kagablog

Chris Clark presents the conclusion to his sonic trilogy which kicked off with the much-praised ‘Body Riddle’ [2006], followed up by the near anti-melody assault of 2008’s ‘Turning Dragon’, which vehemently ditched its predecessor’s emotional texturals. ‘Totems Flare’ collects elements of both ambient, flexable detail and potently building riddim, as exemplified in opener ‘Outside Plume’s royal flourishes and ‘Rainbow Voodoos’ frantically evolving beats. While Drum’n'Bass is a key muse, Clark takes grim delight in randomly sabotaging a track’s momentum, then flexing it into round-the-corner directions, or just letting it shimmer and fade. The latter half shines, ‘Future Daniel’s sinuous thumps coalescing into unexpected electro-oriental tinklings; ‘Primary balloon landings’ rises out of nowhere into gentle diagonal ambience, before ‘Talis’ seeps into a quirky industrial ballad. Closer ‘Absence’ signs off with simple, reverbed acoustic geet. Niiice.

[first published in BPM magazine]

From this blog you would think that January was Lerato Shadi month but it was kind of in Joburg. It definitely was one of the hottest shows on this month. Sean Slemon opened at Brodie/Stevenson but it was open for such a short time that it closed before I got to see it, which I am really dissapointed about, the images that David posted on FB looked fantastic. Minette Vari’s Parallax opened at the Goodman and was there yesterday to check it out. She had some really cool video artworks (as usual), she really is one of a few artists who exploits the digital film medium. Will be reviewing for next week in the Sunday Indy so won’t go into much detail. BTW: The Goodman Gallery in Joburg is expanding; Liza gave me a short tour yesterday. There will be permanent photographic section, with a sort of archive of photographic prints. There will also be a coffee shop and a sort of library area where members of the public will be able to peruse through the gallery’s extensive collection of art books. This has to be a first for a South African gallery and I think it is a wonderful addition to the gallery, it will encourage people to spend more time at the gallery and it will hopefully encourage the public to read about art, a neccessary activity if they are to appreciate it to its fullest extent.

My Shadi review:

LERATO Shadi is an old-school performance artist in the sense that she is physically invested in her works. Her works are lengthy - Selogilwe (Setswana for “woven”) is seven hours - and, therefore, require a high level of physical commitment. So, on a very basic level she explores perpetual actions and how they impact on the body. There is always a sense with Shadi’s work that she wishes to identify those acts that are fundamental to human existence.

Shadi uses a neutral canvas for her performances by employing a white palette for the background (in the video performances), her outfit and the metal cubes, which she crawls through in Se Sa Feleng (reference to a Setswana idiom that refers to an eternal state of affairs). This decontextualises her actions, allowing them to exist as abstract expression. It also establishes an imaginative plain, encouraging the viewer to attach their subjective interpretations to the works.

The repetitiveness of her actions also locks viewers into a meditative state, which can simultaneously free them from thought altogether. No doubt, while performing Shadi too vacillates between serious contemplation and mindlessness - both equally empowering states that allow her to either completely inhabit her physical being or to altogether detach from it. And this is the dual function of repetitive movements.

As Shadi navigates her petite body around the metal cubes in Se Sa Feleng one could surmise that it is not just the manner in which architecture shapes movement or our experience of reality, but refers to the psychological/emotional and ideological boundaries in which humans operate. The cube’s structure is reminiscent of a jungle gym, alluding to a type of playful action that becomes habitual, ingrained and eventually banal. Selogilwe and Se Sa Feleng both consist of repetitive actions but they are never uniform. Over time the simple movements Shadi employs gradually transform as she becomes weary, implying that even the most mundane actions undergo an evolution - or devolution of sorts. This obviously has ideological significance vis-224-vis human existence, which primarily consists of recurring actions and behaviour patterns. These patterns, from cleaning our teeth to the kind of relationships we are locked into with ourselves and others, undergo subtle changes. But the illusion of uniformity they create suggests they offer control and set order in the face of external chaos.

In Selogilwe, a video performance work, Shadi is pictured knitting a long red string. Every moment of this seven-hour-long task is captured for posterity - as such, no ordinary moment is overlooked: Shadi suggests that it is not in the dramas of life that the human condition is best observed but in those quiet everyday patterns that appear insignificant. This is one of the characteristics of Shadi’s brand of performance: she creates art from futile activities. This lends an air of absurdity to her work but one that underscores the senselessness and irrationality of self-constructed and/or socially imposed rituals. Her work does not follow any obvious narrative. Yet because her performances are so drawn out and physically demanding, the subtle changes in her movements are designed to discreetly assert a beginning, middle and end. Of course, it is only a patient and devoted follower of her work who might detect this inconspicuous transformation.

Most interesting is the temporal relationship between Selogilwe and Se Sa Feleng. The red string which Shadi is seen knitting in the former is used in the latter performance: it is released from a discreet pouch that is part of her white outfit. So, while we see the red string being made we also see it in its finished state and serving its intended purpose. In this way Shadi collapses time as the past and the present occur simultaneously. It is an interesting proposition given that her performances are so time-bound - in terms of the way that they mark time passing. The red string has much importance too in expressing a central characteristic of her work. A string has no in-built ending to it; it can be as long or as short as the maker deems necessary. In this way the string refers to a perpetual action that has no predetermined conclusion. Thus Shadi’s act of releasing and tying the string around the cube also has no real end to it - albeit that the performance ceases after three hours. The string is looped over the bars of the cube to form another pattern - hinting at the way in which one pattern gives way to another and another. Thus existence is simply a series of interlocking patterns.The string is housed in a back pouch, which summons all sorts of metaphors: most obviously emotional baggage comes to mind. But it’s more stimulating to think of the red string as a life-line that unravels over time and whose length no one is able to truly ascertain. Another interesting aspect to Se Sa Feleng is the manner in which the work exists after the performance: the cube and string are in installation that convey the residue of performance, action and existence.

This is an invigorating exhibition from an astute artist, whose work is becoming more and more visually refined. Those who missed Mmitlwa, which Shadi performed at Brodie/Stevenson early last year, will be able to view a video recording of the work, which in this format repositions the work in an interesting way, making the point that video recordings of performance art bring a different element to the work, while silencing some of its other more visceral characteristics. -

published in The Sunday Independent on January 24, 2010.

read mary corrigall’s blog here

Review by: Mary Corrigall

THE TITLE of the movie refers to the exterior surface of the human body, the superficial manifestation of identity, but the story by no means flits across the surface of apartheid South Africa.

Based on the true-life story of Sandra Laing, a girl of ambiguous racial identity, Skin provides an in-depth look into the effects of a social system which privileged whites.

But, ultimately, it is the irrationality of apartheid that this film brings to the forefront. Born to white parents in the 1950s Laing’s appearance as a black person provided a challenge; not just to her parents, particularly her father who initially questioned his wife’s fidelity, but to the authorities, who battled to place Laing; they couldn’t simply accept that she was a white child when all her physical attributes appeared to contradict this. Such would be some of the quandaries of a system that was based on appearances.

Though a paternity test did prove that Laing (Sophie Okonedo) was in fact her father’s progeny, in the film her identity is a bit of a mystery. It is suggested that Laing’s mother might have taken a black lover. When her father fights for Laing to be classified as white and the case plays out in a high court, a Wits professor is called to the stand and he makes the assertion that the intermingling between the races from early colonial times has meant that most Afrikaners do in fact have “black blood” flowing through their veins - “a throwback gene”, which can surface generations later.

One can only surmise as to how white South Africa must have responded to this kind of declaration, certainly the court case brought to light how difficult, and ludicrous it was to try and create divisions between black and white South Africans when there weren’t any reliable tools to separate the races. In the absence of any scientific method to prove racial identity, any pronouncements were purely subjective. Thus there were no grounds to even support apartheid.

But Skin isn’t simply a vehicle to explore the faulty mechanics of apartheid, it follows a personal narrative, demonstrating the pain this absurd social system wreaked on the lives of people and their families.

Though the story is primarily a long flashback from the present-day, it begins with Laing’s first day at a whites-only high school (presumably she was home-schooled until that point) where her appearance is set to cause problems.

Over time Laing slowly begins to grasp that she is not like other white children. Her parents had chosen to live in a small farming community so as to shelter her from the outside world and the harsh realities of the apartheid system.

Once Laing comes into the open and under the scrutiny of the outside world, she battles to find peace and acceptance. Even when she eschews the white community she has grown up with and chooses to live in the township with her black boyfriend, she never feels at home - her white identity becomes a barrier.

It’s a painful, gut-wrenching tale, but perhaps what is most significant about this story is that it shows the effects of apartheid on a white family - implying that some whites unwittingly became the victims of system that was meant to privilege them.

The story also highlights the contradictions inherent in racism: that its proponents aren’t consistent. This point is best illustrated through Laing’s father, played by Sam Neill, who evinces racist behaviour, yet at the same time is adamant that his daughter not be judged by the colour of her skin.

The emotionally loaded content of this film could so easily have given way to an over-sentimentalised product, but fortunately Fabian and his team of scriptwriters have chosen a more refined delivery, allowing the material to speak for itself.

The result is a thought-provking and moving film of a high calibre. That said, Okonedo’s performance is lacking at times. She is obviously playing the part of a withdrawn character, who, because of her “peculiar” appearance, shuns notice, but she lacks presence. One often feels as if she is on the periphery of the action rather than the central protagonist. Nevertheless it is not say that she doesn’t do justice to the role; her performance is sufficient enough to keep one engaged and emotionally invested in Laing’s rollercoaster existence.

Neill’s New Zealand twang often gets in the way of his performance, but Alice Krige, who plays Laing’s mother,is superb as the conflicted mother and submissive wife. It helps that the scriptwriters have given her a more rounded character to work with.

There is perhaps only one niggling inaccuracy that mars this weighty production. This is when Laing is seen working at a factory after she has just been in line to vote in the landmark 1994 elections.

Aside from the fact that the queues were so long on that day in April 27 that it took almost the whole day for voters to cast their ballots it was a public holiday. This is a negligible oversight and one that undermines the veracity of the story.

However, in allowing the tale to continue, the scriptwriters are able to establish that democratic governance did not provide a quick panacea for the wounds of the past. Certainly for Laing it came too late to restore her family unit.

this review first appeared in the sunday independent

Can a film by itself be considered an act of terrorism?

Of course, one can film an act of terrorism, but that’s not what I’m asking. Cinema Abattoir, the transgressive film series out of Montreal run by Pierre-Luc Vaillancourt, is known for trafficking in challenging and disturbing material, but with their latest DVD compilation, A Rebours, they’ve released their most punishing collection of short films yet.

A Rebours is a direct assault to the frontal lobe, an exercise of extreme imagery so intense, it leave the viewer feeling violated, not just via the senses the way a film can affect a person, but physically brutalized. If there were a DVD to transform its audience into a mass of jelly quivering in the corner unable to speak, to feel, to think, to be human, it’s this one. Nothing resembling humanity or “normal” society exists on this DVD. A Rebours creates its own universe and forces the viewer to live in it at gunpoint.

Here are the perpetrators:

Washing Machine, dir. Ca Ca Ca. This film starts off innocently enough. A nice couple put a load of laundry into the titular machine. But that clean set up leads into a dirty, dirty little film when said washing machine is connected to a massive S&M machine. A woman is strapped in and her entire body vibrated until it looks like her teeth are going to spin right out of her head. The man strapping the woman in is Cinema Abbatoir’s own Pierre Luc Vaillancourt. And if you ever thought while watching a DVD compilation of short films, “I wonder what the curator of this DVD looks like taking a shit?” then your questions are answered here. The film is a chaotic swirl of degradation, including the above actions, plus the smearing of and licking off of food from the body. A traditional, normal act — the washing of laundry — is turned into a depraved tableau of impious behavior filmed in glorious sepia tones.

Man Spricht Deutsh, dir. Filmgruppe Chaos. A break in A Rebours‘ hedonism is provided in this brief film in which a loop of an old Ernest Borgnine-looking man putting coins into a bar payphone is repeated and manipulated. The film stock is charred and brittle and decaying, as if it had been sent to Hell to be processed. Electronic blips pop and snap on the soundtrack. We never know who the man is calling, as if this is the playback from a signature point in his memory, endlessly recalling the moment he should or shouldn’t have made that damn phone call.

Sacre-cœur de Satan, dir. Serge de Cotret. A woman dressed in sexy lingerie performs unspeakable acts upon herself with a crucifix. Yes, like in that scene in The Exorcist. Except, here the action is played out not in continuous motion, but as a series of slides, with the cutting in of a swastika every couple of frames. The woman is in a frenzy, as if she is cursing God while defiling herself with Christianity’s most cherished icon. As the woman comes to satisfying herself, there are more cutaways to other, abstract shots of swastikas and pictures of Hitler, giving the impression that the sexual frenzy is coinciding with the terrible destruction during WWII. Plus, the orgy between the woman and the iconic figure is steeped, bathed and immersed in a sea of intense red, symbolizing the fire and blood that comes with both war and sex.

Yellow Fever, dir. Frederick Maheux. This film starts off as a nice, pleasant train ride through a post-apocalyptic Hell. Footage taken from out an actual train window has its colors reversed and manipulated so that the land is in B&W while the sky burns a fiery red. Then, like on most lazy train rides, the mind starts to wander and suddenly the landscape is replaced by clips of Asian women in porno videos, then a montage of cartoon mouths cut out of magazines, followed by deteriorating pictures of Asian women in bondage. The final images are so warped and degraded that the women look like zombies, with their faces covered with deep wounds and burns. All the while, the soundtrack is a constant, intense hammering of static and voices pulled from the ether. While the intended eroticism of these images is still abundantly clear, their sexual appeal is replaced by a repulsion of the deformed, as if their is an anger towards these pictures that they were once arousing.

J., dir. Solomon Nagler & Alexandre Larose. Old footage — or at least it gives the appearance of being found footage — of a woman comforting a child and whispering into a lover’s ear is converted into a harsh B&W where the faces are completely blown out while all backgrounds are encased in shadow. It is assumed this is the same woman, or maybe the woman with her lover is remembering a time she was being comforted as a child. The instrumental music on the soundtrack is heavy and sad and slow, as if these are sadly sweet moments recalled from memory. Perhaps that was the only time the woman has experienced tender moments in her life, and even then the memories are shadowy and not detailed.

Passage, dir. Karl Lemieux. This is the first narrative film I’ve seen by experimental filmmaker Karl Lemieux, but even then there’s still a dreamy quality to the way the story unfolds not unlike his more abstract work. Two young men and two young women drive along a rural road through farm country. There is no speaking in the film, so we don’t know what anybody’s relationship is to each other, who is a couple and who isn’t. Perhaps, none are. We don’t see them arrive, but suddenly all four are in a hotel room, dancing and kissing and getting sexy with each other. They have paired up, but soon two of the men are on just one of the women, while the other girl retreats to the bathroom. She stays in there, looking at herself in the mirror, feeling unattractive, while who knows what is going on amongst the threesome in the other room. At last, all four are back in the car and the left-out woman gets her final revenge, showing everybody that she doesn’t need any of them in order to feel pleasure, for which the others resent her. It’s really beautiful how Lemieux lets the relationships morph and mutate without a single word passing between any of the actors. Seeing their interior emotional processes working is much more meaningful and moving than any dialogue could convey.

Hymn to Pan, dir. Francois Miron. This film is a cubist interpretation of the filming of a documentary of a dance. As a woman swirls, twirls and gyrates in a cavernous brick-walled room, there are two camera rolling. One films just the woman dancing, while the other films the first camera and the woman. There is a lot of motion, most of it jumbled and cut up; plus, as the woman moves, both cameras are twisted sideways and that-a-ways and upside-down. We see the woman’s feet, her legs, her face, her torso, but never together and never in the order that a body flows together. And the music, by the industrial band Coil, isn’t catchy or at all danceable. The music inspires the jerkiness of the editing, but not the motion of the dancer.

Dream of Samara, dir. Usama Alshaibi. This is a technicolor religious pilgrimage, with a slow VHS video degraded pan up a large monument in which travelers circle their way to the pinnacle. The distorted video is a hyper-fluorescent rainbow of reality. There is a hint of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Holy Mountain to the proceedings, even though that film’s colors have a somewhat muted quality.

Satan Bouche un Coin, dir. Jean-Pierre Bouyxou. This is an underground film from 1968 and is very “underground” in the classic sense. There is a hint of narrative to the absurdist tableaux that unfold on-screen and the tape splices are extremely noticeable during the rapid-fire editing sequences. Several debauched scenes unfold and, although, they’re not cohesively tied together, they feel as if they are all happening concurrently in the same house. A devilish figure fondles a woman dressed only in panties and stockings, only to have the tables turned later on. Another man tries to make love to statue. And a completely nude woman writhes on the ground while she is sprayed with a reddish-brown liquid, perhaps inspired by the actionist painting films of Kurt Kren. The film is a bit titillating and humorous and it can clearly be seen how older films like this paved away for the extreme debauchery found in modern transgressive filmmaking. It’s a nice mixture of fun and seriousness, lightness and darkness, humor and absurdism. Plus, the classical organ music is a refreshing departure from the industrial soundtracks in the newer undergrounds.

Dead Man II: Return of the Dead Man, dir. Aryan Kaganof. This is a difficult film, to watch and to review. On the one hand, it’s a beautiful artistic exercise from the always inventive and brilliant Aryan Kaganof. On the other, its a catalog of overly offensive debasement by bodily fluids. The opening scene is one so revolting I’ve tried my best to block it out of my mind and would really not like to recall it for you, the reader of this review. Maybe that’s a bit unfair of me, but it’s clear Kaganof meant it as an opening punch right to the solar plexus that will divide an audience: Those who will stay and those who will run out in horror. I did stay and, remember, I did say that the film is a beautiful artistic exercise. The film is gorgeously shot in an old bar full of degenerates. They drink while Waco burns. Into this place, which I took to be the afterlife, an elderly man, presumably the eponymous title character, enters to witness as much ennui as there is obscenity. It’s also a place where a woman urinating off of a bar triggers a horrific memory of an assault back among the living. The dead man becomes resigned to his fate, much like the viewer must become resigned to the terrible visions thrust upon him. Lots of films tackle the issue of life after death, but this is one of the most wondrous, complicated visions of it. And lots of filmmakers try to take on the title of “provocateur,” but few take it to the level that Kaganof brings it in Dead Man II.

(sans titre), dir. Lucia Fezzuoglio. Old B&W film stills, mostly featuring close-ups of women, flare up and shimmy and shake while what sounds like a ready-to-erupt volcano rumbles on the soundtrack. The women have a pious, praying look to their faces, as if begging for God’s mercy or forgiveness.

The Other American Dream, dir. Enrique Arroyo. This is a brutal, horrific film of a young woman being held hostage in a moving car. The film is one, continuous take shot from a dashboard video camera, so the quality of the image is degraded and washed out. The landscape that passes by outside the windows is over-exposed and blown out. So, our attention is focused exclusively, at least visually, on this girl. She is young and defiant. It isn’t clear if she’s an illegal immigrant, but the man driving the car, whom we don’t see for a very long time, is a man of authority, perhaps a police officer driving her somewhere. The girl has come to America for a better life, but she has fallen into drug addiction and prostitution. To the viewer, she is clearly a prisoner, although through her attitude we can see she believes she will be able to get out of this mess. She’s gotten out of worse before, she believes. We understand this even though she doesn’t talk much. The man does the majority of the talking. She will escape her fate by granting sexual favors on her captor. But, he overpowers her, completely brutalizes her and tells her that what he’s giving to her is one-tenth the horror she will endure from the men he is delivering her to. The terror is palpable and all too real. Is this video found footage from somewhere or a carefully scripted and realistically acted fictional film? Well, best not to reveal, but I will say this film, or this footage, really rattled me to the core.

Buy A Rebors from Cinema Abattoir!

this review first appeared on mike everleth’s essential site badlit.com

Peter Whitehead hadn’t made a film for 32 years – his last film dates back to 1977. Now, he’s back behind the camera to bring us the film of his latest novel of the same name. In this feature-length film of 2h35, Whitehead portrays an icy town which is nonetheless peopled with the feminine graces of several young actresses. Above all, it is a portrait of Vienna today. Its hero is Michael Schlieman, an MI6 agent working with the British Secret Services to solve the mystery of why several operations failed in the past. There are points in common with the sinking of Greenpeace’s Rainbow Warrior and the murder of a photo-journalist from the same organisation. Schlieman is part of an eco-terrorist group and Whitehead, his alter-ego, shows us that his novel is based on “fear and control, or better still, about the fear that the state spreads in order to control” (from the Viennale 2009 Catalogue).

The film opens in Vienna’s Third Man Museum where Schlieman has come to question a beautiful young archivist, played by Sophie Strohmeier. He is hoping to use this research to write a novel. The archivist ends up playing the role of interpreter for his contacts. The colour blue is present in several scenes of this river city, and lines of Seferis and Kazantzakis’ poetry are superimposed on the image. The lines are an accompaniment to the fluidity of the narrative.

Schlieman has to find the young Maria Lenoir, the daughter of Nora, the main character in one of Whitehead’s earlier novels published in 1990, “Nora and …”. A mystical spinning top spins throughout the film, and the local band Black Flash performs its songs while Schlieman’s monologue constantly causes us to lose our bearings. Most scenes are accompanied by instrumental music composed by Whitehead himself.

The film is directed in a way that is different from Whitehead’s earlier films. The images are not packed with formal research on the aesthetics of destruction, but the poetic sensation here comes from the structure of this complicated, multi-layered story. At the end of the third section, Schlieman is found assassinated, without any answers to his questions at the start of the film. His body is lying on the seat of a carriage in the Vienna subway. A line from Homer tells us that “Blue death closes his eyes” – this is the third Greek poet quoted in the film. We filmed the “making of” the latest feature-length film and Whitehead told us that “together, the people he questioned are plotting his murder” (op.cit. “By any old light” published on kagablog, 07-10-08).

“After having destroyed the Third World now we are also destroying this planet” (Whitehead, op.cit. from the Viennale 2009 Catalogue).

Written by Dionysos Andronis, translated by Lucy Lyall Grant

When I was asked to review Zappa’s ‘Sheik Yerbouti’ I mini grimaced. Vague recollection of disappointment. I’d only ever ‘owned’ around half of the album, on tape-cassette. The crudely chopped half was a snobbish deletion. It was selectively taped in std.9, I had already entered the ‘discerning fan’ season.. was discovering the splendour of instrumental composition - specifically the starts and double-takes, the sheer eyebrow glee of Zappa’s omni-blasphemous compositions. “Lyrics exist for those who need them”, was my prized cue.

Structured almost like a Zappa mix-tape, ‘Sheik Yerbouti’ combines Zappa’s grinning scatologies and sociopathic irreverence in blindly upbeat rockin’ rhythms; drops in some crudely gifted extended solos; and those delightfully arb spoken-word mash-ups that first sneaked into view with the Lumpy Gravy projects. One of the classics from Zappa’s ‘Rock’ canon - along with the arguably superior ‘Overnight Sensation’, ‘Joe’s Garage’ and ‘Apostrophe’, ‘Sheik’ is structured to mirror live Zappa gigs from the period 1975-80 - showcasing crowd-along numbers like ‘Jewish Princess’; ‘Baby Snakes’; ‘Dancing Fool’s slapstick magnificence; ‘Bobby Brown Goes Down’; and the teenage Rock melodrama of ‘Tryin to grow a chin’.

‘Fountain of love.’

Perhaps the definitive anti-love figure of 20th century popular music, Zappa had no time for the frills and, to him, delusions of romance. He drops the slang pretence of being ‘into’ someone, preferring the geographic accuracy of “I, have been in you, baby” and the mechanistic prediction that, indeed “when we get through, I’m going in you again.” Appropriate to his devious sense of fun, opener ‘I have been in you’ is cloaked in the sheen of your typical romantic ballad - all sparkly, floating synths and crooner rhythm.. The initially smarmy texture of Zappa’s vocals becoming increasingly lurid, greasy, as the debauchery of sentiment grows. Elsewhere, via one of his multiple characters, he sings praise to a girfriend exceptionally talented in the world of Eros, in a flipside to Hall & Oats’ unintentionally hilarious ‘She’s a Maneater’, with ‘Jones Crusher’ (”better get the gauze..”)

Mister Frank further elaborates on the pitfalls of romance, and its melancholy sparkle, in the self-explanatory ‘Broken hearts are for assholes.’ Live performances typically included fingers pointed, and indeed, middle-fingers aimed, at the audience, and finally at himself and the band, during chorus: “And you’re an asshole too, so whatcha gonna do? Cos you’re an asshole”, neatly cementing the generosity of his insults.

Although Zappa’s more infantile scatologies (not quite the tautology it seems) are novelty items, constructed as they are on the punch-line of shock, there is a general, insightful satire that unites all of his humorous output. Zappa strategized against what he felt to be a pandemic of hypocrisy in the modern human condition, and, well, the general phenomena of what he calls stupidity. “Some scientists claim that hydrogen, because it is so plentiful, is the basic building block of the universe. I dispute that. I say there is more stupidity than hydrogen, and that is the basic building block of the universe.” Consequently, in his frame, Zappa never wanted for subject matter.. he was surrounded by a seemingly inexhaustible mine of human quirks. The sheer ridiculousness of human patterns, their, ahem, ‘culture’, would inform the near-encyclopaedic sweep of Zappa’s humour.

A central, and to this fan, infuriating, credo of Zappa was his deliberate quashing of perceived distinctions in quality as a question of style. Zappa insisted that musically plain, intellectually unsmiling pieces of gratuities like the notorious Flo & Eddie period, lyrically restricted to crude infantalities, was indistinct from the shocks of gorgeousity characteristic of his more adventurous instrumental inventions. Both structures entertained him. The notion of ‘art’ was an affectation for the man who would often blend Doo-Wop, gag-reflex, Varese-ian nods, a private language of sound, and hitherto-unknown twists in rhythm’s relation to melody. Often in the space of a song.

‘I knew you’d be surprised..’

The mini-epic ‘Flakes’ is an outing into another of Zappa’s favourite terrains; laziness. Absence of vigour, boredom as spiritual condition. As he did in tracks like ‘Yo cats’, where his focus was ever-procrastinating studio musicians; and ‘One Size Fits All’s ‘Pojama people’ where it was dimness in general that was un-celebrated; ‘Flakes’ takes on the middle-America of service delivery, even letting (a caricaturized) Bob Dylan drawl a complaint about his washing machine’s dubious fixedness. For the guy who tended to work 12 hour days, and churned out around 70 albums of wildly divergent, often unprecedentedly original music, in the space of a quarter century, the rest of America was not exactly industrious. ‘Flakes’s anti-ode to talented, multiplying ineptitude raises to a slow-building climax; its bridge attaining a nicely tongue-in-cheek Armageddon, as the eponymous Flakes, zombies from Lunch-break-Land, rise in numbers to take over the world while it sleeps. “We’re coming to getcha, we’re coming to getcha, we’re coming to getcha, we’re coming to getcha.” Very possibly a recurring nightmare for the composer.

Elsewhere in the album Zappa’s instrumental inquisitions take momentary centre-stage via the crackling distortion of guitar on the precarious blues-run ‘Rat Tomago’, followed by the short, gleaming Patrick O’Hearn bass solo ‘Rubber Shirt’, and the bristling texture of Zappa’s take on the electric guitar tango, on the title track. Both ‘Rat Tomago’ and ‘Sheik Yerbouti’ are booby-trapped with tasty surprises in the time-continuum, with many atonal sidesteps, many a pothole and wormhole redirecting the flow of sound. Grinning stuff!

The album carries on into concert-favourites ‘City of Tiny Lites’ and ‘Baby Snakes’, before plowing into ‘Wild Love’ and the epic ‘Yo Mama’, instructing its audience to get out into the world and do things their own way, followed by a sonic example of just that, via Zappa’s extensive, richly layered guitar solo.

Publisher: Mehlo-maya

Let me start by declaring a conflict of interests: I am an avid lover of the works of Lesego Rampolokeng and have an intimate association with him based on our common commitment to taking poetry out of the elitist enclave of ‘high-art’ to make it speak to the concrete issues affecting individuals, communities and the world we live in. “Bantu Ghost: a stream of (black) unconsciousness” is vintage Lesego Rampolokeng, recreating language, overturning idioms\concepts\terms, giving birth to new words and developing new proverbs to deal with “new” realities. In Bantu Ghost, Rampolokeng captures the contrast between the bling-bling, opulence and crass consumerism of urban suburbia and the squalor, wretchedness and hopelessness of township life. He uses the device of ‘uncouth’\ ‘vulgar’ language and the imagery of filth\dirt and gore: excrement, vomit, etc - to highlight ravages of the new world order on the social psyche as well as the rampant corruption and moral decadence from the top echelon to the bottom-rung of society. Like Aime Cessaire in Return to the Native Land, Lesego Rampolokeng shuns romantic portrayal of his motherland’s past and present (and future). He uses graphically surreal images - and definitely not politically correct lingo - to interrogate post-freedom dreams and nightmares, slogans, rhetorics and realities.

It is succinctly clear that Rampolokeng adds a spice and puts a spin and twist to words and concepts not as an exercise in word-play but as a “subversive” act of questioning the slogans and rhetoric of the new dispensation. His is a critical, skeptical engagement with official, dominant discourse and established literary and political canon. The New World Order is rendered as the New World Hoarder, IMF and World Bank are respectively referred to as Iron Mother Fucker and World Shank, the middle-class becomes the diddle-class, and renaissance is ‘transliterated’ as “rear naai sense.” Even the sub-culture\ counter-culture\ underground fraternity does not escape the redefining pen of Rampolokeng. “More fire” - the mantra of poetry sessions, and hip hop and dance-hall circles becomes “whore fire.”, and the word-play shadow fights of battle-rappers comes under spotlight: “battle-cats on sulphur-trips\ word-cut the cipher drips \ strychnine rhyme-busted lips \ hips twisted off the break \ beat on the outskirt …shit and bleed.”

Bantu Ghost – a stream of (black) unconsciousness could be described as a poetic treatise on the psycho-physical condition and state of the masses and the new political and economic elite in Post\ Neo- apartheid South Africa. It started as a tribute to Steve Biko but ended as homage to Black thinkers who have made a contribution to theorization on the Black Experience. In the prelude and chapter four – entitled “The Black Word” – Rampolokeng particularly celebrates and presents the voice of mostly writers and thinkers who have contributed on the discourse on the politics and economics of identity and the psychology of the rulers and the ruled in a both a colonial, settler-colonial as well as post-colonial\ neo-colonial setting. In many ways Bantu Ghost: a stream of (black) unconsciousness is a continuation of the project initiated by writers like Fanon, Cesaire and Biko: the theorization on the conditions and forces that puts Black under-classes at the receiving end of the politics and economics of race and class. Like most of the characters and personas in the novels, plays and poems of Rampolokeng, the protagonist of Bantu Ghost is an archetype through which the writer\poet\actor\narrator takes us through his study of the pathology and psychology of people who have been victims of various forms of denigration, degradation, de-humanization, de-personalization through social stratification systems that uses race, class and gender and in some instances religion and culture.

Through the mind\voice\eyes of Bantu Ghost – an institutionalized demented abstract or a saintly prisoner of experiment for the Pavlovs of power possessed by Biko’s spirit, Lesego Rampolokeng interrogates the exteriorities of South Africa to delve into the interior - the psyche, consciousness and sense of identity of the new political and economic elite, the literary, academic and public intellectuals and the general masses. From Bantu Ghost’s perspective the much celebrated peaceful change in South Africa was the result of no miracle but a forced choice of reform above revolution:

” We promised Mabrak-time\ a black lightening strike\ but then we got struggle fatigue.” The book is divided into six chapters with self-reflective titles, and ends with notes of which titles are also allude to their thematic contents. Aptly titled The Cell, chapter one portrays the mental cage and psychological prison, identity crisis, state of anesthesia and false consciousness that ‘flag freedom’, manufactured consent and romanticized narration of history and mediocre representation of history and social reality puts the people into. The internet, television, radio, exhibitionist and conformist literature and arts are presented as the new instruments of self-alienation self-ostracization that helps to keep truth and conscience in manacles:

“Torture instruments have changed \ brains caught in the internet \ they incubate the minds in the television \ they radio-fry vision”

The Tower of Babel, chapter two, raves against the hijacking of the language and songs of liberation to promote sexist, homophobic and ethnic prejudice, and the cooption of intellectuals and activists by corporate capital and political establishment. It takes a critical look at the hypocritical double-standards and forked-tongue of the world in dealing with race politics and humanrights issues: “Life is gauged on broken scales \ the weight of humanities in unequal\ like stomp the kaffirs \ but just do not touch the jews \ history will not allow it…’ This is clear allusion to the great powers affinities towards Zionist Israel and their amnesia with regard to the holocaust of slavery and colonialism suffered by Black People, reflected in among others, the concerted efforts towards removing Zionism and Slavery from the agenda of the world conference on racism, xenophobia and related forms of discrimination. The poet is scathing in his critique of this conference: “in the Sandton sun\ a race conference \ they are plumbing identity \ behind Anal-eyes….” Bantu Ghost is equally harsh in revealing South Africa’s tendency to skirt around the problem of racism and present a false picture of racial bliss at the expense of obfuscating the reality at the ground. He laments the loss of an opportune moment for a transformed anti-racist humane society in South Africa:

“ humanity’s greatest most silent crime \ the alienation of emancipation \ non-race gone obsolete at birth \ redundant concept at conception\ we celebrate a still-birth “

In chapter, three, aptly titled “Chaining the minds”, Bantu Ghost castigates the mediocrity of the cult of consumerism, the celebrity culture, and the false securities and paranoid insecurities of the new black middle class. Chapter Five is a critique of The New World Hoarder, with its obscurantist flight into fantasy, its massacre of intellect and its sale of spin rather than truth to the masses. The cooption of intellectual and activist voices in the big conferences organized by officialdom is exposed: Another conference \ they call for toilet papers \ all to present their faeces \ what is your deception \ are you content to lick arse \ they say it nourishes” Chapter 6, “The search for consciousness” is a damning critique of liberal democracy, with its proclivity to give a real voice only to the rich and propertied. Bantu Ghost could be talking about the systematic exclusion of other political voices through devices such as the R1.5 million rands required for a party to register to contest in South Africa’s general national elections: ‘they cram democracy in a can \ & put it in a shelf \ they can buy who afford” The whole chapter constitutes a critic of the regimes and regiments of global capitalism and neo-liberalism such as Brettonwood institutions, and also eposes the ravages of neo-liberal macroeconomics of South Africa on the poors. For instance, it makes an allusion to the ruthless eviction of the poor:”Lefifi Tladi said we are the elephant\ but some are the red anT” There is also a criticism of acquiescent “poster poets” and the erasure of memory.

The six chapters are followed by the Notes: Mountain Sermon, Black Art of the Perry Normal, Notes for TOU (The Original Ungovernables) and Notes from the Smoke. I will only talk about my favorite notes in the book: Notes for TOU (The Original Ungovernables). The note is in the loving memory of the unnamed unknown unremembered boys and girls who walked into the lion’s den to make Apartheid South Africa ungovernable to free Mandela to liberate South Africa to build a new South Africa to see the dawn of the government of the people… the young lions who never returned from exile, the combatants who disappeard (not)mysteriously, the former guerillas who were not fortunate enough to make it to parliament or to know someone who knows someone who has they key to getting tenders. Like Edward Said speaking truth to power, the poet-persona in Notes for TOU scratches beneath the veneer of political correctness to interrogate the neo-apartheid dispensation with tough questions and frank testimonies of the harsh realities on the ground.

Because the heads of states usually provide us with the state of their heads rather than that of the nation, the poet takes it upon himself to do a thorough stock-taking of the condition of the nation. Since writers, poets and singers are supposed to be windows to the soul of the nation as well as watchdogs of society at the ground - or so to speak, the ears, eyes, and noses of the common people - the poet dares to question the state of the word – written\ spoken\recited\ sung\mumbled. This is no easy task as the culprits of turning the word into commodity on the dough\ dung exchange market are - so to say – colleagues, including trusted \ celebrated god-fathers turned entertainers, stripping pro bono for par-lie-mantrarians - bored men and women in gray suits and outdated hairstyles. It truly must hurt to witness the massacre and death of the word at the hands\mouths of people who include pioneer word-combatants of the freedom struggle:
”in the beginning was the dread-word
& that’s where it all ended. dead.
the holy recorder spun & cadavers fell out.
blood-oily how the vocoder sound the deathbout”

Even soothing melodies and healer-sounds such as the symphonies of Zim Ncqgawane and Wilhelm Richard Wagner’s synthesis of the poetic, visual, musical and dramatic arts can be appropriated by the ideologue and aparatnik to be opium that turn people’s heads into vegetable by sucking out their memory and keeping them too busy grooving & merry\baby-making to notice the preservation of white privilege by clauses aimed at ensuring that the sun never sets on white bureaucrats and technocrats….And leaving the people too sound-drunk and drama-befogged to see the spear of the nation being turned into ammunition for the racketeering political elite whose reward for corruption is handsome golden-handshakes:
”Now the sun sets on THE clause
populace abide by c/laws of the land are arse-wipes
gangs in government-approved stars & stripes
rackets wrapped around tax brackets painted ‘immune’ in blood
no arrest warrant but a cold-blood-age pension card
license to steal permit to get loose the perversion flood
from ‘mkhonto sharpened to intshumentshu is a national hemorrhage
the bleed is internal this liberation age”

It is not so much the political cover-ups and collusion between the police and crime syndicates that is shocking, but the ululation\cheering of veteran wordsmiths turned groupies of the establishment that is mind-shattering & arse-choking:

police farce so crime syndicated ultra-sophisticated
it moneyed /tendered lethal plastic economic explosive
with) ghost-in-the-latrine-bred intentions)
Don Dada top of the political machine ladder
makes capital bank-rob/rupt semantics

The poet raises our consciousness about the conscious decision of the establishment to demonize counter-culture voices that challenge the commodification of art as well as the cult of consumerism:
anti-consumerism rap they establishment yap it crap-talk lyric \ theory it psycho-conspiracy chaotic \ verbal dummy-bulleted anarchic dung

He also makes us aware of the carrot and stick maneuvers of the establishment. This takes the form of offering cash and massive coverage and ample performance podium to apolitical, hip-swaying, clapping poets\singers\rappers who transport people away from social reality with happy-verses \ anesthetic lyrics ,and labeling conscious art as primitive and out of the times. This works as a cooptive measure, as those who crave for His Masters’ endorsement stamp and crumbs from big capital dada join the ‘talk-a lot-and-say-nothing’ crowd:

got my thoughts stapled to my tongue so all i drop is bung \ crease&shined/muff-buffed/trance-verse-tightened up
pre-apartheid-historic \ caught between kgositsile’s gravedigger precision text \& celan’s concentration camp black milk\ i house them cemetery-dead-gold-heaven stratospheric

Notes for TOU depicts the reality of neo-colonialism, as it exposes how the new elite continues the legacy of the old colonial elite (as Fanon predicted) by creating wealth out of the blood\sweat and death\misery of poor men daily swallowed by the hungry death. This is aptly captured by allusion to former mine-workers turned into mine-owners or former foremen at the mines becoming chairmen of the directorate boards of the same mining companies that turn workers into cogs-in-a-machine, our parents into boys and our men into the devil-god-knows-what. The poet shows us how even the taste and eating habits of our new middle and comprador bourgeois class change with their newly acquired status:

(How they get down, the diddle-class…better raw boerewors copulation with spanspek).” But the poet has a stubborn hope and a remembering mind that is tuned to the most seasoned verses and lyrics from sons and daughters of the land who keep it real enough to hear the telegraphed message of the blue sky, to affirm Africa’s son’s belonging to the sun, and expose the prostitution of the word: “pimp-poetry became fashion, style & flash, dracula-dressed up in drag pattern u swung roots radics-style”

Notes for TOU is a verbal\frontal attack on the abortion of a better life for all and\or the miscarriage of “the people shall govern” false consciousness, respectable petty bourgeosie lies, and kitsch illusions sold to the masses as reality. The poet raises his voice above the noise of the truth-slaying mess media and the tell-lie-vision, to caution against phantom roars of young lions living in the shadows of big daddy former guerrilla now gorilla munching from instead of feeding the masses:

“voices from the palace & noises in the sewers \ is spitters & swallowers difference-\
whether all fours or prostration the crack’s always in between\ now youth league/organisation/congress is hog-dick-&-run\ to hide inside father-cock’s panties”

The sharp eyes\ words of the poet are spot on with regard to the old trick of media-created radicals who spit cold-fire to take the attention of the masses away from real alternative voices. The poet is not fooled by empty pronouncements on freedom of speech, while in reality there is no travel-space for non-parrot artists and dissident voices, and the public broadcaster offer us little live debates and public forums but a lot of ‘parliament live’- a dead show of “wrinkled arse-shuffle on the bench afro-chic petty & boozed up on hysteria’s versions of history’s perfumed stench” Notes for Tou is a lethal attack on poetry\music for the sake of arse-shaking and ranting only for the sake of paying rent or fitting the bill. It is the assertive voice of a dissident poet refusing to flow with the time or to let his individuated voice be swallowed in the vast cesspool of kitsch culture and fashion trends. Here poetry is not a passport and visa from concrete reality but a means of rememorying the place that the poet calls home and the times and spaces that characterizes it without any selective memory or schizophrenic romanticizing.

The notes make us ware that we are trapped in the same old story of taking power in the name of the people but never giving it to the people…the same old tale of two cities.: ”The leadership carries cannibal cargo…\ fakes a people’s power cumming & spurts Soweto-Mouth way.\ No receipts for the royal seminal-flushing\
nothing for the receiver/deceiver/achiever of revenue\ Joburg moves its jaws, Soweto’s stomach rumbles.” The same old story of jet-setting, globe-trotting leaders and denialism with regard to critical issues afflicting the country and the world:
Mista Leader proclaims in foreign cities: \ nothing to heal zero to mend there is no crisis \ as he strokes his beard the body of labour suffers a stroke.” Bantu Ghost takes us into the idyllic, paradise that is suburbia, and then into the dusty god-forsaken streets, into the lives of ordinary men and women, boys and girls trying to eke a living and make sense out of the misery, into the world of the subaltern people on the fringe of the markert economy- euphemistically called the second economy; and into the underworld and\or underbelly of society, into the world of vampire insurance schemes, and into the utopian\escapist world of religion and idealism: “in blithe & tithe visitations we guzzle Jesus chalice profanity\ In religious drunkenness attempt to puzzle out the lice from the fleas…\ as the bloody waters continue to rise, life’s little prices\ it’s all venereal soaking thru my notes.”

Reading Bantu Ghost – a stream of (black) unconsciousness, one could not help but come to the conclusion that Lesego Rampolokeng is to literature and theatre what Fanon and Biko are to sociopolitical analysis and activism.

reviewed by Terry Reis Kennedy

erbacce-press, Liverpool UK 2009
36 pp., $8.00

It’s holy. It’s blue as a bruise. It’s A.D. Winans at his best, so merged with Billie—her pain, her songs, her longing for love—that we feel their Oneness. Winans identifies with the Jazz saint’s ability to survive the worst in life, and remain committed only to her art.

These poems are hard as nails, but paradoxically smooth as honey because they are sprung from the depths of compassion, the poet’s great love of humanity—particularly the downtrodden, the abused, the outsider. His is a love so large that, like his heroine, Winans never finds an equal partner.

In much of his published work, for example, we discover that personal, sexual love is thwarted by fate. He loves, instead, the unknown suffering, the “huddled masses”. His idealistic longing is always disproportionate; nothing can fill the void that the Truth keeps on enlarging— people are not interested in their fellow men, not interested in seeing them as brothers and sisters, only as objects to be used, abused, and cast aside.

In “Jazz Angel” one of the most evocative poems in the collection, Winans relays what he discovers walking the streets of San Francisco. Delivering the poem like a detective’s report, the straight forwardness of the words eviscerates us:

She sits alone

In her small hotel room

Above the 222 Club

At Ellis and Eddy Streets

8 months pregnant

Forced to give head

For soup and bread…….

And after showing us the woman’s life, as if he was in her room himself, which perhaps he was, he writes:

She heads for the door

Hears the night manager whisper

“Whore.”

Suspended in silence

And grief

Floating face down

In the bowels

Of the American dream….

For Winans, the Jazz Era celebrated the sensitivity of souls who had no interest in superficial values. To him, Jazzers were what William Blake had described poets as, “fallen angels”. Billie Holiday was an alien in a world hooked into money and fame. And Winans who always worked at jobs to support his art never wanted to be part of any Gentleman’s Club. In “Post Office Reflections,” he notes:

Bone-ass tired from

Sorting thousands of letters

Fingers numb from stuffing

Them into pigeonholes

& I smelled of sweat and death

& kept drinking until

I felt good

Or ran out of money

Or both

& rode the 14 Mission Bus

Home with other people

Like me

Who couldn’t do

A nine-to-five shift…

Although Billie Holiday’s archangel wings got burned up in the fires of the country’s heartlessness, its racist Klanism, its failure to perceive women as equal to men, in her performances she was she able to fly. Winans empathizes with her yearning for salvation through freedom. Consequently, he has created this tribute, not only for “The Jazz Lady” (title of a poem dedicated to her); but he sings a sad farewell to the Blues as well. For example, in “The Demise of Jazz in North Beach,” he writes:

No cool cats in North Beach anymore

No cool cats blowing the horn

No jazz at the old Purple Onion

No be-bop snapping fingers

No fallen angels spreading their legs

On the way home after

A conversation with God

No black cats improvising the blues

No white dudes riding the midnight express

No stoned soul train musicians blowing

Mean clean notes crucified suffocating

In the smoking mirrors of the mind

Gone buried in the decadence

Of collective madness

Richard Dawkins’ review of Intellectual Impostures by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont. Profile Books 1998, £9.99. Published in U.S.A. by Picador as Fashionable Nonsense.

Suppose you are an intellectual impostor with nothing to say, but with strong ambitions to succeed in academic life, collect a coterie of reverent disciples and have students around the world anoint your pages with respectful yellow highlighter. What kind of literary style would you cultivate? Not a lucid one, surely, for clarity would expose your lack of content. The chances are that you would produce something like the following:
We can clearly see that there is no bi-univocal correspondence between linear signifying links or archi-writing, depending on the author, and this multireferential, multi-dimensional machinic catalysis. The symmetry of scale, the transversality, the pathic non-discursive character of their expansion: all these dimensions remove us from the logic of the excluded middle and reinforce us in our dismissal of the ontological binarism we criticised previously.

This is a quotation from the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari, one of many fashionable French ‘intellectuals’ outed by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont in their splendid book Intellectual Impostures, which caused a sensation when published in French last year, and which is now released in a completely rewritten and revised English edition. Guattari goes on indefinitely in this vein and offers, in the opinion of Sokal and Bricmont, “the most brilliant mélange of scientific, pseudo-scientific and philosophical jargon that we have ever encountered.” Guattari’s close collaborator, the late Gilles Deleuze had a similar talent for writing:-
In the first place, singularities-events correspond to heterogeneous series which are organized into a system which is neither stable nor unstable, but rather ‘metastable,’ endowed with a potential energy wherein the differences between series are distributed . . . In the second place, singularities possess a process of auto-unification, always mobile and displaced to the extent that a paradoxical element traverses the series and makes them resonate, enveloping the corresponding singular points in a single aleatory point and all the emissions, all dice throws, in a single cast.

It calls to mind Peter Medawar’s earlier characterisation of a certain type of French intellectual style (note, in passing the contrast offered by Medawar’s own elegant and clear prose):
Style has become an object of first importance, and what a style it is! For me it has a prancing, high-stepping quality, full of self-importance; elevated indeed, but in the balletic manner, and stopping from time to time in studied attitudes, as if awaiting an outburst of applause. It has had a deplorable influence on the quality of modern thought . . .

Returning to attack the same targets from another angle, Medawar says:
I could quote evidence of the beginnings of a whispering campaign against the virtues of clarity. A writer on structuralism in the Times Literary Supplement has suggested that thoughts which are confused and tortuous by reason of their profundity are most appropriately expressed in prose that is deliberately unclear. What a preposterously silly idea! I am reminded of an air-raid warden in wartime Oxford who, when bright moonlight seemed to be defeating the spirit of the blackout, exhorted us to wear dark glasses. He, however, was being funny on purpose.

This is from Medawar 1968 Lecture on “Science and Literature”, reprinted in Pluto’s Republic (Oxford University Press, 1982). Since Medawar’s time, the whispering campaign has raised its voice.

Deleuze and Guattari have written and collaborated on books described by the celebrated Michel Foucault as “among the greatest of the great. . . Some day, perhaps, the century will be Deleuzian.” Sokal and Bricmont, however, comment that “These texts contain a handful of intelligible sentences — sometimes banal, sometimes erroneous — and we have commented on some of them in the footnotes. For the rest, we leave it to the reader to judge.”

But it’s tough on the reader. No doubt there exist thoughts so profound that most of us will not understand the language in which they are expressed. And no doubt there is also language designed to be unintelligible in order to conceal an absence of honest thought. But how are we to tell the difference? What if it really takes an expert eye to detect whether the emperor has clothes? In particular, how shall we know whether the modish French ‘philosophy’, whose disciples and exponents have all but taken over large sections of American academic life, is genuinely profound or the vacuous rhetoric of mountebanks and charlatans?

Sokal and Bricmont are professors of physics at, respectively New York University and the University of Louvain. They have limited their critique to those books that have ventured to invoke concepts from physics and mathematics. Here they know what they are talking about, and their verdict is unequivocal: on Lacan, for example, whose name is revered by many in humanities departments throughout American and British universities, no doubt partly because he simulates a profound understanding of mathematics:
. . . although Lacan uses quite a few key words from the mathematical theory of compactness, he mixes them up arbitrarily and without the slightest regard for their meaning. His ‘definition’ of compactness is not just false: it is gibberish.

They go on to quote the following remarkable piece of reasoning by Lacan:

Thus, by calculating that signification according to the algebraic method used here, namely:
S (signifier) = s (the statement),
s (signified)
With S = (-1), produces: s = sqrt(-1)

You don’t have to be a mathematician to see that this is ridiculous. It recalls the Aldous Huxley character who proved the existence of God by dividing zero into a number, thereby deriving the infinite. In a further piece of reasoning which is entirely typical of the genre, Lacan goes on to conclude that the erectile organ
. . . is equivalent to the sqrt(-1) of the signification produced above, of the jouissance that it restores by the coefficient of its statement to the function of lack of signifier (-1).

We do not need the mathematical expertise of Sokal and Bricmont to assure us that the author of this stuff is a fake. Perhaps he is genuine when he speaks of non-scientific subjects? But a philosopher who is caught equating the erectile organ to the square root of minus one has, for my money, blown his credentials when it comes to things that I don’t know anything about.

The feminist ‘philosopher’ Luce Irigaray is another who is given whole chapter treatment by Sokal and Bricmont. In a passage reminiscent of a notorious feminist description of Newton’s Principia (a ‘rape manual’) Irigaray argues that E=mc2 is a ’sexed equation’. Why? Because ‘it privileges the speed of light over other speeds that are vitally necessary to us’ (my emphasis of what I am rapidly coming to learn is an in-word). Just as typical of the school of thought under examination is Irigaray’s thesis on fluid mechanics. Fluids, you see, have been unfairly neglected. ‘Masculine physics’ privileges rigid, solid things. Her American expositor Katherine Hayles made the mistake of re-expressing Irigaray’s thoughts in (comparatively) clear language. For once, we get a reasonably unobstructed look at the emperor and, yes, he has no clothes:
The privileging of solid over fluid mechanics, and indeed the inability of science to deal with turbulent flow at all, she attributes to the association of fluidity with femininity. Whereas men have sex organs that protrude and become rigid, women have openings that leak menstrual blood and vaginal fluids. . . From this perspective it is no wonder that science has not been able to arrive at a successful model for turbulence. The problem of turbulent flow cannot be solved because the conceptions of fluids (and of women) have been formulated so as necessarily to leave unarticulated remainders.

You don’t have to be a physicist to smell out the daffy absurdity of this kind of argument (the tone of it has become all too familiar), but it helps to have Sokal and Bricmont on hand to tell us the real reason why turbulent flow is a hard problem (the Navier-Stokes equations are difficult to solve).

In similar manner, Sokal and Bricmont expose Bruno Latour’s confusion of relativity with relativism, Lyotard’s ‘postmodern science’, and the widespread and predictable misuses of Gödel’s Theorem, quantum theory and chaos theory. The renowned Jean Baudrillard is only one of many to find chaos theory a useful tool for bamboozling readers. Once again, Sokal and Bricmont help us by analysing the tricks being played. The following sentence, “though constructed from scientific terminology, is meaningless from a scientific point of view”:
Perhaps history itself has to be regarded as a chaotic formation, in which acceleration puts an end to linearity and the turbulence created by acceleration deflects history definitively from its end, just as such turbulence distances effects from their causes.

I won’t quote any more, for, as Sokal and Bricmont say, Baudrillard’s text “continues in a gradual crescendo of nonsense.” They again call attention to “the high density of scientific and pseudo-scientific terminology — inserted in sentences that are, as far as we can make out, devoid of meaning.” Their summing up of Baudrillard could stand for any of the authors criticised here, and lionised throughout America:
In summary, one finds in Baudrillard’s works a profusion of scientific terms, used with total disregard for their meaning and, above all, in a context where they are manifestly irrelevant. Whether or not one interprets them as metaphors, it is hard to see what role they could play, except to give an appearance of profundity to trite observations about sociology or history. Moreover, the scientific terminology is mixed up with a non-scientific vocabulary that is employed with equal sloppiness. When all is said and done, one wonders what would be left of Baudrillard’s thought if the verbal veneer covering it were stripped away.

But don’t the postmodernists claim only to be ‘playing games’? Isn’t it the whole point of their philosophy that anything goes, there is no absolute truth, anything written has the same status as anything else, no point of view is privileged? Given their own standards of relative truth, isn’t it rather unfair to take them to task for fooling around with word-games, and playing little jokes on readers? Perhaps, but one is then left wondering why their writings are so stupefyingly boring. Shouldn’t games at least be entertaining, not po-faced, solemn and pretentious? More tellingly, if they are only joking around, why do they react with such shrieks of dismay when somebody plays a joke at their expense. The genesis of Intellectual Impostures was a brilliant hoax perpetrated by Alan Sokal, and the stunning success of his coup was not greeted with the chuckles of delight that one might have hoped for after such a feat of deconstructive game playing. Apparently, when you’ve become the establishment, it ceases to be funny when somebody punctures the established bag of wind.

As is now rather well known, in 1996 Sokal submitted to the American journal Social Text a paper called ‘Transgressing the Boundaries: towards a transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity.’ From start to finish the paper was nonsense. It was a carefully crafted parody of postmodern metatwaddle. Sokal was inspired to do this by Paul Gross and Normal Levitt’s Higher Superstition: the academic left and its quarrels with science (Johns Hopkins, 1994), an important book which deserves to become as well known in Britain as it already is in America. Hardly able to believe what he read in this book, Sokal followed up the references to postmodern literature, and found that Gross and Levitt did not exaggerate. He resolved to do something about it. In Gary Kamiya’s words:
Anyone who has spent much time wading through the pious, obscurantist, jargon-filled cant that now passes for ‘advanced’ thought in the humanities knew it was bound to happen sooner or later: some clever academic, armed with the not-so-secret passwords (’hermeneutics,’ ‘transgressive,’ ‘Lacanian,’ ‘hegemony,’ to name but a few) would write a completely bogus paper, submit it to an au courant journal, and have it accepted . . . Sokal’s piece uses all the right terms. It cites all the best people. It whacks sinners (white men, the ‘real world’), applauds the virtuous (women, general metaphysical lunacy) . . . And it is complete, unadulterated bullshit — a fact that somehow escaped the attention of the high-powered editors of Social Text, who must now be experiencing that queasy sensation that afflicted the Trojans the morning after they pulled that nice big gift horse into their city.

Sokal’s paper must have seemed a gift to the editors because this was a physicist saying all the right-on things they wanted to hear, attacking the ‘post-Enlightenment hegemony’ and such uncool notions as the existence of the real world. They didn’t know that Sokal had also crammed his paper with egregious scientific howlers, of a kind that any referee with an undergraduate degree in physics would instantly have detected. It was sent to no such referee. The editors, Andrew Ross and others, were satisfied that its ideology conformed to their own, and were perhaps flattered by references to their own works. This ignominious piece of editing rightly earned them the 1996 Ig Nobel Prize for literature.
Notwithstanding the egg all over their faces, and despite their feminist pretensions, these editors are dominant males in the academic lekking arena. Andrew Ross himself has the boorish, tenured confidence to say things like “I am glad to be rid of English Departments. I hate literature, for one thing, and English departments tend to be full of people who love literature”; and the yahooish complacency to begin a book on ’science studies’ with these words: “This book is dedicated to all of the science teachers I never had. It could only have been written without them.” He and his fellow ‘cultural studies’ and ’science studies’ barons are not harmless eccentrics at third rate state colleges. Many of them have tenured professorships at some of America’s best universities. Men of this kind sit on appointment committees, wielding power over young academics who might secretly aspire to an honest academic career in literary studies or, say, anthropology. I know — because many of them have told me — that there are sincere scholars out there who would speak out if they dared, but who are intimidated into silence. To them, Alan Sokal will appear as a hero, and nobody with a sense of humour or a sense of justice will disagree. It helps, by the way, although it is strictly irrelevant, that his own left wing credentials are impeccable.

In a detailed post-mortem of his famous hoax, submitted to Social Text but predictably rejected by them and published elsewhere, Sokal notes that, in addition to numerous half truths, falsehoods and non-sequiturs, his original article contained some “syntactically correct sentences that have no meaning whatsoever.” He regrets that there were not more of the latter: “I tried hard to produce them, but I found that, save for rare bursts of inspiration, I just didn’t have the knack.” If he were writing his parody today, he’d surely have been helped by a virtuoso piece of computer programming by Andrew Bulhak of Melbourne: the Postmodernism Generator.
Every time you visit it, at http://www.cs.monash.edu.au/cgi-bin/postmodern, it will spontaneously generate for you, using falutless grammatical principles, a spanking new postmodern discourse, never before seen. I have just been there, and it produced for me a 6,000 word article called “Capitalist theory and the subtextual paradigm of context” by “David I.L.Werther and Rudolf du Garbandier of the Department of English, Cambridge University” (poetic justice there, for it was Cambridge who saw fit to give Jacques Derrida an honorary degree). Here’s a typical sentence from this impressively erudite work:
If one examines capitalist theory, one is faced with a choice: either reject neotextual materialism or conclude that society has objective value. If dialectic desituationism holds, we have to choose between Habermasian discourse and the subtextual paradigm of context. It could be said that the subject is contextualised into a textual nationalism that includes truth as a reality. In a sense, the premise of the subtextual paradigm of context states that reality comes from the collective unconscious.

Visit the Postmodernism Generator. It is a literally infinite source of randomly generated syntactically correct nonsense, distinguishable from the real thing only in being more fun to read. You could generate thousands of papers per day, each one unique and ready for publication, complete with numbered endnotes. Manuscripts should be submitted to the ‘Editorial Collective’ of Social Text, double-spaced and in triplicate.

As for the harder task of reclaiming humanities and social studies departments for genuine scholars, Sokal and Bricmont have joined Gross and Levitt in giving a friendly and sympathetic lead from the world of science. We must hope that it will be followed

Reading “Terrorism Considered As One Of The Fine Arts”, the first part of the “Nohzone Trilogy”, by Peter Whitehead, is like slipping on a cosy pair of slippers, or climbing into a hot bath. Its hero, Michael Schlieman, an academic drafted into MI5 whilst at Cambridge, loves the Lakeland poets, malt whisky, pretty young girls and a bit of noir. He has a helpless everyman quality which is endearing, but only to the point where familiar references hold sway. But this is Peter Whitehead, and familiar references are the first things up against the wall.

Schlieman has gone AWOL in the Lakes, and his story is pieced together by a narrator who searches for him at first in the Lake District itself, then in carefully annotated second hand books, then in laboriously decoded web addresses and finally in the reaches of his own psyche. A tale of intrigue involving eco terrorism and the sale of nuclear material ensues. We learn about him through his associations with a pair of Femmes Fatale (who may or may not be aspects of his own anima), through his painstaking self-immolation in myriad concealed hypertexts and from rumours divulged by his estranged MI5 handlers. The cosy hot chocolate-ness rapidly takes on a wormwood bitterness.

Widescreen atmospheric inserts give us heady glimpses of Egyptian brothels, homely snapshots of the slightly depressing provincial lecture circuit, and nouvelle vague memories from Paris in the late sixties, all cranked up with a dose of laboratory strength laudanum.

Whitehead makes use of copious literary quotations, from De Quincey to Kawabata to Kotzwinkle to Coleridge. These serve ostensibly as a frame of reference, but become inevitably a springboard into the void, a void into which all his characters, and indeed ourselves, seem to be headed.

A central theme is that of the palimpsest, a text written over other erased texts, and here Whitehead has not only written over the erased remains of all his other novels, but also succeeds in interweaving the events in his characters’ lives to such an extent that the reader experiences a vertiginous feeling of déjà vu, a warp in consensus reality.
The novel’s most significant achievement, however, is to present a cogent narrative that emerges from the chaos of its shattered compositional style.

Each thread is a link in a vast interconnected labyrinth of allusions, a Qabbalistic raft of elision, a glittering panoply of synaptic flashes multiplying and self fertilizing, rather like neural pathways in the human brain, out of which emerges a new mindset. One cannot divorce oneself from complicity in this process, and in fact the fourth novel in the trilogy, “ And Death Shall Have No Domain Name” may or may not manifest solely in the mind of the reader.

Michael Schlieman straddles this web like Adam Kadmon, the archetypal man, the great within the small, He represents an opium- drenched messiah who not only drags Eros and Thanatos in his slipstream, but heralds the new google consciousness beloved of information technology evangelists.

In Nature’s Child, part two of Peter Whitehead’s Nohzone trilogy, we find ourselves becalmed in a pastoral lacuna. From the opening quote by Coleridge and references to the climactic anomalies of El Nino, to the conclusion with its clear parallels in shamanic transformation, we have Nature as transcendent force, mystical and physical in equal measure.
Whitehead gives us Nature besieged, in the overt story of eco-terrorism, which serves as the exoskeleton of the tale. Beautiful and idealistic young people bent on the assassination of corrupt and double-dealing French businessmen coupled with revenge on murdered activists (think Rainbow Warrior). The possibility of eco-disaster as an anarchistic lesson in political chicanery.

Central to the novel, and indeed to the entire trilogy, is Maria, and Nature’s child is specifically Maria’s story. Like Nature, however, nothing here is straightforward, and while Maria would seem to be a chimera, in that she is a shattered glass reflecting myriad different elements, she is also, like Nature, a quantum polymorph whose life encapsulates millions of alternate potentials which happen to be crystallised into one particular narrative by Michael Schlieman.

Those of us who are easily distracted should take comfort, however, in the gripping style of Schlieman and Maria’s encounter. We are quickly enmeshed in a quagmire of spy thriller thrust and counter thrust, whereby everything we think we know is rapidly eroded, and gradually the artifice of surety is deconstructed until nothing is true (and probably everything is permitted).
Reassuringly we are soon in familiar Whitehead territory, as the protagonists engage loins and the real action begins. An intense psychodrama ensues, in which the struggle for dominion over mind is engrossing and deeply erotic.

In Girl On A Train, Peter Whitehead resolves some of the thematic strands which have entwined, in ophidian fashion, around the central pillar of the caduceus that is Nohzone.
Taking as a template Kawabata’s “Snow Country” and the notion of plagiarism; of novels, of lives, of the curlicues of existence; he revisits his old stomping grounds- academia, spies, sex, the esoteric. Milton Schlieman travels to Japan for a Kawabata conference, encounters a mixed race courtesan on a train, then becomes involved with a pretty translator, who turns out to be more than just a cunning linguist.

The novel pivots on a sex-magickal ritual in which the ghost of Kawabata is evoked. As with all of Whitehead’s novels the occult perpetually hovers at the periphery of the narrative, waiting to warp events whenever the parameters of reality are weakened. Whether it be ghostly occurrences, discreet espionage or unspoken emotional agendas, the hidden constantly strives to be revealed. Here, revelation is held up to us like a trophy head, then snatched back, leaving perhaps a greater awareness of just how precarious the truth is.

At the culmination of Girl On A Train we discover the Girl’s (Yoko’s), letter to Schlieman, where a story of two sisters’ lives unfolds. In it we have a tale of sibling devotion and a hitherto unexpectedly frank expurgation of events. This narrative, coming as the denouement of so many twists, turns, false alleys and blurred memories, is shocking in its candour, as well as profoundly moving. One cannot help striving for explanations, tying up loose ends, correlating the miasma of half lives, chimeras, ghosts.

The final nail in this sarcophagus is both disorienting and hugely audacious, as our presumptions are turned on their heads yet again. The facts themselves are too pivotal to expose here, suffice to say we question novelistic logic and simultaneously our own precarious foothold on reality. To simply recount the events of a Peter Whitehead novel is always to reduce it’s epic nature to the level of the prosaic. His writing is literature as total immersion, and his world is one where writing and magic are co-conspirators.

Peter Whitehead has always stood at the brink of cultural change, documenting and shaping significant resonances long before their delineations have been absorbed into the mainstream. With the Nohzone Trilogy, he anticipates a truly interactive new breed of novel.

Prepare to have your mind messed with.

this review first appeared here

Review by Rachel Kendall

237 pages
the ExaggeratedPress
2008
ISBN: 978-0-9558522-0-6

Available from www.lulu.com (£8.99) or as a download (£2.50)
The book can also be purchased direct from the author at terrygatesgrimwood@msn.com (£6.50).

Writers exaggerate. It’s what they do. It’s called artistic license. The writer takes excerpts from the world as he experiences it, and enlarges them through writing. He exaggerates to make his message more real than reality.

Grimwood’s reality is apocalyptic. It is dark, very very dark, putrid, and surprisingly true to contemporary society’s silly form. These stories exaggerate, and in a way, celebrate, humankind on its road to Hell. It’s about political correctness gone mad; aesthetic self-improvement bent all out of shape. Cold people, people of the future with no warmth, no odour, no excretions. Worlds where people daren’t walk, they use the TubeNode and then the LiftScoop, they travel in compartments used specifically by those who don’t breathe, thanks to surgical advances and media lunacy.

“Are you ready Mister Denna, to take one giant leap away from the primitive?” (Breathe)

Grimwood is an excellent teller of gruesome tales and the nineteen in this collection wend their way through horror to sci fi to magic realism to kitchen-sink drama to futurism to fairytale. Never have I come across such a wealth of stories, all so different, but all held together by the bloody umbilicus that links beauty to horror and horror to reality.

His stories tell of debt-collectors and dead-collectors. Of offal and bile, sin and fear, disease and a malfunctioning society. A war-rotten core, told with such precision, such poetic imagery that you can’t help but feel moved.

“The dancers turn slowly on their creaking, straining ropes. A slow gyration, one-wise until the rope reaches full tension, then other-wise to reverse the eternal pirouette. Turning and turning, they stare sightlessly down at us from their lofty stations; lamppost, war-exposed rafters, the branches of surviving trees. Old and young, men and women, hands behind their backs like inspecting Royalty, tongues protruding in mockery, faces blue-black with shame.” (Freedom)

There is a lot of death in these pages. Grimwood is a horror writer after all. There is also a lot of unpleasantness:

“Dinner is a slithering, sliding, squelching, chaos of naked, blood-smeared flesh, crawling and slobbering over a floor covered with… Christ I can’t say the word, I can’t begin to describe what I can see, what is being crammed into mouths that dribble blood and vitals.” (The excellent Deadside)

“She was… dirty. Scraps of make-up clung to her face, her pores leaked fluids, her flesh was ingrained with muck of all kinds. She stank of sweat, semen, of other juices and excretions.” (The Exaggerated Man)

But however repulsive some of these images are, however repugnant the characters and horrific the crimes, I can’t help but feel there is more to these stories than surface nastiness. A number of these tales use our fears, arachnophobia, being buried alive, fear of losing one’s mind, the itching beneath the skin, the flitting shadows and the sense of being watched, the sudden gusts of wind, the blackness, the sounds and sense of evil. These are not new ideas; they are well-worn horror-story constructs, but didn’t someone once say all stories have been written? What the skilled writer does is take these ideas and sex them up, bruise them a little, add some spice, make them unique. Grimwood is able to retell these nightmares as though you’re having them yourself for the very first time.

And then there is the guilt. Oh god, the guilt. Tied in with almost every story, whether on this planet or another, this plane or something beyond life, there is trial and punishment, guilt and grief. Whether taken down to basics as in Red Hands, murder being the vilest thing and perhaps a manifestation of every other sin. Or infidelity, loving and losing the wrong woman, hurting those you love. Or the kind of childhood violations that brand you with another’s guilt so you’re left with the smell of burning flesh until you can finally face your demons. There is also temptation splattered across every page, money, sex, beauty, purity, come on, you can have anything you want for the price of…

“Williamson dropped to his knees, reached down into the grave and felt bony fingers close about his own. Her flesh was dust-dry. When he pulled, that flesh slid horribly over bone in a way that flesh should never slide.” (What the Dead Are For)

It’s hard to pick a favourite story. I don’t think I can. I love the unexpected ending in Deadside, Coffin Road’s tale of the growing relationship between father and grandfather against a rotting backdrop, the rat-pack connections in the magic-realist Friends of Mike Santini, the weird weirdness of Atoner:

“He crawled into the funnel. Head first. The semen-pack squelched against the back of his skull like a grotesque, silk-skinned balloon.” (Atoner)

Any lover of horror literature will be more than sated by this book. In fact, they’ll be standing for an encore. But so too will lovers of books like The Wizard of Oz and Greenaway’s film The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. The Exaggerated Man reminds me of these two very different, very colourful stories. Like Baum’s Oz, Grimwood’s world is part-myth, part-reality where good vs evil (or, the dead vs the living) in such awful places as Deadside, Liveside, the Pits or worst of all - London, and the big cheese isn’t all he’s been made out to be. Then there is Greenaway’s film, with its prettying of pure evil, a technicolour dream-world where sex and filth and corruption run the show, a perfect comparison to The Exaggerated Man.

“And while Doug’s cigarette ascended, flared, faded, fell then ascended again like a slow motion pendulum, the dark seethed with the animal utterances of the grieving and the thud and clink of spades as they wounded, fed, then healed the earth.” (Coffin Road)

Writers exaggerate. That’s what they do. But some writers, like Grimwood, do it better than others.

this review first appeared here

pravasan pillay’s tearoom books has published the chapbook of the year.

there’s no escaping it.

the moment you see gary cummiskey’s face you start screaming

because

there is fire in the enema of art

he put it there

poignantly

not yet free of the dream nor of the memory of when you came to me not wearing panties beneath your light summer dress

but the moment you got on top of me and you saw my face you started screaming

As far as South Africa is concerned a reason for Gary Cummiskey’s neglect may stem from the fact that he spent almost 20 years in Randburg, and by the time he returned to settle down in Sandton, the political situation had changed and so Cummiskey’s surrealist work seemed out of place. Thus Gary had become a marginalised figure as a result of poth psychogeographical and cultural factors.

He writes in “European Writers” “Some people became poets after corresponding with European writers. I became a poet after sleeping on a razorblade.”

And this means that Gary is sharp.

He’s busy looking for a magic wand - no strings attached.

Another problem that may account for the relative obscurity of Gary’s work is the difficulty of placing it within the various ‘movement’ categorisations. While Romancing the Dead contains a number of poems dealing with the Colonial City scene in Joburg, the rest of his work does not particularly reflect the social context in which it was created.

In the end it boils down to the “Painting”:

I am hungry and dirty.
My feet stink.
I want to brush my teeth.

However, it can also not be ignored that Cummiskey’s illness sometimes made him an extremely difficult person, and most publishers and editors were reluctant to deal with him. For this reason alone Pravasan Pillay must be commended. Despite there being no physical attraction Pillay liked Cummiskey as a friend.

Gary was aware of his outsider status, and openly declared that he did not wish to fit in with any particular group or category. But there is a difference between being an outside and being marginalised to the point of neglect - and Cummiskey’s work is neglected. (Although Stephen Gray would probably not agree).

Romancing the dead is a funeral ceremony and all Gary’s sleeping relatives sit on the floor of the bathroom around the bath where his corpse is laid. Once the sleepers have been given the pills to swallow when you left you took them out from your handbag and slipped them back on.

Some people become poets after sleeping with European writers. Gary Cummiskey is a razorblade. Very sharp.

Aryan Kaganof
5/11/2009

tearoom books
ISBN 978-0-620-44717-1

reviewed by Alexander Tudor

Judged by its cover alone, Deceit (1981) is the great prophetic record of the era – the front depicts a scream beneath a mask that is a collage of: Mushroom-Cloud between-the-eyes; JFK & Khruschev shaking hands; Stars & Stripes across the tongue; Ron & Nancy on the forehead. These are the images still familiar in 2008. The lyric-sheet is scattered with the same clippings, and some more helpful captions. Much of this is identical to the collage ingredients for OK Computer (1997) and its singles: what to do in the event of a bomb, or when the siren sounds; where tactical nukes are deployed, worldwide; those oddly dehumanizing line-drawings of how to prepare your fall-out shelter. Deceit came out in 1981, though – a couple of years before Star Wars (the Strategic Defense Initiative); before Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam Hussein; before the first massacre of the Kurds. Ten years later, GW1; ten years further on, 9/11; then the War for Oil, then the Credit Crunch; and only this week can we see real hope of a decline in Republican war-mongering and financial mismanagement (the legacy of Milton Friedman, via Reagan & Thatcher). You know most of this; the point is, to get a sense of history… but also a sense of “prophecy” as a meaningful term in the context of avant-garde music.

Back in 1979, punk in the sense of scuzzed-up glam or sped-up blues had already exhausted its capacity for subversion. Nonetheless, a door had clearly been opened for the experimentalism of post-punk (in a loose sense), and within that (or overlapping), a kind of proto-industrial music that has little to do with Ministry, NIN, or Front 242. Alongside Lydon’s definitive nail-in-the-coffin of the Pistols – Metal Box (1979) – This Heat’s debut was the sound of re-invention and refutation, both musical and ideological. Heavier than Throbbing Gristle or Cabaret Voltaire, the industrial analogies (at the time) require some contextualizing: industrial as a simile (metal on metal), industrial as a reflection of process (customized machines), industrial as an allusion to critiques of the “military industrial complex”. The best (or worst) was yet to come, however…

Deceit (1981) is prophetic, for a start, in that it’s glossolalic – it’s gibberish, it’s speaking in tongues, it’s too many ideas at once, and if you throw them at the wall, some of them are bound to stick, and look like a warning three decades later, if not like Revelations. Thing is, prophecy often attracts the wrong people, and gets ignored by the rest, when they assume it must refer to some specific event in the future (i.e. Kabbalism), rather than referring to the horror here and now, but visibly imminent to those who can see the historic patterns (…which is one aspect of Gnosticism). Track 5, ‘Cenotaph’ spells this out: “his-tory / his-tory / repeats itself / repeats itself / Poppy Day – remember poppies are red / and the fields are full of poppies” – it’s literally a song about decoding symbols, and not letting the signal become noise; it’s not a Fuck You to the jingoism and self-righteousness of the generation who “served” (as Sid, Siouxsie, and others claimed their Nazi regalia was meant to suggest), nor does this song disrespect the dead, but it does demand that we re-consider our values. The most recognizably “punk” track on the album, ‘SPQR’ (Track 4), identifies another repetition, and how we’re taught by rote to repeat the values, and sometimes the mistakes, of our parents – right back to the imperialism and centralized government of 2,000 years ago: “we’re all Romans / we know all about straight roads / every road leads home / home to Rome / amo, amas, amat, amamus, amatis, amant.”

The devastating industrial freak-out, ‘Makeshift Swahili’ (Track , condenses most of these ideas into one song, although you wouldn’t know it at first from the Dalek-voice: “…makeshift she sings / in her native German / you try to understand / what she’s trying to say / she says ‘You’re only as good / as the words you understand / and you, you don’t understand / the words.’ / CHORUS: Tower of Babel!!! / Swaaaaaaahili!!! / It’s all Greek to me!” The middle-eight introduces a pretty guitar figure, and a second voice relates a fragment of history that might have been dropped in as a sample, years later: ” ‘we give you firewater / you give us your land’ / ‘white-man speak with forked tongues / but it’s too late now / to start complaining…’” The sinister drones resume almost immediately, and then the song explodes with an intensity surpassing punk at its most violent – Charles Hayward shrieking “Rhubarb! Rhubarb! Rhubarb!” Granted, this track may not be the most obvious demonstration of the genius of This Heat – Yes, Babel remains the best-known parable of the dangers of imperialism (if not globalization) collapsing under the weight of its ambition; there are also hints that language is power, and literacy was an instrument of subjugation, in the case of the Native Americans, rather than being the gift of enlightenment (see also, Gang of Four’s contemporaneous Entertainment!). These allusions operate according to the collage-principles of juxtaposition and partial-tearing to create new meanings – collage being the best known Dadaist strategy – but This Heat also employ sound-poetry and a kind of automatic-speaking akin to channelling and possession (these being associated with Dadaism’s loopier, more magic(k)al experiments, pre-WWI). Art-history lesson almost done, it remains to point out that when inter-war Surrealism re-visited Dadaism, it used the slogan “Surrealism in the service of the revolution”, and was firmly Marxist in its orientation. If 1970s English Progressive Rock was a debased surrealism in the service of trippiness, This Heat brought the revolutionary spirit back.

What of the rest of the album? It’s a complex beast, whose intra-textualities are as numerous as the inter-textualities. The use of loops, drones, found-sounds, and unusual percussion (girders, dummy-heads) was so elaborate that you have to look to The Beatles’ ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ for a precursor, and as far ahead as Aphex Twin when describing the more danceable and abrasive tracks. A guitarist as evil – but subtle – as Charles Bullen wouldn’t be found until Dave Pajo (of Slint), and if you want a comparison for the first album, only Liars have come close, with Drum’s not Dead (2006). Personally, I can hear the ghost of Nico channelled into This Heat’s weird mix of fucked-up lullabies (Track 1: ‘Sleep’), and drone-based proto-industrial nightmares. The drawing of parallels between the End of Rome & the Cold War Era is also very Nico, and the phrase “the sound of explosions” on ‘A New Kind of Water’ (Track 10) feels like a reference to Eno’s “bomb-noises” for Nico’s The End. (Eno also recorded Manzanera’s pre-Roxy band, Quiet Sun, who included one Charles Hayward, later of This Heat. Rhubarb Rhubarb.)

Opening track ‘Sleep’ tells us we’re all unconscious, lulled by commercials (hence “softness is a thing called Comfort”), and these operate on us like Pavlov’s dogs (CHORUS: “stimulus and response”). ‘Triumph’ might be suggesting a parallel between Neighbourhood Watch (imported from the US in 1982 – a landmark in the history of surveillance), and the early years of Nazism, when Riefenstahl assembled her filmic montage Triumph of the Will. ‘SPQR’ is sung in the first person plural and refers to the supposedly democratic electorate as “unconscious collective” – Cold War propaganda and sci-fi alike often fantasized the enemy as an insectile hive-mind, but this song isn’t about an external enemy: the enemy is now internal. ‘Independence’ (Track 9) is, quite literally, the Declaration of Independence. Ask yourself, as a UK-citizen, have you ever read it? Do you know what it says? Could you imagine trying to implement its ideals now? Doesn’t its endorsement of revolution sound – well, “un-American” (as the Patriot Act defines “American”)? The climax is post-punk masterpiece and personal favourite, ‘A New Kind of Water’, which layers un-synchronized drums, bass, and a chiming guitar line – a distant siren that hasn’t yet been recognized as a warning signal. As the parts cycle, and change in volume, the notes interact differently. The initial chorus vocals are those of impotent, infantilized consumers (”we were told to expect more / and now that we’ve got more / we want more”). After that, the vocal delivery is soulless and hollow – Winston Smith at the end of 1984 – we have hope, it says: ‘a cure for cancer / we’ve got men on the job.’ Urgency increases… the drums begin to pound… you realize the apocalypse is here and you wish you were in Neverland (”fly away Peter / hideaway Paul…”). The title of the final track is written in Japanese characters, transliterated into Romaji (’Hi Baku Shyo’), and then translated into English (’Suffer Bomb Disease’). There are no words in this murky, marshy soundscape – maybe this is the world in which only cockroaches have survived. Maybe English-speakers are only tolerated as slaves of the victorious “Yellow Peril” (hence the Romaji-script). Then again, maybe the bomb has already dropped, and we became insects without realizing it.

this review first appeared on drownedinsound.com

this review first appeared in oor.nl

This ink is daunting. In preparation of teasing this feature into view, I am listening to ‘Bitches Brew’ for the first time in years. And the opening strains, instructively, and deceptively quietous (the proverbial ellipse preceding rupture), displace me: I am seventeen again, and I have unwittingly opened Pandora’s box by nothing more innocent than pressing ‘play’. I am unprepared for this shit. A new alphabet is at the door, and I’ve naively let it in.

‘Bitches Brew’ is one of those inspired works of art that can’t be over-praised, words literally pale. It is also one of those rare works - rare in any technical field of endeavour - that don’t date. This is a central characteristic of true, naked originality: To be so self-contained, so self-defined, as to bear no signs of its location in time. Miles Davis was quite a kerel; few today can dispute his gargantuan presence in 20th century music. He shared the insatiable, dionysian genius of that other creative giant, Picasso. By the 60’s Miles had already altered the currents of Jazz twice, re-introducing melody and space to the then-buzybee soloing era of Be-Bop, with his appropriately named ‘Birth of The Cool’ in 1950, and freeing Jazz from its ironically rigid chord-obsessions by spearheading modal Jazz, in what some have called the perfect sonic event: ‘A Kind of Blue’ (1959).

But Mr. Davis didn’t know about standing still. It was the late Sixties - Rock was hitting its second mighty crescendo; everybody and their tannie were opening the doors of perception; Funk was beaming into view; and Sex was tearing off its clothes. Times were stimulating. Miles was with a young beaut called Betty Mabry (who herself would turn out quite the motherfucker - hint, Mabry was her maiden name), whom Miles had recently pedestalled as his central muse, with the sonic gorgeousity of 68’s ‘Filles De Kilimanjaro’. Mrs. Davis (yes, THAT Betty Davis, underrated Funk Maestress ala ‘They say I’m different’) was very much of-the-scene at the time, and introduced Miles to the psychedelic punch of Hendrix and Sly Stone.
The deal was sealed. Jazz didn’t know it yet, but a bomb was about to go off, ironically cued by the hush of ’69’s ‘In a Silent Way’.

At the time of recording, Jazz was considered an art of the acoustic instrument. The handful of jazzos who dared explore electricity were seen as musicians using gadgets to disguise obvious lack of skill and finesse. Electric instruments were taboo, a vulgar crutch. Having tentatively insinuated electricity into 1968 recordings ‘Water Babies’ and the afore-mentioned ‘Filles’, Miles finally shrugged off the purist’s glare with ‘In a Silent Way’, a fully electric silence that preambled ‘Bitches Brew’.

But ‘Brew’ is a beast unto itself. AT LEAST two drummers, two bassists, and two horns are juggling sound at any given point in its timespace, resulting not in cacaphony, but blisteringly detailed sonic texture. Interestingly, the impression ‘Bitches Brew’ leaves in hindsight is that of storm, and slow-motioned explosions; but on actual listening, the stretches of sound are for the most part laid-back. There Are many bursts, many slashes of fever - especially in John McLaughlin’s staccato-pathic fretwork, which suggests the scrawls of mechanical arachni - but, ultimately, ‘Bitches Brew’ doesn’t flaunt its energy, its potency. Most of its space is a lazy stretching of musculature.

One of the first albums to hint at what would become Fusion and Jazz-rock - certainly the most influential - ‘Brew’ had Rock fans’ jaws clanking onto the floor. McLaughlin was a guitar revelation, and Miles showed that Jazz could do fire-and-brimstone as well as any stadium-straddling Rock outfit.
Also influential on the yet-to-be-born Electronica movement, ‘Bitches Brew’ is a crackling meditation more than an album - as ambient as Aphex Twin’s ‘Selected Ambient Works vol.2′, only an ambience of storm. Its production was also phenomenal. Opener ‘Pharao’s Dance’ alone contained 17 edits, with frequent loops and cut’n'pastes - unheard of at the time - producer Teo Macera wielding the studio like an instrument in itself.

Turbulence shaking hands with chill.
Darkly dazzling.

[first published in Muse magazine]

“Things happen here about, they don’t tell about. I see things. You see, they say that it’s just an old man talking. You laugh at an old man, this thing that laughs and knows better.”

A pretty mundane line on page, the above - drunkenly spewed by some sun-blanched drunk towards the film’s beginning - depresses that little button that tells the audience, and Should’ve tipped the victims-to be, that this little Texan roadtrip is not to end in sunshine and flowers. Not that the title wasn’t to the point. Made on a shoe-string budget with mostly amateur actors (shot, then, like porn) this study in terror and dementedly human evil, is phenomenal. The only reason I’ve subjected myself to its visceral hysterics more than once, is that it contains moments that transcend into a kind of… poetics of evil.

There is more than a shiver of genius to this cinematic creature, specifically recalling that original sense of genius as being possessed by some higher consciousness. The soundtrack is unmatched - the sonic, the psychological, equivalent, of nails dragged across a chalkboard. The frequent citing of the sun, that profound entity of perpetual explosion and ungodly temperatures; the scattered logic of seriously twisted home-decorations; the morose consciousness of cattle awaiting slaughter; the (seemingly) arb comment about astrological tidings; and finally the sickeningly, senselessly sadistic reality of the cozy little killer family, seem to quest the bounds of ethicality. ‘Evil just is’. It seems to whisper into your ear. ‘Don’t blame it, don’t try to understand it. Just stay away.’

The film’s resident monster - the gibbering hulk Leatherface - launched the unfortunate careers of dime-a-dozen evil freaks with curious headgear, but the evilest evil lurks elsewhere in the movie…

Excepting the film’s centrepiece, where the unbroken shrieking momentarily re-introduces disbelief (for an ironic reason, since it Is realistic), this is inspired film-making, and, quite literally, breathtaking. But be warned, this be not placid fare.

reviewed By Mike Everleth ⋅ September 23, 2009

Civilization and Other Chimeras

The world is littered with movie “making of” documentaries. Oh, we may not consider those self-serving promotional DVD “bonus” features where filmmakers discuss their process the way a cheesemaker may wax eloquently about the way they make cheese as “documentaries,” but in their own way they are. Some may even exhibit some artistic creativity in and of themselves.

But South African filmmaker Aryan Kaganof elevates the “making of” documentary to a brilliant piece of artistry in his Civilization and Other Chimeras Observed During the Making of an Exceptionally Artistic Feature Film. However, a bit of a correction, as labeling Civilization and Other Chimeras as simply a “making of” doc is very misleading. What’s really happening here is Kaganof has taken the occasion of the making of a particular film to ruminate on the very nature of reality and to push the paradoxical idea of “Even if an action is recorded on camera, did it really happen?”

Kaganof sets up his premise with an on-screen quote from the post-modern French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, which says in its entirety:

There are two-way mirrors which allow you innocently to spy on people. This is one of the finest metaphors for consciousness. There is no two-way screen because there is nothing to see on the other side of the screen, nothing to see without being seen.

The Baudrillard quote also pops up repeatedly throughout the film. Someone — and we can assume Kaganof — has written the quote on a mirror hung on the wall of the film set’s make-up room. Kaganof films various crew and cast members reading the quote, but the only person it really seems to stick with is a young pre-teen actress, Kiriko Mechanicus, who seems to view the quote as a puzzle she needs to solve.

Mechanicus is the star of the “exceptionally artistic film” whose production Kaganof is documenting. Called Winterland, it is the directorial debut of fine artist Dick Tuinder. The centerpiece image of Winterland is of Mechanicus as her character, Sally DeWinter, riding a giant eyeball balloon. If the young actress could only see an image of an audience watching her watching the giant eyeball watching her, she might actually solve that puzzle she’s so desperately trying to figure out.

Baudrillard’s screen metaphor gets a physical workout through Tuinder’s directing style. When scenes of Winterland are being shot, Tuinder sits back watching the action on a playback monitor rather than watch the live action happening just a few feet from him. The actual scenes being performed are so close to the monitor that Kaganof is able to capture both the live performance and it’s immediate playback on Tuinder’s screen.

The effect of being an audience member watching a screen filled with another man watching a screen of simultaneous action that we can also see happening is an extremely disconcerting one. It makes that audience member question where does reality actually lie? The acting of the scene in Winterland is completely irrelevant unless it’s being captured by a camera. Yet, Tuinder acting as a director is also being captured by a camera. So, if Kaganof wasn’t filming Tuinder, would Tuinder’s directing being similarly irrelevant? And who is watching the audience watching Tuinder watching the acting? If nobody is watching somebody watching Civilization and Other Chimeras, does Kaganof’s documentary actually exist?

It’s tough to point out anything that’s real in the documentary. First of all, there’s never any discussion of what Winterland is about and the scenes we see being shot don’t offer any clues as to what the plot may be. Plus, many of the actors we never see outside of their costumes so that most of them don’t seem like real people, just characters living inside some hazy dream. Even Tuinder’s role as director becomes suspect as it slowly becomes clear that he has cast himself as a character in his own film. Where Tuinder the director stops and Tuinder the character begins — and vice versa — is unknown.

The “making of” documentary typically follows fairly rigid structural and formal conventions. For Civilization and Other Chimeras, Aryan Kaganof has completely subverted those conventions to concoct a real challenging mind-bender of a film that intriguingly weaves together layers upon layers of conundrums, paradoxes and mysteries.

this review first appeared on badlit.com

world premiere is on 29 september during the netherlands film festival in utrecht. more information here

En attendant avec impatience l’adaptation cinématographique de ce roman prometteur, nous avons voulu vous écrire nos pensées personnelles.

L’auteur (dont le pseudonyme appartient à Kaganof) revient sur son univers à lui : celui de la violence, cette fois dans les townships de Johannesburg. Ce roman aussi se base sur sa devise éternelle “I believe in violence” qui apparait sur sa “Snuff Collection” cinématographique de 2001 mais qui a été bien preparée depuis 1990 et ses premiers films comme “Carnage dans la maison charnelle”. Maintenant dans ses romans comme “Hectic”(Agité) ou “Laduma” cette devise devient plus parlante. Nous sommes contents de voir apparaître le personnage sécondaire de Nick le Grec, puisque nous avons commencé notre collaboration avec Kaganof deux ans avant la publication de ce roman.

Dans “Laduma” l’auteur mélange l’anglais avec l’afrikaans et le xhosa. L’histoire est celle de l’équation de deux identités différentes en une seule : Laduma Moloi, le chomeur et voyou, prend l’identité de son père Kafka Boy qui avait assassiné sa mère. En héritant ses instincts criminels, Laduma se met dans une impasse aussi avec le meurtre “misogyne” de son amante Dorothy. Avec un brio littéraire très fort, le personnage principal se suicide un peu avant la fin dans l’impossibilité de se réconcilier avec sa condition particulière de victime et d’”esclave” (p.169), dont il a voulu se débarasser.

L’écrivain Lesego Rampolokeng (dont Kaganof était le premieur éditeur) écrit sur la couverture: “Laduma emploie une écriture cannibale pour raconter les aventures fieuvreuses et hallucinatoires dans la zone de la mort. Son style ressuscite les cadavres à travers la voix de l’eviscération. C’est un produit cérébral au milieu de la famine intellectuelle”.

Et nous allons seulement citer le premier strophe d’un poème ambigu intérieur (op.cit. , p.121) qui reste intraduisible, pour nous et pour tout le monde :

“Her name was RAINBLAKKKNATION
the poet glanced up at the blakkk sky
from where his blakkk muse reigned
her blakkk inspiration…..”

En faisant la métonymie de la “nation arc-en-ciel” par le biais de ses jeux de mots politiques, l’auteur revient sur une libération - émancipation incomplète.

écrit par Dionysos Andronis

Influenced by Tacita Dean’s An Aside, a travelling group exhibition curated by the British artist, Julia Rosa Clark’s Sing into my mouth displayed what might be described charitably as a lightness of curatorial touch that was present throughout the entire exhibition. Devoid of accompanying notes, or ‘informative’ panels of text, spectators could meander throughout the WHATIFTHEWORLD GALLERY weaving their own connections between, and frameworks around, the objects of the exhibit. Conversely, the accompanying Initial proposal notes (12 september 2008) provided a compelling narrative of chance and missed encounters that encompassed and exceeded the boundaries of the physical exhibition. In these Initial proposal notes (12 september 2008) Clark writes of her dilettante approach as ‘a kind of mismatch or a failure to correspond: could this be the inability to communicate (even through artworks).’ Thus a web of connections fortuitously encompasses many of the themes of the exhibition — self-portrait, landscape, object and journey, nepotism.

This play of object and intervention found its apotheosis in the most outstanding piece of the show, the transfixing Record (2001) video by Ed Young of a pristinely endless loop, the needle magically lifting and dropping onto the spinning vinyl to play Michael Jackson’s Man In The Mirror “…I’m starting with the man in the mirror. I’m asking him to change his ways…” Part video and part meditation on medium, it was necessarily afforded its own large space in order to accommodate the outmoded equipment which formed not just the apparatus of the work but a constituent aspect of its subject. The visibility of this huge machine, its movement and its integral noise, emphasised the mechanical nature of the subject, the physicality of the machine required to project it and, by extension, explicitly pointed to its complement to complete the experience. That is to say, the whole exhibition could be read as selfportrait or at least an autobiographical retelling of a journey of discovery undertaken by Clark herself, as she points out in her introduction ‘I think of the mental sustenance and reflexivity one gets from viewing artworks, the memory of a work that stays, or the experience of living with artworks and how they change physically and in meaning over time.’ This is an exhibition where the trace of the artist/curator is insistently present in these connections but where there is also an aporia of space for the viewer to insert themselves and their own stories.

“I don’t think hierarchically, I like to think rhizomatically” Clark announced during the walkabout that closed the show and, when pressed by email as to whether she had actually ever read any Deleuze, responded “I have not read A Thousand Plateaus (do want to) but have read around both Deleuze and Guattari, and have been influenced by the trickle down effect of their ideas on other writings, artworks and projects that have interested me over the past seven years or so. So I would say that there is an important but oblique Deleuzian undertow to the way I work, but I am not responding to his work directly.” Indeed.

first published in art south africa vol 8 issue 1 spring 2009

Palm pictures’ ‘The Work of Director’ is a series of dvd’s that showcase innovators behind the lens of music videos. Thanks in no small part to the roster of seven directors in this series, music videos have become increasingly creative, even - Pop forbid! - artful. We zoom in on two of the more extremely original of the bunch..

Frenchman Michel Gondry is one-of-a-kind. Stuck, by own admission, at the wide-eyed age of 12, he is the son of an inventor, and experiences the world with wonderstruck awe. Gondry never even knew there was a box to think outside of. In keeping with his childly nature, and inventive blood, Michel’s works seem to be attempts at matching the sheer mystery the world presents him with - through Michel’s eyes life is a kaleidoscopic series of head-scratch inducing tricks; mind-teasing illusions by the Master illusionist. And of course there’s nothing more challenging, or enjoyable, than out-tricking the Master!

If his quirky name doesn’t ring a bell (mind you, his subsequent ventures into the longer tricks called Movies should - he brought us ‘Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind’, and ‘The Science of sleep’), a quick sample of quintessentially Gondrian images might: A giant grizzly Teddy tearing through cardboard forests on a soccer-ball sized earth, hunting Bjorkie; The White Stripes’ multiplying drum-kits and amps in ‘The Hardest button to button’; Beck carrying a car; and the famous Foo Fighters fable ‘Everlast’, involving Grohl’s giantized hands rescuing the drummer in dis-dress.

‘The Work of Director vol.3 - Michel Gondry’ is crammed to bursting point with the man’s naive genius, Gondry’s videos are unsolveable puzzles, and his greatest virtue is his love of sets; physically constructed illusions and effects embody his videography in favour of the cool, inorganic sheen of CGI. Even more peculiar and rewarding than the numerous vids - to this reviewer at least - are the various documentaries, shorts and interviews that further explore the brilliant, oddball mind that is Gondry.

Come to Daddy..

‘The Work of Director vol.2′ captures the dark inventions of Chris Cunningham. Tellingly, where Gondry repeatedly draws Bjork and The White Stripes into his dazzling playgrounds, Cunningham mostly hangs out with Aphex Twin and Squarepusher, at night.

Invited at 24 to be animatronics & effects supervisor on no-less than Kubrick’s ‘A.I.’ sets (no, not Spielberg: the original, abandoned Kubrick pre-production - ah what could have been!), Cunningham’s always been a force to be reckoned with - exploding onto the scene with the magnificently frightening ‘Come to Daddy’ ala Aphex, he was swiftly being called up by the who’s-who of the music world, but restricted himself to projects he felt passionate about. From the liquid gothic dream of Portishead’s ‘Only you’ to the New York-cracked zombie of Leftfield/Africa Bambaata colab ‘Africa shox’, Cunningham always defies expectation. His masterwork is possibly Aphex Twin’s ‘Windowlicker’, where he singlehandedly perverts the entire Bling-bling culture of Hip-Hop videos and MTV-land: Sheer, eerie genius in motion! As with Gondry’s package, ‘vol.2′ comes with illuminating interviews, extras, and a fantastic 52 page booklet.

Five-minute explosions of art and experiment - must-have stuff!
Check out www.directorslabel.com for more visceral info.

[originally published in Muse magazine]

The long-reigning king of the American bizarre. Nothing needs be said to introduce the man’s work – his name is a genre unto itself, immediately conjuring up those unhinged, paranoid, disturbedly beautiful fever-scapes so peculiar to him.
Besides the unprecedented employment of sound, the canonical images, and the sheer genius of his masterworks, his greatest contribution to American cinema is perhaps that, with Lynch, viewers finally got hold of the notion that you don’t have to understand a film to appreciate its beauty; that film doesn’t have to make itself understood. Before Lynch films could be weird, but they had to make sense - the ‘weird’ had to be qualified somehow, contextualised, patted on the head. ‘Eraserhead’ (Lynch’s debut feature film) completely exploded that quaint rule.

‘The short films of David Lynch Vol.1’ is indispensable to anyone interested in experimental cinema in general, and Lynch in particular.. Starting with his film-student works, the collection traces the painter becoming the director, then leads into the mid-70s shorts that would contain some of the sparks and cues destined to become central to his cinematic art. Appendixed is Lynch’s 55-second contribution to Lumiere et compagnie.

From a little boy growing his own grandma in the attic; to alphabetic nightmares and concertos of vomiting heads; a dull lady auto-dictating letters while her amputated legs retch gunk; and indescribably deeper into Lynch’s labyrinthine trip of a mind, these shorts make most of his eventual films rate PG on the Bonkers scale.

First published in Muse magazine

Godfather of local electronica, Warrick Sony aka The Kalahari Surfers, needs no introduction. Following his musical rebirth in 2000 Sony has gifted us his epiphanic masterpiece ‘Akasic Record’ (2000), all mystery and dreamy elegance, followed by the more upbeat, bass-driven ‘Muti media’ (2003) and the excellent ‘Panga management’ (2007); this in addition to 2003’s trance outing through Microdot Records, ‘Conspiracy of Silence’.

While all this was going on, a great, unreleased collaboration was coming to life in the shadows. Sony gives us a peek into the makings of what sounds to be a magnificent beast. As he put it: “ex-ORB Greg Hunter and Kris Weston vs. me and Brendan Jury. Unlimited budget and never finished – began in 1998 and a version finished now. 2 continents, self-flagellation, yoga and the beach!”

Warrick’s low-down: “[MELT2000’s Robert Trunz] suggested a collaboration [between Trans.Sky, comprising Warrick Sony and Brendan Jury, and] his favourite producer Greg Hunter, who at that point was finishing off his ‘Alien Soap Opera’ project and decided to swop freezing London for a particularly fantastic Cape Town summer.
‘Turntabla’ began in the summer of 1998 at what was then Shifty Studios in Camp Street, Cape Town. Greg fell in love with a Berimbau I bought when I was in Brazil, and worked on it day and night until he was shitfuckn hot on it. Brendan did string stuff on his viola and processed viola. We were jamming with piano, tabla, viola, veena, berimbau, mridangam, turntables, udu pots.. We even went out and bought and old Wurlitzer church organ for the bass pedals – I’ve never had so much fun in a recording. I think we all did.”

Following the initial swell of inspiration the project was dormant for two years, with Hunter and Weston back in the UK and other key conspirator Brendan Jury moving to Joburg. “Greg returned in 2000 and we finished the album at Milestone [studios], blowing all their main studio speakers in the process. This was a very productive period and the album shifted from the very synthesized sound to more organic; Greg taking control and shaping performances from myself, Madala Kunene, and a string quartet for 2 of the tracks.”

“The album lay around for a decade until Robert Trunz asked me if I wouldn’t mind doing some of my own mixes - a sort of remix of an album that never was. I returned to the album, found amazing performances [to replace some uncleared samples] that we’d done ourselves, and some great Madala Kunene guitar.. and so I reworked 3 quarters of the album.”
With Greg Hunter and Warrick Sony as inter-successive heads of this decade-spun project, and all the heady, exotic ingredients in the mix, I can’t wait to wrap my ears around this one!

[’TURNTABLA’ is out now - go to www.electricmelt.com]

(Turntabla:) First published in BPM magazine

Fragmented, incidentally distorted and vital, Shot Down is not only a remarkable (as in “What the Fuck!”) cinematic achievement, it is also a searing insight into the mind of the artistic white liberal in the last high years of Apartheid.

It’s 1986 and Paul Gilliat is coaxed back from a career in New York, shooting footage of visiting Third World musicians, to his hometown of Johannesburg to shoot a film about banned black playwright Rasechaba. It is all a front however; Gilliat is really employed by the National Bureaucratic government to assassinate the man accused of spreading dissent. Gilliat attempts to contact his target through his old friends who are all dissenting artists and musicians (James Phillips, I say nothing else). Film maker Andrew Worsdale uses this device to show clips and portions of then contempory white protest theater and film. I say white because Shot Down is primarily about how ineffective art is as a protest tool, while itself is acting as a conduit for that art of protest and itself being the very thing whose intentions it seems to skewer. But more than that it serves through this cutting up, to show how fragmented the liberal white man’s psychological burden must have been at the time.

The nuances of Shot Down’s point of view are highlighted when Bella (Irene Stephanou) talking seemingly to no one, proclaims “I’m sorry I’m White”. Bella is not literally saying what is on her mind, she is practicing a sketch from a political “cabaret”. Is she really sorry? Is she playing the part of someone who is sorry? Is her character a true reflection of herself? Is portraying white guilt as a way to drive a larger point home within the confines of the “cabaret”. These are questions that, satisfyingly, Worsdale never attempts to answer. Therein lies the brilliance of Shot Down. It illustrates a worldview by being totally part of it, but it never stoops to explain nor offer answers in any traditional sense.

When Gilliat finally gets out of the headspace of protest artists and on the road to find Rasechaba the film settles into a different pace. Our hero sets out to kill in confusion and then settles into to a slow searching for answers, in this regard Shot Down almost functions as a Apocalypse Now in reverse, but it’s invested with a lot less portentous rambling and a lot more absurdity. A key scene is Gilliat, James Phillips and Caesar (A Young Barker Heyns, um, I mean, Robert Whitehead) sitting in their car at a roadhouse (How do you tell it’s still the eighties? A drive-in non-franchise burger joint called Casablanca) watching a guy in another car shout at his girlfriend and then them for watching. It highlights all the intricacies of the relationship without anyone really working at it.

Shot Down is the truest of white protest films, it capture the confusion of being white, knowing things aren’t right and being ill equipped to deal with it, all in a gloriously off hand manner. When Gilliat makes an impassioned plea to the go-betweens about the importance of people seeing Rasechaba’s theater, he is told “Our theatre has no meaning to anyone else but ourselves, do you think there is any point in showing it to you?” Never has the well-meaning white liberal dilemma been illustrated more succinctly. And it’s the closest he ever comes to finding or understanding his target.

On film festival release in 1987 (before it was banned for having ‘ no artistic merit whatsoever’) Ivor Powell called it “the archetypal, white, decadent, existential-crisis-ridden, drug-crazed, politically incorrect, misanthropic film.” These words still stand today even though twenty-two years on, Shot Down is hard to find. If you want to see it, there are occasional screenings at WITS. You could try mailing PaulGilliat@telkomsa.net; he’s a pal of the screenwriter Rick Shaw and may be able to get you a copy. Or you could phone M-Net (they have the rights) but that will probably be as effective as Gilliat’s resignation phone call to his bureaucratic handlers. He was answered by a machine.

Side note: Shot Down has some amazing music in it. The Cherry Faced Lurchers, Benny-B Funk, Kalahari Surfer, Bernoldus Niemand and The Genuines.

this review first appeared on mahala.co.za