kagablog

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.

click for more information, and to book your tickets, here

par Cinéma Abattoir (Montréal)

« Il y a le cinéma Pop Corn et le Cinéma Abattoir: vos amis ne sont pas les nôtres! »

Vous voulez des pixellisations chromatiques, des atomisation cinétiques, des anévrismes rétiniens, des électro-chocs corticaux, des concaténations acoustiques, des déconstructions narratives, des pédopathies ludiques et des dérisions copulatives? Bienvenue à Cinema Abattoir!

Une date unique en France pour découvrir, en présence du gourou de Cinéma Abattoir, les films les plus décadents et iconoclastes en provenance du Québéc .

La Cantada 13 rue Moret, 75011 Paris

vendredi 17 juillet 21h – 5€ - interdit au moins de 18 ans

20min
HDV
2008
sweden

music lars åkerlund (Urs/Volt)

In repressive societies
The quality of the transgression
Is always directly proportional
To the quantity of the repression

The particular form this transgression takes
Is an inverted mirror held up to the
repressive modus operandii
of the dominant culture

The necessary inversion of this mirror
Is described as perversion
by the repressive culture
Which itself is perverted

The paradox of transgressive artists and thinkers:
They are the true patriots and intellectuals of the
Cultures whose repressive rules they transgress

“sms sugar man is a masterpiece!” - peter whitehead

the south african premiere of sms sugar man will be held during the national arts festival in grahamstown on friday 4 july - for more information and ticket bookings click here

it was a perfect day in valhalla
the sun never came up
so all the quotidian
cruelties could
take place
in the
dark

Dear Aryan,

The Auto Stop project has now began, from June 10, and Konsthallen has printed a small card with all the boxes photographed in the hall. The school is tomorrow closing with a ceremony in the Skanör Church. Today, all the classes had a final sport contest event, they had different names on the groups representing different ‘nations’, like Zlatanien, and the class 3 was ‘Brilloniien’!

Best,

Sture

the wheel of false desires is endless
its true essence is the devilish antics
of dem bwoys telling you
that you be the sparkle in the tabernacle
of dem unholy ghosts
screaming your name
falling down on bended knees..
rise lion of judahs pride.
coltrane and courage has departed
from your hungry eyes.
no defeat..
what is it..
it is liberation.. legacy of strength,
stimuli.. a mystic lullaby..
no defeat.. no retreat
but steady movement..
to retrieve authenticity
the impact of slavery
spiritual bankruptcy..

if there are no rules
how does one play the game?

Sound Street Recordings will soon begin releasing a series of six individual CD’s. Late in the year a collector set of all six CD’s will be released. The CD’s are from past readings given by A. D. Winans. Each of the six CD’s will include an insert with art work by the talented Norman Olson.

World Vision Press will be publishing The Continuing Adventures Of Crazy John. The book will feature poems previously published by Second Coming Press under the title of The Further Adventures Of Crazy John, which will include sixteen previously unpublished CJ Poems. The book will include a DVD of a rare 1981 Cable Television interview with A. D. Winans, in which he read for the first and only time, poems from the CJ book.

Mr. Winans will be participating in a film in which several poets are recorded reading poems. Some of the participants include: Nikki Giovanni, Rita Dove, Dennis Banks, Sam Hamil, Janine Pommy Vega, Ferlinghetti, Hayden Carruth, Amiri Baraka, Lou Gosset, Jr, Donald Hall and TR Congdon, with Karina survivors and Common Ground volunteers. The film will benefit Common Ground Relief in the rebuilding of the lower ninth ward in New Orleans. Common Ground is a grass roots organization started shortly after Hurricane Katrina. With virtually no funds, but with help Veteran’s For Peace, it grew into a large volunteer effort that has gutted thousands of homes, formed clinics for people needing legal and medical help, funded a woman’s shelter, community center, and distribution centers, and established bio-remediation efforts to draw poison from the soil in well peopled places and began replanting native grasses, plants and trees along coastal areas to hinder floodwaters from moving inland. All their services are free to the public and they have helped tens of thousands of families.

The film will feature poets reading short clips of their work with scenes of the destruction and rebuilding of the city, and interviews with survivors and volunteers. A number of public access TV stations volunteered equipment, studio time and personnel, so the plan is to run the film back through those stations for them to network among their affiliates and make a dvd for sale from online sites or from Common Ground directly. All the money will be used directly to benefit the people returning to the lower ninth ward and with rebuilding their homes.

Mr. Winans has also been interviewed for documentary films on the late Bob Kaufman and Jack Micheline. These films are still in the production stage.

FORTHCOMING BOOKS

Late this summer Cross-cultural Communications will be publishing an epic Love Poem chapbook (LOVE – 0) with cover and inside artwork by Norman Olson.

Polymer Press, Sacramento, California, will be publishing Winan’s book No Room For Buddha tentatively scheduled for release in January 2009.

CURRENT BOOKS

Erbacce Press in the UK has just released a new book by Winans, Marking Time, which contains 23 new poems written since the fire at his San Francisco apartment, in February 2007.

Mastery Island has just re-released a limited signed and numbered edition of Winan’s Sleeping With Demons.

INTERVIEWS

The June 2008 edition of Home Planet News features an interview with Winans.

The December 2008 issue of Chiron Review will feature Winans, and will include the re-publication of this interview.

The June 2008 issue of Gloom Cupboard (United Kingdom) includes a recent interview with Winans.

Further information and work by Winans can be found on his web site: adwinans.mysite.com and at myspace.com/adwinans

you and I
lets be double-blinded
and make love
in randomized trials
giving each other
our own placebo
.

By Mphutlane wa Bofelo

The political and economic meltdown in Zimbabwe is traceable to the hold on the country’s policy alternatives and developmental possibilities by the restraints of the Lancaster House concessions and the constraints of the Structural Adjustment Programmes. Robert Mugabe and his ZANU (PF) implemented these programmes to the letter from 1981 up to 2000. Mugabe and ZANU’s reward was the blindness, silence and tacit collusion of the western powers in the genocidal attack on the people of Matabeleland in what is called the Gukurahundi. Despite the fact that Mugabe and Zanu PF continued with the culture of violent clampdown on political dissidence and repression of media freedom and the freedom of association and assembly, the custodians of democracy remained prepared to portray Mugabe as an astute statesman and scrupulous ruler. For as long as he trod the path of the Washington Consensus and cracked his whip against labour and ensured that there was no room for leftists to raise their heads in Zimbabwe, Mugabe could reign on opposition to his rule by any means at his disposal.

Throughout the 1990’s, the International Monetary Fund(IMF) and the World Bank and the G8 gave a standing ovation to the social policy path and political economy trajectory pursued by Zimbabwe, South Africa, Uganda and Ethiopia. As late as 2001 political science textbooks at tertiary institutions celebrated Mugabe of Zimbabwe, Mandela of South Africa, Museveni of Uganda, and Zenawi of Ethiopia as the crème de la crème of African leaders, and hailed them as former guerillas who had woken up to the realism of running a country. In 2001 popular disenchantment with the failure to meet liberation expectations and pressure from the war veterans forced the land reform project on the agenda of Mugabe and Zanu PF. Mugabe and Zanu PF then failed dismally to come up with a systematically designed land reform project, with clear targets, performance indicators and monitoring and impact assessment mechanisms. Instead of genuine land reform aimed at sustainable development of communities, they opted for a mixture of anarchist, populist, propagandistic theatrics and bureaucratic centralism, elite’ self-enrichment, and the politics of cronyism and patronage aimed at using the land reform project to prop up the power of the establishment.

Suddenly western governments, with the aid of the media and our ‘fuckademics’ started to shift the focus away from the suffering landless, jobless and poor multitudes of Zimbabwe - who continue to live in utter poverty and squalor - to the fate of white farmers. Both the Western governments and the White farmers in Zimbabwe never raised even a murmur of protest against the rule of Mugabe for as long as their bread remained buttered. All of a sudden, everybody forgot that Mugabe built his repressive machinery under the watchful eyes of the super powers and the so-called multilateral institutions. Nobody cared to remember the role played by the restraints of Lancaster House agreement on a legal-constitutional and peaceful land reform process in Zimbabwe and the ravages of the market forces unleashed by the Structural Adjustment Programmes on the people, economy and environment of Zimbabwe.

Whenever the issue of the war crimes against Mugabe is raised, often the focus is not the crime of the Gukurahundi or the genocidal impoverishment of the people through handing them over to the brutality of the market forces for a decade of subservience to the Washington Consensus. The focus is rather the “crime” of taking land from white farmers. When the Gukurahundi is mentioned no one speaks about the need to also charge Mugabe’s main backers throughout this period - the super powers and the Washington institutions - IMF and World Bank. This is not the first time that America and the West, bankrolled and oversaw a one party dictatorship or military rule for decades only to ditch the regime when it is no longer serving their interests. But not after dusting off blood from their hands and clothes, and presenting themselves as the moral voice, urging for war crimes against the very regime that they baby-seated, reared and mentored. From Mobuto Seso Seko, Saddam Hussain, Charles Taylor and the Taliban to Uncle Bob—the list of rulers utilized and dumped like used condoms by Uncle Sam and his brethren is endless. It is anybody’s guess what trajectory Morgan Tsvangirai and his Movement for Democratic Change is most likely to tread if they ascend power.