me-meme

I haven't done a meme in years. Then I saw this on Liz's blog and thought oh, what the hell. And right now I should probably be posting something a tad more substantial, but I'm tired. Between exams and my dissertation and marking first years who use words like feministic, my ability to come up with profound posts is dwindling. Thus, some mindless fun.

1. Three best movies you've watched recently.
Meh. It's been a very slow few months, outside of Michael Haneke's films I haven't seen much. Thus - Antonioni's Blowup, Bahrani's Man Push Cart, and Harold and Maude.

2. Three favourite songs at the moment.
Ice Ice Baby - Vanilla Ice (I know. I know. There's no reasoning this one away.)
Undisclosed Desires - Muse (I am obsessed with this song. Obsessed.)
Lekker Dans - Tidal Waves. (The first time I heard this I was driving, en ek het amper die kar omgegooi ek het so gelag.)

3. Favourite dessert.
Peter Veldsman's chocolate mousse.

4.(a) Two physical characteristics you like about yourself.
My hips and neck.

4.(b) Two physical characteristics you like in a significant other.
Hands. Glasses.

5. The most unforgiveable thing anyone could do is:
Betray me.

6. If your were to dress someone up as yourself they would be wearing...
Anything that is Amish and twee. Or, even more disconcertingly, seems like it might have been stolen from the set of The Piano Teacher.

7. Three favourite magazines:
Haven't been an avid magazine reader for many years. But if I had to buy some now - Food and Home Entertaining, Vogue, Elle Decoration.

8. A new favourite bad habit:
Reading old Savage Love columns when I should be working.

9. Dream house:
Old house. Big garden. Pantry. Stoep.

And now I'm going to tag a bunch of people, who are free to join in or disregard this completely. So - Marie, Paul, jvdh, EOH, Karen Little. Have fun.

s is for semiotics

A typical instance of this was the furious argument they had about the Silk Cut advertisement. They were returning in his car from visiting a foundry in Derby that had been taken over by asset-strippers who were selling off an automatic core moulder Wilcox was interested in, though it had turned out to be too old-fasioned for his purpose. Every few miles, it seemed, they passed the same huge poster on roadside hoardings, a photographic depiction of a rippling expanse of purple silk in which there was a single slit, as if the material had been slashed with a razor. There were no words on the advertisement, except for the Government Health Warning about smoking. This ubiquitous image, flashing past at regular intervals, both irritated and intrigued Robyn, and she began to do her semiotic stuff on the deep structure beneath its bland surface.
It was in the first instance a kind of riddle. That is to say, in order to decode it, you had to know that there was a brand of cigarettes called Silk Cut. The poster was the iconic representation of a missing name, like a rebus. But the icon was also a metaphor. The shimmering silk, with its voluptous curves and sesuous texture, obviously symbolized the female body, and the elliptical slit, foregrounded by a lighter colour showing through, was still more obviously a vagina. The advert thus appealed to both sensual and sadistic impulses, the desire to mutilate as well as penetrate the female body.
Vic Wilcox spluttered with outraged derision as she expounded on this interpretation. He smoked a different brand, himself, but it was as if he felt his whole philosophy of life was threated by Robyn's analysis of the advert. "You must have a twisted mind to see all that in a perfectly harmless bit of cloth," he said.
"What's the point of it, then?" Robyn challenged him. "Why use cloth to advertise cigarettes?"
"Well, that's the name of 'em, isn't it? Silk Cut. It's a picture of the name. Nothing more or less."
"Suppose they'd used a picture of a roll of silk cut in half - would that do just as well?"
"I suppose so. Yes, why not?"
"Because it would look like a penis cut in half, that's why."
He forced a laugh to cover his embarrassment. "Why can't you people just take things at their face value?"
"What people are you referring to?"
"Highbrows. Intellectuals. Your're always trying to find hidden meanings in things. Why? A cigarette is a cigarette. A piece of silk is a piece of silk. Why not leave it at that?"
"When they're represented they acquire additional meanings," said Robyn. "Signs are never innocent. Semiotics teaches us that."
"Semi-what?"
"Semiotics. The study of signs."
"It teaches us to have dirty minds, if you ask me."

-Nice Work, David Lodge

a good monday

And suddenly it is as if the skies clear. Perhaps this bout of happiness will still turn into hysteria as the work of the next few weeks piles up, but for now I am elated by the endless Jacaranda petals underfoot, on my early morning run, the fact that I am wearing dresses every day, that my dishes are washed and that I made a batch of wondrously dark cupcakes on Saturday, just after dawn. Summer is here, the year has almost had its fill, the wait is almost over.

letter to a younger man

Dear C

You are 19, and a good man. Because you are my friend, some advice from an older woman. At this age, being a good man is quite a kat in die sak. It will be many years before the women your age will get over their infatuations with the suave, charming bastards in their midst. Before they eventually grow out of a phase which finds destruction sexy. Trust me on this. I know what I speak of. You will stand by and watch as they fall for lesser men, and you will remember what I have told you, and hope to hell I'm right. Because you see, somewhere, at some point, it stops. It takes a while for women to appreciate all that is in men like you, before they see what I see. Unselfish, sincere, incredibly kind.

My advice to you is thus - you have to wait. I realize that at 19, when time is such a scary thing, this is no happy news. But reconcile yourself to the fact that you will have to wait, and wait much longer than you ever expected to, and one day, suddenly, out of the blue, you will wake up and find that your currency is in high demand. It will be worth the wait.

a monkey's nut

"You know, " she mused aloud to Charles one day, "there are millions of people out there who haven't the slightest interest in what we do."
"What?" he said, looking up from his book, and marking his place in it with his finger. They were sitting in Robyn's living room/study on another Sunday afternoon. Charles's weekend visits had become frequent of late.
"Of course they don't know what we do, but even if one tried to explain it to them they wouldn't understand, and even if they understood what we were doing they wouldn't understand why we were doing it, or why anybody should pay us to do it."
"So much the worse for them," said Charles.
"But doesn't it bother you at all?" Robyn said. "That the things we care so passionately about - for instance, whether Derrida's critique of metaphysics lets idealism in by the back door, or whether Lacan's psychoanalytic theory is phallogocentric, or whether Foucault's theory of the episteme is reconcilable with dialectical materialism - things like that, which we argue about and read about and write about endlessly - doesn't it worry you that ninety-nine point nine per cent of the population couldn't give a monkey's nut?"

Nice Work, David Lodge

since i've been gone (2)

I haven't written a proper post in ages. I know. But I've just come out of one of those month-long stretches of never-ceasing deadlines, where nothing happens as it should. The first clue is always to be found in my apartment - dishes pile up, laundry doesn't get done, I don't make it to the Boeremark on Saturday mornings, and so I inevitably end up wearing ratty t-shirts whilst eating corn flakes from a cup. So, since we last spoke, I wrote two chapters of my dissertation, one purely on Heideggerian ontology and the other an analysis of Michael Haneke's Vergletscherungs-trilogie, at the hand of the above-mentioned Heideggerian ontology. I got flu. The worst flu I've bloody well ever had, in a week of pre-production on a shoot. I ended up spending three days of shooting being horrendously sick, and at the point of leaving film altogether. During that time I got to shoot a sequence prominently featuring beet, which was very exciting, and had to get permission to shoot in a certain portion of streets in Arcadia from some buff Nigerian pimps. I spent a week of long days editing my footage, still coughing up a storm, and marking first-year Design History papers, which is all about ulm stools and Raymond Loewy and globe chairs. Wrote a paper on my other big love, David Cronenberg, and how his films Videodrome and eXistenZ mark the move from traditional media to new media, and at Aardklop was offered R20 by a man if I was willing to show him my "tiete". And I sent away yet another scholarship application, hoping for the best whilst not keeping my hopes up. Here's to the last stretch.

wednesday

I am Jack's emaciated energy levels.