FIVE copies of donga left in stock

Dye Hard Press has FIVE copies of donga left in stock. donga is a selection of poetry, short fiction, interviews and essays from what was one of South Africa's first literary online journals (2000-2003).

With 32 contributors, donga contains work by writers such as Lionel Abrahams, Robert Berold, Lauren Beukes, Nadine Botha, Toast Coetzer, Gary Cummiskey, Graeme Feltham, Richard Fox, Stacy Hardy, Stephen Hofstatter, Aryan Kaganof, Bernat Kruger, Joan Meterlerkamp, Ike Mboneni Muila, Pravasan Pillay, Lesego Rampolokeng, Arja Salafranca, Kelwyn Sole, Ivan Vladislavic and Paul Wessels.

donga is edited by Alan Finlay and Paul Wessels, and was published by BlekSem, in collaboration with Botsotso Publishing and Dye Hard Press.

320 pages.

The cost is R100 per copy, including postage - South Africa only. Email me at dyehardpress@iafrica.com to order!

Aryan Kaganof's review of Off-ramp

the debt to raymond carver is obvious, nonetheless gary cummiskey forges territory that is all his own in this collection that, bejewelled as it is with his astringent surrealist prose, might well be described as a “gem” were it not for the final story, entitled “space”, that lends the collection a certain brownish pucker. this dark opening of a story is the book’s highlight, brilliantly chosen to end at the bottom so to speak. south african literary fiction has thirsted for a well-written poepgat, but now, having grown curious about gary cummiskey’s anus, our earlier revulsion withdraws into the background as the goal of penetrating and exploring the taboo of unknown darkness becomes foremost in our minds. the poepgat is central in understanding our collective national psyche here in africa south south (ass), where all who, after marikana, still believe in the rainbow mythology are well and truly assholes. bravo!

first published here 

New title from BlekSem, in collaboration with Botsotso Publishing and Dye Hard Press: donga

donga is a selection of poetry, short fiction, interviews and essays from what was one of South Africa's first literary online journals (2000-2003).

With 32 contributors, donga  contains work by writers such as Lionel Abrahams, Robert Berold, Lauren Beukes, Nadine Botha, Toast Coetzer, Gary Cummiskey, Graeme Feltham, Richard Fox, Stacy Hardy, Stephen Hofstatter, Aryan Kaganof, Bernat Kruger, Joan Meterlerkamp, Ike Mboneni Muila, Pravasan Pillay, Lesego Rampolokeng, Arja Salafranca, Kelwyn Sole, Ivan Vladislavic and Paul Wessels.

donga is edited by Alan Finlay and Paul Wessels, and is published by BlekSem, in collaboration with Botsotso Publishing and Dye Hard Press.

320 pages.

ISBN: 978-0-620-52779-8

For more information and direct orders, contact Alan Finlay at bleksembook@gmail.com. donga will soon retail at bookstores.

Review of The Edge of Things, in Wordsetc

An edge is the most exhilarating point for a story to place itself. Ask any reader. We don’t need cliff-scrabbling above a literal precipice; masters (and mistresses) of the form can hollow out spaces of mystery and risk beneath the most prosaic inner or outer landscape. But what we do ask, as readers, is that the threshold matter somehow and that we are surprised and, perhaps, even changed when the story crosses it.

The Edge of Things, then, is an enticing title and a flexible one too, stretching to cover all manner of brinks. Characters cross the endlessly fascinating boundary between innocence and experience, naivety and self-knowledge, one sharing his first kiss at the company picnic, another beheading her first chicken.

What would infidelity look like? one story wonders, while another shows us what looks like cheating but turns out, in the flick of a needle, to be bridal branding instead. Worlds collide: matter-of-fact house renovations clang against soul-exchanges in one story while in another an empty house invites a range of intruders, from teenage lovers to lowering-the-tone buyers to symbolic creatures, recalling District 9, that challenge notions of inside and out.

Liesl Jobson’s “tips for super pics” apply with wit and pain to parent-child relationships, tracing shifts that the photographer protagonist catches out of the corner of her eye while her lens is trained elsewhere. Beatrice Lamwaka writes about a schoolgirl who wants to win a race on sports day. She has, after all, trained hard, fleeing rebel soldiers who abducted her. “I outran them so that’s an A+ for me. If anyone needs more practice in athletics, I’m sure it’s not me.”

Sometimes, an edge is sharp enough to draw blood. Then there’s literary edginess, fun with texts, intertextuality. Iconoclasm (“I don’t like Coetzee”) meets homage, for example, in Jeanne Hromnik’s exploration of new-South-African father figures both lecherous and pathetic. Perd Booysen amuses himself, and us too, with the device of the discovered journal, inadmissible as historical evidence because of its fictional finesse.

In David wa Maahlamela’s playful bus ride across the fiction/non-fiction frontier, we meet both Wordsetc and its editor, Phakama Mbonambi. In the optimistic view of the narrator, also called David, writers who describe lived experience “know exactly the impression they are intending to give their readers”. But this is perilous terrain for less adept scribes.

An event that bit your heart for real needs just as much construction on the page as a situation you make up from scratch. You can’t refer to that day, you must weave it, as Bernard Levinson does in “Tokai”. We have no idea whether the story draws on his life or his imagination or some alchemical meld of the two. What matters is that he shapes place, time and action so fully, so deftly that, like the narrator, we are moved by the mysterious intensity of the last scene.

The Edge of Things is in every sense a mixed bag. Alongside Levinson’s story, gems include Salafranca’s unforgettable image of a mother in an iron lung and Pravasan Pillay’s characters, dialogue and spicy small-canvas family drama.

Silke Heiss’s “Don’t Take Me for Free”, arguably Best in Show, nimbly outstrips our expectations. Like its trucker-clown narrator, Vonny, the story “was built to change”.

In Vonny’s extended appeal to her lover, “All-I-Have, Azar”, the  language is as elating as the ride across ostrich and canola country in a bright-eyed van “with its massive, roaring heart and load continuing to doer ’n gone”.

The collection’s subtitle – South African short fiction – proposes that we read the stories as a kind of national sampler. (In a one-off slip, the introduction makes an unwarranted claim to be presenting writing “on our continent”.) Clearly, South African fiction has moved beyond the imperative to be earnest, political or even particularly South African. Mischief is now acceptable story territory, while Fred de Vries’s chilling tale could take place in almost any big city and Aryan Kaganof’s junkies claim that Amsterdam may as well be Durban, “there’s no fucking difference. Bars are the same everywhere. Drugs are the same everywhere.” But it is also true that, as per Hromnik, “the past is hungry”.

Several stories tackle a mix of  race and privilege, either head-on or obliquely. In “Telephoning the Enemy”, for instance, Hans Pienaar crosses the “what if ?” line for an intriguing revisit of apartheid-era violence.

Solitude, as Salafranca notes in the introduction, features in many of the stories. We glimpse various anxious, closed, self-referential worlds. A man sits at a café table in the last story, telling himself consoling untruths and inking “NARCISSIST” into his crossword puzzle as he fends off contact.

What feels like a limitation, though, looking back over the collection, is neither inner landscapes nor low spirits (excellent fiction fodder) but rather a sense of stasis in some of the stories, a single note struck and held, Act 1 from curtain up to curtain down.

For these writers and for all the rest of us, Jenna Mervis’s story offers advice. Her protagonist “mentions nothing of … the fingernails of trees that have begun to tear at her corrugated roof in the night”. She looks for “a sign that … that the dangers outside have become manifest”. But by the end (and this won’t spoil it for you), she steps off the edge of the deck and plunges into the veld. Why not, writers? Instead of tamping down tension, why not let it explode? Approach the edge. Plunge. Leap.

REVIEWER: A Zimbabwean filmmaker and writer,  Annie Holmes has published short stories in the US and Zimbabwe and a short memoir, Good Red, in Canada. She co-edited, with Peter Orner, Hope Deferred: Narratives of Zimbabwean Lives. 

(Published in Wordsetc, Third Quarter 2011)

Ons Klyntji, August 2011

The latest issue of alternative culture journal Ons Klyntji has been published and contains poetry, prose, interviews and artwork from a wide variety of names including Allan Kolski Horwitz, Aryan Kaganof, Diane Awerbuck, Koos Kombuis, Kai Lossgott, Stacy Hardy, Kleinboer and notably - from my point of view - Fred de Vries's piece on Sinclair Beiles, 'The First Man in Space was a South African'.

Contact Toast Coetzer at info@toastcoetzer.com for details.

Loneliness a recurring theme in this collection: a review of The Edge of Things, by Gwen Podbrey

The short story has come back into its own over the past few years, possibly because time-strapped readers find them easier to manage than a lengthy novel.

This collection includes contributions from a remarkably diverse range of writers, including Gail Dendy, Jenna Mervis, Gillian Schutte and Jayne Bauling.

If there is one central theme to the book, it is alienation (or, to use real name, loneliness). The stories capture encounters and experiences which tilt us over into the cracks between the crevices of contemporary life: those dark, uncharted spaces where needs are failed by niceties, and pain and perdition walk hand in hand.

Pick of the crop – by a long way – is Bernard Levinson’s superb “Tokai”, which recounts his delivery of an Afrikaans couple, the Bezuidenhout’s, baby in the dead of night. But the birth is complicated and the womb goes into violent contractions, forcing him to manually secure it and staunch its gushing of  blood.

For hours he sits, his hand in the uterus of his semi-comatose patient, feeling this incubator of life convulse, enfold his fingers and relay to him its arcana.

“There was a slight shift of tempo. I listened with the fingers of my fist. Unmistakably, I heard the womb flutter and shift itself minutely over my fist... It stretched and gripped. Stretched again and squeezed my fist firmly. I inched my hand out. A secret dialogue between my hand and the womb. My blunt fist - mute and solid. The womb excited, chattering and intimately pressing and caressing my hand.”

Witnessing the drama of this birth - like the primordial one and, indeed, all births - Kleinman Bezuidenhout is engulfed in agony as acute as his wife’s. The next morning, Levinson - preparing to leave - sees him engaged in a ritual which matches, in every detail, the intensity and power of the previous night’s crisis.

The story is an unforgettable glimpse into the soul of the healer, whose patients’ trust in him can crucify as often as it coronates, and whose brief role in their lives - as an outsider, observing and intervening, but never sharing - carries a unique loneliness.

Later, in Liesl Jobson’s “You Pay for the View: Twenty Tips for Super Pics”, we enter the alienation of a compulsive photographer unable to fully engage with her life, and attempting instead to capture its essence through her lens “because the camera never lies”.

Yet it does, for it lacks the vocabulary to capture the truth of locations and individuals, how they  imbed themselves in the DNA of the soul and remain there forever, a testimony to life and loss. These are  not within the province of pixel and resolution, but of another documenting medium altogether.

The third exceptional story in the collection, Pravasan Pillay’s “Mr Essop”, recounts the arrival of a seemingly kindly, placid lodger at his parents’ home. The author, still a child, notes the growing friendship between the boarder (Mr Essop) and his father - both lonely men - and their mutual pleasure at discovering the values they have in common. But when Essop suddenly shows a brutal side to his nature, shock is added to disappointment.

Aryan Kaganof’s “Same Difference” explores yet another kind of alienation: that of drug users, whose subculture and exclusion from mainstream society force them to band together, unwillingly recognising in each other kindred tortured spirits and putting on a show of bravado to conceal their desperation.

In this ugly, treacherous world, the only allegiances which matter, last as long as it takes to shoot up a crystal meth hit.

“The upstairs toilets are for blowjobs and the schnarf sessions. The outside toilets are for quick shags and schnarf sessions … Tretchikoff girls clustered on the walls and in the mirror. Looking down serenely on the useless lives of all the pastel customers. Useless, all of it. Useless.”

As the narrator ends yet another all-night session with his gang of users in the fetid, filthy basement of a nightclub, and the sun announces the break of yet another unwelcome day, he reflects: “I’m frightened. I’m lonely. Sometimes I feel close to death. But at least I scored tonight… There is no reason to stay alive. But I refuse to bribe the reaper to come and take me.”

Hans Pienaar’s contribution, Telephoning the Enemy”, makes a brave, but failed, effort to explore the alienation of white, apartheid-bound South Africans on the verge of political change. As bombs hidden in sidewalk garbage cans claim one civilian victim after another during the early 1980s, racist beliefs are heightened and the gap between terrorist and victim appears unbreachable.

Not all the stories have the gravitas or compositional skill to sustain the reader’s interest. Angelina N Sithebe’s cumbersome, melodramatic and poorly structured “Sepia”, for example, features characters who are utterly implausible, while Rosemund Handler’s “Clueless” exhumes a stale, clichéd story line: white, lonely madam coming on to a man across the colour bar, followed by a delicious explosion of eroticism and new awareness of each other as human beings. Hardly groundbreaking stuff.

Still, with 22 out of 24 stories offering piercing insights and showcasing a range of exciting writing talent, the collection is one of the best to emerge in recent years. Salafranca’s eloquent and moving foreword whet one’s appetite for the feast to come and the contributors’ profiles at the back of the book give perspective to the voices on the pages, which demand - and deserve - an audience.

(Published in SA Jewish Report, July 8, 2001) 

Review of Gary Cummiskey's Sky Dreaming - Aryan Kaganof

gary cummiskey was born after a short stint in london in 2009. in that same year he co-opted with sinclair beiles? a collection of titles about the beat poet. it’s intriguing that gary notes high levels of supermarkets in hillbrow as well as his death in 2000 (9 years before the so-called re-birth). gary cummiskey, a midget staring into space, moves on with his legs inspread. he leaps down from buildings into the fire but nobody hears his singing so he drags the terrified, whimpering sinclair beiles? through the hall up to andré gide’s lecture stand where he knocks a glass of papers all over the water. that’s when the cops surround him...read more here

Review of alan finlay's pushing from the riverbank by Aryan Kaganof

a beautifully assembled and printed collection of poems
designed by the poet’s wife whose typography and layout
attest to an
intimate understanding of her spouse’s concerns...read more here

Spring 2010 issue of Incwadi

Check out the Spring 2010 issue of Incwadi, a South African online journal of poetry and photography. This issue of Incwadi includes poems by Robert Berold, Ingrid Andersen, Gary Cummiskey, Isabel Dixon, Gus Ferguson, Sarah Frost, Colleen Higgs, Aryan Kaganof, Aryan Salafranca, Kobus Moolman, Fiona Zerbst and many others.

April in the Moon-Sun available as free ebook

April in the Moon-Sun by Gary Cummiskey, published by Dye Hard Press in 2006 and now out of print, is an astonishing cut-up prose sequence with delirious images shifting between Johannesburg and London, capturing the instances of experience through a simultaneous and multi-layered kaleidoscope rather than by linear perception.

It also formed the basis of a short film by Aryan Kaganof, called Velvet.

April in the Moon-Sun can be downloaded for free here

Romancing the Dead: A Sharp Cunt Dripping Honey, by Aryan Kaganof

Pravasan Pillay’s Tearoom Books has published the chapbook of the year.

There’s no escaping it.

The moment you see Gary Cummiskey’s face you start screaming

because

there is fire in the enema of art

he put it there

poignantly

not yet free of the dream nor of the memory of when you came to me not wearing panties beneath your light summer dress

but the moment you got on top of me and you saw my face you started screaming

As far as South Africa is concerned a reason for Gary Cummiskey’s neglect may stem from the fact that he spent almost 20 years in Randburg, and by the time he returned to settle down in Sandton, the political situation had changed and so Cummiskey’s surrealist work seemed out of place. Thus Gary had become a marginalised figure as a result of both psychogeographical and cultural factors.

He writes in “European Writers” “Some people became poets after corresponding with European writers. I became a poet after sleeping on a razorblade.”

And this means that Gary is sharp.

He’s busy looking for a magic wand - no strings attached.

Another problem that may account for the relative obscurity of Gary’s work is the difficulty of placing it within the various ‘movement’ categorisations. While Romancing the Dead contains a number of poems dealing with the colonial city scene in Joburg, the rest of his work does not particularly reflect the social context in which it was created.

In the end it boils down to the “Painting”:

I am hungry and dirty.
My feet stink.
I want to brush my teeth.

However, it can also not be ignored that Cummiskey’s illness sometimes made him an extremely difficult person, and most publishers and editors were reluctant to deal with him. For this reason alone Pravasan Pillay must be commended. Despite there being no physical attraction Pillay liked Cummiskey as a friend.

Gary was aware of his outsider status, and openly declared that he did not wish to fit in with any particular group or category. But there is a difference between being an outsider and being marginalised to the point of neglect - and Cummiskey’s work is neglected. (Although Stephen Gray would probably not agree).

Romancing the Dead is a funeral ceremony and all Gary’s sleeping relatives sit on the floor of the bathroom around the bath where his corpse is laid. Once the sleepers have been given the pills to swallow when you left you took them out from your handbag and slipped them back on.

Some people become poets after sleeping with European writers.

Gary Cummiskey is a razorblade.

Very sharp.

Tearoom Books isbn 978-0-620-44717-1

First published on Kagablog

Gary Cummiskey: Extreme Romantic

Aryan Kaganof, in a recent review of Gary Cummiskey and Eva Kowalska's Who was Sinclair Beiles?, drew an insightful parallel between Cummiskey and Beiles and, rightly, highlighted the scandalously fact that Cummiskey remains uncelebrated in South Africa....Read more here

Stephen Gray and Sinclair Beiles: which is the real literary con man?

Stephen Gray, in his review of Who was Sinclair Beiles?, (Mail & Guardian, 07/09/09) implies that Sinclair was “some sort of impostor? A scam?” Gray’s egregious insinuation is further developed in the article: “In the classic accounts of the period, James Campbell’s The Beat Generation and Barry Miles’s The Beat Hotel, “our boy” merits only a footnote or two, and no listing of his works, if there were any, in the bibliographies.”...Read more here

Kaganof on Who was Sinclair Beiles?

eventually one has to love gary cummiskey. he does not give up. he’s the kind of irascible soul that always draws trouble. something about his pugnacious nature attracts difficulties. if it can go wrong at a printer it will. twice. gary’s often stuck in traffic. the waiter dusts more flies into his soup. but unlike most people you’ve ever met who share this streak of disaster-attraction - cummiskey hasn’t got it in him to throw in the towel. you would have thought after years of publishing small press editions to little or no acclaim from the precarious south african literature “establishment” that gary would see the light and stop bothering. thank the gods he’s not that sort of bloke. gary persists. his persistency is the stuff of local literary legend.

green dragon 6 is the best edition of his literary journal to date. and this volume about the late yeoville beat poet sinclair beiles is worth its weight in genetically modified stem cells. it keeps beiles alive. a collection of essays by the likes of alan finlay, fred de vries, co-editor eva kowalska and gary himself, the book sheds shards of splintered, diffused and hazy light on the figure of beiles whose reputation is based largely on memories of his surly frame sitting truculently outside coffee society in rockey street, chain smoking irritably - has anyone ever read any of his poems?

in yeoville in 1994 to film nice to meet you, please don’t rape me i was introduced to beiles by my co-screenwriter peter j. morris, himself an equally taciturn, sour-bellied type. the two of them found things to grumble about. it was impossible for me to talk to beiles. he just seemed too far gone in a vinegary disposition exacerbated by the brutal disappointment of never having ‘made it’ (whatever that means to a poet). but this volume opens the man up. dawie malan’s exquisite essay “the trouble with sinclair beiles” resuscitates the poet, gives him a fragile, vulnerable soul - and reveals librarian dawie to be one of our most sensitive writers.

this book is essential. one day somebody will be collating a set of essays asking the question “who is gary cummiskey?”he deserves better. he deserves to be lionised now.

First published here

Taylor Rain is Dirty Girl in Velvet - Dionysos Andronis

The latest short film from Aryan Kaganof is a precious, allegorical jewel of a film lasting 11 minutes and 32 seconds. Poetry is central to this film, firstly in the form of lines being composed, and then in the poetry of the female body, a favourite theme in Kaganof’s work. The poet celebrated here is Gary Cummiskey, one of the most promising poets of his generation in South Africa. The poetry of the female form comes from Taylor Rain, an exceptional performer who offers us her radiant and photogenic body.

The film is divided into four parts. In the first part, a blank screen serves as a point of anticipation. You’ll see why a little further on in the text.

The poems being written by Gary Cummiskey appear in the second part, accompanied by improvised music from the group Matmos. Even though we don’t understand the poems in their entirety (they scroll down the screen quickly, word by word), it creates a sensation of mounting excitement which becomes aesthetic and sensual. The words are not merely groups of letters, but carry an emotional charge. The suspense is accentuated by the sound of a typewriter off-screen providing a second, eerie music. We have the feeling that something is about to happen. This part lasts six minutes.

In the third part, the actress Taylor Rain starts masturbating in front of the camera. She caresses her vagina and anus. Gary Cummiskey’s poems now scroll down in the centre of the screen, becoming the true stars of the film in the foreground, while the actress provides a very beautiful background motif multiplying the wealth and interaction between the themes. A small white bear is sitting next to the beautiful young girl. It serves as an element of explanation. This significant section lasts three minutes.

The caption “Yes, that’s velvet” appears in the fourth and final part lasting 32 seconds. It is a sweet, short conclusion of exemplary grace. The background is black, in harmony with the opening image, and the artificial velvet of the little teddy bear is a metaphor for the forgery of the second body-poetry in the film. The truth lies in the words and written poetry. The body is beautiful, extremely beautiful, but the aspect of our human lives which is most alive is in the written lines.

(translated from the French by Lucy Lyall Grant)

Blogs can bring a fresh alternative perspective

They often ignore traditional market-related views and can provide a platform for passionate individual opinions, writes Gary Cummiskey

THE past five years have witnessed a surge in print book publishing in SA, while focus on internet publishing has not been so prominent, mainly because of low internet access in the country which is only at about 6%-7%. There have however been some forays into online literary publishing, and blogs in particular offer scope.

Poet and publisher Goodenough Mashego, in Shatale, Mpumalanga, is the creator of Kasiekulture, which offers some often cheeky and humorous commentary by Mashego and others on literary, cultural and sociopolitical issues. Mashego says Kasiekulture was started in 2006 as a new medium to promote “alternative literature, arts in the periphery and cultural activities in the fringes”.

The Kagablog is the brainchild of filmmaker, novelist and poet Aryan Kaganof, in Cape Town. More of an online literary and arts journal than a commentary blog, such as Kasiekulture, the Kagablog has numerous contributors from various countries. It usually has several daily postings, including music, film, visual art, poetry, fiction, criticism and photography.

Kaganof says: “I started up the Kagablog in late 2005. I was interested in creating a forum for writers, poets, artists, academics and digital explorers of all persuasions to present work. This forum would, unlike the mass media as we know it, not be market-driven, either in the sense of its content always relating to new product, or in the sense of having to pander to the consideration of what the readership wants.

“I invited contributors whose work I admired, respected, believed in and or loved. Once in as a contributor there is no editorial censorship. In this way too, the blog works very differently from market-driven mass media.”

Mashego says he gets huge satisfaction from posting material by other writers and cultural practitioners.

“While I still post lots of my thoughts and my understanding of what's going on, what makes Kasiekulture different from many blogs is that I do post material from other people as long as it's in line with what I'm doing. It could easily have been an online magazine in the sense of a website, but that route for me has been exhausted and is not that cost-effective. I have reviewed most mainstream books, films in the fringes, alternative music, cultural festivals and heritage sites and commentated on literary issues.”

An advantage of online publishing is, of course, that one can the ability to monitor readership through a hit counter, and, depending on the quality of the software used, obtain fairly comprehensive geographic information about visitors.

Mashego says: “I have an average of 56 visitors on a good day. Per month it would definitely be more than 1500 visits. Most of those who visit from SA access the internet from their workplaces. Most of my readers are white, given that I have more visitors from the US and Europe than Africa. In the US it seems most of the visitors are seem black, given the comments I get when I hit at people such as Molefi Kete Asante and some rappers. Locals love light-hearted opinions and political commentaries.”

Kaganof says his hit-rate can vary quite dramatically. “For instance, from November last year to February this year, the blog was getting more than 250000 hits per a month. But then when I moved to Sweden for five months from March it dropped off a bit as I was unable to give the blog as much attention as I usually would.“About half the readership is located in geographical SA, but there are a lot of hits from the US and from the Netherlands.”

Neither of the initiatives receive sponsorship. Kaganof says the Kagablog is a labour of love.

Mashego says, “I don't think the Google Adsense strategy works. They say you apply and they post content-related ads. Yeah, they are content-related and they appear on my blog but I still have to see the money. The trick here is that as a blogger you can't really monitor if anyone clicked on the ad, which means you depend on them to tell you that you have made a few dollars or not. I'm still waiting for a big local advertiser with a soft spot for art and culture.”

There is also the issue of SA’s low internet penetration, which raises the question of the feasibility of online publishing aimed at local audiences, but as Kaganof says, 6%-7% is better than nothing at all, and it is growing.

Mashego says, “Blogs are feasible. The penetration of the source might be very low but the information carried on these blogs reaches more people. That is why I think they have a role to play. The shortfall is just that print has not seen the importance of collaborating with blogs to help them cover the whole country. Also, newspapers should realise that if they browsed blogs they could find material to syndicate on their newspapers and pay the blogger.”

A criticism that has been made against of the blog concept is that it skips the editorial process usually involved in print or broadcast media, thereby allowing a situation where anyone can become a published writer. In SA particularly some people do not regard them as having any value.

Mashego says, “They should be taken seriously. Some time back I posted a comment after the AIDS-related death of a kwaito artist and a journalist quoted it on her tribute to the artist. This means somebody saw the seriousness of the blog and its content. We might not have reached a point where we are an alternative to print, but given that most newspaper websites carry the same stories you find in print, blogs should be regarded by South African audiences as an alternative. For example, if there is a rugby or soccer game that finishes after 9pm a blogger is likely to post the story before print or television media, which have broadcasting time frames or print deadlines. Blogs don't have that. Acceptance is gradually coming, once people realise the staleness of stuff they read in newspapers and see on TV.

“Blogs can also be incentives for people to read books. There are books I have reviewed on Kasiekulture and then I got mail from readers asking me how they could buy copies. Some inquiries came from libraries wanting to have those the titles on their shelves.”

Kaganof takes a harder, more critical view of whether blogs are taken seriously in SA.

“The only things taken seriously in SA are drinking and sport. I cannot allow myself to be contained by the mediocre opinions of the market. What matters is that I take blogs seriously, that the contributors and the readership takes them seriously.
“Look at the print publishing industry: too many books are published and thrown out into the marketplace in the hope that something sticks. It's just a huge jumble sale out there, and it is exhausting for readers to keep up with it all. And that's why people retreat, they turn inwards, they find refuge in the classics, in what they already know, because it is impossible to read through all the books that are thrown at them.

“The blogging phenomenon is something entirely different. It's a distinct medium of its own. If anything, I think blogs stimulate people to buy books because they give readers access to so many fresh critical voices who are writing from a position of passion rather than the established critical voices who write from jaded positions of power and assumed authority.”





First published in Business Day's books and publishing supplement, November 15, 2008

Taylor Rain is Dirty Girl in Velvet - Dionysos Andronis

Ce nouveau court métrage de Aryan Kaganof est un bijou précieux et allégorique de 11 minutes et 32 secondes. Dans ce film il y a d’abord la poésie sous la forme de vers en train de se composer et puis il y a la poésie du corps féminin, un thème favori chez Kaganof. Le poète honoré est Gary Cummiskey, un des plus prometteurs de sa génération en Afrique du Sud. La poésie du corps féminin appartient à Taylor Rain, une performeuse d’exception, qui nous offre son corps photogénique et radieux.

Le film est divisé en quatre parties. À la première partie un écran noir de deux minutes sert comme point d’anticipation. Vous verrez pourquoi un peu plus tard dans le texte.

Les poèmes en train de s’écrire de Gary Cummiskey arrivent à la deuxième partie et ils sont accompagnés par une musique improvisée du groupe Matmos. Même si on n’arrive pas à saisir les poèmes en entier, puisqu’ils défilent mots à mots et en vitesse sur l’écran, une sensation de palpitation est déclenchée qui devient esthétique et sensuelle. Les mots ne sont pas des simples lettres mais des porteurs de charge émotionnelle. La palpitation est accentuée par le son d’une machine à écrire en off qui sert comme une deuxième musique angoissante. On a le pressentiment que quelque chose se prépare. Cette partie dure six minutes.

À la troisième partie l’actante Taylor Rain commence à se masturber devant l’objectif. Elle caresse ses parties vaginales et anales. Cette fois les poésies de Gary Cummiskey défilent au milieu de l’écran. Elles deviennent les vrais protagonistes en premier plan et l’actante un très beau motif secondaire qui sert à multiplier la richesse et l’interaction entre les thèmes. Un petit ours blanc est assis prêt de la belle jeune fille. Il sert comme un élément d’explication. Trois minutes est la durée de cette partie significative.

L’inscription «Yes, that’s Velvet » (Oui, c’est du velours) vient à la quatrième et dernière partie qui dure 32 secondes. C’est une conclusion heureuse et courte d’une grâce exemplaire. Le fond de l’écran est noir pour être en accord avec l’image du début. Le velours artificiel du petit ourson - jouet serait une métaphore du faux de cette deuxième poésie corporelle dans le film. La vérité est du coté des mots et de la poésie écrite. Le corps est beau, très beau même, mais les vers écrits sont l’élément le plus vivant de notre vie humaine.

First published on www.kaganof.com/kagablog

Aryan Kaganof's Velvet - Helge Janssen

It is utterly impossible to view this short film and not be affected.

Art/film does not come more cutting edge than this.

But it is absolutely impossible to take Kaganof at face value. To do so is to get entangled in a web of personal likes and dislikes, revealing ones own psychological imperfections, and this serves no purpose whatsoever.

Never more so as in this 11 minute film.

The challenge then, if one feels up to it, is to empty one’s head of all psychological baggage, step into a clear space of NOW, and view what we are being shown in a state of heightened and relaxed alertness. (Tolle)

On an evolutionary scale I’d say that is a pretty high order.

Having said that, and even so, the emotion and the intellect are prodded to a point where they run amok, and the situation becomes an exercise in crisis management. Perhaps I am a ‘poetic epileptic’ for if I were an epileptic, these words and images would have had the same effect as a strobe.

And the words, the words, the words, hammering, hammering.....‘dirty girl’....not least of them by Gary Cummiskey.....drilling...the cut-up flashes of phrases coming furiously......all the while ‘emptying one out’, pausing just long enough to allow the viewer a foothold, then shooting off again, stripping stripping, stripping......becoming as naked as.....

....the visuals of Taylor Rain large, unabashed.....

....but Kaganof is not about to use the word ‘physical’ (introductory information) lightly, and herein lies the very reason why this film is not pornographic: a very pretty woman is exploring her lower orifices without apology, without taint, without trying to stimulate the viewer, she herself is not ‘self pleasuring’, she is matter-of-fact, controlled: she becomes at once her own 'doctor', a researcher and a pioneer....

As such Rain/Kaganof/Cummiskey together stab right into the heart of the matter: where’s the taboo?


This review originally appeared on KZNSA Gallery.

Seedy world of sex for sale

Christmas Eve in Johannesburg is the setting for independent filmmaker Aryan Kaganof’s SMS Sugar Man, which recently premiered on the sidelines of the Grahamstown Arts Festival. The film, written and directed by Kaganof, focuses on Sugar Man (played by Kaganof), a pimp who is losing his grip on reality, and his three prostitutes, the Sugars, as they travel in his 1966 Valiant to hotels in the city to service their clients.

The film is unique in a number of ways, mainly because it is the first feature-length film to be have been shot on a cellphone camera.

“The natural evolution of film is away from film and towards digital projection technologies,” says Kaganof.

The cellphone camera provides film with its next great historical milestone, and evidence of this is that all over the world many festivals are springing up to advance this direction. Hollywood is also embracing the medium, with Spike Lee doing a cellphone film for Nokia.

“I am proud SA was the first country to produce a full-length feature film generated using this technology,” says Kaganof.

The film is a bit pixilated in places, but rather than signalling inferior quality, the pixilation adds to the sense of the seediness of Sugar Man’s world — one of sordidness, exploitation, kinky sex, pimps, prostitutes, junkies, pushers and gangsters.

It adds a dreamlike vagueness to the action, the reality of which is open to question, while simultaneously evoking a realistic and immediate feel, like a homemade film or documentary.

One of the central themes of the film is that of identity. In its first moments, the Sugar Grace (Leigh Graves) asks: “Who are you, Sugar Man?” Identities are mostly kept concealed throughout the film. The Sugars do not reveal their real names to clients, who in turn are simply referred to as Wallets.

It is an anonymous world where sex is merely a financial transaction, and who people really are is not important. The Sugar Selene (leading actress Deja Bernhardt) refers to Sugar Man as wearing a mask, which he says is his business mask.

The characters often use cellphone cameras in the film, almost interrogating each other with their questions, searching for the truth. This also suggests a film within a film, as if the characters are indulging in play-acting.

There are striking similarities between the figure of Sugar Man and Jesus Christ, especially in his relationship with the Sugars, which parallels Christ’s relationship with his disciples.

There is also the theme of betrayal by a favourite. Biblical references are frequent throughout the film, and one Wallet appears to be a vicar (“appears” because it could be fantasy role-play) who spouts biblical passages while receiving a blowjob.

Setting the film on Christmas Eve provides an opportunity to explore tensions. Christmas Eve might generally be a warm, traditional family occasion, but it is also, as Sugar Man points out, the most depressing time of the year — especially for the lonely, from whom pimps can make good money.

When Selene says to Sugar Man that she feels something bad is going to happen, his response is that it is Christmas Eve, so how could anything bad happen? But the sense of doom is reinforced by Atilla the hit-man’s insistence that he feels “bad things will happen”.

The film opens with the fairy-tale introduction of “Once upon a time”, but there is little that is innocent in this story. At one point, Selene puts a transvestite Wallet to bed as if he were a child, tucks him in and tells him a bedtime story while masturbating him.

The feel-good movie genre is one I have always viewed with a certain malevolent distaste,” says Kaganof. “This film introduces South African audiences to the feel-bad movie, a genre of my own that I have finely honed and shaped over the past 20 years.”

The film is filled with loneliness, such as that of Sugar Man and of the Wallets. In one powerful scene, a Wallet (John Matshikiza) calls Selene “darling” and asks her what her name is. Selene leaves without saying a word, leaving him to his loneliness.

“I have to give full credit to John Matshikiza for digging very deep into himself, as an actor and as a man, and finding a character that is recognisable and deeply tragic,” says Kaganof. “It was a great privilege for me to work with John, whose chemistry with Deja Bernhardt was, literally, heartbreaking.”

Kaganof goes on to quote French philosopher Jean Baudrillard: “Even good and evil dream of each other from the depths of their loneliness.”

Feelings matter little in this world of sex for money, and it is notable that none of the sexual encounters in the film result in penetrative sex.

“Real sex, penetrative sex,” says Kaganof, “cannot happen in a world of masks and screens, the world of simulacra. But this is the world of the new SA, the world of the spectacle, the world of the mall and the world of the reality of the illusion of freedom, the illusion of democracy, the reality of the illusion of progress. The illusion that we have choices that will make us happy.”

In the film, Sugar Man says: “Money is God.” There are several close-up shots of money being counted, and it is money that binds Sugar Man and the Sugars together. Sex, relationships, trust, and even life and death seem to be purely a matter of financial transaction.

Yet this sordid world in which the film is set is in many ways not very different from the “respectable” middle-class world of the suburbs, of what is “decent” and acceptable, or from the legal financial transactions that take place every day in business.

Kaganof says: “The underworld microcosm of the film’s milieu serves, of course, as a reminder that this is how it’s down here in the new SA, the cashocracy.”

One of the main presences in the film is that of Joburg: its streets, people, garages and convenience stores, the phallic Hillbrow tower, the seedy as well as plush hotels with their equally lonely and mysterious empty corridors. It is a setting reminiscent of Jean-Luc Godard’s ’60s film, Alphaville, to which Kaganof acknowledges a debt.

“Alphaville is a seminal film of the ’60s,” he says. “Nowhere is the extreme horror of the modernist dystopia better realised than in that film. What SMS Sugar Man does is update this dystopian perspective in Johannesburg.”

With barely a superfluous shot or word spoken, SMS Sugar Man takes us to the ugly heart of the city — a nightmarish, deceitful underworld in which human decency and self-respect are lacking. All that matters in this milieu is money and gratification, but it comes at a price.

First published in The Weekender August 2, 2008

Velvet to be screened at the KZNSA Gallery

Aryan Kaganof’s film Velvet is based on a cut-up prose sequence called April in the Moon-Sun by poet Gary Cummiskey.

Composed in 2002 and originally published on the online literary journal, donga, April in the Moon-Sun is characterised by astonishing surreal images that shift between London and Johannesburg. Throughout its hallucinatory pages lurks the whore-spirit, Dirty Girl.

When donga went offline in 2006, Cummiskey published April in the Moon-Sun through his Dye Hard Press. The print run was limited to 100 copies, one of which was sent somewhat belatedly to Kaganof.

Towards the end of 2007 Kaganof announced his intention to make a short text film which would be his interpretation of the work. In January this year, Velvet was born.

Lasting 11 minutes and 32 seconds, containing electronic music by US experimental duo Matmos and culminating in what Kaganof describes as “physical poetry” by US porn star Taylor Rain, the film begins in total darkness with background sounds reminiscent of John Cage’s work, and which hint at what is to come.

From darkness – nothingness – is born the word, as the text of April in the Moon-Sun starts to appear on screen. The music of Matmos, a track titled Burroughs, reflects the cut-up nature of the work. The spirit of Dirty Girl is invoked as she starts to appear in the narrator’s brain.

From the word is born the image – the physical manifestation of Dirty Girl, played by Taylor Rain, who engages in some naughty, dirty exploration. Dirty Girl’s sudden appearance after about six minutes of text comes as a shock to our eyes just as her activities may come as a shock to our bourgeois sensibilities.

Velvet will be screened at the KZNSA Gallery, in Glenwood, Durban, from August 5 to August 24.