Cool on Your Island

I read somewhere that William Kentridge had said, of his Magic Flute, “In this production (as in all), we ask you to listen to the orchestra, the singers, the spoken text, to watch the singers, to read the surtitles above the stage, and also to watch the projections behind and around all of this. It is clear that this is too much. The best advice I can give is to let your eyes and ears follow as they will, and accept that a part of the production will be missed. This acceptance is better than an anxiety about not taking everything in.”

Well, I thought (without properly attending to what he was saying), I can do that, and after snapping up a ridiculously expensive ticket the moment the box office opened then checking on it every day for five months to make sure it was safe, the big day finally came. I took my seat in a packed theatre, to the singular sound of an orchestra tuning up. That sound is a music all its own, tweee squeee li li dong ding li li li bom li li ooop to the shuffle-hum of an audience that’s trying to settle but keeps dropping the programme down the side of the seat. You can’t put that sound on a CD, same as you can’t bottle the aroma of coffee, or popcorn in a cinema lobby.

Then I sat numb-bummed and bummed-out for the next couple of hours, wondering what was wrong with me. This is awful, I thought, and felt cretinous for thinking it. I furtively checked some other faces for signs of same but they were rapt. I was a lone Neanderthal. I felt dejected, and small, and horribly uncultured.  After a while I tried to avoid the subtitles - subtitles on an opera? Yes! And not just lowly subtitles either but surtitles (so it wasn’t a typo like I’d thought), ahem, up top there way above the stage on that screen-thing do you see (“SHHHHH!”)? Oh how clever! But no, how distractingly neck-cricking, and honestly, sometimes it’s better not to understand the words after all. The Magic Flute story itself is quite thin and silly, isn’t it – basically a gilded bus for the music to travel in. I know that’s heresy but still. I’m afraid the whole thing sailed straight over my head like a golden Frisbee with bells and ribbons on. I felt that if I came across Mr Kentridge in the lobby at interval I’d have to avoid him carefully because he’d sense my utter ignorance and he’d be unable to stop himself from smiting me.

Afterwards I thought, Ok I can accept that this isn’t for me, I can get on with life and not lug the trauma around like a pet rock, but I still want to know: Who is it for? Who are those chosen ones who loved it to bits? The answer came some time later in a review I read by Andre Brink, titled “A profound meditation on Kentridge’s multi-dimensional Magic Flute”, of a profound book called Flute, which is profoundly about the production itself. 

According to Mr Brink, “Flute should now affirm, persuasively and gloriously, that Kentridge comes closer to the prodigious creativity and the promethean energy of Picasso than any other South African artist.” He said that Mr Kentridge’s treatment of this opera “…reminds one of the epithet terribilita used in the renaissance for the work of Michaelangelo.” He said that the only possible problem there could ever be with this production, albeit a tiny one, could be that local singers aren’t always able to “…match Kentridge’s staggering grasp of visual, spatial and musical experience…” , and then he said some other stuff too. There are grand and complicated things in there, and while reading the review I lapsed into another series of Frisbee moments.

So it’s simple, really - the people who liked the show are the ones who know what it all means, or who don’t mind that it doesn’t mean anything. They are the ones with heads held high enough for the Frisbee to connect with, and who know how to listen carefully to the artist’s advice and then actually apply it. I am very happy for them.
 

I have decided to be pragmatic about the problems I have with regards to accessing this blog (and any other of mine that exists or existed or ever tried to exist at all in any reliable way). Actually I decided it long ago but have not been able to access it in order to explain. Ha.

Should I even explain, though? Perhaps it wouldn’t do any harm to simply let it be mysterious. Such mysteriosity might even elicit a shiver of excitement and result in Conversation:
“Ooooh… did you see, did you see??? She’s posted something!”
“Gosh, this hasn’t happened since last year!”
“Yes, she must be really busy saving the world or something, and doesn’t have the time.”
“But George Monbiot and Andreas Spath are doing that too and they have the time…”
“Wow, it must be really important!”
“Yes, yes it is! Look - it’s about the lists in her notebook!”

No. Explain I must. There is a glitch in my matrix. This has been going on forever. Most times, when I try to log on, I get an http 500 error. Very, very occasionally I get a fleeting window of opportunity, when I and my power to log on manage to be in the same place at the same time. Fortuitous planetary alignment? Randomly correct offerings to small binary gods? Who can tell? The geeks can’t – and I have consulted them on this*, bleated pitifully in person and also on support forums. I borrowed and asked a magic 8 ball, and even went to see the genuine gypsy fortune teller who sometimes parks his caravan on the freeway offramp up the road. Their answers are always a variation on the same theme of head-scratching and brow-furrowing, and holding palms up to the sky with shoulder-shrugging (ever seen a magic 8 ball do that? Very disconcerting). Except for the acupuncturist, who bellowed with laughter when I asked him to stick needles in my keyboard. Charlatan.

I am one of those people who freak electric things out. Toasters explode, kettles short, hairdryers curl up and die. Alarm clocks that sound like roosters crowing throw themselves out of windows. Computers snigger. Why fight it? Geeks and fortune tellers. Who needs them? Not I, not anymore.

I will take the little floating windows as and when they come my way, and not mind too much, and not snivel, and not rend garments. So this blog is erratic. So what.

* I didn’t consult Captain Owen of the starship Dauntless, though, because if anyone could have helped it would probably have been him but I was too embarrassed; partly because of the acupuncturist but not only. Also, if he finds out that I am an electro-magnetic anomaly, he’ll understandably blame me for certain ‘malfunctions’ and might throw me off the ship at the next port somewhere in some godforsaken quadrant. In fact my anomalous qualities, although inconvenient, are essential to my very important Work on board. Nobody really appreciates this. As an undisclosed crew member, I spectrally inhabit the vertical Jefferies Tubes but I can’t say more than that because it’s classified.

Sjoe. Dusty in here. That’s what happens when one abandons a place for months I suppose. No excruciating excuses available. How to get back in the groove though?

Looking through my notebook to find out what was going on during those months (because I honestly couldn’t say – it feels like an alien vampire has sucked the red blood out of me and filled me with dishwater), I find it incomprehensible. A random page sample goes like this:

Vacuum-solar panels – what is this
Florian kroll
Telkom ref no 2446CRsquiggle…smudge
Outstanding amounts – compeg 550 & query Water/lights what the hell is going on
NB shock doctrine book for sir
3 plectranthus and shade seedlings for courtyard pots
Washing powder
Dish liquid
Leave money for annah
Long term parking – go past emperors and left into Griffiths all way down winding
How do you tuna fish? Howzit fish
NB Note to dad re potatoes – population dynamics follow patterns and pat for new crop is increase
UPS? – what is this
NY resolution is to be braver

…and so on.

It’s a mess, but that resolution is a good one, I think. I’m adding to it here on the record.

1. Be braver
2. Pay more attention ie make better notes
3. Stop turning down jobs. What on earth are you afraid of???
4. Find out what a florian kroll is
5. Don’t call Mr Moroake “Sir”. What are you, twelve?
6. Stop telling the tune a fish joke already, nobody else besides Shelagh thinks it’s that funny and you just freak people out when you cackle like that.

Oh wait! Something did happen! I had a most excellent birthday party with beloved people, and got the sorts of wonderful presents you only get from people who know the who and why of you. It made my first forty years of life worthwhile and I shed some secret tears of happiness. Here’s to the next forty and after that, we’ll see what happens.

Michelle Magwood is gone from the Sunday Times. She says that she’s at a loss for words for the first time ever, and thanks us for all the fish. “I want to drift through the days without having an opinion,” she says, and although I know what she means, this is another dark day for me. I’m almost too scared to open any newspaper anymore, for fear of finding yet another goodbye from a valuable voice.

Dear fellow readers of quality writing: I’d like us to set up some sort of magnetically confused but luscious and hospitable island without any too-dangerous animals on, with gorgeous beaches ringed by reefs to keep the sharks, dragons and well-meaning but ignorant rescuers out, where we can send all our columnists so they can’t escape. This isn’t an ethically debatable social experiment or anything like that, it’s just necessary. They will have a lovely life, and all we’ll ask in return is about eight hundred written words a week from each of them, more if they’d like. Once a week we’ll send in a boat to fetch columns and deliver goodies – books, pasta, lilos, beverages, sarongs, chocolate, cough syrup, whatever they want.

Are you with me on this, fellows? We can’t let our writers carry on slipping through our fingers anymore. If it goes on this way I see a future newspaper experience that offers little besides static buzz with ads and the occasional puffy blip from Sir Ronald and Lady Christine. CQ, CQ, come in… come in CQ*….
Heaven help us, she’s a movie critic now too. “I enjoy love stories in film,” says Christine in The Star, “but I insist they must have a happy ending.”
She’s addicted to the Matrix, especially the first one. She passionately urges us to see a movie called Scent of an Oak and ends her column with, “I sit on the SABC board which owns SABC Africa. However, I would have recommended Scent of an Oak to be watched even if it played on a competitor’s channel and hoped that the SABC management would have forgiven me.”
For the whole column, see Comment in The Star, October 24th 2007. Or not.

*Line from the movie Contact, where Ellie Arroway is trying to get in touch with her dad who is somewhere on the other side of Vega. It’s possible that Christine is even further out than that.

(19-01-08 Update: Long long long story, partly to do with my nemesis, http500, which followed me here all the way from blogspot, cunning nemesis that it is and a good thing too because who’d want a feeble nemesis, but the short of it is that the STPC 2008 was a spectacular non-success. All I can say is that I apologise, and better luck next year.)

Yes! It’s that time of year again! The time when poets from all across the universe chew furiously upon their pencils, get splinters in their gums or choke on little bits of eraser and ask, from their hospital beds, “Can I really do this? Yes! I can, I really think I can! No! I know I can!!!”

It’s time for The Silvery Tay Poetry Competition, which celebrates deplorable verse and is dedicated to the Affectionate Remembrance of William McGonagall, Poet Laureate of the Silvery Tay, also known as Sir William Topaz McGonagall, Knight of the White Elephant of Burma. It is said that McGonagall was “so giftedly bad he backed unwittingly into genius”. He was a legend in his own lifetime, fearlessly reciting anti-alcohol poems in Dundee drinkeries and elsewhere across the world. Despite peltings of rotten eggs and vegetables, he pursued his vocation with vigorous commitment until the day he died.

Hopefully, Mr James Clarke of the Stoep Talk Organisation (which owns The Star newspaper) will be our celebrity judge again this year. Not only is Mr Clarke an expert of Pomes, he is also venerably fit for duty, being the heroic L*E*A*D*E*R of the Tour De Farce. He looks lovely in Lycra, too, and if you run out and buy a copy of his book Blazing Saddles, you can photostat all the pics and prestik them up on your walls, as I have done.

Click, friend, and enter!

George Monbiot is on Gary Player’s case. He says he’d never heard of Gary Player before now and while he doesn’t want to widen the great golf gulf, he’d like some answers please. So while we wait for those answers, here’s what he’s got so far.

He does some digging up of old bones, and I did feel a weird pang of sympathy for the player at around the eighth paragraph of Mr Monbiot’s column, which had him sounding exactly like my late grandfather – shame I thought, bit of a low blow let it lie, people change don’t they? But they do not really ever change, and my sympathy quickly gave way to schadenfreude. Old bones maybe, but still in print and my, how they gleam in the torchlight.

Stephen Fry has a blog. This means that many of us can now die happy, but not before we’ve read it all. This bit is from his 9 000 word entry on Fame :

“Fame is a function of memory. I can’t impel you to forget Adam Sandler, for example, any more than I can instruct you to forget Jack the Ripper or the Jolly Green Giant. Indeed… to urge someone to forget is worse than useless. It’s like the well-known procedure of telling someone not to think of something specific and odd, a yellow panda, for example. Go on, do not think of a yellow panda. There, the image of such a being is now in your head. Fame is a great bouncy castle that we have all blown up to its present state by breathing the names of the famous. Simply in mentioning ‘Adam Sandler’ I have inflated his fame by a cubic millimetre. It will only deflate, over time, if his name is never uttered.”

I can think of a lot of names that must never be uttered again. If I utter them here I’ll only be inflating them by a cubic zillimetre (because I am not Stephen Fry ((what? You thought maybe I was Stephen Fry???)) and my utterings have not the gravitas for millimetres), but even that’s too much. If I encode the names and someone decodes them, it would still be minutely inflationary and that won’t do. There’s a particular bunch of nasty blogger boneheads whose names I’d like to mention but I just can’t because they don’t deserve even one quarter of one half of one fame-inducing nano-mention. They’re trapped in horrible, pathetic, frustrated little lives where, as a friend pointed out, they have recurring nightmares in which they find themselves trying to pass Standard Grade Science in Sesotho. Maybe that’s punishment enough.

Bugger.

That was pointless. Well I suppose this entry will have to be about something else instead.

Stardust the movie. No. I’m not going to write about that either because it isn’t fair to expect the movie of a book to be the book, and despite having had realistic expectations I was still disappointed by the movie. Most people who have seen it, however, have thoroughly enjoyed it. But I must ask just one thing and then I’ll be quiet: If there’s a character in a book and he’s the hero and his name is Tristran, why change his name to Tristan for the movie? Give me one good reason for that.

There’s a lot to be said for hobby writers keeping their meanderings (now called ‘journaling’, if you please. For god’s sake, why not just hit yourself on the head with a rock? I can’t go shopping/fold the laundry/take your call right now, I’m journaling) strictly between the lavender-scented and tightly locked covers of a genuinely secret diary. One need seldom look further than blog entries like this one for evidence. So let’s go back to the beginning and I’ll point you towards Stephen Fry again for a 9 000 word treat.

Secret Sosaties…

“Who’s behind this ‘official’ National Braai Day? Who is the ‘Tongmaster’? Who consulted whom? Who is benefiting? Are we dealing with a secret sosatie here? …Now, before you throw me with a wet wors, please note that I’m not dissing the idea, or casting any aspersies on the organisers. I’m just asking… while I think the notion of a reconciling, nation-building Braai Day is a brilliant one, I have a deep aversion to invented holidays and festivals whose only purpose is to get cash registers chinging…” - Juno

Revelry…

“A relative who shall remain nameless (but he knows who he is) took the award for Most Spectacular Body Part Confusion, when, after a long night of beer and seafood curry with the boys, he came home to find that a recalcitrant bit of prawn had lodged itself at the back of his throat. After vigorously brushing his teeth, gargling and flossing, it was still there, so he tried to manually remove it. Pity it was his uvula. He couldn’t speak for a week afterwards.” – Muriel.

Rugby…

“There was Johann, for instance, whose only comment on the battle being waged on that field in France was, in a gay delirium, ‘Oh god, look at their tight little pants!’ And Michael, who, at a loss for words in his support of the boys in blue, kept shouting out the only French word he knew: ‘Croissant! Croissant!’” – Muriel.

Muriel is always Terrible and often Debauched as you can tell from the snippets above, which is why we more timid women love her, and secretly want to be her even if only for a day, and harbour little dreams of being invited to her house for dinner one night when Juno’s cooking. If you want more go over to Salmagundi but I warn you, you’ll laugh a lot, and maybe you’ll cry a bit, and they might try to feed you.

They complain, when she shreds their legs from the shins down in punishment. I tell them often, “When she’s sitting there in your path on the way to the fridge, pointedly glaring up at the countertop and wailing, it doesn’t mean ‘ignore me and continue with what you were doing.’ It means, ‘pick me up and put me on the counter immediately so that I might drink from my glass of water, or you’ll be sorry.’”

But they ignore her, and so they pay. She knows what she wants and she wants it right now, and she isn’t afraid to use her claws. She can’t leap up there like an ordinary cat, because apart from being unusually small, she is also unusually cautious for a cat. We excuse people all the time for this sort of pernickety behaviour - we say things like, “Shame, small-person-syndrome, you know, and besides, she had a traumatic childhood,” so why shouldn’t we make similar concessions for a cat?

Eleven years ago someone found her on the side of the road in a refuse bag, together with her mother and siblings, who were dead. They dropped her off at my vet, who reckoned that this four week old black scrap was injured, traumatised and dehydrated without even a marginal chance of survival, but he gave it his best shot anyway because the receptionists insisted. She survived and they kept her in a basket behind the counter. Three weeks later I saw her there and knew I was hers.

“Are you sure?” the vet asked, knowing my tragic cat-history too well and foreseeing yet another heavy episode of sobbing on the surgery floor, “She’s not allright you know. Possibly brain-damaged, won’t grow properly, won’t last long, will be challenging…”

Here she is, eleven years later. Her name is Beetle and I adore and admire her. A tiny, stubby, fierce and loyal animal who supposedly didn’t stand a cat’s chance, and doesn’t take nonsense from anyone. She doesn’t really know she’s a cat, having hung out exclusively with humans and dogs during her kittenhood and so orienting herself more or less along those lines. Greets me at the gate, doesn’t catch birds or mice, will only drink out of a glass tumbler and will knock it over with a paw to get at the water if the level’s too low, hogs my pillow. And as I said, she’s not afraid to use her claws. I’m like Hodgesaargh, the Falconer from Discworld, with old and new nicks and scratches all over, but they are the marks of love and I wear them accordingly. Not so, insensitive friends and family with oversensitive ankles and shins. They take petty umbrage and make no effort to understand. Tch.

I’ve been in trouble before, for looking at a piece of art and saying out loud, but this is such kak. You aren’t allowed to do that – in the world of fine art appreciation you’re supposed to gurgle and coo at kak, even if it’s quite literally a dog poo in the corner of a room, because it isn’t simply a dog poo you see, it’s a dog poo with a rationale. If you can’t find the appropriate gurgleable or cooable jargon, you’re supposed to gaze at the thing and be speechlessly lost in the infinite depths of it. My attitude is said to be a marker of my ignorance, my intellectual poverty revealed by my reluctance to engage and for all I know, that may well be true.

So now, having been completely upfront about my exclusion from the ranks of people who are allowed to talk about art, I’m going to talk about Willem Boshoff, if that’s ok. If you want to see beautifully executed work that you really can get lost in, you won’t find better. There’s an insane amount of Willem’s work on exhibition currently at the Standard Bank Gallery in Johannesburg, a sort of history of it all from 1975 ‘till now.

I was lucky enough to be there on Wednesday night for a walkabout, and got to hear Willem explain some of it in his own words. His own words are forthright and he’s generous with them, which is like a lovely present when someone is so articulate. He’s without jargon or pretence, and he’s delightfully and gently mad.

In his youth he often felt cut off and excluded by the English academics he worked with, mainly because of a language barrier which meant that he didn’t always know what they were on about. He became a bit obsessed by obscure words and began collecting them in hopes of maybe one day baffling the academics back again, which turned into a recurring theme that has its most well known incarnation in the Blind Alphabet. He thought - this visual art that I love, that is what I am, is for sighted people. No surprises there. But what must it be like to be excluded from all this because you can’t see and you aren’t allowed to touch? The result is a crazy dictionary, a huge and ongoing work (I think it’s only at E so far) which excludes the sighted so that they must depend upon the blind to explain.

The Blind alphabet is a set of mesh boxes on plinths at about hip height. On each lid, in Braille, is a word and its definition, to do with form and structure. Inside each box is a beautifully crafted and voluptuous but visually inexplicable sculpture, which offers a three dimensional experience of what the word means. All around are ordinary, very legible printed signs saying typical gallery things like “Do Not Touch.” The whole thing is impossible for a seeing person to decipher. The seeing person is therefore handicapped and frustrated, able only to conclude that there’s something mysterious in the box but unable to see that something clearly through the obscuring mesh, prohibited from touching by signs that are clearly understood, and locked out of any explanation by the very possession of eyes in working order. But the blind can’t read the printed signs, of course. They may touch, first reading the Braille and then handling the object as much as they like, so that they may understand and then enlighten us. It’s sublime and incredibly mischievous.

There was no handy blind person around when I was there, though. I need to find one and go back.

Most of Willem’s work either revolves around words themselves or uses words as a sort of scaffolding, and all of it requires that you pay attention. I left the exhibition with a feeling of heavy lightness. I wondered, as I often do as an Englishman, about whether one of my ancestors may have crossed swords with one of this Afrikaner’s ancestors, and if so which one was run through. Sadly hoped that it was mine.

The exhibition closes at the end of November, so there’s still lots of time to go back again, and then go back again, and then go back again… a single visit is overwhelming because there’s so much to take in. Some of the pieces have come home to visit from collections across the planet and probably won’t ever all be in the same place at the same time again.

Willem Boshoff, Word Forms and Language Shapes 1975-2007, Standard Bank Gallery Johannesburg, ends 1 December 2007.

When I read Tom Eaton’s column about Harry Potter I thought, oh dear, he had better stockpile some provitas and cheese ‘cos next time someone recognizes him in the spar they’ll throw him with a bag of gemsquash. People are like that. It was a bit like when David Bullard wrote that column about bloggers, only much worse because I wouldn’t miss David Bullard but if a gemsquash squashed Mr Eaton’s typing finger I’d die.

I don’t know if they ever threw him with a bag of gemsquash in the spar, but he did get sacks full of hate mail over it, which he made an excellent meal of.

Then he went away for three weeks, then he came back for two, and now he’s gone from the M&G, just like that. Gone, I tell you, and Friday will be just another day, again. I don’t know how I’ll get over it.

He wrote:

“Spring is changing to summer. Outside there is the smell of diesel and of jasmine. Last Friday, as I drove down through the Bo Kaap, a soccer game was interrupted by a good daughter. “Faisal,” she called, “Mommy says you must go to mosque NOW!” Someone in the tussle of players said, “Voetsek!”, and the good daughter turned, her mouth forming an O, to deliver news of the insurrection to some dark and cool room, where maternal retribution no doubt waited.

These are the sorts of things you stop noticing when you’re paid to notice. It is the things that mean so much that you start discarding, because they mean so little in politics or popular culture or even in comedy.”

Viva Gazania was a funny, cunning sword and an eloquent window. It was also the tears of things. I’m going to miss it terribly.

It was a horrible September in Jozi. Parched and dustier than ever with monster construction happening all over and every man, woman and beast possessed by the small and fractious demon gods who inhabit the crackle-spaces of mote striking charged and toxic mote. 9 accidents involving trucks in one particular 24 hour traffic eternity? If that’s not the work of small and fractious demon gods then I don’t know what is.

But two marvelous things happened in the past few days, and all is well again. As well as it can be around here at any rate. Firstly, it rained. Not just rain, this was actual weather. A proper torrent, then something softly Irish, then hail with all the noisy chaos of a newly formed and enthusiastic metal band, then wind that howled so theatrically one would have thought it was auditioning for a movie soundtrack. The city and its sky is so spotlessly laundered that yesterday even the horizon was visible. Makes a heart glad, and a nose less reluctant.

Secondly, Tom Eaton returned to the M&G after what seemed like a hundred year absence but was really only three weeks. One Doug Downie wrote a little note to the M&G saying, “It’s been so nice reading the M&G in recent weeks without Tom Eaton. I’ve been able to read through the entire paper without that last groan. And it’s not about Harry Potter, Tom, it’s about your puerile schoolboy style.”
I think he’s in denial though and it really is all about Harry Potter. I’ve phoned the M&G about a hundred times, demanding the address of this poor confused man. They won’t give it to me, the sillies. I only want to help him.

Doug must’ve had a conniption fit when he read The Luthuli Times, Volume 1, Issue 1. I thought of him tearing out his hair and groaning mightily, perhaps even choking on his cornflakes but reading on to the bitter end regardless, and I’ll admit that the thought was a happy one.

Get the Luthuli Times here: http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?articleid=320487&area=/columnist__tom_eaton/

Salut!