Well I’ve had this post laying around for quite some time now, and I’m utterly ashamed of not being to post more frequently… my workload has been UNBELIVABLE, I’ve had projects over projects, and I recently entered a contest in the museum of art of my city, so I’ve been stressed out on that as well… so at last I have a small gap in my tightly knit schedule and have decided to finalize this loose end.
As some of you may know, it was my birthday a few Saturdays ago and that Gecko you see in the picture there was among some of the gifts… I feed it live crickets, and he(she?) sleeps alot, I’m told they can grow up to 50cms in lenght!
So as you can imagine, that Saturday was full of music, food and wine… I think it’s the closest I’ve been to a Roman party dedicated to Bacchus! Wine, wine, wine, food, food, food, music, music aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand music! All wholesome fun as you can imagine…

I think that upbeat, cheerful music in order, to lighten up my heavy-workloaded day. So these are songs dedicated to my Gecko.

NOTE: The illusion of these songs, only work if you imagina a Gecko dancing to the beats of each song!

~<*)))><

I made this list because I want to have the ultimate generic retro/pop-punk list circa 2006. Somewhere between Clash and the latest Shins album. One list that I can listen to droningly without feeling a thing. To be frank I am kinda over with pop-punk and everything just pass right through my head. The Shins seems to have incorporate everything there is into retro punk without turning it into something else. (eg. Tortoise , ambient/electro rock such as Album Leaf or dream pop even)

Here is my question for you my brave readers: 1. Is the Shins all that? 2. Is it the tail end of 2006 or giving us something new for 2007? 3. Is this retro-punk style even exist?4. Am I the best looking contributor at MdM? more ketchup? What’s your take? Discuss.

“Today’s Household Pop”

1. The Album Leaf – See In You
2. Tokyo Police Club – Be Good (web)
3. Love is all – Talk Talk Talk Talk (web)
4. Tortoise – Some Say (I Got Devil)
5. The Shins – Sleeping Lessons
6. Dirty Little Secret – Hush Your Lips (web)

see also: the Clash, the Shins
image: “Just What Is It That Makes To-day’s Homes So Different, So Appealing“, “My Marilyn” by Richard Hamilton

Image: Matthew Laznicka.

Sentiment is a really difficult thing. How do you express your feelings over something that has affected you deeply for all of your life without seeming dramatic. I had an idea to do a mix of tracks by k. d. lang about a week ago and the mix became something else entirely. I was listening to Dropout by Urge Overkill (again) thinking about how I’ve loved that song for so long without really understanding it’s true significance to my life. For years I thought of it as being about a young girl, all stylized as the perfect waif character, lost in the world. Truth is it very closely describes the life I led for many years. It also struck me how much it applies to so many of my crew, the boys I grew up with, the lost generation of whiteboys who “fucked-out” as we used to say back then. It’s difficult to describe what living under the apartheid government was like. When I think back the best way to describe it would be to say that there was never any air. You could breathe but nothing nourished you. When I was sixteen I refused to register for military service. My entire family was not aware of this and I kept it a secret. If I think about it now my motivation for everything was to get away from things and not towards them. By the age of seventeen I was blacklisted. This was not as significant as it sounds really, it never affected my life. I stayed in school and managed to get into university so I was safe. If I had continued to refuse national service without an official way of getting out of it I would have gone to jail for six years. This fact may be insignificant in retrospect but I honestly wonder now: how did a society that brought up it’s children in that way expect them to turn out if they treated them like that. It got me thinking about Karl. Karl was the older brother of one of my best friends in Primary School. During the BMX years he was our hero. He used to do off road racing and he was really good at it. He was even on a TV drama program for awhile. He was always my benchmark for how to survive within the circumstances we found ourselves. He went to university and studied journalism, I wanted to follow in his footsteps.

On Wednesday night I was speaking to my new friend Eran. He’s busy traveling at the moment, visiting the country of his birth, which is here due to the fact that his parents were working in Jo’burg when he was born. He’s from Israel and in a hardcore punk group. I was interested in what he had done as far as his military service was concerned. He told me that he had served two months in jail when he was younger. I thought that it was quite a strange time period to serve and he explained to me how it works. They put you in jail for two weeks. They don’t tell how long it’s going to be for, they don’t put you on trial. After two weeks they ask you again and so on. Depending on the political situation and other factors your time served is up to the whims of your captors. He was lucky I suppose but to hear him talk about it is pretty heavy. That is basically legalized torture.

The military issue was always an axe hanging over our heads. Two years before I would become eligible to serve in the military, South Africa experienced some of its worst township violence. One of Karl’s friends ended up going to the army around that time. He was an intelligent individual who would skillfully argue against apartheid, in the bravest fashion. Within about eight months of going into the military he came out on leave. He was dating one of my friends sisters at the time. He had become a raving racist. My friends sister was trying so hard to get him back on the ground, like where the fuck are you, what happened. He would tell us what happened, it did not sound good. In the townships they were basically at war. In the process he had learned to hate black people. The constant threat of dying had made him insane with hatred. His girlfriend ended up biting off one of his fingernails during a really violent fight that occurred later that evening. She was pregnant at the time and ended up having a boy called Christopher (named after me, yay!). They never married, she ended up with someone else, a family friend. They had been deeply in love.

The first time I ever smoked Mandrax I was walking with my two drug buddies back to Northcliff corner. They were both a year older than me and about to finish school. They were poor kids whose parents would not have been able to put them into university even if their school marks had been good enough. Alister started talking about going into the army, asking in our lingo if my other friend thought it was inevitable that he would have to go. He was scared. He OD’ed on Wellconal a year later. A few years ago so did Karl. This mix is for my friends, the one’s who did not make it through the wilderness, the ones who barely did and for the rest of us lucky ones. May we never go “there” again.
Both The Oppressed And The Accused

Image: The death of Ken Oosterbroek, 1994.