I showed people that I understand how to make perfect. Dark Fantasy can be considered to be perfect. I know how to make perfect, but that’s not what I’m here to do. I’m here to crack the pavement and make new grounds sonically and in society, culturally.
Kanye West during an interview on BBC One
You’ve got to remember, the West was built by Europeans
Mads Mikkelsen speaking about the cosmopolitan “wild west” as seen his movie In the Salvation in Interview Magazine
I didn’t get it.
When I first heard “Yeezus” I pretty much had an allergic reaction. But the album is growing on me.
I’ve been going through something now, where I’m starting to realise that we haven’t overcome the legacy of racial segregation and oppression, but that we must overcome everyday. But as the barriers fall to the advancement of oppressed peoples, the entrenched power manifests new ways to slow humanity’s progress.
It’s exhausting and I haven’t ever played any kind of active role in the healing process. If anything, my ignorance slowed us down. But I will do something now.
When I heard Kanye talking about hitting the glass ceiling (from about 8:00) I sat up. Imagine, a person like him saying something like that.
He’s human, but he’s great. And speaking into a heavy situation. And I liked him more after I heard him say.
Oil and detritus
The last of it
Seeps from the husk
Onto sand
The broken trust
The world won’t ever
Forget us
Not when we’re gone
And turned to dust
The wind will howl
Forlorn chorus
Each year more rubble
And detritus
How would the world
Hope to forget us
As all we touched
Turns to rust
I originally published this on Yahoo! Voices in 2011. That platform has since pretty much died. I hadn’t thought about it in more than a year and it would be all but gone were it not for Flickr needing my Yahoo! credentials. I thought I’d repost it here. I hadn’t even thought about it in a year, so it was a rush when it flooded back. It’s very much inspired by Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Ozymandias (Wikipedia). In Shelley’s, the poet speaks of the eroded ruins of a glorious statue. Instead, I bemoan how much of this age will never be forgotten. Not when we put permanent materials to use in temporary products.
At the tail end of 2011, the Seli 1 started breaking up off the coast of Blaauwberg, Cape Town, after being stranded there since 2009 (News24 / Times). I drove up to the area with my good friend Sean Messham (some of his most recent work at Messham Photography) to witness the clean-up effort. He took amazing photos (as usual). I was lucky to snap this on my not-so-smartphone.
Or everything I don’t like about the way Dove and, by extension its parent company Unilever, approaches people.
On a related note: Has anyone compared Dove with its sister (or should that be brother) brand Axe? I mean specifically the way Unilever marketers drastically change how they interpellate* and portray men and women as they switch brand hats.
You can’t fool everyone all the time.
*Interpellation is how you hail a person, and how that address changes how they read your message (more on Wikipedia). Read more about how words alter meaning for better or worse in Hlanganyela vs ?
Word choice makes a huge difference. Even when words look like synonyms on the surface, they can have distinct connotations. I hadn’t consciously thought about that much with my home language, isiZulu, but White Zulu looks at that in his eponymous blog, specifically focusing on the majority party’s campaign slogan for #Elections2014 in South Africa. I won’t go into hyperbole and say this post has changed my life, but I’ll definitely say I’m going to be more conscious of my word choice going forward.
Discourse analysis is about asking two questions about word choice (diction) and sentence structure – “why?” and “why not?”.
For example:
“WHY did the ANC choose to use the word hlanganyela on their isiZulu election posters?”
and
“WHY did the ANC choose NOT to use other words for togetherness on their isiZulu election posters?”
The same question can be applied to a comparison of the ANC’s posters and those of the DA, where similar choices have been made.
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We’ve all seen them. They have appeared in all 11 of our official languages (as well as in Portuguese, Italian, Cantonese and Greek), blossoming with the last heavy rains of summer on lampposts and at intersections, 20 metres tall in blazing lights or the size of a postcard in newspapers. They grow every day. Almost all have a face, though some show the proof of the promises (roads, houses, smiling well-fed…
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This. It ticks all the boxes for me:
10/10
Has anyone impressed you lately?
Behind the mic on the stand
And you’re telling a story –
History wiped clean
Lean in and cradle your ego
Go on tell them you didn’t know
Oh maybe they will listen
Glistening schadenfreude on the brows
How did we ever get here?
Whatever you want to hear
Tears are your curse
Worse men have done better
Yet better men have done worse
I got excited watching an episode of Dragon’s Den on BBC-K. A few seconds of searching (and reading) later, these start popping up.
After being rebuffed by the UIF again, I began wondering what portion returned to me of the many taxes I’ve paid over the years. Hint: it’s not a car.
Uneducate 