Slide Machine

So, I guess I was sort of asking for it… you know, wanting a life that is different than the one you were living… a life that doesn’t just cruise by and keeps you in a false state of security until you reach 60 and think what the hell did I do? So I moved. So I noticed:-)

I got some good news regarding my visa on Monday, drinks with a friend that same evening followed by a cool time at Langebaan all day Tuesday. Kite surfers, cool company, beer, weird stories, sun, lagoon… it was a good day:-)

 Then yesterday morning things changed. My flatmate came in to tell me that her boyfriend was held up at gun point in our street at about 5.30 am. Totally unprovoked while packing his car to go to work. Shit-heads. Then I went out that same afternoon to meet with a friend only to find that my car was stolen. It took me a while to register the fact which in itself is kinda funny… I walk out, expecting the car to be there and nope, no car. I put on my glasses to check again and oddly enough still no car. I ask my flatmate to have a look and no, no car in sight… We must have looked quite funny to the random people passing by. She just got out of the shower and was only wearing a towel and I just had the most blank yet incredulous look on my face I’m sure. Huh??. Spent most of the day at the police station and calling the rental car company… Burnt straight through my newly uploaded airtime.

But yay, as soon as I logged on to Facebook this morning I saw the little video the talented Nic Redelinghuys made of the Swimming Upstream exhibition opening. I haven’t got a copy yet but there is one on the Grand Daddy Hotel Facebook page, right here

The title comes from a Mark Lanegan B-side to the Stay 7″ from years and years ago. Can’t get the song out of  my head today. It’s not a badthing seeing how Mark Lanegan is pretty much my favorite singer of all time and he can sing straight out of the phone book and I’ll still love it:-)

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Slightly out of focus

Here I am today, recovering from National Braai Day, listening to Sharon van Etten and trying to finish #5 of my 5 Must Do’s of this week. I am unfocused and my mind’s all over the place. I am trying to ignore my financial worries and the looming end of my stay in SA. It’s too depressing. Then I try to imagine myself living in the NL again and hmmm, not really want I want, even if my friends and family are there. In two days time it’s the birthday of one of my best friends, Suzanne. She’s expecting a baby. I won’t be there. And no matter how much I want to stay here and also to *not* be in the NL, I do miss my friends. I love my friends here, they’re awesome but my friends in my other life are awesome too.

On another note, you know how they say you must verbalize your wishes and the universe will hear you?

Well, this is it:

I want funding to come through for the Swimming Upstream exhibition and for the exhibition to be awesome and successful;

I want to generate work from it so I can stay in SA, at least until June/July next year;

I want to travel… I want to travel in Southern Africa; I want to see more of SA, I want to go to Zim. I want to go to Mozambique and Botswana and frankly, I still want to go to Tristan da Cuñha but that can wait;
I want to work for magazines; 

I want to stay.

 

 

There’s gotta be a way, there always is… I am just slightly out of focus and missing the obvious or too unwilling to accept the inevitable but I am still in denial about that. Just so you know:-)

The title for this post comes from Robert Capa’s memoir ‘Slighty Out of Focus’. He’s my all time favorite photographer. Fellow photographer and friend Henri Cartier-Bresson may have taken the slightly more high-brow and aesthetically perfect images but to me Robert Capa’s images are better, rawer, less observing, more present.

 

I remember this this conversation I had once with an American Jazz musician at a random train station in the NL. I was reading Billie Holiday’s biography and he came up to me to chat. According to him I should listen more to the likes of Ella Fitzgerald as she was the better singer (compared to BH), always on the beat, always perfect. My reply was that that was exactly why I like Billie Holiday so much more. It’s also why I love Robert Capa’s work so much. Maker of haunting images on D-Day ’44 and of  amazingly beautiful and somehow very human Spanish Civil War portraits. Traveler, with John Steinbeck, to Russia. Awesome, adventurous, inspiring, co-founder of Magnum, beautiful eye, a little dangerous, loner and ever so handsome.  

(photo: Gerda Taro)