Author Archives: cherry bomb

fleurmach at chimurenga pop-up tonight

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I’m spinning some records here this evening – come say hi!

chimurengaChimurenga will be occupying the AVA stoep in Cape Town with a pop-up bookshop over three days, from the 27th to the 28th January 2016, from 4 – 7pm daily. The pop-up includes a live broadcasting studio of the Pan African Space Station (PASS), Chimurenga’s online radio, featuring a programme of music, interviews, and performances with Chimurenga collaborators in Cape Town, including People’s Education, Future Nostalgia, Lohla Amira and many more.

This event is produced in collaboration with VANSA and the AVA.

For more on the broadcasting schedule, please visit panafricanspacestation.org.za.

The live broadcast studio functions amidst an installation that brings together pop-up stores that experiment with trade, informal economies, aesthetics and body language, music and spoken word, mobility and infrastructure.

jung, on mansplaining

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jungWhat can a man say about woman, his own opposite? I mean of course something sensible, that is outside the sexual program, free of resentment, illusion, and theory. Where is the man to be found capable of such superiority? Woman always stands just where the man’s shadow falls, so that he is only too liable to confuse the two. Then, when he tries to repair this misunderstanding, he overvalues her and believes her the most desirable thing in the world.

From Women In Europe (1927)

david bowie – lazarus

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I was listening to David Bowie’s brand new album last night, thinking about how much I still love him. I can’t even begin to engage with how important Bowie and his work have been to me since I was a very young teenager. It’s washing over me in waves.

He felt like my guardian angel at times, transcending the vulgarity of the mundane, making alienation tangible and difference something to celebrate wildly… How strange to think of him as mortal.

Sayonara, Starman. What a gut-wrenchingly perfect exit.

 

sharon van etten – remembering mountains

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The opening and title track of a very beautiful compilation of recordings by different people of unheard Karen Dalton-penned songs, released in May this year on Tompkins Square Records. You can find it HERE.

And here are the lyrics and chords, handwritten by Karen. Karen’s melodies for the songs were not included, which is why this is more a record of collaborative compositions than straight covers. And it’s fascinating for that – you can certainly hear the debt all the participants owe her in their own work.

mnts

how mainstream media unknowingly helps the anc use zuma as its racial jesus

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“[W]hat will shape South Africa’s political destiny is not “the truth” but the careful navigation and understanding of how words are digested by those watching and listening.”
A deeply perceptive piece by Siya Khumalo about how South Africans are talking past one another.

Siya Khumalo's avatarsanitythinksoutloud.com

Almost everyone on my Facebook has been asking the same question: how did the #ZumaMustFallMarch become about race? Isn’t it clear that the current president is bad news for the country?

Jacob Zuma – the person and the president, the body that is depicted visually and the figure that is related to politically – is the terrain on which South Africa’s race issues have played themselves out in weird and telling ways. Without realising it, mainstream media has done the ANC a huge favour in playing up the DA’s “Zuma is corrupt” trope because as well-intentioned and truthful as it may be, what it’s done is exacerbate the friction among the races – especially between black and white people – because white people do not know how to level an insult so it lands where it’s intended. This is because colonialism and apartheid skewed racial relations.

Let’s say Jacob Zuma…

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maya deren – the very eye of night (1958)

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“The laws of macro- and microcosm are alike. Travel in the interior is as a voyage in outer space: we must in each case burst past the circumference of our surface – our here-space and now-time – and, cut loose from the anchorage of an absolute, fixed center, enter worlds where the relationship of parts is the sole gravity. When the sun sets, the stars become apparent; when our eyes close out the light to sleep, there rises in the night-eye the constellation by which sleep-walkers plot their incalculable accuracies. By day we move according to desire and decision; by night Noctambulo advances without moving, led by the twins Gemini (as the eyes are twins or as the I of night is twin to that of day). It is by the dark geometry of such celestial navigation that the day‘s erratic negotiations are corrected and reconciled into the total orbits of our lives.

The film is in the negative. The blackness of night erases all horizon and, released from the leveling pressure of this plane, the movements both of the dancers and of the camera become as four-dimensional and directional as those of birds in air or fish in water.”

– Maya Deren: Chamber Films, program notes for a presentation, 1960

maya deren Eye-of-Night_1
#Title: The Very Eye of Night
#Director: Maya Deren
#Year of Production: 1958
#Duration: 00:15:00
#Choregraphy: Antony Tudor, Metropolitan Opera Ballet School
#Dancers / Actors: Philp Salem, Rosemary Williams, Richard Englund, Richard Sandifer, Don Freisinger, Patricia Ferrier, Barbara Levin, Bud Bready, Genaro Gomez
#Camera: Maya Deren
#Editing: Maya Deren
#Foley Assistance: Harrison Starr
#Sound: Louis and Bebe Barron
#Music: Teiji Ito