The biggest challenge for me is to avoid becoming murderous!
So many problems and yet as I see it the biggest problem is our complacency, our apathy, and the fact that we are so damn good at being blinkered and mislead. There are times when I actually think that maybe all the shit should escalate to the point where the systems and the bigots and the arseholes all self-destruct; but the moment always passes... thus far.
So I take comfort in the power of words and I try to write things that I hope will make people think. I can no longer do the pop-easy money-bums-on-seats kind of shit that mainstream theatre, television, film and even publishers so desperately want us all to churn out.
And at the end of it all, I remain a pragmatic idealist to the core!
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There are too many humans and hardly enough humanity.
I was listening to the late Mr. Devious earlier who – as few of you would know – was a brilliant hip-hop poet (one of the best the world has not seen) and whenever I listen to his work it blows my mind and angers me simultaneously because he is dead and we didn't get the chance to do more together.
I often have the conversation with local artists and spectators: I think that for all the creative dexterity on display in much of our art – and that across genres and disciplines – I find no social consciousness and that lack of acknowledgement of self and by extension of other, transforming what could have been art into entertainment with neither soulful nor truthful expression albeit with great technical skill. Another distraction revealed as just more mindless drivel: just more prime-time polish.
“Do you also not want to see what is happening around you?”
In my humble opinion...
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I also had and still have a wanderlust that took me to Johannesburg from the Cape Flats as a teenager. Hanging out at Kippies and the Market Theatre, trawling Hillbrow and Rocky Street, growing up with an open mind and empty pockets...
But more than too many, I can now say that I am living my dream which is constantly being recreated and which grows and dies daily.
I am now single but have always been solitary because I prefer silence to chatter.
I don't have kids because I was raised by a single mother in a society in which it is still deemed to be a sign of manhood to sow your seed and have kids all over the show; and as I grew older the idea just completely lost its appeal.
As I always say, I love other people's kids and pets....
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As for silence, I sometimes fill it with music - like now, an unreleased copy of one of Hilton Schilder’s concept studio albums in the Rockart vein - but mostly my head is so busy that I have to make a conscious effort to not live the fiction exclusively.
Right now the story of the novel is so vivid in its detail that it becomes (invigoratingly) consuming. So as much as I think of sharing myself with that mystical, beautiful other self, I have to contend with the present and my predisposition and my intolerance and my idealism and my ... Let me not go further.
My problem is that I am full of shit!
Quite frankly. I expect the most of myself and as a consequence I don't want to have to indulge a relationship that is in any way defined by a construct. I do enough of that crap just being nice to most people.
And so without having expectations- as such - I do want to be with someone who blows my mind in every way. I used to do a series of workshops with kids in prison about I LOVE YOU.
The premise was that to understand those three words individually, you could begin to understand life in all of its complexity. Issues of identity, socialization, assumption...
The whole bang lot, in three words.
I & You, both tangible, animate, personalized and yet for the most part a universe exists between us always. And then Love, an abstract... It worked and still does.
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