kagablog

Who would have believed it was possible to shoot a full-length feature film on a cellphone? Well, it’s now been done, and for the first time in the world.

The “bad boy” of South African cinema, Aryan Kaganof, shot SMS Sugar man entirely on Sony Ericsson W900i cellphones. Withdrawn from last year’s National Festival of the Arts, the controversial film had its premiere this year in Grahamstown.

The grainy, pixelated, night-time footage fits perfectly with the theme of a pimp, played by Aryan himself, and his “sugars” – prostitutes – as he hooks them up with “wallets” – men who are paying lots of money for sex.
It all takes place on Christmas eve, on the sleazy streets of Hillbrow. The sugars dabble with drugs as they cruise around in a 1966 Valiant ‘Valaza’, and of course, there is lots of sex. But there is also romance … and lots of chatting on cellphones!

This uniquely South African film stars, among others, John Matshikiza, Luthuli Dlamini, Jerry Mofokeng and Julius Moeletsi.

“I thought cinema in South Africa wasn’t the appropriate medium to represent who we are, as it is a mostly white thing. Then it struck me that a medium that Africans love more than any other is the cellphone,” said Aryan.

Shot in just 12 days, the whole film cost less than R1 million rand to produce, just a fraction of the R6 million that many low-budget local films cost. Hollywood pictures usually cost about R50 million and often go up to R100 million.

Graphics and special effects editor Jurgen Meekel believes that SMS Sugar man will revolutionize the future of film-making. “I think it will democratize film-making. After this film, no one can say that they cannot make a film because they don’t have the equipment,” said Jurgen.

Cinematographer Eran Tahor agreed: “I think that in South Africa, which offers great stories and great locations, but hardly any budget for films, nor distribution, this approach will stimulate others to make their films.”
Ster-Kinekor is distributing SMS Sugar man, and it will also be available on DVD soon.

For details, check http://kaganof.com/kagablog/category/films/sms-sugar-man/

derek davey

this article first appeared in the daily sun on friday 11 july 2008

Little flea
Why do you bear the weight of the world on your shoulders?
You are only one flea
In a huge flea circus
And anyway, the ringmaster has gone AWOL
With all that weight,
Little flea,
How
Are
You
Going
to juuuuuuump?

I’m dreaming that there’s a ship sinking offshore. I’m on the beach and I can see there are many people who will drown when the stricken ship finally sinks. But the sea is a tossing torment of seething grey. I want to dive in but I’m too weak, too sick. If I am not whole and healthy, if I can’t save myself, how can I save others?

I’m dreaming that I’m on holiday somewhere in South America. Somehow I get caught up in a civil war … I’m thrown into a makeshift prison created from bombed-out houses, along with thousands of locals who were on the ‘wrong side’. Women are raped, the non-morality of war, men’s worst demons, are loosed. They revel in their freedom.
The war lines shift, and we are forced into a massive boat, which is to take us to another prison. After a time, this ship also begins to sink, and we have to swim to shore.
One of our fellows is falling behind. I turn back to fetch him. So does another guy. The two of us swim, using one arm each, holding the poor chap with our other arms. Later, when we look back, he has died. We debate bringing the corpse with us, as a decoy for the sharks. But we decide that if we release him when a shark arrives, his blood will summon other sharks. So we let him go, hoping that when the sharks that find him, he will be far away.

Some of us make it to the shore, days later. More rubble, more bombed out buildings. One of the locals is able to converse with a soldier, who gives him a packet of biscuits. He returns to share the packet. I haven’t eaten for so long that as I attempt to swallow, I’m simultaneously drooling and trying not to puke. My stomach doesn’t know what food is anymore. It’s a tiny, shrivelled nut. I heave and swallow, swallow and heave.
I’m dreaming that my comfortable bourgous world, with its DVD player, hot bath and heater has been shattered by a cold, stormy sea. By a world short of energy, food, water and ideas. We don’t know how to live with each other. Our leaders have grabbed it all for themselves, they are gangsters, they have failed us. The money I hold in my hand feels taut and stretched. There is so much need attached to it. Later, it’s not worth a damn thing.

Then in my dreaming I meet a woman, who tells me of a land where honour still exists. Where the desperation of tiny resources just brings people closer together, instead of bickering over the scraps. Where the old are revered, not victims. Where children eat first, or, if the rations are short that day, they are the only ones to eat. Where foreigners are guests and welcomed into homes. Where the consciousness of animals, trees, objects … even utensils … is acknowledged.

I awake. I’m hoping that the first part of this dream is only a dream, not a premonition. I will strive to make the last bit of this dream - finding this community - a reality.

What is a wild white?
Does it come out at night?
When it drinks of this wine,
Does it then like to fight?
Why would it shop at Woolworths?
To give the patrons a fright?
One wonders if this is its means of delight …

Mike Makotoko and Mak Manaka doing poems at a Likwid Tongue open mike session in Newtown, Jozi, South Africa.

Likwid Tongue is a hot and happening poetry collective, which hosts charity poetry shows and writing and theatre workshops for kids

In the Joburg Inner City.

Anton barfed
Dick laughed
Suchoon Mo
Bumped his toe

Mick was all laconic
Kerkhof smelt alcoholic
When Helge got too obscure
Cecilia had to draw the cure

Danila felt inspired
Cherry Bomb got too wired
Jimmy’s rage fell off the pages
Mia smiled for the first time in ages

And the dish got un-pc with the spoon

Jesus, Allah, Buddha, Krisna.
When a loved one lies dying
We call these names
To ease their passing, to comfort ourselves.
For death is as much about the living as the dying;
Relationships shift and change,
Both inside and between people.
We don’t know who hears our pleas
I mean, how do you talk to a god?
Do you pray, do you meditate,
Do you send out good intentions?
Do these names resonate somewhere …
Is a heavenly eye cast in our direction?

Death comes for the dying, like a dog to its evening bowl,
Hungry, expectant, confident.
It adheres to the living in the vicinity
It fills your aura and lives in your dreams
You can see signs of it in the sky and birds and sea.
But, for all that, death is not to be feared.
It’s just the flipside that comes with every single.
What else do we really expect, when we tire of living?
Only modern man has pushed it aside;
We assume our medicines will keep us going indefinitely.
Death, like our horses, cows and pigs
Used to live in every household;
It was never far away, from our minds or our lives.
Festivals were held in its honour:
It had a face, a name, a character.
Death was respected. It was present.

Once, I cornered a mongoose in a tree
It stared straight back at me
There was no fear in its level gaze -
If I was its death standing before it
I was neither welcomed nor rejected,
I had simply come there on that day.

Does a mountain fear death?
When it opens a grassy eye,
What does it muse when it surveys
The brief lives that flicker on and off,
Death-life, life-death,
Upon its slopes?

A samurai contemplates his death
Every day.

How many times the toothbrush
Has scraped my pearlies bare
How many times the kick-drum
Compliments the snare

How many blinks the eyelid
Between the movie scenes
How many times have I forgot
The message in my dreams

How many times my feet have trod
On dust and grass and stone
The flexing of the tendons
The weight upon the bone.

How many strokes of beaten meat
And fantasies enacted
How many surreal partners
Pleasured forward, and then backward

How many times my heart has beat
In fear and joy and wonder
How many times will my chest rise
Before this flesh has done its time
And off my errant spirit flies …

How many times
will my soul find
These vessels
for these lessons?

How many times the sweetness
How many times the pain
How many times the sunshine
How many times the rain.

I’m dancing wildly to the music, along with a bunch of equally crazy, smiling folk, under a half-moon and clouds lit by the city’s lights. I feel my belly expand and my breath goes right down. The band’s singer, Algerian-born Fethi Tabet, seems to feel it too; he’s making motions across his stomach and saying something about ‘spirit, spirit’, in French.

It occurs to me that music is a true vehicle to gain freedom, even if only temporarily. During the two hour concert there is only positive vibration. For those two hours we defeated all the shit outside, all the price increases, the rampant crime, the pollution, the chaos.

We are held by the music … in our elation, our celebration of life. We show off to each other, we play with our beauty and revel in the talents of our bodies as we waltz, polka and tango together.

The music holds us. We swim in it, we bathe in it. We are part of the river of music that has always been there, since our hearts began beating as a species and we started knocking things together to mimic the heartbeat rhythm. I look down at my footprints in the dirt dance-floor and I wonder how many of my footprints have been made to music and dance.

Shortly before the concert I watched the movie Favela Rising. Set in the extremely violent Vigario Geral slum in Rio de Janiero, early 1990s, it’s about the AfroReggae movement, led by Anderson Sa. The movement provides music and dance as positive alternatives to the slum’s kids, who until then could only work for gangs to acquire status and respect.

It’s an epic battle of good and evil, or as I prefer to see it, harmony versus discord. Roots culture - music, dance, art, story-telling and group participation in these activities - in these are harmony.

Western culture and globalization has divorced people from these structures, offering in their place discord: materialism, corruption, addiction to sex and drugs, gangsterism, the macho ethic, the myth of the individual.

Favela Rising talks about the Shiva effect: how transformation follows chaos, or how chaos is created in order for light to shine from the darkness. How the stronger the darkness/chaos/discord, the purer the light and harmony that arise from it. Anderson and AfroReggae are fantastically clear in their thinking, in their message, in their fearlessness, in their example.

There is more music in the world today than there has ever been. We can all tap into this harmony. The present discord is massive and global, but this can only create stronger light. There is no need for fear. The Shiva effect is here.

The act of producing a plastic bottle,
the contents of which are consumed in five minutes
- but the bottle takes 10 000 years to biodegrade -
must rate as short-sightedness in the extreme.

Its part of an arrogance
Inherited from the conquistadors
That the world is an endless backyard
There for the taking
Which can be forever dumped in

What can we conquer now
As we spin around in the Gore
Of our trash vortex
But this way of thinking?

There is always this image associated with nature that it’s perfect. Animals and plants fit seamlessly together into these ancient eco-systems, and only humans don’t know how to fit in, what to do with themselves or how to stop fucking this harmony up.

So it was quite encouraging to see this hapless male weaver bird not getting it right. There is a river at the bottom of my garden where I like to sit and have a quiet smoke, and I couldn’t help noticing this poor little critter, busy creating his useless nests, year after year. Every spring he builds four or five nests in a tree on my bank of the river and every spring, the female weavers reject his labours without fail.

Some of the nests are really well built, some are patchy affairs. The little dude is really active about promoting his works, good or bad, to the females. Advertising is not his weak suit. But time and again, they come to inspect the nests, quite reluctantly it seems, and then fly off, leaving him desperately twittering and bouncing up and down on the twiggy branches. Wifeless, eggless, futureless, hopeless. But still optimistic.

Across the river, on the opposite bank, other male weavers have established successful homes for their broods several times. It would appear that all this dude has to do it fly across river and set up some female-luring nests there. But he’s a stubborn character, and somehow he’s got it into his head that this tree will become the next weaver bird haven, if only the females would see some sense.

There are certain patterns in my head which repeat themselves: like records with grooves, which get deeper each time the needle gets stuck in them. Psychologists call these lacunae. I’ve learned, over time, to accept that if I return to these scars and pick at the scabs, they bleed.

So I circumnavigate around these painful areas in the psyche. Some wounds just never heal, I guess. But I never give up hope that one day, I’ll find a fresh path in there, or that I’ll be armed with some new knowledge, and when I leave … the wounds will disappear. And when my guard is down, I find myself back there, fiddling and picking at the wound. Like that weaver bird. Eternally optimistic. Never learning.

Ah, well. At least nature also fucks it up sometimes.

‘n Soutpiel wou opkook
‘n lewende kunsboek
Wat mens in die mag skop
Dinge laat staan op hul kop

Hy kom toe uit by ‘n weerhaakse roof
En ‘n ou dronklap nou-nugter
‘n Karoo-deurdrenkte-digter
Wat direk na die hart praat
Met hand volle trane …

En toe wonder hy,
Is dit nie meer die ware
Is dit nou die stem
Wat hul noem Afrikaner?

MUSICIAN Andy Palacio may be gone, but his music won’t be forgotten that easily.
Palacio, an iconic musician and cultural activist in his native Belize, was an passionate spokesman for the Garifuna people of Central America. He was laid to rest few days ago.
He died from a massive stroke to the brain, a heart attack and respiratory failure due to the previous two conditions.
Palacio (47), started feeling poorly and visited a doctor with complaints of dizziness and blurred vision.
The reaction has been strong around the world.
The past year had been one of tremendous accomplishment for Palacio. His album Wátina, under Phuthumayo World Music, was released at the beginning of last year. It had become one of the most critically-acclaimed recordings of the year in any genre.
Perhaps the most unanimously revered world music album in recent memory, Wátina,appeared on dozens of Best of the Year lists in major media outlets around the globe and was praised everywhere.
Last year Palacio was named a UNESCO Artist for Peace and won the prestigious WOMEX Award. Wátina was also nominated for the BBC Radio 3 World Music Awards.
In Belize, the international success of Wátina has sparked a revival of Garifuna music, as young musicians were inspired by Palacio’s example.
Even in the days since Palacio’s health crisis began, the accolades have continued to pour in for his work.
Palacio became a leading figure in a growing renaissance of young Garifuna intellectuals who were writing poetry and songs in their native language.
An upbeat dance form based on Garifuna rhythms has become known as “punta rock”.

We are a long-lived species. Compared to us, the life of a bird is fleeting, transient. We must appear to birds as mammoths, wading through a swamp in slow motion.

It’s difficult to know where to draw the line, in processes which take a long time. If you are lying in bed on a cold winter morning and your bladder is full, you know that the coldness must win, because the bladder pain will only increase. You can delay the decision, but eventually you must take it.

But getting old is a different matter. You might think now, while you are still relatively healthy, that you would never allow yourself the indignity of being unable to survive without a handful of pills a day, the pacemaker that ensures your heartbeat never goes over a certain rate, your caretakers who bring you meals and change your sheets. Having a piss has become something you dread, it’s an agonizing process that can take over half an hour. If the wife leaves you for even a minute, panic sets in because you can’t remember how you got here, even if you have been here a thousand times before. You can’t hear or see or digest properly. Nothing makes sense in the outside world and you can’t follow a movie plot on TV; nature channels and classical CDs are your only solace.

You might ask a friend while you are still in your forties or fifties, that should you get to this stage, won’t they please come and blow out your brains with a twelve-bore shotgun, end the agony, the senselessness, the burden of it all. But where do you draw the line? When which senses fail? When you can’t run, can’t walk far, or can’t walk at all?

Historically, it couldn’t have been easy for the Germans in the 1930s, watching the gradual erosion of the human rights of the Jews and the slowly increasing attitude of aggression to neighbouring countries, then the rest of the world.

At what point do you leave the comfort of your home and work to head out for an unknown shore? My father left what was then Rhodesia, the country he absolutely loved, when, in a 1970s ‘election’, the whites voted resoundingly for Ian Smith yet again, squashing any hopes of conciliation or real change. His brother only left last year, by the skin of his teeth. He judged it finely. The money he got for his house was worth what a simple operation cost another relative, who stayed.

Since the election of Zuma to the top position of in the ANC, many so-called whites are discussing with added zeal the possibility of emigrating. At what point does anyone with the means to, decide this is no longer the place they want to bring up their kids? When rapes go from one every six minutes, to one every three minutes? When power outages occur not once a day, but twice a day, as they already do in Nelspruit? When the press is openly muzzled? How much do you let yourself get used to?

A study I did on battered women revealed that the final straw, which made them decide to finally leave the abusive partner, could be almost anything. It could be that hubby hit the kids, or was drunk again for the thousandth time, or simply forgot to pay the maid. The decision was based on past events and the accumulation of resentments that suddenly added up, and needed only this or that catalyst to spark a new chain of events and actions, which resolved the situation for once and for all.

The mammoths chew their cud slowly, plodding forward together. The sound of cud-chewing mingles with that of the grass brushing their limbs, and those of their fellows, reassuringly. Where to turn now, for better feeding, they wonder? The collective mind answers: there are no correct choices, only better or worse ones.

When I moved up to Joburg in 1990 to make my fortune as a musician I was pretty much unaware of how dangerous it could be, and my combination of ignorance and arrogance placed me in violent situations quite often. For example, just showing the finger to a motorist resulted in a gun being shoved into my face by an irate off-duty cop. I had to learn what was acceptable Joburg behaviour, where was safe, and when. Along the way I picked up a fair amount of bruises.

One new year’s eve, the band I was playing in at the time played a gig at the Black Sun in Yeoville. After the gig I passed out in the car outside. Band members woke me up in the early hours of morning to pack up our music equipment. I stumbled upstairs to fetch my drumkit, totally unaware of what was happening around me.

We found out later that somebody was busy selling coke on the premises, which had infuriated the local mafia. They placed some heavies at the door and then proceeded to trash everyone inside.
As I came down the stairwell with some drums in my hand, one of the mafia dudes took a drum out of my hands and hit me on the head with it. I fell down the stairs, and he threw the drum after me, and then ran down the stairs and leapt onto my face. I had a clear imprint of the sole of his shoe on my cheek afterwards.
A couple of them then proceeded to kick the shit out of me as I lay there, until my girlfriend, god bless her tiny cotton socks, managed to argue her way past the dudes at the door and pull me to safety.
One the band members had his eardrum damaged by the mafia in the attack, and he decided to sue them for damages. It then turned out the guy he was pressing charges against had about a zillion assault charges against him, so they offered us all bribes if we would keep our mouths shut. Not wanting to invoke the ire of the mafia, we agreed and collected the cash from them, ironically, in the very halls of justice themselves.
We were never certain if the attack that followed a few weeks later was organized by the mafia or not. I was busy sleeping at the time (yes, I used to pass out quite a lot) when a group of people walked past our house and broke off the arial of our car. My mates, who were sitting on the balcony, took exception to this and one of them ran out with a broken baseball bat to challenge them.
They decided to feed the baseball bat to him … and entered our house in a fury. I awoke to screams and the sound of shattering glass, pretty terrifying, as I had no idea of what was going on. I ran to the band room and locked it, before they could get in there and destroy our music equipment. They found a broomstick in the kitchen and broke it over the head of the guy who had run out with the baseball bat, until it was in tiny pieces. He needed about 60 stitches. Apparently one of the crowd was a woman, who had flung bricks around our house! Nice people, the Joneses ..
Not long after this, I had an argument with my girlfriend at a club and decided to walk home, something I often did at the time. The club was on Bree Street and I thought I would head for Yeoville to visit a girl there. In my considerably pissed state, I thought it wise to take a shortcut through a narrow alley at three in the morning.
I noticed, off to my right, a dude running towards me in a threatening manner, so I turned towards him, and put up my fists. But he was only meant to distract me, and three or four teenage guys leapt on me from behind. They dragged me into a dark corner, held my arms, and one began hitting me in the face, while another stabbed me in the back repeatedly with a knife. Fortunately I was wearing a leather jacket and the stabs were shallow, probably intended to make me shut up, because I just kept shouting and struggling.
At one point they got me down on the ground and started putting in the boot, and that was when I realized that I might not make it out of this situation alive. Somehow I got to my feet and then I decided to drag the lot of them towards the street I had come off, which had street lights.
Some sort of superhuman strength came over me, because I managed to pull them all with me. One of them tried to get my watch, and another tried to pull off my jacket, but I managed to retain both … and ran towards a couple who were leaving the club and getting into their car. My attackers fled. All I had on me was R40, but there was no way in hell I was going to let those bastards take it! They got nothing from me in the end.
Instead of going back into the club, I carried on walking. Some cops pulled up next to me and asked why I was drenched in blood. I told them what had happened and they drove off. When I got to the flat of my female friend, she wasn’t there, or wouldn’t answer, so I trudged off and broke into a mate’s house. The scar this left, from the window frame, is the only one I still bear, though my face looked like a raw burger patty for weeks …
Since then, I have learned to avoid, or recognize on time, potentially dangerous or violent situations. I did get smacked by a bunch of Lebs because a woman was giving me a blowjob. She had insisted on giving it to me on the bonnet of a car, just a few feet away from her boyfriend, who had passed out in his car.
The Lebs had arrived at the pub with their shirts off and were looking for trouble. When they saw me being pleasured on the car they took exception and came over to see what what was going on. When the woman talked back to them, they hit both of us. Then they began chatting and, for some strange reason, apologized for having hit us. Pretty weird …