kagablog

I mean what tha FUCK!!!!
Suddenly you decide to care…

Care about My feelings..
Babe this is not what it is supposed to be…

According to my world…

And here you are…
Talking to me…
Talking with me….
Listening……
Understanding……..

All….

And still you seem to care…
Whatever I tell you…
Fire at you….

You are still here…

Listening….
And understanding….

Even though you are at least ten years younger…
You seem to understand…

And care…

Well maybe you really are…
Are….

My Angel….

“Where I am, is where I am not, so to speak. Contemporary art practice
and migration has found me travelling.. crossing borders to new places
with new stimuli, creating new identities, finding new ways to
articulate and narrate these stories. Donning different persona to
explore different aspects of art, both audio and visual.” Jimmy Rage

photo gustao zea

I first bumped into Jimmy ‘Wordsworth’ Rage on local
artist-of-all-trades Aryan Kaganof’s labyrinthine arts blog. Rage’s
presence on the colossal stage of the Kagablog, which stretches back
two years, collecting and dispersing thousands of works (film, visual
art, essays, poetry, philosophy and other) and showcasing around 120
contributors from all over this globe of ours, is hard to miss. Which
says a lot. To date Rage has contributed 450 pieces to this cyber soil
which boasts contributions from the likes of legendary film-maker
Peter Whitehead and famed beat poet A.D. Winans, along with a slew of
other artists, musicians and writers, including locally Mphutlane Wa
Bofelo, Warrick Sony, Koos Kombuis, Paul Wessels and Zakes Mda.

Most recently spotted in the latest issue of SA-based art-and-thought
mag Chimurenga, under one of his various pseudonyms, it took some
cross-investigation to establish this to be the same artist whose
music video ‘La Puerta’ currently stalks Youtube. ‘La Puerta’ will be
showcased in August as part of the Latin America show in The Eagle
Rock Art Centre in Los Angeles; mista Rage is currently off to appear in Dutch
artist Dick Tuinder’s film ‘Winterland’.

Jimmy’s art overtakes his art – working within and across a spectrum
of disciplines his output is literally overwhelming. Jimmy Rage has
several tentacles, a clutch of monikers, and a fistful of passports.
His written words, spilling forth, climbing clambering everywhere, are
overtaken by the stronger lines of his heady illustrations and leaps
of paint – buildings growing into the shoulders of soldiers of Future,
ladies standing about carrying cities on their heads, or thrown
asunder bursting in the moons of passion.. all the while his music
dubbing and flowing – If you look over here, you miss what’s swelling
over there..

The eclectic energy of his art, its multifarious nature, is reflected
in his various pseudonyms.. and his inter-national life. As
evocatively recounted in his prose reminiscences, Jimmy was born and
raised in Jamaica. Following his recent return to the soil of his
childhood, after a two decade hiatus, Jimmy recounts, “I saw and felt
my past and ran into that lickle bwoy in his khaki uniform heading for
school, singing about leaving on a jet plane, with red dust in his
lungs and overseas on his mind.”

“It was the returning of my own rooting, my own ground-swell away from
the Euro-peon that haunts my dailies. It [my European life] ceased to
exist and my own brown life floated back like a fairytale with all the
faces appearing like in a dream: flash-back and deja-vu all at once.
The earth smelt the same, the ground gave the same food, and I dreamt
the same things in the house my spirit soared with a thousand and one
metaphors.. It was a long time in coming..”

Following “high school of music and art in New York City, and then
college upstate and California to graduate school”, Jimmy’s various
works have been exhibited/ released from LA to London and Europe.

His intrinsic need to explore the other side of borders, to collect
experiences from other worlds, ultimately seeks to celebrate and
interrogate his heritage. The central thrust of Jimmy Rage’s art is
what he dubs “personal diasporas” – in contemporary reality, no
culture exists in isolation. Jimmy Rage’s thrust is his immersion into
foreign culture, foreign tongue, whilst retaining his cultural source.

“The image of urban scapes projected/introspected into human forms are
a big motif in your visual gestures.. when did you pick up that
thread?”

Jimmy: “My urban landscape began when I came from the bush and went to NYC.
I was overwhelmed by the metaphor of buildings and space, I arrived in
NYC in winter, and the snow and the rain and the skyscrapers blew me
away. Never came down.”

Whilst this writer attempts to project meaning into Jimmy’s voluminous
rage of output, the artist’s works, from dub-inflected song to
towering visuals to the melancholy passion of his inked words, stand
and grow beyond definition..

His latest collection is due next year through Aryan Kaganof’s local
Pine Slopes Publishing:
” Indeed, a book, edited by Kaganof himself, 433 pages – stories,
poems, art, photography, etc.. Truth is there are two books in there –
the classical stories, like the post colonial stories of life in
Jamaica and school and such, Andre Salkey, and VS Naipaul type shit..
and then there is the world of our dailies.. I’m split down the
middle, as usual culling from both angles..”

There are more than two angles to Jimmy Rage’s self, and his art.. and
in the midst of the explosions of his art, beats the Rage:
“..my rage is the metaphor for passion. I’m passionate..or as my
mother puts it, sensitive.. I’m a soldier, on the forefront. A leader
or a diplomat, a preacher or a teacher, a warrior and father, a lover,
and confidant.. As yes I rage against the dying or dimming of the
light.”

i dreamt of you again,
this time you were that young fine thing
on the wings of a butterfly with your eyes
the colour of the sky,
the low light of the horizon slightly pulling your hair just so,
with the leaves of trees rustling in the ease of these beautiful things..

im navigating my eyes to the rise of the day and the sun behind you
turning the clouds into a smile..
i am below in the greenery of trees with the crickets singing in ease
as i compose these simple pieces to assist the gods in their caressed
carelessness.
falling like the cotton clouds into blue..

my murmuring is the ebb and flow
of enforced power to my heart
as i dare to love or give.
as i leave the anchored shore of my own life.. i
see and feel more than i wanna say
be or become.. so i place it right there
in the middle
whispering deep in my own heart
soul..
you fly luv,
fly to the dream of your waking
your shaking and your breaking
the glass half full
half empty..
half moons
and the dark side
coming round.