Medialternatives

THE man who produced the first serious attempt to fictionalize Observatory and the Cape Town art scene in a contemporary narrative, was saved from the gutter by his wife Christine, a wealthy heiress who later took her own life in mysterious circumstances — some say a protest against a stifling academic environment and the constant globetrotting of her husband.

Ashraf and I sit down at a local café – Le Petit Paris. It is 1995. Fresh back from San Francisco, I casually mention a novel in progress, The Fleshiton, a surrealistic orgy that is part Science Fiction novel, part romantic disaster. My final break-up with Rehane Abrahams has had devastating consequences and there is only one thing to do, regroup, plan ahead. Write the “great novel”.

We arrange a reading in the Tamboerskloof home of my actress sister, Carolyn. Needless to say, the academic is a little shocked. I have painted characters from a post-gender existence with a landscape that cross-references pop-culture, Aushwitz and the blues. Lindzi Rabinowitz and architect Johnny Jacobson are there, but my kabbalistic erotic fantasy fails to impress them.

Later we smoke a bong or two and I receive an invitation from Ashraf to visit a hippy chalet in Observatory, where he is holed up, after an abysmal first novel with a great title that nobody wants to publish. My second, like my first attempt at a novel, has yet to be abandoned.

Christine is pottering about in a saffron sarong. “She really saved me, David. Without her, I would be living in the gutter,” says Ashraf rolling a rizla and tobacco cigarette. I am greeted by an artsy-looking blonde woman with a rare, affected voice. Jamal, a student of the 19th Century novel is entranced. I can see why they are attracted to each other.The chalet, or should I say studio, is filled with second-hand clothing and bric-a-brac. Christine supports South Africa’s Hanif Kureishi, who lives life as “a series of beautiful moments” or “graduations in a blur”. A cream Macintosh SE on loan from the eco-feminist Niki Dunkley sits on a table, (the self-same machine which once put together the organic and anarchic pages of Kagenna magazine). Ashraf is therefore free to unleash himself upon the world in a state of literary revolt while I egg him on with a threat to unleash my own form of prozac for the mind. “Let me read you the first chapter. He says, of his second novel, a work still very much in progress. “What do’ think, Isn’t it splendid.”

“Dunno” I say, a little jealous and guarded. “The character’s seem a bit one dimensional?”

Ashraf reads and rereads the first chapter. We lounge around on a huge bed while Christine potters around, humming to herself. Slowly I recognize Andrew Putter. The man lives in a constant state of revision. An entire sequence of Putter dialogue is lifted from casual conversations and reminiscences. A smashing gallery scene transported to Cape Town’s power station site as well as the name of a doomed technology and fashion magazine I am punting, Mondo Madiba, eventually makes its way into the finished creation, which is duly published by Zebra Press, along with artwork by Tracy Payne (a splendid cover piece which she has entitled Sabastian, depicting a transvestite, in all he/she/its shocking campness).

The Fleshiton like so much of this inebriated though enlightened period is eventually consigned to the flames. Mondo Madiba dies a living death. Without a soulmate, a muse, I am a shadow of myself, there is no reason to continue writing and publishing. Instead I choose to mutate, I undergo a ritual alteration of my brain patterns, courtesy of Roger Young and the Secret Garden Project. Overnight, the entire city of Cape Town has turned gay. People are freaking out. I see the headlines: Sex, Drugs and Ecstasy Parties, as if ecstasy is not a drug.

The reality is far more mundane than artifice, shock tactics, intellectual transgression, or bourgeois attitudes and queerdom. Great love no longer makes for a great novel. Sex is inferred. Eros demonised and disemboweled. In fact there is very little of it, and most of it is bad attitude, like Bridget McCarthy sleeping in my bed, and then writing Superbabe. Cape Town though, breathes in an amniotic fluid of creativity that will finally break free, if only we let it out of the closet.

Despite rumours to the contrary, the summer of ’96 brings the sheer ecstasy of freedom, a vain terror of constitution writing and odd proposals to include the right to cognitive liberty, electronic sex and cyberorgasms as a fundamental tenet of democracy, along with the much vaunted freedom of sexual orientation. I bathe in the rapture of life. Still wishing male machismo and cowboy stories were given special protection from the intrusion of ideology, and the political correctness that is to follow.

***********

It is Summer. Ashraf is at a shabeen in Observatory. The same shabeen that Anthony Baker is busy turning into a restaurant, painted in silver and orange enamel paint. It is 1996 and the infamous Café Ganesh has yet to open its doors to the public. Ashraf is busy making breakfast. I am sitting at one of the linoleum tables drinking coffee.

“Lets keep it like this? No need to invite anyone?” I say, between mouthfuls of fried egg and toast.

“What d’think”, it’s a bit Skye and Czech, No?” Freedom and the revival of African Psychedelia has washed over us in a blur of boundary dissolving anticipation. Compared to my Jewish neurosis, Ashraf is an English gentlemen, forever on Safari to an intellectual island populated by the truly sane and oddly gentile.

Freedom fades, Long Street Freaks dissolve rapidly into oblivion. The struggle disappears. Ganesh, the Elephant Headed God lives on.

Picture this: The nightly Ashraf routine. Jamal serving klippies and coke. Bar tabs that run a mile. Conversation that reaches heaven. Given the Mother City’s appetite for reinvention we are lucky to have the presence of Ganesh, Graham Germond, the artist and film-maker has made an appearance as resident trickster, as does psychojournalist Graham Feltham, and Caera O’Shaunhessy, still going through a post-adolescent gothic phase while her father Brian fusses about the “old Transvaal” and an acting career that includes the Villagers, and Springbok radio plays such as the legendary Jet Jungle. Sculptor Mark Neft, still alive, a potential suicide, like everybody else, constantly engaging, all and sundry with an obligatory “hello blossom”. Tracy and Natalie Payne are virtually permanent installations.

**********

The world swirls by as our leaders unleash our constitution. The much awaited book is finally published. Ashraf & Christine have moved to the countryside where they occupy a cottage in the quaint village of Riebeek Kasteel. There has been no book launch as such. As far as I can tell. Instead they are to exhibit at Gallery Mau Mau, where they arrive in a convoy of desert hues, sandy horizons and a 1940s Ford pickup truck. Oh the joys of living a part, a play within a play like Time of the Gypsies.

Herman Van Wyk a giant of a man, a proverbial mountain and a photographer to boot, is dressed in the old khaki of the SADF conscript. Like so many of us, his artwork is the result of MIA – Missing in Action. Hundreds of conscripts have gone AWOL, deserted the apartheid army for Freedom and now wear surplus uniforms with the pride of a nation defeated by a post-feminist, queer-friendly, nigger-loving, peace corp.

“Do you mind if we paint on the walls? asks van Wyk

“Certainly not. Whatever your hearts desires.” I answer back.

Without further ado, a load of Karoo Sand is carried in, along with tins, pots and crates. The resulting detritus poured over the gallery floors until it flows out the door. The walls of the Mau Mau are then painted with ochre. Christine has taken up residence with her sowing machine and is making a patchwork quilt. Ashraf nails his wood, tin and paint sculptures to the wall. The reception draws a capacity crowd and there are one or art two sales, mostly to friends. The book needless to say is a best-seller, at least for Cape Town, sold mostly to student, intellectual types who trapeze through the gallery, poo-pooing, the rustic artwork as “too naïve”. There is no second imprint though, and one dares to ask the question how many unsold copies end up on remainder shelves, Love Themes for the Wilderness is however, translated into German, and I find a copy staring at me at Boekehuis.

Psychiatrie Noir

News of my breakdown has brought an urgent phonecall from Ashraf.

Apparently somebody called him with the news and he has tracked me down.

Yes, David has gone AWOL. The Mau Mau has all but burnt down. The fringe artworld is already planning its next move like Kendell Geers. Long Street is stunned. It appears I am being held captive in a luxury psychiatric ward for people with visceral art addictions. Michelle Breeze, believe it or not, is in a nearby ward for the fashionably insane, the nineties heroin chic of the emerging SA music world, all raw talent and nowhere to go. It’s all quite absurd. I am not mad, I am just having an issue with my body, while my brain has detached itself along with the transition from revolutionary pop art to homeboy décor and democracy.

Nurse is concerned about the fact I may be fixated with my arsehole. Doctor, though alarmed, prescribes drugs. David does not need potty training, David needs a holiday. The bottom inspectors are on paid leave.

But Doctor, my assistant has walked out. I am being attacked by irate members of the public who know f-all about art. Mau Mau does not have a security guard. Reactions, to say the least, have been somewhat of a calamity. Like I was telling you, I have absolutely no control over what happens in the space. It is a free space after all. Barend de Wet’s feaces have been plakked all over the walls but why not? As have Beezy Bailey’s doodles. No, doctor, I am not a coprafiliac. My bottom is fine. Yes, it is kind of weird to see Karen Rolfes pudenda on a wall. I know how you feel about liberalism but this is Freedom? Did you not get the liberation struggle? No, Estelle Jacobs has phoned me, at least twice a day to tell me that I am sick. Doctor, why do people care if I am sick? What is it that you despise?

Along with the diagnosis from the insane asylum, my psychosis and the art establishment criticism, for fat f-ck-all and bugger the lack of recognition, I am psychically, spiritually, mentally stewed and so ready to take a long walk. A walkabout like they say in Australia, and this is not all about going native. So forget the Mau Mau. I want nothing more to do with the gallery or neo-colonialism, or struggles against colonialism. In fact I have handed Garth Erasmus, my own Khoi Konnexion, the keys and said: “Garth, I trust you. Here are the keys to the space. You take-over dude. I am no longer going to play the part of the oak who like runs the space. I am not a curator, I am a janitor. I do not have an art degree and do not have to hang paintings with heavy frames without a step ladder. If my life had been planned this way, I would probably already have a bank loan and problems with organized labour, but this whole thing has been a three-year fly-by-night operation with no pay, and so should never have gotten off the ground in the first place. Yebo. We don’t even have a bank account to put all the “slush money” that people who say the rat in art, Conrad Botes who must have made the Mau Mau run a profit, say we have. So the money does not exist. Capiche The only reason anything stays up, is because I am around, and I do not want to be around. I just want a break. Enough. Comprehende?

No, I am misunderstood. This is like communicating through a straw The demand for airtime, my time, this crazy precious time, by petrol-guzzling, attention-seeking, drug-crazed, dope-smoking artist types has eaten a great big hole in my pocket and my aura, and so my nerves are rubbed raw by it all. I just want out. There is no point in filling the gaps. Why should I tell you about my diet of Lola’s coffee and no weed. My coup ‘de gras, my petty foibles and personal disaster, a luckless homage to Hockney, yes, Urban Objects of Desire, the entire show, has had to be chucked just to accommodate a nincompoop whose father insists honkey money will turn him into a great artist and I am still flat broke. What an investment. Son, with glass frames like this, we’ll take on New York.

Let me explain. The Mau Mau you see is a self-regulating organism. A temporary art space, as Hakim Bey would say: Temporary Autonomous Zone. Which means it exists like a pirate utopia. An art zone. Instead, the space has turned into an extension of the great creative unconscious. The gallery, which has been run on strict “homeopathic principles” just happens to be there. Walls disappear. Time warps. A temple dedicated to Art. Yes A R T. After Antigravity and Anti-Art, we have all grown up. The move towards the new slick, new cool and with-it but High art is just so noticeable. Still, I model it all on TAZ. My presence is not important. Yet I, the visual I, am stuck somewhere inside the programme. I want out.

News of my breakdown has brought an urgent phone-call from Ashraf. Apparently somebody called him with the news and he has tracked me down. Overworked, underfed, nothing that one can say moola, I found myself slipping away, on just a holiday your honour, a bit of cash to pay for the collective brain surgery, but no, a bunch of gangster dealers want me to, like deliver b-boys to next years ball, and the mama’s say you’re sick. I desperately want out of this capitalism-by-numbers schtick.

Doctor: Why did you smear shit on the walls? I heard you were naked and shitting on the floor?

Nurse: He told you that? It wasn’t shit, it was beautiful ochre.

Doctor: So you still think art-dealers are trying to kill you?

Nurse: Take one of these and its all just a bit of Dali-Gala diamante Herr Doctor.

This psych-sister has given me really, really heavy medicine. I needed a break but not this kind of break — first the breakdown, then hyper-medication. We lapse in and out of consciousness. Strange. This place really does look like an MC Escher building. Are those people walking upside down?

Wake up. It is light, I am tucked in so tight I could be here for the next twenty years. Instincts drive me. I am a survivor. A McGyver, I refuse to take the BIG PILL that is etched with the Greek symbol for NEURON DEATH. All I needed is a bit of Calm. Some TLC, KFC, XTC something to chill me out. I’ll be fine. No such luck, the place is reinforcing my nightmare, worse than hell. I think my family are monstors, my sister has been kidnapped, art dealers are turning into heroin heavies. J P Getty is a priest. It’s a looney bin for Christ sake. There are people walking around who think they are Napolean or Jesus. A guy here in the lunch room who walked off a corporate ladder, a real policeman on the POLMED programe.

Doctor: We’ve upped his medication.

Nurse: Didn’t Michelle Breeze waltz up to me and tell me she wants to fuck me?

Doctor: “No, you’re having a nervous breakdown/hallucination/ hernia/baby if you take these pills three times a day, the hallucination that you’re an artist/writer participant/observer will go away.”

The madness ceases. Eventually I awake to find myself in a pristine bed. I am so deep in the bed, that I can hardly breathe, but thankfully there are no four-point restraints. A nurse in a corporate medical dress brings me a phone. “He was just having a problem with his lawyer, he’ll get over it.”

Ashraf: “David, we’re getting you out of there. You’re coming to live with us and that’s final.”

Psychiatric five star service. Hell with elevators that twist up and down. I cannot agree or disagree. I have been nearly lobotomized – electrochemically shocked and psychically spayed with a neuroleptic drug, and am one step away from brain surgery ego-personality death. Ashraf’s voice reminds me of somebody. It is deeply reassuring in the way only those who know the dramatic arts can connect to the deep psyche inner tissue. The phone call gives me the strength to plot my great escape. I smile at the nurse trying to avoid a lunatic’s grin. Spit out pills. Hide them. Lose them. Medical movies give me the creeps.

Today I escape. Yes I am an art dealer. A VIPP – Very Important POO Person. Actually there is no me inside except tunnel vision. I am whatever you say I am. Recite after me: I love the capitalist system and will do everything to promote gangsterism and drugs. Outside the Fontaine de Vie, sister and brother-in-law arrive (BTW He is a soap star) but they are like out of focus. Crescent Clinic, I am sick in the stomach. Get it together David. They can’t seem to sign me out either. Eventually I pluck up the courage, pull things together enough: “you’re just a business-fuck like the rest of them.” I sign myself out of the joint with my new corporate identity, brainwashed by psychosurgery. Capitalism sucks.

Zwavelberg

Without much cash I board a train. It is still painted in apartheid khaki. The third-class carriage takes hours to weave its way out of town and into the countryside until eventually it arrives at an offsiding known as Hermon.

Ashraf and Christine are waiting for me at the station. My hair has been shorn-off by Peter the Haircutter and then dyed. I am in my new role as psychiatric patient, ex-art dealer, escapee boho boohoo from a mental ward. We get into the rickety, blue Volksie and drive off to Zwavelberg, 10 000 hectares of real estate outside Riebeek-Kasteel. A French hen greets me. I speak to the chickens.

Mother phones to inquire as to my health. First born is behaving badly, in trouble, and needs to be scolded.

Christine: No, this is a sanctuary. David needs a little rest. He’s broke. No we don’t believe in drugs, just a little dope.

The phone slams on the other side. Mother is a hypocrite who believes whatever lies the medical doctors can cook up. Psychiatrie Noir. Explain consciousness will you? Next, life is a disease. Stop, Wait, Life is not a disease, I am not sick, and neither are these martyrs who suffer for the mortal sin of imbibing of the cannabis sativa, nature’s herbal remedies, jungle oats.

Slowly Christine nurses me back to health. We live on pap and vleis, rice and beans. Cheap bottles of sherry. Christine swears that she wants to give the world a therapeutic massage. Fresh air and the countryside works wonders. A little bit of weed hurt no-one. Within six months I am right as rain. The days come and go. I paint, write, stoke the fires that light up the evening that lights our passion for life. Café Ganesh has relocated itself to Zwavelberg. There are swarms of artists, errant teenagers and well-wishers. Julia Duncan, Anna Domino. Trinity Diva. We are all head over heals in love. Love Themes for Zwavelberg. Ashraf is busy working on a review of Antjie Krog’s Country of my Skull. The TRC is breezing past us like the wind.

*************

If you drive up to the old farmhouse, you will see the barn with a tin roof on the right. Immediately to the left you find the grand building with veranda that wants to go right around the house but stops short. Several huge rooms, a lounge, kitchen, outdoor bathroom. Sort of reminds me of the Retreat where my grandmother lived.

Christine is the focus of attention. Each day, Ashraf comes home to his beloved, a spectacular sunset, the smell of fynbos, a star-filled evening and time with the girl-child, Zahar. The baboons are playing in the caves. Wind is rushing through the gumtrees. There is a giddy sense of possibility. Mothers are as Mothers is, Mothers to us all.

In the day, we have tea. Hours and hours of conversation. Copious and lengthy soirées and winter paeans by Christine, “Oh the joys of reading Jeanette Winterson,” or “the latest English novel” I paint and make myself useful, trying not to crack up into a psych-story like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Today there is talk of turning Ashraf’s novel into a movie. A meeting with the notorious director Ian Gabriel turns into an option that is extended from one year to the next. Instead Jeremy Handler is drawn to Zwavelberg where he concocts a plan for a short film Husk, that makes its way to Cannes. Wild stuff. Ashraf casts Gerard Rudolf in the lead. I never get to see the result but hear that it is good, finished, product.

**********

Christine, Ashraf, Herman, Anthony Baker and I are on safari. We are at Warmwaterberg. The hot springs, where the rooms are cheap enough in the off-season for a bunch of skollies — One Pakka Cowboy, a Scottish Jew or three, a Boer Manservant Menagerie and an English Dame and her bearers, to afford. We lounge like a bunch of seals and walruses in water, soaking up the volcanic warmth as the moon rises over the berg. “Oh, Darling, bring me a shrubbery.” Mineral water does a lot more for you than Prozac.

It is new year and I am alone at Zwavelberg. The Jamal’s have packed up and headed for the Berg. Bridget has arrived from Jozi to see me, I meet her in town and we take the train back to Hermon, a taxi to Riebeek, and walk all the way from the town to Zwavelberg. It is a blistering hot, epic day. Stan the Waterman comes out to greet us, as we throw off our clothes and play in a shower of water piped from a fountain deep below the berg, I recall Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers.

Predicaments in South African culture and how to avoid marriage

Christine is dead. The words are like a death sentence. I am half-way through a meal of olive chicken when the call comes. It is Ashraf pronouncing on the state of affairs like Moses breaking the stone tablets. The funeral-wake is thick. There is no laughter, grim humour or joking. It is so terribly sad, so utterly horrible that we choke back the tears. I cannot bring myself to think, to feel anything, let alone cry. It is as though the whole thing is one cruel episode. Christine is dead, they say suicide.

Eve, who was there shortly before she died, says Christine looked up ways to kill herself on the Internet. “She was obviously planning something before I opened my garage door to find her hanging there like a limp doll.” That she would hang herself in a garage is bad enough. I always took her for a bloodletter or one of those people who overdoses on pills, nevertheless the woman swears there were mysterious circumstances surrounding Christine’s death.

I never thought Christine used the net much it wasn’t like the woman to advance the cause of the twentieth century let alone the 21st. Nevertheless, here I sit with a problem out of the twilight zone. There is a statement about the whole matter in a factual sort of way that a person who works for the Cape Argus, like Eve, would say is the truth. Do I believe Eve? Do I believe Ashraf? I have yet to see a suicide note. She might as well have been stuffed in an attic somewhere for all I know, or smothered in her bed. There has been no public inquiry as such, and so lets leave it all at that.

Christine, as far as I can tell was admitted to Crescent Clinic. Diabolical really. Psychiatrie Nouveau. They say she was still on medication when she left, had a prescription for seroquel and didn’t take the pills she was given on the day she died. Eve, since she is a dinkum news editor, reckons she would know this sort of thing, because Christine was staying with her at the time.

It is all too grim to relate what happens when you suddenly stop taking psychiatric medication. Adverse effects run a mile. Shit gets shitter. Daylight robs the blind. People throw away a lot of intellectual and emotional stuff they never knew existed all because neurons tell fibs and dendrites moan at us. Phantom limbs appear out of nowhere, and the body is far weirder than the brain.

***********

A great tragedy once befell the town of Riebeeck Kasteel. Stephan the avant garde couturier fell out of a bakkie, hit his head and died. A regular feature at Zwavelberg, he was about to put on a fashion show and all the models were like ready. The entire range of hand-stitched chintz and rubber, feather and faux fur hung in his single room. Ashraf refused to give up on Stephan and the show had to go on. So whether Stephan wanted it or not, here was this thing. Guy Willoughbye even did the opening ceremony. The Dance Macabre at the Royal Hotel, so we all sang, drank and prayed that life should be so bittersweet, so absolutely fantastic and out of this world that we desire more of it, not less.

It was perhaps the fact that the literary bohemian life, ones promise to ones maker and oneself, was growing less and less that made Christine leave us. After 911 the world grew cold, and instead of art, there was politics, and instead of conversation there were rallies. For Ashraf the need to feed a growing family, had resulted in his seeking sanctuary in academia, an intellectual escape which drew his attention to the lofty heights of so many linguistic and spiritual babkas. Such an appetite, that no juicy sausage or fritta of theory was considered too trite or too ornate for his mind or his belly. Man does not live by theory alone, and the spirit leaves one when one is so affected.
I saw Christine in the weeks before she died. It was as if like the Mad Mrs Rochester, she was the last one left in a terrible scene, the death scene. If the quacks didn’t kill her, then the psychiatrists certainly put paid to any hope of recovery. Why was she ill?

That Ashraf and Christine were estranged, there could be no doubt. The man had struck up a relationship with his younger daughter Mira’s babysitter that was a tad uncomfortable and Christine was desperately trying to keep the family together.

Then Christine started losing weight. They said she had “rickettsia” or “chronic fatigue syndrome”, what others called “yuppy flu”. One day I stopped by and Christine was moaning about an electronic parasite that was buzzing around inside her. She spoke of going to see a doctor who had hooked her up to a machine. I was baffled. Was Christine shocked? While we were all being told about Christine’s illness in pleasant terms of health, hydro and spa treatments, the reality was far less banal.

Crescent Clinic is like a concentration camp with soft-focus lighting, rubber sheets, and the proverbial padded cell. They still use Electroconvulsive Shock Therapy (ECT), along with behaviour modification, biopsychiatry, the whole nine yards of invasive psychosurgery. Neuroleptic drugs are given on the installment programme. Like the patient who was released simply because his insurance ran out, Crescent is all about the money and not enough jive.

Ashraf Jamal, says Christine’s friend Eve, put his wife into a psychiatric clinic, insane asylum, looney bin, call it what you will, like a nineteenth century noble and then went on tour — some intellectual hero who had just slain the only dragon he knew well, his own wife. So much for the predicaments of modern life and boho culture. A million years ago, back in the nineties, before there was such a thing as an Internet, the novel was considered a model for human interpersonal experience. Now the psychiatric ward has replaced polite dinner conversation. DSTV the role of fire. And playstation eats children’s bedtime stories.