messy things with words

Self-portrait in infrared (Experimentarium, Copenhagen, 11/12/2011)

2012-02-11T09:30:00.002+02:00

The traveller's songbook #1

2011-11-28T09:31:00.002+02:00

"In the backseat" - Arcade Fire

Nando's does it again

2011-11-25T11:10:00.001+02:00

Taking aim at Africa's dictators.

Home for a bit, Dr Priemesvej, Copenhagen

2011-11-23T18:44:00.006+02:00

Very deep thoughts

2011-11-20T18:33:00.002+02:00

Science offers a different view: The human animal evolved to have the capacity for both good and evil, and it does plenty of both, but there is no hidden hand of universal purpose or consciousness behind what we do, only our own consciousness, our own purpose. Each of us chooses love or hate; we give and we take; we leave our own imprint on our family, our friends, and society. We don't need an eternal and conscious universe to give our lives meaning. Our lives are as meaningful as we make them.

Leonard Mlodinow (basically kicking Deepak Chopra's ass in War of the Worldviews: Science vs Spirituality, p. 62-63, 2011).

Stockholm, 15 November 2011

2011-11-18T19:53:00.003+02:00

Bad man he comin (Mr Cat and the Jackal)

2011-11-03T10:23:00.000+02:00

Tattoos I want

2011-10-26T12:05:00.005+02:00

(I no longer know where I found these, so cannot credit them properly - if you know, please leave a comment and I'll fix.)

Think different (Steve Jobs, 1955-2011)

2011-10-06T14:43:00.004+02:00

Undoubtedly one of the great innovators of our time.

WWJCD

2011-09-06T13:45:00.003+02:00

So I know there's been a glut of funny posters here of late (OK, maybe not a "glut", since "glut" presupposes an excess of material, which is hardly the case around here). But this made me laugh and so here it is.

[via Peonies and Polaroids]

Jozi Neighbourgoods Market

2011-09-05T08:12:00.004+02:00

The Neighbourgoods Market is coming to Jozi, and Starling and Hero will be there on 10 September. See you there!

Two and Five

2011-09-04T22:10:00.003+02:00

(Five Was Not Being Photographed on the day...)

The only thing you remember is your life

2011-08-17T09:47:00.002+02:00

los nacimientos (births)

we will never have any memory of dying.
we were so patient
about our being,
noting down
numbers, days,
years and months,
hair, and the mouths we kiss,
and that moment of dying
we let pass without a note -
we leave it to others as memory,
or we leave it simply to water,
to water, to air, to time.
nor do we even keep
the memory of being born,
although to come into being was tumultuous and new;
and now you don’t remember a single detail
and haven’t kept even a trace
of your first light.
it’s well known that we are born.
it’s well known that in the room
or in the wood
or in the shelter in the fishermen’s quarter
or in the rustling canefields
there is a quite unusual silence,
a grave and wooden moment as
a woman prepares to give birth.
it’s well known that we were all born.
but if that abrupt translation
from not being to existing, to having hands,
to seeing, to having eyes,
to eating and weeping and overflowing
and loving and loving and suffering and suffering,
of that transition, that quivering
of an electric presence, raising up
one body more, like a living cup,
and of that woman left empty,
the mother who is left there in her blood
and her lacerated fullness,
and its end and its beginning, and disorder
tumbling the pulse, the floor, the covers
till everything comes together and adds
one knot more to the thread of life,
nothing, nothing remains in your memory
of the savage sea which summoned up a wave
and plucked a shrouded apple from the tree.
the only thing you remember is your life.

-pablo neruda

[via the littlest]

National Sarcasm Society

2011-08-01T21:15:00.002+02:00

[via Kirtsy, via Piccsy]

The sound of 1999

2011-07-29T07:46:00.003+02:00

This popped up on a playlist the other day, and took me right back to the year 1999. Which got me thinking about the other songs I listened to death in 1999.

There will be a list.

A Mother's Prayer (by Tina Fey)

2011-06-30T19:41:00.003+02:00

First, Lord: No tattoos. May neither Chinese symbol for truth nor Winnie-the-Pooh holding the FSU logo stain her tender haunches.

May she be beautiful but not damaged, for it’s the damage that draws the creepy soccer coach’s eye, not the beauty. When the crystal meth is offered may she remember the parents who cut her grapes in half and stick with beer.

Guide her, protect her:
when crossing the street, stepping onto boats, swimming in the ocean, swimming in pools, walking near pools, standing on the subway platform, crossing 86th Street, stepping off of boats, using mall restrooms, getting on and off escalators, driving on country roads while arguing, leaning on large windows, walking in parking lots, riding Ferris wheels, roller-coasters, log flumes, or anything called “Hell Drop,” “Tower of Torture,” or “The Death Spiral Rock ‘N Zero G Roll featuring Aerosmith,” and standing on any kind of balcony ever, anywhere, at any age.

Lead her away from acting but not all the way to finance. Something where she can make her own hours but still feel intellectually fulfilled and get outside sometimes and not have to wear high heels. What would that be, Lord? Architecture? Midwifery? Golf course design? I’m asking You, because if I knew, I’d be doing it, Youdammit.

May she play the drums to the fiery rhythm of her own heart with the sinewy strength of her own arms, so she need Not Lie With Drummers.

Grant her a Rough Patch from twelve to seventeen. Let her draw horses and be interested in Barbies for much too long, For childhood is short – a tiger flower blooming magenta for one day – And adulthood is long and dry-humping in cars will wait.

O Lord, break the Internet forever, that she may be spared the misspelled invective of her peers and the online marketing campaign for Rape Hostel V: Girls Just Wanna Get Stabbed.

And when she one day turns on me and calls me a Bitch in front of Hollister, give me the strength, Lord, to yank her directly into a cab in front of her friends, for I will not have that shit. I will not have it.

And should she choose to be a mother one day, be my eyes, Lord, that I may see her, lying on a blanket on the floor at 4:50 A.M., all-at-once exhausted, bored, and in love with the little creature whose poop is leaking up its back. “My mother did this for me once,” she will realize as she cleans feces off her baby’s neck. “My mother did this for me.” And the delayed gratitude will wash over her as it does each generation and she will make a mental note to call me. And she will forget. But I’ll know, because I peeped it with Your God eyes.

[Via Peonies and Polaroids]

Movies

2011-06-23T12:33:00.004+02:00

Nowadays I hardly ever manage to finish watching a movie. Short attention span, or something. But this was on the telly last week sometime, and I found it so charming that I watched the whole thing... I do like Dave Eggers. Maybe that's why.

Turn me on (The Grates)

2011-06-23T10:34:00.001+02:00

Dad

2011-06-23T07:35:00.005+02:00

So I realise Father's Day is past (and my dad's not into it, anyway), but still...

Dad, you're awesome, and we're lucky.

Dear Persephone

2011-06-10T12:52:00.002+02:00

Aren't you ever so pretty?

(My upcycle, made by Starling & Hero, whose online shop is now officially open for business.)

Pumped up kicks (Foster the people)

2011-06-09T20:37:00.003+02:00

A supercatchy song to dance to late at night in your bedroom when the temperature is below zero and you think it may in fact be warmer outside than inside your house.

Try it. I'm just saying.

Starling & Hero featured in Elle Deco (June/July 2011)

2011-06-07T19:45:00.003+02:00

The WTF poster

2011-06-03T10:35:00.001+02:00

[via Minga, where there are more]

& thanks to Emile

VCR (The xx)

2011-05-21T09:40:00.002+02:00

So much in love with this band at the moment.

Beautiful ad campaign for books

2011-05-21T09:34:00.002+02:00

[Via Black+Eiffel, where you can also read more about the campaign]

Kissing you

2011-05-21T09:31:00.001+02:00

Kissing you,
I think,
would be like
eating perfume:

without weight,
but still a mouthful.

More Starling & Hero

2011-03-31T12:12:00.000+02:00

The Starling & Hero Bicycle Company has been busy....

Click

here

for an interview with Emile that appeared on the website of the glossy lifestyle and design magazine Visi (hey! he's even on the front page today), and

here

and

here

for two posts about S&H on alternativelycampaign -- a project that's all about good transport habits in South Africa.

Scenes from our favourite songs

2011-03-25T13:33:00.000+02:00

Organised by my talented sis Thalea.

Earth Hour 2011: Beyond the hour

2011-03-25T13:26:00.001+02:00

26 March 2011, 20:30-21:30
And after that...
Get a bike.
Ride it.

Farewell Syd

2011-03-24T11:33:00.000+02:00

Syd Kitchen at Poetry Africa, 2007.

May you go well, Syd.

[Photo from Poetry Africa]

Starling & Hero in Voila!

2011-03-20T07:32:00.000+02:00

Starling and Hero features in the March edition of Voila! magazine. Click on the picture to read more.

Wishlist

2011-03-17T13:13:00.000+02:00

My new obsession is owning one of these old-school Diana cameras.

[Image from here]

Reading

2011-03-17T12:19:00.000+02:00

Reader Digest

2011-03-14T08:48:00.000+02:00

Open publication - Free publishing - More chapbook

Reader Digest is a free e-chapbook of poetry and recipes, compiled by Pravasan Pillay and Victoria Williams, and featuring 13 poets from 5 different countries. Poets were asked to pair their poems with a suitable recipe and the result is a deliciously good read. The poets are: Philip Burton, John L. Cope, Gary Cummiskey, Heshel Heller, Eva Jackson, Anton Krueger, Haidee Kruger, Joan McNerney, Jacob Kobina Ayiah Mensah, Joanna O’Connor, V.W. Sparkes, Pȁr Svensson and Adam Taylor.

Published by one of my favourite indie outfits, Tearoom Books. (As always, the design is beautiful.)

Read the e-book by clicking on the image above. You can also download the e-chapbook from here.

Nailcolour for the indecisive

2011-03-09T08:41:00.000+02:00

Starling and Hero over at Beatnik Bazaar

2011-03-08T20:59:00.000+02:00

A writeup about S&H over at Beatnik Bazaar. And while you're there, check out the online shop for some ohsoprettythings they sell, like these enamel brooches by Skermunkil.

[image via Beatnik Bazaar]

The weekend's yummy thing

2011-03-08T14:52:00.000+02:00

[image via Chocolate Reviews' photostream]

Signs (Johannesburg, 29 January 2011)

2011-03-07T07:31:00.000+02:00

The awesomeness that is The Starling and Hero Bicycle Company is now online

2011-03-06T21:25:00.000+02:00

Proud purveyors of one-of-a-kind, custom-built, absolutely unique and utterly awesome upcycles, the Starling and Hero Bicycle Company is now online.

To give you an idea... Here are the before and after shots of Bottlepop, Anja's bike, a 1950s Triumph upcycle, with handmade murara basket specially designed and made for Starling and Hero by local weavers. Cool, no?

Now go and look at some of the other upcycles in the Starling and Hero stable, like Apple-Daisy, Cerulean and Paprika. And then phone Emile for your very own upcycle.

Progression of a flood (5-6 January 2011)

2011-03-06T12:05:00.000+02:00

Yes, that's our corner, our gate, our street. Touch and go there, for a day or so.

Soundtrack for the end of a decade #3

2011-01-13T11:58:00.000+02:00

Soundtrack for the end of a decade #2

2010-12-26T09:28:00.000+02:00

Soundtrack for the end of a decade #1

2010-12-24T10:50:00.000+02:00

The boy

2010-12-22T13:36:00.000+02:00

Reading

2010-12-21T07:30:00.000+02:00

The blank slate: the modern denial of human nature (Steven Pinker, 2002)

Wishlist

2010-11-02T13:01:00.000+02:00

From Papillionaire Bicycles.

Sadly, they only deliver in Australia.

The Mickey Mouse, Minnie Mouse and Pluto coat (by Adam Batchelor)

2010-10-29T11:59:00.000+02:00

More, here.

Paris Review interview with Michel Houellebecq (extract)

2010-10-28T10:39:00.000+02:00

INTERVIEWER

What do you think is the appeal of your work, in spite of its brutality?

HOUELLEBECQ

There are too many answers. The first is that it’s well written. Another is that you sense obscurely that it’s the truth. Then there’s a third one, which is my favorite: because it’s intense. There is a need for intensity. From time to time, you have to forsake harmony. You even have to forsake truth. You have to, when you need to, energetically embrace excessive things. Now I sound like Saint Paul.

INTERVIEWER

What do you mean?

HOUELLEBECQ

“Now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.” For me the sentence would be “Now abideth beauty, truth, and intensity; but the greatest of these is intensity.”

INTERVIEWER

You once wrote in your biography of H. P. Lovecraft “No aesthetic creation can exist without a certain voluntary blindness.”

HOUELLEBECQ

Yes, it’s true that you have to choose your family, so to speak. You have to exaggerate a little.

INTERVIEWER

Who would you say is your family?

HOUELLEBECQ

It may surprise you, but I am convinced that I am part of the great family of the Romantics.

INTERVIEWER

You’re aware that may be surprising?

HOUELLEBECQ

Yes, but society has evolved, a Romantic is not the same thing that it used to be. Not long ago, I read de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. I am certain that if you took, on the one hand, an old-order Romantic and, on the other
hand, what de Tocqueville predicts will happen to literature with the development of democracy—taking the common man as its subject, having a strong interest in the future, using more realist vocabulary—you would get me.

INTERVIEWER

What is your definition of a Romantic?

HOUELLEBECQ

It’s someone who believes in unlimited happiness, which is eternal and possible right away. Belief in love. Also belief in the soul, which is strangely persistent in me, even though I never stop saying the opposite.

INTERVIEWER

You believe in unlimited, eternal happiness?

HOUELLEBECQ

Yes. And I’m not just saying that to be a provocateur.

Read the rest of the interview here.

Reading

2010-10-22T12:06:00.000+02:00

Put the days away (Sun Airway)

2010-10-22T12:04:00.000+02:00

Put the Days Away by Sun Airway from Secretly Jag on Vimeo.

Something in the water (Brooke Fraser)

2010-10-19T11:56:00.000+02:00

Wild tigers I have known (Emily Jane White)

2010-10-18T09:10:00.000+02:00

Reading

2010-08-26T09:50:00.000+02:00

I love flying

2010-08-25T21:26:00.000+02:00

Between Liverpool and Amsterdam.

31.07.2010.

One (06.08.2010)

2010-08-21T09:41:00.000+02:00

Happy birthday, littlie.

Notebook extract 31.07.10, en route Amsterdam to Johannesburg

2010-08-20T09:01:00.000+02:00

Together with the Picasso Peace and Freedom exhibition I saw yesterday at the Tate Modern in Liverpool, I also saw a video work by Rineke Dijkstra, called The Weeping Woman, Tate Liverpool 2009. It is a strangely affecting work, showing, in three panels, a group of children talking about Picasso's Weeping Woman (1937), which they are looking at. The camera moves in and out, focusing on groups of children and individuals, and the soundtrack (supplemented by occasional subtitles) mixes fragments of their observations and interpretations. After their initial observations of the physical qualities of the painting, the children soon launch into explanations for the sadness of the woman in the painting. The impact of the work lies in how it reveals the way art is a mirror for the children's own terrors, anxieties and obsessions.

"Maybe someone sent her a letter saying 'you're next.'"

"Maybe she's afraid of the devil and the things he does."

"Maybe her mother died."

"Maybe she's the only person in the world who looks like that."

The darkness of these imagined worlds is made even more poignant by the coolness, the prosaicness, the straightforwardness of the situation and the way it is presented.

It is an odd but emotionally arresting experience to meet these children standing on the cusp of the real and the imaginary, trying to word the things that haunt them. Their hauntedness plays tricks with their faces, like a landscape that shifts under light and cloud.

I afterwards looked up some of Dijkstra's other work, and this obsession with the cuspness of things, the inbetweenness, the liminality of being is a feature of much of her work, especially her portraits of children, adolescents and new mothers.

It is the portraits of new mothers I return to. Why? Because in their cool distance they capture all the contradiction of disembodiment and profound embodiment of birth and after. The women in the pictures are not poster girls for new motherhood. The pictures are harsh, even brutal. They evoke for me the sense of just having done battle, coming to the other side - bloody, battered, shattered, but with the living world in your arms.

They are prosaic and epic at the same time, which is my own memory of that time. In between the mundanities of tending to the body and the body of a new little animal, there is this sense of staring into the mouth of death, a sense of using your body to shut it and its sharp teeth, of turning round and coming back, of not being yourself again, ever, of being more yourself than you've ever been.

Miniature pencil-lead alphabet by Dalton Ghetti

2010-08-17T10:31:00.000+02:00

Twee, but pretty.
(Via my dad.)

Big jet plane (Angus and Julia Stone)

2010-08-07T06:56:00.000+02:00

Angus & Julia Stone - Big Jet Plane from TSL on Vimeo.

Sign, Ormskirk 29.07.2010

2010-08-05T08:34:00.000+02:00

Wishlist

2010-08-04T13:29:00.000+02:00

The Kinderhotel is part of the boutique Seehotel in Neuklostersee in Germany. How pretty... Some additional drawcards: an ear trumpet built into the first-floor playroom wall, to amplify the sounds of nature outside; a camera obscura; giant swings; wind-up music boxes and a glass roof to look at the stars.

I would actually like a house like this. For the kids, you understand.

Photography by Liu Xiaofang

2010-08-03T08:02:00.000+02:00

Reading

2010-07-30T06:54:00.000+02:00

I'm teaching this later this semester, and have, shockingly, never read it before.

Converse + Dr Seuss = I want

2010-07-29T22:36:00.000+02:00

Arja Salafranca wins the prestigious Dalro Award

2010-07-22T09:14:00.000+02:00

By Amitabh Mitra
This post first appeared on book.co.za.

I have the greatest pleasure in announcing the prestigious Dalro (Drama and Lyrics Rights Organisation) Award for 2009 has gone to Arja Salafranca.

Judging poetry makes me go beyond the realm of words, to the human that has extracted an understanding with oneself and crafted it in imagery. I try to probe into values and rightfulness connecting the poem to present circumstances within the country, the person being a part of the country and the world, shares thoughts, recurring and sometimes inadvertently that comes to the mind. Mapping thoughts and places in this rapid stream, the eye believes and that’s when we share this belief too.

The prize winners have been judged from poems published in the South African Poetry Journal, New Coin. New Coin is published by the Institute of Study of English in Africa, Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa.

It was a difficult task but I definitely enjoyed thinking about each poem. Words, Imagery, Fusion, Restlessness and a combination of all of these goes to the achievement in the poetry of Dalro Award winners.

First Prize – Arja Salafranca
Second Prize – Lungelo Mbatha
Third Prize – Anton Krueger

Honourable Mention
1 Peter Horn
2 Brett Beiles
3 Natalie Railoun
4 Haidee Kruger
5 Rosemund Handler

Steak
Arja Salafranca

There’s a perfection in the sharp knife,
handle thick and satifying to hold.
It eases through the meat, parting it
like the Red Sea.
A thin trail of red juice eases out,
I spear the soft buttery steak
with a mushroom, add a half-moon of avocado,
a quartered tomato.
The food shatters in my mouth.

There’s something about summer nights,
the kind of nights that follow days
in a city that reeks of boiled bodies
crisping under the sun’s glare.
There’s something: the lack of breeze,
the water in the pool. gleaming bluely,
the soft murmur of traffic.

It’s an island, an oasis, the lawn jewelled green.
Candles illuminate our faces
the silver, the sparkling cutlery,
the sheer perfection of knife, fork, crystal glass,
steak, salad, speared food, shattered tastes.
At the bottom of a garden,
in the heart of Johannesburg.

July Flame (Laura Veirs)

2010-07-07T09:55:00.000+02:00

Jiri Trnka (1912-1969)

2010-06-17T21:12:00.000+02:00

Illustration for Andersen's Fairy Tales, 1959

More from the Learning to Fly series

2010-06-15T14:27:00.000+02:00

More from the Learning to Fly series by Thalea Lombard. Contact her on thalea at elizium dot za dot net if you're interested in buying some of these pretty little things.

Get over yourselves and on with it, whining whites

2010-06-15T14:24:00.000+02:00

Jun 13, 2010 12:00 AM By Eusebius McKaiser
First published in The Times.

Antjie Krog and Rian Malan reportedly had a very colourful exchange at the Franschhoek literary festival about whiteness in democratic South Africa.
Their respective takes on the phenomenology of whiteness differ sharply. In the one corner there is Malan, who articulates a lived reality of a pale citizen who feels that his entitlement to speak has been obliterated by virtue of his pale skin. His opponent, Krog, speaks to a white reality that is one of continued privilege, thereby challenging the assumption of lost power inherent in the moaning and groaning of the Malan-types.
Yet, upon reflection, these two narratives are equally tragic and unhealthy. Whiteness has become trapped between victimhood and self-flagellation. This stops white South Africans from fully integrating into democratic South Africa in a way that retains their agency fully, sans Krog, but at the same time acknowledges their continued privilege, sans Malan. We need a white consciousness that transcends the embarrassing Krog-like yearning to be black - as if becoming the bantu that you had formerly oppressed is the ultimate mark of atonement. On the other hand, the Malan-like moaning festival needs to be exposed as less an expression of a profound truth about loss of citizenship than - to the shock and horror of too many whites, still - the democratisation of public space.
Putting some meat to the bones of his various contentions, Malan cites an example or two, including his own attempt at making a contribution to government debate on issues of education policy failure, on assignment for the Daily Sun, which has met with silence. The conclusion he draws is that bona fide attempts by white commentators to contribute towards important national conversations fall on deaf black ears.
Another example is the report about electoral reform, authored by the brilliant politician and political analyst, the late Frederik Van Zyl Slabbert, which has been shelved for almost a decade. Again, a white person's attempt at contributing to democracy is seemingly met with ominous silence.
One should, of course, assess the general point these examples are meant to support even if one deems them unconvincing. But in this case the examples betray the crux of the problem with the Malan narrative. First, it is not just white commentators who are often not heard; black ones are ignored too. This has nothing to do with Malan's whiteness, but everything to do with dishonest state machinery that tries to evade tough criticism from an active citizenry.
It is not clear why Malan insists on interpreting this experience as uniquely revealing something about the place of whites in the new South Africa. Should the example not rather be read as revealing an equally sad but nevertheless different reality, that of a government and state which still need to learn the meaning of responsive government? Why else do organisations like Equal Education, which are black-led outfits based in townships, also not get through to government?
Second, the Slabbert report has been shelved purely because of political calculations about the ANC's interest in agreeing to replace the party-list, proportional representation system with some mixture of proportional representation and a constituency-based model. Even if that report was written by a black ANC sympathiser, it would still not have seen the light of day. Race is the wrong prism through which to see why Slabbert's report gathered dust.
The big question is not so much whether these examples succeed in proving Malan's phenomenological account of whiteness, but rather whether that account is compelling in any way. It seems to me that Malan's view of the place of whites in post-Mandela South Africa is not convincing. In particular - and hence the reason I unpicked the examples he gives us - much of the first-person narrative of whites who feel excluded from mainstream national dialogue is a result of how they construct society. In a sense, exclusion is in Malan's head. Hence the misplaced racial analysis of why his views on education were ignored. This paranoia becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy at the point where he, and others of a similar bent, then imagine that they may as well withdraw from the public space. And, in a fit of circularity, they showcase their retreat as evidence of exclusion. The genesis of such retreat is not black agency marginalising white voices, but white voices not knowing how to deal with no longer having exclusive rights to speak.
This is not to deny dangerous undercurrents among the intolerant within the political arena. It is shamefully true, for example, that when the ANC Youth League responds to deputy transport minister Jeremy Cronin not by engaging his brilliant polemic on nationalisation but by dismissing him as a white racist, they are affirming Malan's fears. But Malan exaggerates these pockets of intolerance.
Equally important, Malan overlooks the reality that critical black voices are also subjected to this intolerance, such as Native Clubs which exclude natives who are not sufficiently in love with the government. This is not to say that these trends should not be condemned, but such trends speak more to state power gone mad, in a colour-blind manner, than to state power gone mad solely in relation to white critics.
Does this mean that Krog is onto something when she reprimands fellow whites for not being aware of their continued privilege? After all, as Krog points out, the mere fact of being at a literary festival, wining and dining while millions of mostly black people are starving, or reflecting on those people without ever working with them or engaging them directly, smacks of a lack of critical self-awareness of how (white) privilege continues to reproduce itself long after the loss of political power.
Krog makes a profoundly important observation. And, in a sense, my own deep discomfort with the tone with which she makes these observations, including in her book Begging to be Black, is less a challenge to the truth of her claim than it is an unease with what I fear might be lurking beneath the self-flagellating moralism. One gets the sense that whites should be "oh so grateful that the darkies have not driven us into the ocean"!
The danger with this perverse sense of gratitude is that it dehumanises us all. It dehumanises whites by impoverishing their agency with the moral injunction that they should think thrice before speaking up because it is "their turn to speak". It also dehumanises blacks by inadvertently imagining that "they" are not capable of handling robust intergroup dialogue as a result of a spontaneous post-traumatic crisis that they might suffer on hearing the former baas getting tough with them, again. Actually, blacks are perfectly capable of hearing out an angry Malan and engaging him. Krog need not protect blacks from Malan.
The good news, in the end, is that white consciousness can emerge from all of this in healthy shape by locating itself between the Krog-Malan dichotomy. It can take the good from each of these thinkers and discard the unhealthy bits. From Krog, whites can learn the importance of acknowledging and understanding how white privilege continues to reproduce itself. But they must reject her well-meaning but wrong-headed motif of encouraging a reduced role for white agency in a deliberative democracy. From Malan, whites can learn the importance of asserting an unqualified entitlement to speak. But they must reject his exaggerated sense of a loss of power and privilege.
White consciousness, like its more famous counterpart, black consciousness, is urgently needed in contemporary SA. It is critical that we keep this truth alive.
McKaiser is an associate at the Centre for the Study of Democracy. He also hosts a weekly show on Talk Radio 702

edward estlin always gets me. just a little.

2010-06-12T21:46:00.000+02:00

you shall above all things be glad and young
e.e. cummings

you shall above all things be glad and young
For if you're young,whatever life you wear

it will become you;and if you are glad
whatever's living will yourself become.
Girlboys may nothing more than boygirls need:
i can entirely her only love

whose any mystery makes every man's
flesh put space on;and his mind take off time

that you should ever think,may god forbid
and(in his mercy)your true lover spare:
for that way knowledge lies,the foetal grave
called progress,and negation's dead undoom.

I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing
than teach a thousand stars how not to dance

And Lo! in the Bleak Midwinter, a Dancing Rose, Pensively

2010-06-11T20:48:00.000+02:00

Vereeniging Art Festival, 07/06/2010.

Nando's ads

2010-06-11T20:23:00.000+02:00

Nando's has always done these really plucky, funny, sometimes controversial ads. My brother sent me this link to their latest ad, which promises the Mexican team and their supporters free lunch if they lose in the opening SWC match against Bafana Bafana (because everybody knows South Africa is rife with bribery and corruption, and we try hard not to disappoint).

Looking around, I also came across this, the Nando's poster for the Confederation Cup. I want one. It would look really good in our red kitchen.

From the Learning to Fly series

2010-06-11T10:12:00.000+02:00

From the Learning to Fly series by Thalea Lombard (my cool artsy sister). If you're interested in buying some of these witty little works, mail her on thalea at elizium dot za dot net. More to come.

Black balloon (The Kills)

2010-06-04T15:33:00.000+02:00

Two (The Antlers)

2010-06-04T13:21:00.000+02:00

Wishlist

2010-06-01T10:58:00.000+02:00

By Camper.

Paranoia

2010-05-31T13:40:00.000+02:00

it’s april, again, and
the sun
has a dangerous tilt

in the
back garden the chrysanthemums
bleed headlines

at night
memory picks my locks

Girls we love #1: Coraline

2010-05-30T22:25:00.000+02:00

Graffiti statement

2010-05-28T14:57:00.000+02:00

And from the backseat she says

2010-05-28T14:00:00.000+02:00

Look!

The moon

looks like

a giant's

toenail clipping.

And so it does.

Illustrated Jack Kerouac haiku (Lauren Monaco)

2010-05-26T09:45:00.000+02:00

By Lauren Monaco.
Via Emile.

With whom to dance (The Magnetic Fields)

2010-05-25T20:01:00.000+02:00

Did I rock that PhD gown, or what

2010-05-08T20:04:00.000+02:00

The bonnet (academic-speak for "funny hat") not so much. Which is why I'm sparing you the visuals.

Wits, 29/04/2010

Jeffrey's Bay, 30/03/2010

2010-04-17T14:21:00.000+02:00

How many black intellectuals would it take to change the light bulb in Steve’s head?

2010-04-16T13:39:00.000+02:00

By: Koos Kombuis
This article originally appeared here, on Koos Kombuis's thoughtleader blog.

(Koos Kombuis is an Afrikaans columnist, bilingual author and retired rock musician. In spite of his numerous attempts to settle down and conform, his career has been dogged by controversy ever since he was banned from performing his anti-apartheid songs on several university campuses in 1989.)

The realisation hit me around one o’clock in the morning, as we were jiving to the crazy guitar notes of a hastily assembled jam outfit called “The Albert Frost Trio” in the packed auditorium of the so-called “Club Al Capone” at the KKNK festival last Thursday night.
I had accompanied my friend Theresho to the dancefloor after trying to persuade my wife to get up and boogie. After all, how can one listen to Albert Frost and not boogie? Theresho, who was there with his white girlfriend, had no luck either trying to persuade his partner to accompany him to the dancefloor. So that was how I ended up dancing with a black man in Oudtshoorn.
Had this incident happened a decade or longer ago, I might have drawn enough attention to myself to make KKNK festival history, thereby eclipsing the Wynand Windpomp rape allegation scandal and the Drunken Dozi Incident as topics of gossip and discussion.
It’s tempting to conclude this segment of worthless information with a platitude such as “Hey, we’ve come a long way since 1995”, if only it were true. But that was not the realisation that hit me right then. Right then, I was staring at Albert’s fingers as they dazzled their merry way across his guitar, and my thoughts went back, way back to the time when Albert was still a schoolboy who my wife and I had asked to stay in our house in Gordon’s Bay to look after our dog while we went on holiday. It proved to be a disastrous decision — Albert not only lost our dog, but managed to run up a gigantic electricity bill after spending the whole week jamming with his entire band, plus sound equipment, in our lounge — but the point is, those were the merry and uncomplicated days before the local music revolution we had instigated with the Voëlvry tour had become truly mainstream.
After the neighbours had brought back our dog — it had fled to their house to get away from the noise — I forgave Albert, and allowed him to play in my rock band, “Die Warmblankes”. Next thing I knew, though, he had teamed up with Arno Carstens and they were playing with the Stones in Barcelona. Yes, the Rolling Stones! They actually met all four of the geriatric rockers backstage. And all because someone who knew the Stones spotted them performing at The Isle of Wight festival the week before and had told Mick Jagger about them!
Now, as it is, my rock ‘n roll days are over, and though I’m not much younger than the Stones, I no longer have any ambition about making a breakthrough into the international music market. (As if the world would sit up and notice at the sound of songs like Kytie or Lente in die Boland!) But I remember being mighty proud that a member of “Die Warmblankes” ended up playing with the Stones. I had no idea where or what the Isle of Wight was, but to me the sound of that name acquired a magical ring; obviously, it was the place to go for young South African musicians if they wanted to break into the international scene.
Alas! Instead of queuing up to go and play at The Mythical Isle of Wight, young local musicians, especially young Afrikaans musicians — also those who are not so young — seem to be eternally stuck on a metaphorical Isle of Whiteness.
I cannot begin to express how depressed I felt when I read that my old friend Steve Hofmeyr had written, in a letter to Julius Malema, that there were only six black intellectuals on the continent of Africa. Okay, sure, that wasn’t exactly what he said, but he sort of suggested it, even though the precise number of African intellectuals in existence had absolutely nothing to do with Julius Malema, who is certainly not an intellectual and wouldn’t recognise one if he saw one, even if it turned out to be Steve.
I thought, at that moment, that Steve had committed career suicide, yet he survived; the only journalist sufficiently aghast at this statement was the editor of Mail & Guardian online, Chris Roper. The Afrikaans papers all mentioned Steve’s letter to Malema, but failed to call attention to Steve’s dreadful faux pas.
And then I heard about the Dozi thing. I must admit I felt a bit sorry for Dozi when I read about him getting drunk in a restaurant in Oudtshoorn and shooting his mouth off about Julius Malema, offending all the other people in the restaurant by using the “K word” liberally. But the next day, Dozi sobered up and made everything infinitely worse by not apologizing for his behaviour, and by saying (to a journalist from Die Burger): “I was only saying what all of us feel”. Oh, really?
Is that really what we all feel like? That blacks are inferior? What kind of reasoning is this? Just because the ANC has failed us in so many respects, just because someone like Julius Malema has managed to grab the headlines with his crazy talk, are we to make the assumption that all blacks are stupid and that we should return to old-style apartheid?
I am reminded of the words of Steve Biko:
“Blacks have had enough experience as objects of racism not to wish to turn the tables. While it may be relevant now to talk about black in relation to white, we must not make this our preoccupation, for it can be a negative exercise.”
Biko realised this decades ago. Dozi, who can speak Zulu fluently, who has recorded some of the best Zulu music I’d ever heard, has still not realised it, and has now decided to turn back the clock in favour of Steve-speak. In fact, the two have been openly encouraging each other in the media since then.
These have been a politically explosive two weeks, admittedly, and it’s true that the murder of Eugéne Terre’Blanche, right after the “kill the boer” debacle, could not have happened at a worse time (not that there would ever have been a “good” time for such a heinous murder to take place).
Thankfully, not everyone got caught up in the crazy rush towards ethnic polarisation. This is what I read in a Thought Leader blog barely two days ago:
“Eugéne Terre’Blanche did not deserve to be murdered. He did not deserve to die the way he did … the first and most important thing for all of us to do at this time is to extend our deepest condolences to the immediate and extended family of Terre’Blanche — and that includes the AWB.”
These words were not uttered by a white supremacist, but by someone called Tinyiko Sam Maluleke. I have yet to read such an impassioned statement of empathy by a white author toward, say, the families of the victims of the Skielik massacre.
The increasingly blatant flirtations with racism of erstwhile friends and colleagues like Steve and Dozi is not the only thing that bothers me about the local music scene. What we had set out to do when we launched Voëlvry — to create a multicultural platform which included Afrikaans — we failed to do. Up to the Houtstok festival we had tried, and tried very hard to engage black music acts, to perform to black audiences, with only limited success. Then came Houtstok, and the whole emphasis of the movement changed overnight. Instead of working towards a new political alignment, everyone was suddenly trying to “act” like “hippies” from the “Sixties”. It became a white suburban jol, “decadence” was cool, and the one thing which we had struggled to control and deal with on a personal level — drugs — suddenly became a fashion statement.
Houtstok was the end of the Voëlvry dream, not the beginning, as most cultural historians seem to think.
What Sandile Memela wrote in another recent Thought Leader blog about the ANCYL would have been equally applicable to the young white Afrikaans rock rebels of fifteen years ago:
“What the youth leadership of this country needs to understand is that they cannot afford to settle for quick-fix solutions.”
There is a Houtstok again now, so I heard, somewhere outside Malmesbury. A vast number of entertainers from mostly the Afrikaans music industry have been invited, almost all of them white.
Of course, there’s nothing wrong, per se, with being white, or with inviting whites to a festival. But one would have hoped for the organisers of a festival named after the 1969 Woodstock happening in America — whether the first Houtstok festival years ago, or this new one — to at least give a subtle nod in the direction of non-racialism, equality, and shared humanity. But that, presumably, is a quantum leap in free association which had simply not occurred to those guys.
I had always thought that, deep down, most South Africans instinctively agree that these words by Xolela Mangcu in his book To the Brink — the State of Democracy in South Africa encapsulates a basic and universal truth about South African politics:
“I have argued in many of my writings that the ANC needs to rediscover non-racialism as its language of life. Even though I have not always been a great supporter of non-racialism as a strategy for struggle, I never had any doubt that the ultimate aim of our struggle was the creation of a non-racial democracy.”
Of course, I am not implying that, of all Afrikaans musicians, the founding fathers of the Voëlvry tour were the only ones who were politically correct. We were awfully naïve and sincere, sure, but we had precious little leadership abilities then, and we still have precious little leadership abilities now. I simply cannot imagine the likes of myself, Piet Pers, Lee Edwards or Dagga-Dirk Uys being offered cabinet posts by the ANC and making a success of it (not that the ANC would care either way). Apart from the fact that most of us have no organisational skills, and besides the sad fact that most of us now hate each others’ guts, we will always be tainted by our decadent past. Even if I were to become an elder in the Dutch Reformed Church or start singing gospel songs at Angus Buchan’s Mighty Men get-togethers, I will always have fans out there who believe that I start every day with a joint, a glass of Tassies, and a few spoons of cough mixture.
Bill Clinton might have gotten away by saying “I did not inhale”, but who would believe us? We were vrot, all of us, rotten to the core with angst, bad habits and untreated dysfunctionality. The voters would never vote for us if we tried to start a political party now. A statement like “I did not inhale”, such as the excuse offered by Clinton, would sound as lame as Monica Lewinsky saying “I did not swallow”. (She did not actually say that, but we know it to be true, for if she had swallowed, all that stuff would not have landed on her dress as forensic evidence.)
On the other hand, it is unfortunately true that by now, in this year of our Lord 2010, our young democracy has had so many crises that we are all tainted, to some extent, with failure and mediocrity. Hell, if one can’t even trust Mr and Mrs Vavi, who can we trust? How can we still call ourselves the rainbow nation if the editor of The Sowetan felt the need to write something like the following in his editorial of March 30? (I quote:)
“South Africa’s politicians, especially those of the ANC, are openly at each others’ throats over positions and tenders. This worries foreign investors and the citizenry who see comrades ripping each other to shreds.”
Back in 2007, Justice Malala phrased the dilemma even more fluently in his Sunday Times column when he wrote:
“The question has to be asked: is this the South Africa of Nelson Mandela and Albert Luthuli? Did the heroes of June 1976 and the 80s lose out in schooling and normal lives to be in a country where journalists are prosecuted as happened under apartheid?”
Yes, indeed, Julius Malema is by no means the first black politician to threaten journalists; the editor of the Sunday Times and one of his colleagues were threatened with arrest under the reign of Thabo Mbeki for exposing our beloved (now deceased) garlic-and-beetroot-driven ex-minister of health, Tannie Murderous Manto, as a “drunk and a thief”.
Mondli Makhanya was still editor then. It was the same guy who, during that same year, said this in a newspaper column:
“The ANC must wake up to the fact that its responsibility goes beyond its paid-up membership and its own self-preservation.”
You may ask yourselves at this point, who am I attacking in this blog entry, Afrikaans musicians or the ANC? Whose side am I on, actually? Well, neither. In the first place, I’m not attacking Afrikaans musicians for making kak music (I have done that often enough in the past, and my criticism had no effect whatsoever, so I took a vow earlier this year never to go down that route ever again, with the possible exception of Die Antwoord). I am attacking them for setting a sloppy example to their fans by publicly indulging in racist slurs which, in the end, strengthen the hand of those members of the ANC who wish to polarise South Africans among racial lines so as to cover up the real issue: ineffective and corrupt government, self-enrichment and lack of service delivery.
Please stop confusing the issues, Steve. By stirring the fires of inter-tribal hostility, you may be aiding your career in the short term, but you are doing it at the cost of alienating thousands of people outside the Afrikaner tribe who would have been potentially sympathetic to your cause. At some point during the KKNK festival, I found myself dining out with Theresho and some other friends in a charming little place called The Swiss Bistro, when someone at our table remarked: “Did you realise that it was in this very same restaurant last week that Dozi got drunk and started throwing the K word around?”
No. I had not realised it. But as I reflected on it, it seemed a fitting epitaph for that sorry incident for us to be eating out, as a multiracial group of colleagues, in exactly the same place where Dozi had finally lost the plot.
I know, I know, none of us are perfect. I have been guilty of subtle forms of racism myself on some occasions, and I know very few people, black or white, who do not, from time to time, have harboured some mild form of ethnic paranoia. It goes with the territory. After all, we are living in a country which is trying to recover from a 40-year bout of collective insanity.
But that is no reason to condone a shameful lapse into pro-apartheid thinking by people as prominent and talented as Steve Hofmeyr and Dozi.
Allow me to end this blog entry with a quote from a personal email sent to me by an ex-comrade in the States, someone who had been jailed by the Nats and who fought Koevoet in the Angolan bush war:
“I think my head would explode if I were to come back home. What I read and hear over the internet makes me so mad that I think I would end up being chased by the blue-light cars. I cannot believe the thuggery and pilferage all in the name of the masses and politics.”
I would have liked to quote many more clever blacks, of course, but I think seven is enough (at least it is one more than Steve’s estimate). Up to this point I have not made any mention of intellectual giants such as Desmond Tutu, Sipho Seepe, Prince Mashala, or Sipho Hlongwane, and countless others. Unfortunately, I am running out of space. Not writing space on Thought Leader, but space inside Steve’s head.

I am not afraid (Nontsikelelo Veleko)

2010-03-21T20:25:00.000+02:00

Nontsikelelo Veleko, I am not afraid, Louis Botha Ave, Johannesburg, 2002

Towards the end of 2001, when I lived in Kensington in Johannesburg, these stencils were all over the parts of the city I frequented. The one I remember best was not on Louis Botha Avenue, but on Jan Smuts. It was in a kind of archway, the same colour as this, the same kind of crumbling background. I always wanted to photograph it, and never did. The image stayed with me, though - one of those mindpictures that define a chunk of time in one's life. Coming across Veleko's photograph recently (part of an exhibition now on at the Johannesburg Art Gallery) was a peculiarly startling experience.

By Aya Takano

2010-03-18T07:48:00.000+02:00

Yum

2010-03-15T06:10:00.000+02:00

Compass (Jamie Lidell)

2010-02-12T08:26:00.000+02:00

Tokyo Police Club: Your English is Good

2010-02-05T21:08:00.000+02:00

Martin Amis criticises JM Coetzee for 'having no talent'

2010-02-05T20:49:00.000+02:00

From The Telegraph
By Lucy Cockcroft
Published: 27 Jan 2010

Martin Amis, the novelist known for his outspoken comments, has dismissed the Nobel Prize-winning author JM Coetzee as "having no talent". Martin Amis, the novelist known for his outspoken comments, has dismissed the Nobel Prize-winning author JM Coetzee as "having no talent".

After calling for the introduction of euthanasia booths for the elderly last week, he has now turned on his fellow writers, criticising the assumption that "gloomy" books are somehow more serious.

"it's the gloomy ------- that are the serious ones", he said in an interview to be published on the Prospect website. "Coetzee, for instance – his whole style is predicated on transmitting absolutely no pleasure.

"I read one and I thought, he's got no talent. But the denial of the pleasure principle has got a lot of followers."

Coetzee, the South African author perhaps best known for his 1999 novel Disgrace, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003 and has twice won the Booker Prize.

Amis, 60, the author of The Rachel Papers, Money and London Fields, has won neither award, but has attracted his own share of criticism. Tibor Fischer, the writer, described his 2003 novel Yellow Dog as "terrible" and 2006's House of Meetings about Stalinist Russia was applauded only for its brevity.

Last week Amis compared Britain's growing elderly population as "an invasion of terrible immigrants", as he called for ‘death booths’ to be placed on street corners so they could kill themselves.

In an interview with The Sunday Times, Amis said: "How is society going to support this silver tsunami? There'll be a population of demented very old people, like an invasion of terrible immigrants stinking out the restaurants and cafés and shops."

"I can imagine a sort of civil war between the old and the young in 10 or 15 years' time."

Amis' new novel, The Pregnant Widow, is due to be published next week after six years of work.

Reading

2010-02-05T20:45:00.000+02:00

It's interesting, here

2010-02-05T09:01:00.000+02:00

In South Africa, a Scandal Over All the President's Children
Time
ByAlex Perry / Cape Town
Thursday, Feb. 04, 2010

Four days after a South African newspaper broke the story that he had fathered a child — his 20th — with Sonono Khoza, 39, the daughter of the owner of one of South Africa's top soccer teams, Zuma finally came clean on Wednesday that he was in fact the baby's daddy...

Since his election last April, Zuma has made short shrift of objections to his expansive appetite for women, calling his accusers culturally blinkered and claiming that, in a country of millions of single mothers, polygamy is actually responsible...

The latest revelation from his private life may not prove as easy to dismiss, however. As newspapers and opposition politicians in South Africa were quick to point out, there is nothing responsible about having unprotected sex or an extramarital affair in a country with the world's biggest HIV/AIDS population, currently numbering more than 4 million. Zuma's behavior has "set us back at least a decade in the fight against HIV/AIDS," said a stern-faced Helen Zille, leader of the opposition Democratic Alliance Party. In an editorial, the Business Day newspaper worried that Zuma's casual attitude to marriage may carry over to his view of government. "If the president is unable to respect social boundaries such as those created through marriage, how can he be trusted to respect the boundaries erected in terms of the national constitution's checks and balances?" the paper asked. The Johannesburg Star mourned the humiliation of the country: "His rampant libido has made South Africa a laughingstock of the world."

Read the full article in Time.

Reading

2010-01-15T10:45:00.000+02:00

Most-listened songs 2009

2010-01-03T08:38:00.000+02:00

Here are the songs I listened to most often this year. Odd mix...

Imitosis - Andrew Bird
Souvenirs - Architecture in Helsinki
Enjoy your worries, you may never have them again - The Books
Arcade Fire - My body is a cage
Use somebody - Kings of Leon
Okay - KaiserCartel
iieee - Tori Amos
Stand inside your love - The Smashing Pumpkins
Modern world - Wolf Parade
Runaway - Yeah Yeah Yeahs
Die woord - The Buckfever Underground
Country leaver - The Dandy Warhols
U.R.A Fever - The Kills
Safe as houses - aKING
I will follow you into the dark - Death Cab for Cutie
Terrible angels - CocoRosie
Misheen - Matthew van der Want & Chris Letcher
Almost happy - K's Choice
What I see - Dirty Projectors
Sweet Jane - The Velvet Underground
Spirit on the water - Bob Dylan

Safe as houses (aKING)

2009-12-29T09:16:00.000+02:00

Reading

2009-12-29T09:01:00.000+02:00

The God delusion (Richard Dawkins, 2006)

Reading

2009-12-29T08:59:00.000+02:00

From A to X: a story in letters (John Berger, 2008)

Reading

2009-12-06T08:05:00.000+02:00

Begging to be black (Antjie Krog, 2009)

The boy, in love with a star

2009-12-06T07:57:00.000+02:00

Sign, Kleinmond 15 November 2009

2009-12-02T17:06:00.000+02:00