kagablog

they call it past tense
because once it’s happened,
all the stress in the world
won’t make one jot of difference.

About an hour ago, regarding his video, Soweto-born Spoek Mathambo tweeted, “Who’s got the better silkshirt-game…Nelson Mandela or me in the ‘Mshini Wam’ video?? Dun know!!” While he was drawing a line between his sartorial preferences to those of the great South African leader, he was also referencing the historical context of his lyrics—”Mshini Wam” is a flip on the South African jam “Umshini Wami,” a kind of anthem for military dudes in the African National Congress. So when he’s talking about kids with machine guns on celebratory synths, he’s also giving us a brief lesson in South African politics in double dutch cadence, a young historian of his homebase with serious future-funk chops to flex. Mshini Wam, the album, is out September 13, and it is one of the best releases of the year, period.

Read more: http://www.thefader.com/tag/spoek-mathambo/#ixzz0xh5EqsUc

promo video with censored lyrics

it doesn’t bother me *in principle* that women choose to portray themselves as sexualised objects – if you are conscious of what is going on, there is space to fuck with these commodified tropes and it can be fun… what bothers me is that the vast majority of women are NOT conscious of what is going on, what they are flirting with, and so it backfires. they think that through displays of sexual “liberation” they are empowering their femininity/throwing off society’s shackles, when actually they are just playing straight into reinforcing misogynist and capitalist orthodoxies, repackaging the imposed norms as endemic. with the external, masculine gaze narcissistically internalised by female subjects, it is even more efficiently exerted – their yang is selling out their yin… i guess it’s a similar species of argument that andile mngxitama (drawing on fanon) makes about inadvertent collusion with systems of “white” power.

if i was a man
i would come and kick your head in
but if i was a man
i wouldn’t have to kick your head in
cos you wouldn’t keep on
treating me like
.tihs

When Jean d’ Halluin first published I Spit On Your Graves in 1946, he was looking for a bestseller to kickstart his new imprint, Editions du Scorpion. Written by an African-American writer named Vernon Sullivan, the book was a visceral, often misogynistic, and (once it gets rolling) violent pulp novel offering a gritty commentary on racial injustice in the United States.

The plot centered on Lee Anderson, a light skinned black man seeking revenge for the murder of his brother at the hands of whites. Anderson, takes his revenge by infiltrating southern society as a white man (he has light skin and blond hair), bedding every white woman he can, and ultimately selecting two of those women to murder as payback for his brother’s death. Despite being considered too controversial and subversive for U.S. publishers, the French public devoured the novel. By 1947, it outsold work by Sartre and Camus, giving d’ Halluin the bestseller he craved.

That alone would’ve made for interesting literary history. But there was more to the story…

Vernon Sullivan never tried to have the book published in the United States.

Vernon Sullivan did not exist. I Spit On Your Graves was in fact written by a Frenchman. A white Frenchman. Said Frenchman had never actually visited the United States.

Then there was the law suit filed against the author by Cartel d’action sociale et morale, the same right wing organization that tried to censor the work of Henry Miller.

Last but not least, there was the grisly murder committed by a Parisian man who strangled his mistress. The authorities discovered a copy of I Spit On Your Graves at the scene of the crime with a part where Lee Anderson dispatches one of his victims circled.

Hence its bestseller status. Who didn’t want to read the “murder book,” as the introduction Marc Lapprand calls it?

And then of course, there was the bigger question: what if the book was not about racial injustice at all?

On the surface, I Spit On Your Graves is a pulpy, not expertly written tale of murder and sex. And upon first reading, I Spit On Your Graves comes across as that – a cheap pulp mystery, lacking only the cover illustration of a woman screaming, hands raised against her face, as an unseen stalker comes at her with a knife.

It is overflowing with graphic sex (for it’s time) where Lee takes the female characters in every scenario imaginable (barring midgets and donkeys). At first one would take it as a sub-par Tropic of Cancer, except that the reader’s knowledge of Lee’s racial identity gives the book a taboo that is non-existent in Miller’s novels. Lee gets his hands on every white woman he possibly can, and they are all to willing to be taken, even if they don’t admit it at first (as is the case with Lou Asquith). As Lee relates early on in the story, “I had all the girls, one after the other, but it was a bit too easy, it turned my stomach.” It comes off like a line from a 70s Blaxploitation film. And in many ways, I Spit On Your Graves reads like a Blaxploitation script. However, as the book goes on Lee flips from bragging of his conquests to being disgusted at how far he has sunk to achieve his revenge. He becomes increasingly sickened by his seduction of the Asquith girls and this drives him further towards the violent outcome.

And that is where the book starts to turn from pure pulp sadism and gratuitous sex into a more layered, psychological exploration. We know Lee is seeking revenge. We know he is going to kill. It is only a matter of time and the reader is forced to travel down the road, dragged further and further into Lee’s madness, strapped in, unable to change the course.

Keep in mind, Vian was no pulp writer. He was a contemporary of Sartre and Camus, who wrote the incredibly well received Froth on the Daydream (also translated as Foam of the Daze). He was also a translator, poet, music, critic, and jazz musician who was close with Duke Ellington and Miles Davis.

In many ways, it is similar to Brett Easton Ellis’ American Psycho, forcing you to see the world of the book through the eyes of a very twisted and violent narrator. We immediately find ourselves repulsed by the narrator’s narcissism, their ruthlessness, and most importantly their penchant for extremely grisly acts. And yet, it is this grotesque, amped, psychotic, bloodthirsty humanity that captivates us.

I’m not the first person to make such a comparison between these two books. However, there is a major difference between them. Whereas Ellis was satirizing society, specifically the Reagan-worshipping stockbrokers of the 80s, Vian was going deeper – he was satirizing publishing and ultimately, the reader.

After all, sex and murder were rampant in novels published circa 1946. Both are still widely used as devices and plot points today. In fact, one could argue that both are necessary lynchpins of all modern literature. Sex and death is what it’s all about.

The book is so overly violent and misogynist because Vian is parodying pulp writing, a form very prevalent in post-war France when he wrote I Spit On Your Graves. Like Swift’s A Modest Proposal, it takes the argument to its fullest extreme, giving readers the ultimate in literary-noir: a story so extremely violent and disgusting to modern thinking that the reader can’t put it down.

Much has been said about the social commentary perceived within I Spit On Your Graves. Of this one can look literally. Lee, a black man who’s brother was murdered by whites, seeks revenge by wreaking havoc on white society. In the end however, without giving anything away, there is no justice for Lee. So it is easy to see I Spit On Your Graves as a biting commentary on racial injustice in America during the 20th Century.

But in many ways, Vian is still having his fun with us. After all, he’s not trying to convince us that Lee is an unfortunate character of racial injustice that we should pity. He’s getting us to hate Lee Anderson in spite of his quest for justice. After all, Vian’s audience was white, educated, French society. And it is Lee’s racial identity, his status as `black’ that made (and still makes the book) so controversial. If Lee was a white man bedding a bunch of women and then murdering two of them, it would be a Harry Crews novel. Vian however spins the tables, serving up a tale of a violent, lustful black man out for revenge, one that horrifies and yet draws us in, convincing a repulsed and outraged public to keep on reading. Ultimately the joke is on us. We are thinking of racial injustice, clinging to the social message seemingly contained within the book, and yet it is the titillating bits – the sex and death – that keep us reading. Swift would’ve been proud.

DIR: Johnathan de Vries / SA / 2003 / 52min

ENCOUNTERS 2003 AUDIENCE AWARD WINNER

Cape Town and Havana may lie longitudes apart, but both are melting pot ports where sailors, soldiers, traders and slaves have created a fabulous mix of religions and cultures. Historian and musician Vincent Kolbe and jazz legend, the late Robbie Jansen, travel from the Cape to Cuba to explore the island’s rich musical heritage and share with it some of their own city’s eclectic cultural treasures. The film follows Jansen as he takes his sax on a tour of Havana’s parks, streets, jazz clubs and studios to meet and jam with the city’s finest soundsmiths. The result is a highly entertaining introduction to Cuban music – past, present and future – and a deeply personal account of Jansen rediscovering his own wellsprings of creative inspiration.

Courtesy of Idol Pictures

IN MEMORY OF ROBBIE JANSEN
CAPE TOWN LABIA: SUN 15 / 4.30pm + Q&A

it is so startling to see yourself somewhere you are not
so slippy
in my sleep
i am that dancing girl
in the weimar nightclub
and i buzz with black holes
between the nest of swinging cliches
dietrich’s smile
kurt weill refrains
bauhaus lines
they’re all unravelled, sucked away
and i’m left with only questions
to clothe her dancing bones

so who was she?
and what was her name?
what was her favourite food?
colour?
how did she move?
was she a good dancer?
where did she work?
was she in love?
was she lonely?
did she have a brother in the army? a lover?
as she donned that “vaterland” hat, did her chest swell with pride
or was it just the dress code?
where was she in 5 years’ time?
did she have any children? grandchildren? where are they now?
do they also look like me?
more and more questions
and all from just a 1-and-a-half second cutaway to anonymous archive in
a lousy louise brooks documentary
i feel dizzy
eisenstein was right
montage is dangerous.

By Jonah Lehrer

Money is surprisingly bad at making us happy. Once we escape the trap of poverty, levels of wealth have an extremely modest impact on levels of happiness, especially in developed countries. Even worse, it appears that the richest nation in history – 21st century America – is slowly getting less pleased with life. (Or as the economists behind this recent analysis concluded: “In the United States, the [psychological] well-being of successive birth-cohorts has gradually fallen through time.”)

Needless to say, this data contradicts one of the central assumptions of modern society, which is that more money equals more pleasure. That’s why we work hard, fret about the stock market and save up for that expensive dinner/watch/phone/car/condo. We’ve been led to believe that dollars are delight in a fungible form.

But the statistical disconnect between money and happiness raises a fascinating question: Why doesn’t money make us happy? One intriguing answer comes from a new study by psychologists at the University of Liege, published in Psychological Science. The scientists explore the “experience-stretching hypothesis,” an idea first proposed by Daniel Gilbert. He explains “experience-stretching” with the following anecdote:

I’ve played the guitar for years, and I get very little pleasure from executing an endless repetition of three-chord blues. But when I first learned to play as a teenager, I would sit upstairs in my bedroom happily strumming those three chords until my parents banged on the ceiling…Doesn’t it seem reasonable to invoke the experience-stretching hypothesis and say that an experience that once brought me pleasure no longer does? A man who is given a drink of water after being lost in the Mojave Desert may at that moment rate his happiness as eight. A year later, the same drink might induce him to feel no better than a two.

What does experience-stretching have to do with money and happiness? The Liege psychologists propose that, because money allows us to enjoy the best things in life – we can stay at expensive hotels and eat exquisite sushi and buy the nicest gadgets – we actually decrease our ability to enjoy the mundane joys of everyday life. (Their list of such pleasures includes ”sunny days, cold beers, and chocolate bars”.) And since most of our joys are mundane – we can’t sleep at the Ritz every night – our ability to splurge actually backfires. We try to treat ourselves, but we end up spoiling ourselves.

The study itself is straightforward. The psychologists gathered 351 adult employees of the University of Liège, from custodial staff to senior administrators, for an online survey. (I should note that it remains unclear whether happiness and other aspects of well-being can be meaningfully measured with a multiple choice test. So caveats apply.) The scientists primed the subjects by showing them a stack of Euro bills before asking them a bunch of questions which attempted to capture their “savoring ability.” Here’s how the savoring test worked:

Participants are asked to imagine finishing an important task (contentment), spending a romantic weekend away (joy), or discovering an amazing waterfall while hiking (awe). Each scenario is followed by eight possible reactions, including the four savoring strategies referred to in the introduction (i.e., displaying positive emotions, staying present, anticipating or reminiscing about the event, and telling other people about the experience). Participants are required to select the response or responses that best characterize what their typical behavior in each situation would be, and receive 1 point for each savoring strategy selected.

Interestingly, the scientists found that people in the wealth condition – they’d been primed with all those Euros – had significantly lower savoring scores. This suggests that simply looking at money makes us less interested in relishing the minor pleasures of life. Furthermore, subjects who made more money in real life – the scientists asked all subjects for their monthly income – scored significantly lower on the savoring test. A subsequent experiment duplicated this effect among Canadian students, who spent less time savoring a chocolate bar after being shown a picture of Canadian dollars. The psychologists end on a bleak note:

Taken together, our findings provide evidence for the provocative notion that having access to the best things in life may actually undermine one’s ability to reap enjoyment from life’s small pleasures. Our research demonstrates that a simple reminder of wealth produces the same deleterious effects as actual wealth on an individual’s ability to savor, suggesting that perceived access to pleasurable experiences may be sufficient to impair everyday savoring. In other words, one need not actually visit the pyramids of Egypt or spend a week at the legendary Banff spas in Canada for one’s savoring ability to be impaired—simply knowing that these peak experiences are readily available may increase one’s tendency to take the small pleasures of daily life for granted.

This makes me think of the Amish. From a certain perspective, the Amish live without a lot of the stuff most of us consider essential. They don’t use cars, reject the Internet, avoid the mall, and prefer a quiet permanence to hefty bank accounts. The end result, however, is a happiness boom. When asked to rate their life satisfaction on a scale of 1 to 10, the Amish are as satisfied with their lives as members of the Forbes 400. There are, of course, many ways to explain the contentment of the Amish. (The community has strong ties, plenty of religious faith and stable families, all of which reliably correlate with high levels of well-being.) But I can’t help wonder if part of their happiness is related to experience-stretching. They don’t fret about getting the latest iPhone, or eating at the posh new restaurant, or buying the au courant handbag. The end result, perhaps, is that the Amish are better able to enjoy what really matters, which is all the stuff money can’t buy.

first published on wired.com

Mic Substance – Fungwa Uhuru (inkululeko yengqondo)

Released and distributed by Ntyilo Ntyilo Edutainment
ntyilontyilo@gmail.com
074 468 6185/ 074 060 1137

by peter kirwan

To understand what the web has done for free speech, it’s necessary to think about how Natalya Gorbanevskaya and her fellow dissidents produced 65 issues of the samizdat publication Chronicle Of Current Events in the Soviet Union between 1968 and 1983.
Censoring the web poses a significant challenge to authoritarian rulers everywhere, and often involves fine-grained judgment calls.

The Soviet state controlled access to printing presses and photocopiers. So when it was time to publish, Gorbanebskaya would tap out six identical copies of Chronicle on a controband typewriter. Next, she distributed these editions to six friends, who would, in turn, type out further copies before distributing them to additional readers.

Distribution was slow and extremely risky. Like dozens of others involved in the production of Chronicle, Gorbanevskaya was arrested by the 9th Division of the Fifth Chief Directorate of the KGB, which was specifically charged with rooting out samizdat. In 1969, she was diagnosed as a schizophrenic and confined to a mental hospital for three years.

Today, there are only two countries in the world where censorship-induced paralysis exists on anything like a comparable scale: Burma and North Korea. Everywhere else, the terms of trade between free speech and censorship have improved since the Cold War.

Technology has been responsible for most, perhaps all, of this improvement. Behaving like water, information on the web always seeks the largest possible audience. In doing so, it continues to exert pressure on the adamantine surface of oppression.

The experience of Iran suggests that the results can be significant. The Berkmann Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University suggests that 35,000 regularly-updated blogs are written in Arabic worldwide. Yet a separate Berkmann study suggests that as many as 70,0000 active blogs are written in Farsi.

According to Technorati, the lingua franca of the Islamic Republic of Iran — spoken by an estimated 75m people worldwide — ranks among the web’s top 10 most popular blogging languages.

“If you look around the Arab world,” one member of Dubai’s digerati told me during a visit to the emirate last week, “you’ll see that blogging and social media is taking off fastest where repression is most severe.”

It’s also true that censoring the web poses a significant challenge to authoritarian rulers everywhere. Unlike the Soviet drive to wipe out samizdat publishers, it often involves fine-grained judgment calls.

The Chinese government, for example, recognizes that the web can keep its citizens entertained (and therefore quiescent). It also recognizes that web access — and the accompanying access to ideas and inspiration — is an indispensable driver of economic growth. Under these circumstances, deciding what to censor can become difficult and expensive.

In many cases, the playing field is more level than it was for Natalya Gorbanevskaya. Measures call forth counter-measures. In Beijing, on 15 June, for example, 2.3m soldiers in the People’s Liberation Army were banned from blogging. Yet in Paris, ten days later, the advocacy group Reporters Without Borders set up a virtual private network designed for journalists, bloggers and dissidents who wish to evade eavesdropping.

In addition, it’s nice to imagine — as Clay Shirky did last week at the Guardian’s Activate conference — that dissidents hold a trump card: the absence of hubris. Power tends to make rulers “certain of what will happen next”, said Shirky. As a result, rulers “try fewer things” than dissidents, who excel in terms of creativity. Meanwhile, as Shirky argues, “the wiring of the population” is “complete to the first degree”. Even North Korea has a mobile phone network.

But what happens when information, like water, does its work? What happens when barriers to free expression come crashing down?

Westerners typically envisage free expression being accompanied by profound political consequences. From the English Civil War to the French Revolution, the model for this kind of transition feels deeply familiar.

But is this model applicable everywhere? What, for example, will happen when the voices on the other side of content-filtering walls become too loud in a place like Dubai?

A US-friendly emirate in a strategic location, Dubai’s social and cultural norms are rooted in the past. Everything else about the city, including its rampant consumerism, is predicated upon fast-forwarding to the century’s end.

Like governments everywhere, Dubai’s government operates in the present tense. Not surprisingly, perhaps, it’s described by the OpenNet Initiative as an “extensive” censor of the web. The authorities block any web site deemed to be “inconsistent” with the government’s “religious, cultural, political and moral values”.

In practice, this means difficulties for sites that specialize in nudity, sex, dating, gambling, religion, alcohol, drugs, anonymizer tools and VoIP applications. For its part, traditional media censors itself, wary of selective enforcement of draconian laws.

The society on which bloggers and journalists pass comment rests on a series of significant fault lines. In a city of 1.7 million , for example, four out of five inhabitants are migrant workers, many of whom live in conditions described by Human Rights Watch as “less than human”.

At street-level, Dubai is a city of Pakistanis, Indians, Chinese and Iranians. Only in comfortable air-conditioned offices and hotels does the emirate suddenly become Arabic. When wealthy local women go shopping, indentured servants trail behind them, carrying their bags. The glittering shopping malls they patronize are studded with prayer rooms for spiritual contemplation.

To western eyes, the contradictory feudalism of Dubai is disorienting. Last week, a taxi driver from Peshawar who drove me around the city hinted at the tensions that exist beneath the surface. “The locals are good for only three things,” he told me dismissively. “They eat, they sleep and have sex.”

You won’t hear such criticism of Dubai’s ruling class on the airwaves or in print. Yet technology enables their expression around the fringes of public life. James Piecowye, an expat Canadian who hosts a radio talk show in Dubai, tells a story that captures the fragility of censorship in a society that isn’t accustomed to speaking its mind.

Recently, Piecowye was talking live, on air, about “something that couldn’t be said” because of the emirate’s media laws. At this point, he received a text message from a listener that read as follows: “We know what you’re trying to say, so why don’t you just SAY it!!”

Dubai isn’t a failed state, or a famine-wracked totalitarian basket case. Among those born in the emirate, life expectancy is 78 years. Slightly less than 90 percent of the local population can read and write. Yet the natives of Dubai live their long and literate lives in a society where public debate is frequently non-existent.

In places like this, much the web’s leveling work remains to be done, with consequences that remain unpredictable.

this article first appeared on wired.com

“Out, damned spot…”
Blood is thicker than water. And it stays under your nails.

I only saw Aryan Kaganof’s short film “The Promise of Water” once, about two years ago, and I don’t recall many specific details, although I have listened to the eponymous Angels of Light song that provides the soundtrack many times before and after seeing it. The sense I got at the time of viewing was that the film concerned moral neurosis. To me, it expressed a desperate thirst for redemption, along with an abject knowledge that all the water in the world can never be enough to wash away the stains from a guilt-ridden conscience.

Deepened by the slow, menacing chanting which propels the song, the film’s drone of internal anxiety felt relentless. In the imagery of running water I saw a restlessness of the spirit rather than revival. The woman’s drinking and smoking were morbid physical manifestations of inner pollution, which provided no relief beyond surface distraction.

Trapped between denial of conscience – “there’s nothing to fear because nothing here’s real” – and dread of the dark repercussions of sins past – vengeance from those wronged – transcendence or separation from the degeneracy is not possible. “They live in your head and they travel your veins”…”Let their hate fill your mouth”… The horror is embedded within, deterministically, at a cellular level. With every breath it is sustained. “If you kill them enough they will look just like us”. There is no distance between “them” and “us” – brutalising another brutalises us. Rational apprehension is drowned out, drains away, surrendered in a flood of dumb terror and compassion. One is forced to go with the flow and submit – “Just as it was is just how it will be”. “The promise of water”, of escape and absolution from this violence, is a delirious mirage.

I experienced the film in its entirety as a meditation on the inescapable weight on the spirit of a sense of culpability: as a quietly chilling commentary on living with the legacy of racist oppression in South Africa, but also as a species of morality tale, one bearing a more universal meaning about the toxicity of guilt on a personal level.