco wiped out experimental theatre in South Africa. Disco and tv.

Everything’s changed in the past ten years. The largest faculty at Amsterdam University is Film and Television Science (sic). Hardly anyone studies literature or philosophy anymore. Nobody dreams of writing the great South African novel these days, they all want to make the great South African movie. I can see that I got into this game just in time, before the mid-nineties explosion of “independent” film-making and makers and journalists and festivals and fucking theoreticians. Luckily by now I’m a veteran with a c.v. as long as Snoop Doggy Dogg’s dick…a list of titles of films that nobody’s ever seen but that’s part of the mystique of under-underground movies, they’re “legendary” because most of them don’t exist outside of vhs work copies or sketches on paper. Fuck these movie vultures, failure has made a better drunk out of me!

I tried to read Plato today but Timaeus’ misogynist dialogue makes no sense to me. No wonder women aren’t interested in philosophy, it’s all homosexual propaganda. But I would like to have read Plato into John Cage’s ear with a foghorn: “all audible musical sound is given us for the sake of harmony, which has motions akin to the orbits in our soul, and which is not to be used to give irrational pleasure but as a heaven-sent ally in reducing to harmony and order any disharmony in the revolutions within us.

How right Wittgenstein was about the worthlessness of Mahler’s music. Everything after Mahler is equally useless or worse. If Webern stands up to close scrutiny it’s only because of his fastidious compression of means. The music’s ghastly but always mercifully brief. Concision is a much neglected virtue these days. On to dinner with the producer and his post-modernist “friends”. Yeah, we’ve all got friends when we foot the bill.

“When you compare Captain Beefheart to Zappa, what is Picasso’s legacy?”
“The key word is matter.”
“It’s a towering personal achievement.”
“Johan Cruijff preferred Picasso to Duchamp.”
“So you’re not a big fan of Duchamp?”
“A lot of misrepresentation if you ask me.”
“Visual art has been very frustrated this century.”
“Music is always abstract.”
The producer gets the bill. That’s what he’s there for. I’m exhausted. I need an early night. It’s all about hypocrisy in Holland. Materialism and copycat conceptualism.
Ten years later everybody wants to hold hands with Hitler.

first published by sein und werden autumn 2009

On a coke-fuelled roll Citizen Kohen decides to give up under-underground film making and write a novel instead. Semi-biographical, picaresque Gertrude Steinish novel with lots of Joycean fragmentation. He’ll write the reviews as well, put them in the back of the book as an appendix along with the manifesto and a list of telephone numbers of coke dealers in fifteen major cities worldwide (not to mention some decidedly un-major cities like Durban and Goteborg). Even if the book’s lousy, it should sell because of the coke listings. Citizen Kohen smiles to himself, winks. Sits down in front of his computer. Starts typing…

“Good evening. My name is Citizen Kohen. I am 35 years old. I live in Sea Point, Bomb Bay. I write these notes by hand in a journal I stole from the Rotterdam Hilton Hotel. It is past 3am on Sunday 12 February 2000; the Year of the Dragon. The gulls cry incessantly in the midsummer heat. An occasional police siren etches the night with rumours of war. There is a poster on the inside of the door to my little room which advertises an art event in Holland called “Loneliness in the City”. The poster seems pertinent to my lifestyle. On it I have attached with sticky tape a piece of paper on which I have hand-written in neat block capitals a paragraph by Yukio Mishima. The paragraph reads: “When the lovers set out on their michiyuki, the final pilgrimage to death, the tone and brilliance of their language is heightened, and the lovers themselves seem to grow taller. Two people who until then had been ordinary citizens, a pitiful man and woman, suddenly attain the gigantic proportions of a tragic hero and heroine.” Opposite me, in the cheap pine bookcase is a large format trade paperback book which consists entirely of photographs of Mishima’s house. When I compare his living conditions with mine I shudder; but it is foolish to compare one’s own life with that of another man. Was it not that wise Jewish patriarch Simon Gamliel who said that “a rich man is one who is content with what he has”? To the right of me, in the window ledge, a Penguin paperback copy of the Hagakure annotated by Mishima sits neatly wedged between Kant’s One Possible Basis for a Demonstration of the Existence of God and Bataille’s Story of the Eye. All three paperbacks are well-worn, their spines showing evidence of many years of reading and re-reading. I dip into the Hagakure often. It guides me. On the wall opposite me are three pictures; a red postcard with the famous iconic image of Che, a cd-cover sized painting of Charlie Manson done in the style of a postage stamp of the Third Reich, and a small painting of a rather thick-legged woman in a corridor with her back to the viewer. All three images were sent to me by different women. Che’s portrait from Cortado when she was in Buenos Aires; Manson’s from my first love Mary-Jayne Someone, still living in Durban; and the self-portrait of the perversely shy woman in the corridor from my Alaskan Angel, accompanied by a note imploring me to remember her by way of the painting. I would have remembered her anyway, but it is a lovely painting.”

Citizen Kohen stops typing. Does another line of lunar essence. Reads back to himself what he’s just written. Reads it again out loud. Thinks to himself that it’s all too boring. Too pedantic, like a piece of writing by Sebald. Dull dull dull. K reflects on his many abuses and lies, his calculating manipulations. Does so in the third person, tries to depersonalise the process. Lessen the sharp burning sensation of shame that sours his stomach when he thinks about what he’s done to Cortado, how he’s treated most of his “ladies”. She phones him at the office at 4:30am, on this, his last night in Amsterdam.
“Where are you?” she asks.
“What do you mean where am I, you’re phoning me?” but he knows full well what she means. He wants to avoid the subject. She invites him to join her. But he needs to shower before catching his train to Brussels at 6:24am from Central Station. He invites her to join him instead.
“Have you got drugs?”
Her question irritates him. He lies.
“No.”
“Pity.”
He’s angry that it should matter whether he’s got drugs or not, wants her to be content with him. “How are you doing?”
He doesn’t really care.
“Not so good.”
An awkward silence. It’s not useful for him to know this right now.
“Goodbye sweetie.”
There’s a lot of cracked pain in her cracked voice but he can’t give her anything. Has nothing to give her. Never had anything to give her.
“Goodbye.”

The click of the receiver. A sharp concentrated wave of regret rushes into the place that was once open before the defences were erected. He glances down at the page of semi-autobiographical fiction and chops himself a line. Snorts it. Feels bad about himself. Chops a much bigger line, this one fat and long like an albino eel, licks the wrapping paper clean, wipes his gums with it. Does the final line. Excruciatingly sharp sensation as the mucous membranes burst under the attack of the acidic powder. A stream of bloody snot oozes out of his left nostril. He walks to the bathroom, looks in the mirror, notices many pimples cropping up in clusters under his mouth and around the chin. Blows his nose. Squeezes a couple of the riper yellow pustules. Has a huge diarrhetic shit. Coke always moves his bowels. When he’s all done he puts the lights out and locks up the office, checking to see that he’s brought his semi-autobiographical diskette with him. Walks from the Keizersgracht to the Tichelstraat. Showers. Packs his bag. Watches a bit of CNN. The walk to Central Station takes him 20 minutes. He buys a single ticket to Brussels International Airport Zaventem. Sixty five guilders and fifty cents. Chuckles to himself. He’s had this ticket paid for twice by ample-bosomed Swedish Camila, once by his producer and once by the Rotterdam Film Festival. Perhaps he should stick with under-underground film making after all, it certainly pays well. He sleeps until Rotterdam, wakes up to see dawn exposing herself. Holland is the future. A paradigm of rational construction and planning. Belgium is a nightmare version of the past by comparison, but this morning the sun and the sky are so bright that even the platforms at Brussels North seem almost pretty. The airport express takes another twenty minutes to get to Zaventem, then it’s the lift up to the third floor, check in, passport control, boarding and takeoff. He isn’t stopped at the security desk for not paying his taxes - thanks the goddess for Belgian bureaucratic inefficiency. Those blonde Dutch Nazis at Schiphol wouldn’t be so kind.

first published by sein und werden summer 2009

you can read chapter 1 & 2 of citizen kohen online at seinundwerden

you can order the print edition of sein und werden from seinundwerden@gmail.com

i’m supposed to meet ben williams of book.co.za at the fat cactus in park street. he’s not here and the waiter tells me discretely that there’s another cactus, in mowbray, that i look like the kind of punter that would be more at home there and would i please leave and take the bunch of flowers with me when i do. actually the flowers are for my wife not my mother even though i bought them for mother’s day but that’s in lieu of my daughter buying them which she didn’t do because she’s barely sixteen (months) old, but i presume that the waiter presumed i had brought the flowers for ben cos when i asked him where’s ben, he looked at the flowers then he looked at me and he looked at me oddly, then he said, “who’s ben? i don’t know any ben” and i started singing “ben, the two of us need look no more…” and that in combination with the flowers must have given every indication that i was (am) one of those and that’s probably why he suggested i take my flowers and get me hence to mowbray. now for those of you unfamiliar with the lyrics of early seventies pop songs, it was michael jackson that sang the immortal “ben” a saccharine pop song from, i think, 1972, and one that has probably dogged ben williams of book.co.za all his life, how could it not? pop songs have a wicked way of doing that. as for me i don’t have much trouble with the lyrics of schmarmy pop songs replicating my monicker given as that said monicker is aryan. which is a conversation stopper if ever there was (and is) and therefore this fat cactus story is hereby stopped.

Hi Aryan,

thanks for sending me your piece on Amsterdam. It’s interestingly written and certainly sets a vivid scene, and while you do directly engage with a comparison of Amsterdam and Durban, I don’t think it’s going to fit the mix as it’s turned out. I think you correctly picked up from the brief that I was going for something edgy and quite free, but in the subsequent months, dealing with the realities of getting the thing published, the project’s taken on a more mainstream shape. I don’t know, I suppose you’re used to this sort of reaction, and you’ve carved yourself a great niche, but your style is not one that easily fits alongside other voices that range from chicklit to thrillers to straight travel and memoir.

Thanks for your time, though, and I have no doubt that your story will find a market.

All the best
Louis

San Francisco

Big Mike is waiting for Citizen Kohen at the airport. He really is huge, picks up both items of luggage effortlessly, throws them into the boot of the Lincoln Continental. They cruise into the city at a leisurely pace, up Third Street past Mission and finally left into Mason where Mike stops on the corner of Eddy. The enormous man looks long and hard at Citizen Kohen.

“OK. So this is how we’ll play it. You’re supposed to be a left wing anti-apartheid documentary maker having a retrospective at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Check into the Hotel now, there’ll be a message waiting for you in your room with instructions.”

Mr.K thanks the giant, gives him the salute. The Hotel is called the Bijou. The front desk man looks suspiciously like Tom Waits. Every room in this hotel is named after a movie shot in ‘Frisco. Citizen Kohen’s is 505, Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It seems kind of fitting somehow. He lifts the receiver of his telephone, dials 9 to listen to his coded message.

“Murder is immensely exciting because it is precarious, an interplay of personal psychic reality and the experience of control of actual objects (people). This is the precariousness of magic itself. Magic that arises in intimacy. This develops into the capacity of the Hindoo child to murder the Hindoo mother in a relationship that matures into the ability to murder alone in the security that the Hindoo mother was never there when needed. It is in murder, and only in murder, that the individual Hindoo adult or child is able to be creative and to use the whole personality, and it is only in being a murderer that the Hindoo individual discovers the Self. Culture then, is essentially creative genocide. Murder is older than culture. Purer.”

It takes Citizen Kohen a while to figure out what the message really means but he chuckles when he gets it. The hidden instructions are in two parts. 1) Why do Jews have big noses? Answer: Air is free. 2) Meet me at the City Lights bookstore tomorrow at 11AM.

Next morning Citizen Kohen walks up Geary, turns left into Kearney, walks all the way up to Columbus, finds number 261, the City Lights store. Legendary home of the beatnick generation. He steps in, is overwhelmed by the selection. All his favourites are here. The surrealist novel by De Chirico; Lautreamont’s Maldoror; all the stuff in the basement about death. But mostly Citizen Kohen is moved by Cioran, by Celine, by Goethe and Marguerite Duras. They’ve got the Grove Press paperback of The Malady of Death. He hates to part with money, doesn’t buy anything. He is approached at exactly 11AM by a tall, burly gent who is definitely “of colour”.

“Wassuuuuuup?”

They spend the day together in the Blue Bar. Citizen Kohen enjoys the retro free jazz vibe. Ingelbert keeps on buying Citizen Kohen drinks until it’s closing time. Ladies and gentlemen please finish your drinks and start heading for the doors. Next morning the phone rings at 9AM. It’s Ingelbert.

“Are you friends with Dante?”

“What?”

CK doesn’t know what’s going on. It doesn’t seem to matter. He’s passed the test anyway.

“Meet him on the stairway at MOMA at noon.”

CK showers, looks at himself in the mirror. There is a plot but he’s lost it. Never mind. Walks along market, right into 3rd. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is a marvelous construction. It is Citizen Kohen’s all time favourite building for the experience of absorbing modern art. They are holding a show featuring the complete works of Sol Lewitt. K pays five dollars to get in and enjoys himself immensely for an hour until noon when he walks to the top of the fabulous staircase, stands looking down at the scurrying ants, thinks about Orson Welles in The Third Man. He is joined by an elderly, distinguished looking gentleman.

“Citizen Kohen I presume?”

“It is I.”

“I’m a great admirer of your work.”

“Have you got the cash?”

“What’s the hurry?”

“I need to get back to a mermaid.”

“Tsk. Tsk. Let’s walk. I want to show you something.”

They walk down to the third floor. The wealthy art collector pauses in front of a daguerrotype by Charles F. Hamilton. Little Girl With Lace Gloves. Circa 1850. It’s a masterpiece. The finest work in the museum.

“I have the rest of the series. All she gets to keep on are the gloves. Hamilton was a master at getting little girls to shed their garments. Used to bribe them with sweets.”

“I usually threaten my models with death.”

“Artists all have their own curious and very distinct methodologies.”

They continue to walk together through the museum. Citizen Kohen is bored. He wants his money. The collector wants to talk.

“I’m thinking of writing a monogram about your work. I need a complete collection in order to do so.”

“What are you missing?”

“Akihiro tells me that you’ve brought ten new pieces into the country.”

“I have them in my hotel room.”

“What do you want for them?”

“I’m out of touch with the market. What are you paying?”

“You drive a hard bargain Citizen Kohen. Very well then. I’ll have them picked up from the Yerba Buena Center after your screening tonight.”

Citizen Kohen had forgotten all about the absurd screening of his fake documentaries, purported to have been shot during the first so-called democratic elections held in South Africa, but actually filmed in a makeshift studio in Ougadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso where K was stationed shooting kidnap porn for the director of the Centre Georges Pompidou.

The screening is packed with left-wing engagement phonies who ask him impossible-to-answer questions about stuff he knows absolutely nothing about, like politics, justice, and the future. He mumbles his way through the most difficult bits and shocks everyone by denouncing Mr. Pansela as a puppet whose strings are being pulled by the Sea Point yids.

A blind Afrikaans woman in the front row yells out: “What’s the Jewish dilemma?”

CK doesn’t hesitate.

“Pork at half price.”

Half of the audience walk out disgusted. The other half accompany Citizen Kohen to the XYZ bar at Hotel W, which is conveniently located on the corner of 3rd and Howard, right next to the MOMA building. Citizen Kohen is plyed with free booze. Which is fine by him. He isn’t quite able to follow the gist of the conversation.

“L’Aube parfumee par la pluie d’or?”

“She spent four hours drinking Jack Daniels with Bob Rauschenberg.”

“Nearly blew my mind.”

“She’s like high end. Only drinks Sierra Nevada Pale Ale.”

“We’re friends from way back.”

“Manhattan is so played out for me. Everybody is so drugged out.”

“I’d rather kick it here than Manhattan. Everybody is like cellular and has a headache.”

“Are you friends with Dante?”

“Everybody wants to audition for the hallucinogenic kibbutz.”

“Did you have a Jewish mother or father?”

“There’s a lot of Yang in the room.”

“Querer means to want or to love.”

Eventually a large “of colour” gentleman called Calvin comes up to Citizen Kohen with a suitcase in his hand.

“This is the leather suitcase filled with paper banknotes. Where is the paperbag filled with plastic vhs tapes?”

“Walk with me to my hotel in the tenderloin.”

Arm in arm the two of them leave the Hotel W, walking along Market and right into Eddy.

Notice. It is unlawful for any person to camp, sleep between the hours of 10:00PM and 6:00AM or station or erect any table, platform stand, monument or other structure in any park area including the Hallidie Plaza, without permission of the recreation and Park Department. Please do not feed the homeless.

After Calvin and Citizen Kohen have exchanged suitcases he counts the money. It’s enough to live on in Cape Town for a couple of years without having to work. He sits down at the hotel room’s desk, grabs a piece of Bijou letterhead paper and starts writing his suicide note.

“They call me Citizen Kohen. I am about to turn my page of madness. To break on through to the other side. To dance with destiny. My destiny. Too long have I undernourished my soul on the junk food of illusion. Too long have I walked stooped in the shadow of the valley of self-deception. Who is the dragon if not I? When is the time if not now? Having cured Zarathustra of his melancholy, the question remains, what has Zarathustra done for me lately?”

Not quite happy with the suicide note, Citizen Kohen decides to postpone the event. Takes a cab up to the Castro. Goes in to Daddy’s bar. No perfume, cologne or applied scents allowed. Every Thursday night at Daddy’s Uniform night 9PM till 12AM. Happy hour prices for men in uniform. Barebacking and felching teenagers live on stage.

CK is approached by a Rumanian transvestite called Hooraya. They discuss Cioran and monsieur Derrida. Hooraya is the first person Citizen Kohen has ever met who could explain to him what the “Derridean” was all about. They drive around the Castro area in Horea’s beat-up station wagon.

“Do you find me icy? In Connecticut, where I went to High School, you can’t buy alcohol in a bar after 8pm. San Francisco is the city of pod people. I don’t think anyone’s unilaterally weak or strong. Have you read Blue of Noon?”

Next day on tv the Pope apologises to the Jews. Fuck the Pope. Fuck the Jews. Citizen Kohen has had it with San Francisco. Dot com city. He’s had it with the United States. A boring place to be unless you’re buying something.

He checks out of the Hotel Bijou. Tells the front desk man that he looks like Tom Waits, makes the kid’s day, saves himself from having to leave a tip.

Back in Cape Town first thing he does is phone Rebecca. Her mother answers the phone.

“Is that Rebecca?”

“No, it’s her mother.”

“May I speak to Rebecca?”

She doesn’t cover the mouthpiece of the handset, probably deliberately. He hears her yelling “…Citizen Kohen on the line for you”

Hears his Yzerfontein Angel’s voice from the distance: “…tell him I’m at the beach…”

“Hello? Citizen Kohen she’s gone to the beach. Can I take your number down? Get her to call you back?”

“No. It’s ok. I’ll call back some other time.”

Devastated. Citizen Kohen takes a walk down to the rocks at Bantry Bay. Everything happens so fast after 35. Life spirals faster and faster unto death.

Citizen Kohen lets out a ferocious stinky fart. Inhales. Satisfying.

Goodbye Rebecca.

Goodbye.

first published by sein und werden in april 2009

dear

you seem to read an awful lot
i get very tired reading - i do a page or two of heidegger every night before i go to bed - that way i might be finished reading heidegger by the time i am 3643 years old
when i was younger i read constantly, i loved reading
now i find it difficult to concentrate
i enjoy playing pool
i like the sound of the balls clunking in the pockets
i think books should make that clunking sound when you turn the page, it would be very satisfying and encourage drunkards, layabouts etc to read more as it would remind them of being in a bar where they feel at home
it is very difficult to read in bars because the beer spills onto the pages making them soggy and we all know that soggy pages don’t make that nice clunking sound

i was in stellenbsoch last week and stopped myself from offending people and i felt so grown up, so IN CONTROL of myself - and it was particularly delicious because i had all the sentences in my head ready to burst out and offend everyone but i was aware that i would ruin their day and i thought better of it and this is new for me and therefore i now believe in the possibility of development and also in the happy ending and this is all startling me and i am quite sure it is because of my daughter because i do not want to invade her precious space with my miserableness and have therefore, on the quiet as it were, decided to stop being miserable

this sickly sweet happy stuff has taken me by surprise but it’s not all bad although i do miss the booze sometimes and i especially miss the dizzying ecstacy of the overdose, of reeling about in a stupor waiting for the axe to fall

it is so long ago and far away, as if it never really happened… then again when it was happening it was ALSO long ago and far away as if it never happened and that’s so strange that most of my life seems not to have happened, even the things that did happen somehow now in retrospect seem like fictions

i always wanted something to happen and then when it happened it was already as far away as if it had never happened

and if this describes my life perfectly - as i fear it does - does this not in effect mean that i never lived at all? i have always secretly envied those people i meet who are not reflective, who have no gift for reflection, they seem to me to be the people who really live

although of course it is true that their lives only happen once whereas my (non) life happens again and again. over and over in the many reflecting mirrors of memory and fantasy.

i enjoy your mails immensely. and i enjoy writing to you because you don’t exist. but then neither do i. and therefore the enjoyment is paradoxical because both of us are forced to exist in order to enjoy our non-existence (which is one of the reasons i only read two pages of heidegger each night - it’s all too much for my little brain…)

yrs sincerely
ak

But what is called writing?
Who is called to write it?
And why?

I knew I was a writer before I could read.
It was as simple as that.
But I’ve never known what to write about.
I have no themes.
Writers with big themes bore me.
They remind me of those incredibly tedious English Literature lectures that I attended before dropping out of university in only the first year of my studies.

I end up writing about myself most of the time.
About the things that happen to me.
But not much happens to me anymore.
I stay at home trying to remember what happened to me when things used to happen to me.
That seems like an impossibly long time ago.

Actually today the best thing ever happened to me. I was in my study listening to Plastician and Skream when the door burst open and my daughter marched in leading my wife by the finger. My wife explained to me that she had been breast-feeding but as soon as our daughter heard the massive dub bass throb of Plastician & Skream she gleefully let go of the nipple and made for my study with my wife in tow.

So there we were, the three of us, my one year old daughter clutching the forefinger of my right hand in her little left hand and the forefinger of my wife’s left hand in her tiny right hand, leading the skank. It’s astonishing to watch her move to the rhythm. Nobody taught her to dance. She simply loves dancing. It’s all inside her little body waiting to come out. The groove.

I could not stop laughing. It felt like our daughter was teaching us to dance! And then I realized that that’s exactly what’s going on. Children come into our lives to teach us how to live and how to appreciate our lives. I was a miserable sod until my daughter came into my life. I wrote drab and depressing stories and poems and pretended to be surprised when nobody was interested in reading them.

I have already paid for all my future sins. Sade wrote that. Not the Marquis De Sade, but Sade the singer. That sentence opening this paragraph was a bit of a non sequitir. A jump cut. It wasn’t, however, carefully constructed in a literary manner, or, indeed, thought about at all. I just happened to have heard Sade singing it when I finished writing the last sentence of the previous paragraph, the one that ends with “reading them”.

That’s two paragraphs in a row that end with “reading them”. Actually not, because the first “reading them” does not have quotation marks around it. So strictly speaking the sentence - That’s two paragraphs in a row that end with “reading them” - is only true in spoken language, where the quotation marks would make no difference.

And that is called “writing”.

this story first appeared on live writing

Glock: a short recoil 9 mm Luger semi-automatic pistol with a standard
magazine capacity of 17 rounds of ammunition

My good friend Moose and I were walking through the Emmarentia Dam park grounds discussing phenomenology and bagels when this tall so-called black man pulled a gun on us and demanded stuff.

Phenomenology I have never understood, despite many attempts at reading Husserl and even Heidegger whose use of language makes Adorno seem like a telegram typist. But I digress…

The thing is that Moose and I had seen this tall so-called black man earlier in our perambulation, he was with a much shorter so-called, but that one was wearing a security guard uniform and hence we felt disinclined to be worried about the possibility of getting mugged.

Now here I feel predisposed to mention the words “mugged” and “perambulation”. These are both good words in very different ways and I like the fact that they are nestled comfortably in the previous paragraph. I also like the way that “nestled” itself is nestled in this paragraph. The truth is that writing about a nasty event is a lot less nasty than the event itself. I should imagine that reading about the event has a similarly diminished quality. And this of course is the problem.

Because I honestly don’t have the words nor the talent to describe to you how awful it felt to walk slap bang into the barrel of that 9mm. It felt like a big turdypoo had just pushed its way out of my bum as I was about to deliver a perfect pickup line to the most beautiful barely legal 18 year old girl you ever laid your eyes on. It felt that bad.

So the hands go up, and the next thing both Moose and I are being patted down by the very tall very black so-called black’s accomplice, who is none other than the so-called security guard. He even has a badge with his name on the uniform to prove it, and for all I know it is his real name and he does work for the security company and is only doing the mugging in his spare time. In order to earn some extra tom to pay for his driver’s license.

What is mugging? What is a perambulation? Where do these crazy words come from? Etymologists make it their business to find out but I’m not one of those birds. I’m currently a visiting Professor at a University in Sweden. I walk through the park here twice a day and every night very late after putting in long hours behind a keyboard where I compose these little stories that are my way of making a living. Nobody ever mugs me in the parks here. I perambulate. I don’t get mugged.

Back home in Jozi I walk with Moose, who is by no means a nancy. Moose used to be with the Mossad and knows from the old tough guy routines believe me. But what can we do. It’s hard to argue with the barrel of a 9mm in your face and the very tall so-called black man in front of you looking nervous and his finger wriggling itself all over that trigger.

The ex-security guard feverishly pats me down and takes R300 in cash notes and my Sony Ericsson w900i limited edition cell phone. Then they are both running away. Not perambulating but running. Mugging all done now the running’s begun.

Here is where my little story becomes exceedingly painful for me to write. I drop to my knees and lift up the trouser leg of my baggy camo trousers. I exchange glances with Moose who sees my Glock and nods to me as if to say “yes”. I pull the gun out of its snug ankle holster, cock it and lift it.

Probably in the real world the time it takes to lift the firearm from the position it was in when I cocked it, to the position it is in when I have the tall so-called black man’s back in my sights; the position change from vertical to horizontal; is no more than a fraction of a second. What they call in fast stories a “split-second”. But this is not how long it takes.

A phenomenologist like Husserl would be able to give you a very good reason why it takes me so long to lift that gun from the vertical to the horizontal, to traverse 90 degrees of Euclidean geometric space-time. But I wonder if Euclid, Husserl and Heidegger together, if all three of them could explain to you (or to me) why the gun is suddenly so heavy.

Maybe it would make more sense to try old Newton, after all, he was the one who was made clever by a falling apple. That was a moment of what the Japanese zen monks call “satori” - a sudden dislocation, an abrupt opening unleashed by the unforeseen experience of strangeness. You might have noticed that the previous sentence seems like it was written by a much smarter person than myself, and it was. That sentence was written by Georges Bataille in his book called “On Nietzsche”. Now “On Nietzsche” is I think a very funny title for a book. I’m one of those very literal kind of guys who likes words to mean what they mean. So when I read On Nietzsche I don’t immediately think it’s a book about Nietzsche, I get an image of Nietzsche lying down having a snooze with Bataille’s book covering his head, on Nietzsche, guarding him from apples of the falling kind and other misadventures that might cause bodily damage. Like mugging.

So, what comes to my mind as I lift the Glock 9mm is that this moment, just like Newton’s apple moment, or that Eureka moment when Archimedes jumped into the tub, might very well be the most important moment in my life to date. And it is. And it only takes a split second in the world they say is real, but in that moment, in that sudden dislocation, my life is forever changed. I can never be the same person again.

You see there is a part of me that wanted to kill the so-called black man. That wanted to blast him in the back with my dum-dum bullet, knowing full well that he would not survive such a wounding, that he would not have time to turn around and fire back, that he would in fact be too dead to do such a thing. Then there is another part of me that was thinking, “if you shoot this man in the back whilst he is running away from you, while there is no direct danger to your own life, the result of this shooting will be murder and the consequence will be imprisonment of your own body to which your mind and soul are irrevocably attached and therefore all three of you will be imprisoned.”

As you can reasonably deduce from the above, a goodly amount of consideration was taking place between these two parts of me - the part that wanted revenge, and the part that didn’t want to go to prison (that was in fact three parts) - and all of this consideration was taking time.

And then I knew that I could not shoot a man in the back, that it simply was not the right thing to do.

And then I fired.

The bullet is probably still in one of those gorgeous oak trees in Emmarentia. Both so-called black men started sprinting in different directions. The tall one that I had shot at turned around and shot back.

Nobody had ever shot at me before. I shot again. He shot again. Moose and I running. Again I go on my knees. Shooting as deliberately and calmly as I can. Shooting into trees or leaves or clouds, whatever, but aiming at the tall so-called black man’s back. Aiming. Doing my best to create gross bodily harm to my mugger. Eventually five of my shots miss him. Eventually five of his shots miss me.

Moose and I keep on running after him. We are joined by a group of tall so-called black men who probably hail from Kenya, they have high cheekbones, are very black, and run like gazelles. They also reek of dagga so they run like very slow, very stoned gazelles. Meanwhile Moose and I are both realising that we are not what we used to be in the running department. Or maybe it’s just that our mugger has so much adrenaline pumping through his long legs that nobody is ever going to catch him.

He exits the park, now there are at least six of us chasing him. A minibus swerves to avoid him, crashes into a high wall. He keeps going. A bakkie knocks into him, he falls down, jolts up again waving his gun at the bakkie driver’s face. The hands go up. The mugger keeps on running. I jump into the bakkie next to the very rattled driver. “After him.”

We lose him on Barry Hertzog drive. He might have jumped into a taxi. I see two security bakkies parked on the side of the road. Rush to them, tell the bulldog-faced security guards what happened.

“Show me the kaffir, I’ll kill him for you.”

Two double-barreled shotguns are cocked loudly. Oh no, I’m thinking, we’ve just travelled back in time to 1976. The security heads keep on stopping their vans and poking their shotguns into the faces of any youthful looking so-called blacks strolling by on their way to the taxi rank. I keep on having to explain to the security toughs that these aren’t the right ones. They’re eager to kill. They have a valid excuse. They want to make the most of the occasion.

Eventually we see a cop car parked erratically in a driveway. Two white cops pointing their handguns into the faces of a very old grandfather and his kwaito-hatted grandson.

“These are not the muggers.”

I’m out of breath and quite angry with the security guards and the cops for being so trigger happy.

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.”

They drop their guns. The old grandfather pushes up one of the smiley masks I remember from the sixties.

“Dankie baas.”

His grandson looks at me with pure hatred radiating from his eyes. He’s ashamed of his grandfather’s theatrically played out gratitude, outraged by the blatant unjustness of the situation, his dignity ripped out and left in tatters on the ground. I understand where his rage is coming from, but what can I do? I’ve become the bad guy in his scenario but I’m still the good guy in mine. There are no so-called blacks or whites anymore, just a dirty shade of grey called reality.

I ask the cops if they can give me a lift to the station. They look disbelieving, at me. “No look, sorry, we have to pick up our supper from the Wimpy.” The bakkie driver has caught up with us. He gives me a lift back to the park where Moose is waiting for me. We go together to the cop station to lay a charge. “A tall and a short one? In a security guard’s uniform, yes we’ve had that description before, they’ve been working all week in the park.”

“Then why don’t you do something about it? Put plain clothes policemen there?” She looks back at us vacantly, the idea seems like too much effort. I’m thinking, “working?” Working? I suppose mugging is working. And it’s quite an interesting thought, that every morning the muggers wake up and they hop into a taxi and mug all day and then they knock off at 6pm when the sun goes down and go home and watch tv. Just like any working person.

So what happened? What changed my life? What was the moment of satori?

I realised that I am a big bullshitter. I have been pretending to myself that I am some kind of macho tough merely because I carry a loaded weapon with me. When in fact I am utterly useless at killing, I have no instinct for it, no passion, no killing sensibility.

But even more ridiculous than this, I have also been pretending to myself that I am a highly moral person, with strong ethics who always weighs up choices heavily and makes the best possible decision under the circumstances. This is not true. I didn’t miss my mugger’s back for ethical reasons. I missed because I am a lousy shot. I did three weeks of training five years ago. I probably couldn’t kill myself if I tried putting the barrel in my mouth and pulling the trigger. The bloody Glock would misfire.

A few months after my mugging the country erupts with xenophobic passion. The left-wingers are all up in arms about how terrible the xenophobia is. I’m thinking about my mugger’s accent, about which country he was from. Whether he’s been necklaced by a crowd who weren’t inhibited by my lack of killer instinct. South Africa is a war zone. More than 25 000 people are murdered each year. Hundreds of thousands of idiots like me walk around with loaded hand guns waiting for the opportunity to shoot themselves in the foot.

I still don’t know what phenomenology means. I’m selling my gun.

first published on african writing online