“De estas calles que ahondan el poniente,
una habrá (no sé cuál) que he recorrido
ya por última vez, indiferente
y sin adivinarlo, sometido
a Quién prefija omnipotentes normas
y una secreta y rígida medida
a las sombras, los sueños y las formas
que destejen y tejen esta vida.”
A year or so ago, some colleagues of mine did a campaign for a film called Night Drive, which was a slashy, schlocky horror that centred on the body-parts-for-muthi trade. The campaign handed out a couple hundred pamphlets, in the style of those ridiculous pamphlets that offer penis enlargement, bad luck cure, womb cleaning etc that we see littered around town every day. The pamphlets offered money for body parts, and linked to a website that detailed the “doctor’s” cash-for-organs trade in more detail. The people who received the pamphlets went ape-shit, calls were made to the national media, everyone was pranked and much outrage ensued. The campaign was slammed by the Department of Health for trivialising a “Serious Problem”, and was pulled, effective immediately, complete with apology from the ad agency in question, and a promise to conduct an “internal disciplinary procedure”.
Pamphlet collected in Durban by Rosemary Lombard, 2009
My question is, what exactly is being done about this serious problem? Why do people get up in arms about a cash-for-body-parts hoax, but think its OK (and hilarious) for there to be pamphlets offering safe abortions, womb cleaning, AIDS cures and a whole manner of sexual health treatment that is not only bogus, but seriously harmful to those who pursue it. What effort is being made by the Department of Health to shut down these “doctors”? Most disturbing is the discriminatory gender ideas at the root of these so called treatments. Muthi to “make lover have sex with you”, and treatment for women for, among other things “cleaner vaginas, more willingness to have sex.”
These charlatan muthi men make a mockery of traditional healing, and the pamphlets and posters not only mislead the poor, vulnerable and uneducated, but reinforce negative stereotypes about traditional healing and the communities that take advantage of them. Is any work being done to address this “Serious Problem”, or do people only care so long as the content of said media panders to savage stereotypes of murderous muthi men lurking in the shadows to chop your heart out?
Pamphlet collected in Durban by Rosemary Lombard, 2009
Tran Nguyen – Treading Through An Untrimmed Memory
Tran Nguyen is a Georgia-based artist. Born in Vietnam and raised in the States, she received a BFA from Savannah College of Art and Design in 2009. She is fascinated with creating visuals that can be used as a psycho-therapeutic support vehicle, treading the mind’s surreal dreamscape. Her paintings are created with a delicate quality using color pencil and thin glazes of acrylic on paper. Tran’s oeuvre has been exhibited with galleries in New York, Los Angeles, Miami, London, and Barcelona. “ I find interest in illustrating the universal emotions we come across in everyday living — emotions that are tucked away, deep inside our psyches.”
Her blog is HERE.
“Our first film. This Way Up had money to make a video, we wanted to make something more like a film. We were told about Jarvis and Steve from Pulp, who were making films with Martin Wallace. We made it during the summer of ’93. Dickon’s not in it because he was in Mexico as part of his studies. It was good fun and hard work, driving around in our Ford Cortina, Jarvis squashed on the passenger seat floor. Sidonie, Stuart’s daughter, is the baby. It was the start of a long and joyful relationship with Martin Wallace, who’s become a wonderful friend.”
So much of the city
is our bodies. Places in us
old light still slants through to.
Places that no longer exist but are full of feeling,
like phantom limbs.
Even the city carries ruins in its heart.
Longs to be touched in places
only it remembers…
(from The Weight of Oranges / Miner’s Pond. McClelland & Stewart, 1997. p.86)
My cousin Paul Davey is a Zimbabwean-born photographer, writer and graphic designer living in London. Growing deathly bored with commercial shoots, he found renewed inspiration by getting onto the capital’s streets and shooting 40 000 protest photos last year. He put them into the book This Is What Democracy Looks Like – a chant frequently heard at protests – resulting in a lively collection of images of people, protests and events from 2012 in London, particularly the Occupy movement.
It’s essentially a book of portraits, portraying the often eccentric, artistic and highly intelligent protestors, and it offers a glimpse – usually not shown by mainstream media – of who they are, what they believe and the events they are caught up in, as they try to change the world in which they live.
Civic protest is definitely alive and kicking in good ol’ Blighty, and the reader will gain some insight into how their system attempts to control uprisings. Our South African police could learn a thing or two from the British bobbies – for instance, they employ a technique called ‘kettling’ in which they surround the crowd of dissenters, with the police linking arms, and contain the protestors until their bladders are full and their steam cools off.
Paul also interviewed many of the people he shot; you can read the interviews on http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/paul-davey/. Here is a sample, from a man known as Dom.
First Name: “Commonly Known as Dom”
Age: 37-ish
How long have you been in the camp? I first visited St Paul’s four days into their process.
What were you doing before you joined the Occupy movement? I was trying to live outside the system of control. I was living in the wild in the hills of Wales. I came here to Babylon from nature. Three years ago I was doing a law degree, but left that. It was the system and I didn’t want to be part of it.
Are you a full time resident in the camp? No. I’m not resident of anywhere I park my body. I live outside the system of control, outside of the others’ world.
Do you have a specialist role in the camp? I speak my truth.
What compelled you to become an Occupier? Staying in the ‘now’ brought me here.
How will you as an individual make a difference? By sharing my knowledge, because knowledge has value and [through knowledge] becoming rich in friends.
Who is your Enemy Number One? The Tavistock Institute and Common Purpose.
Who do you admire? Everyone. Everyone has something that makes them special.
Why? We can all learn from each other. If only we could all see each other as teachers.
What is the best part of being in Occupy? To expose Occupy for what it is. Exposing the orchestration.
What is the worst part? Occupy is a leaderless movement but there is a hidden hierarchy trying to control others. It is like a [government] social experiment.
Is Occypy making a noticeable difference? No. It is not here for that. It’s a social manipulation experiment.
Why? It has Common Purpose facilitators and Tavistock Institute workshops.
Anything else? The donation money was going the Climate Camp. The legal team, which claims to represent all of us, is self appointed. In fact all the leadership is self appointed.
To purchase the book This is What Democracy Looks Like visit http://www.blurb.co.uk/bookstore/detail/3901497
© Germaine de Larch Images. First published on http://www.life-writ-large.posterous.com
Diary 25/12/12 (On xmas evening, i ate so much meat. I felt like coughing it up. Puking a warm sour slimy heartshaped pile of meat on the diningtable.. A lil token of appreciation for my mom, who prepared this feast of gluttony)
The Gulabi Gang (from Hindi “gulabi” = “pink” – “pink gang”) is a group of women vigilantes and activists originally from Banda in Bundelkhand district, Uttar Pradesh, India, but reported to be active across North India as of 2010. It is named after the pink saris worn by its members.
The gang was founded in 2006 by Sampat Pal Devi, a mother of five and former government health worker (also a former child bride), as a response to widespread domestic abuse and other violence against women. Gulabis visit abusive husbands and beat them up with laathis (bamboo sticks) unless they stop abusing their wives. In 2008, they stormed an electricity office in Banda district and forced officials to turn back the power they had cut in order to extract bribes. They have also stopped child marriages and protested dowry and female illiteracy.
More information HERE and HERE, and more pictures by Arindam Mukherjee HERE.
photograph by Alec Soth.
from the series ‘sleeping by the mississippi’.
http://alecsoth.com/photography/projects/sleeping-by-the-mississippi/
“Leaving is not enough. You must stay gone. Train your heart like a dog. Change the locks even on the house he’s never visited. You lucky, lucky girl. You have an apartment just your size. A bathtub full of tea. A heart the size of Arizona, but not nearly so arid. Don’t wish away your cracked past, your crooked toes, your problems are papier mache puppets you made or bought because the vendor at the market was so compelling you just had to have them. You had to have him. And you did. And now you pull down the bridge between your houses, you make him call before he visits, you take a lover for granted, you take a lover who looks at you like maybe you are magic. Make the first bottle you consume in this place a relic. Place it on whatever altar you fashion with a knife and five cranberries. Don’t lose too much weight. Stupid girls are always trying to disappear as revenge. And you are not stupid. You loved a man with more hands than a parade of beggars, and here you stand. Heart like a four-poster bed. Heart like a canvas. Heart leaking something so strong they can smell it in the street.”
— Frida Kahlo to Marty McConnell
And if we don’t fight
if we don’t resist
if we don’t organise and unify and
get the power to control our own lives
then we will wear
the exaggerated look of captivity
the stylised look of submission
the bizarre look of suicide
the dehumanised look of fear
and the decomposed look of repression
forever and ever and ever
And there it is
i really don’t get it,
never have.
hard rock/metal in general, i mean.
too much sweaty hair thrashing around,
too many notes overcrowding each bar,
too many gratuitous tempo changes,
the voice (always male) too yowly or growly,
the lyrics, ridiculous.
i can dig the more spacey prog stuff from the ’70s, king crimson for example, or the o.t.t. weirdness of frank zappa, but the testosserterrain of deep purple/motorhead/budgie etc etc… i just don’t get it.
it reminds me of all the wankers i tried to sing or play guitar with at school.
i could never find anyone who wanted to do anything interesting.
all they did was spank away over and over for hours and hours at the same led zeppelin or sabbath or metallica riffs,
show off their paradiddle-diddle-diddle drumming,
their kakky renditions of les claypool slap bass,
drink black label quarts, smoke dagga, crow about forcing themselves on girls.
here’s a memory from when i was about 15 or 16… i’m at a house party in kloof, drunk and very bored, after one such disappointing “jam”. the drummer, julian (still remember his stinking name), with long fluffy hair and a straggly beard and juicy zits who’s maybe a bit older than the rest of us, starts kissing me and i’m kinda flattered but not feeling anything at all. so i crawl off a bit later when he’s getting another beer to go sleep in someone’s bedroom plastered with creepy iron maiden posters.
he comes to find me and i wake to his entire weight bearing down on me, smothered in salty, smoky hair and he’s forcing his hands into my panties and shoving his filthy callused stompie fingers in my virginity and his penis is grinding into my thigh and i can’t move or breathe. i’m choking. i bite at his furry beer tongue and he swears at me and slaps me, calls me a cocktease, and then he’s gone. mercifully. i need to vomit and wash myself but i daren’t go to the bathroom. i’m scared that he’ll come back. i’m lying there groggy and rigid with the reek of him on me, his plaque in my mouth, with that eddie creature leering down at me from the moonlit posters, with the drone of mosquitoes and the signature riffs of the morning birds over and over for hours and hours – bulbul, white-eye, hadeda, bulbul, white-eye, hadeda, bulbul, hadeda… somewhere a cock is crowing and finally i can get out of there.
coda: my younger sister got seduced by the whole scene and ended up pregnant at 16 by one of these fret-tapping frauds that she’d called her boyfriend for about 2 years. a few months after the baby came, he slunk off with the chick he’d been cheating on her with.
so yeah. i don’t enjoy hard rock/metal’s machismo-drenched doodling.
i find it the aural equivalent of being fucked badly.
there’s not a smidgen of feminine awareness in its puffed-up rooster strut.
september 15, 2008
Protesters in India
Photo: Rosemary Lombard, 2008 (single exposure with 2 megapixel Minolta camera)
stub me out
a cigarette burn
in your third i
Song from Soap&Skin‘s debut album, Lovetune for Vacuum (2009, Play It Again Sam Records).
Video produced and directed by Benjamin and Stefan Ramirez Pérez.
Photography by Anja Plaschg, Benjamin Ramírez Pérez and Stefan Ramírez Pérez.
Jessica Tremp – Over Unto Silence
I made my song a coat
Covered with embroideries
Out of old mythologies
From heel to throat;
But the fools caught it,
Wore it in the world’s eyes
As though they’d wrought it.
Song, let them take it,
For there’s more enterprise
In walking naked.
From Clara Rockmore’s Lost Theremin Album (1975)
Anis Fuleihan (April 2, 1900 – October 11, 1970) was a Cypriot-born American composer, conductor and pianist. Fuleihan’s music generally avoided serial structures, and was heavily influenced by Middle Eastern folk music. One of his works is a concerto for theremin, premiered by the New York Philharmonic under Leopold Stokowski in 1945; the soloist was Clara Rockmore.
Images: Alphonse Mucha
“What he would say, he cannot say to this woman whose openness is like a wound, whose youth is not mortal yet. He cannot alter what he loves most in her, her lack of compromise, where the romance of the poems she loves still sits with ease in the real world. Outside these qualities he knows there is no order in the world.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient
Jaroslava Schallerová in a still from “Valerie a Týden Divu” (Valerie & Her Week of Wonders). Director: Jaromil Jires, 1970
WATCH IT. It’s utterly beautiful.
If this album had no vocals, it would be an almost perfect psychedelic rock trip. I enjoy it most when I manage to ignore the uninspired blandness of the singer (he only opens his mouth here and there to spout triteness, luckily). The best way I have found to do this is put it on loud and leave the room (so the vocals become less distinct), let it fill the house, and get on with the cleaning, which is what I’m doing now…
and the whole night
the horses kept kicking
shoed hooves on steel
clanking
teeth on metal
no dreams came
kick, kick, kicking
hooves are screams
alarms
to eyes imprisoned
for the night
in sleep
as they are conditioned
Dax Riggs – Say Goodnight to the World
fleurmach 