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Hein Marais

Writings and notions about Power, Culture, Politics, Music, Political Economy, Film and Capitalism, and other ephemera are what you’ll find here.

Vast as the web is, many of the tools we use to navigate it nowadays steer us toward enclaves we’re familiar with and comfortable in.

I’m trying to avoid that in my blog, by inclining toward the unpredictable.

A couple of features, though, pop up regularly.

One is The Vault, showcasing music, films and writing of special note from days or years past.

The other is Headspace, featuring mainly music and radio documentaries that deserve more than the few minutes they claim of our time.

There’s something new every few days.

Click the orange RSS feed icon to stay in touch.

Hein Marais is a writer, journalist and editor

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Hook, line and sinker: 5 Best opening lines in novels since 1960

Why 1960?

It avoids the easy touches: Austen, Orwell, Dostoyevsky, Dickens, Melville etc etc. And it hopefully focuses the enquiry on at least some books we’ve read of our own accord (rather than to pass exams).

In no particular order, my top 5 would be:

1. “Later Powers often thought of Whitby, and the strange grooves the biologist had cut, apparently at random, all over the floor of the empty swimming pool.”
—JG Ballard, The Voice of Time (1963)

[The tone, the sensibility, the voice is classic Ballard, like an entire oeuvre distilled into one lone line]

2. “Gabriel Santee was seventeen years old and three months pregnant when she married ‘Sonic Johnny’ Makhurst, a Boeing test pilot and recent heir to a modest Ohio hardware fortune.”
—Jim Dodge, Fup (1997)

[If you’ve never read Jim Dodge, I beg you: change that]

3. “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”
—William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984)

[Even Orwell’s clock striking 13 didn’t connect dystopia to the here-and-now as emphatically as Gibson’s opener]

4. “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his…continued

Hein Marais | Mon, May 14, 2012

Money=Time=Money

“We’ll spot him easily,” says the detective. “He’ll be doing things too quickly.”

The cop’s hunting a ghetto renegade who has gatecrashed the hyper-rich enclave in the 2011 dystopia-lite movie In Time.

For the film’s ghetto-dwellers, time is always running out.

Humans have been genetically re-engineered to live to their 25th birthday and perish—unless they can beg, borrow or steal more time.

And so they scurry about, trying to extend their life spans hour by hour. Hustling, thieving, pleading. In the ghetto, waged work has almost disappeared.

12 zones away, the hyper-rich have cornered the market in time; they’re literally immortal.

In Time’s premise takes the logic of capitalism and walks it to a not entirely implausible extreme.

In the world it sketches (rendered as a kind of retro-future), time=money. Not only in a manner of speaking, but actually: Time is the form of exchange.

Keaton 1
* The photo is from Buster Keaton‘s Safety Last! (1923). That’s Harold Lloyd dangling.

The film is maddeningly flat and lacking in suspense. But the central conceit titillates and holds up well, which shouldn’t surprise us.

Over the past…continued

Hein Marais | Wed, Apr 11, 2012

Headspace 1: Foundation rhythms

Journey deep into head-nodding outlands with this sumptuous mix of late 1970s, early 1980s Jamaican dub and roots.

Top-drawer selections in effect: Turn up the bass!

There’s much more here at dub.podomatic.com, including this showcase of productions from Scientist, the master of minimalist dub:

Along the same track, here’s the piece cosmopolitan turntablist Jace Clayton (aka DJ/Rupture) filed for The Fader on L.A. groove explorer Sun Araw‘s trip to record with roots veterans The Congos last xmas.

Like Clayton’s music, it takes you in unexpected but always rewarding directions. Clayton’s blog, Mudd up!, is worth a regular visit.

PS: You’ll find my homage to dubmeister Osbourne Ruddock (aka King Tubby) here.

 

 

continued

Hein Marais | Wed, Apr 04, 2012

Stuck Apart: The photography of Chien-Chi Chang

Photographer Chien-Chi Chang’s work sensitively explores themes of alienation and connection, apartness and attachment—twinned concepts that of course imply one another.

The themes are vivid in these two photographs, with their echoing compositions.

Chang 1

Chang 2

The photo above is part of an ongoing exploration of Chang’s, as he probes the bisected lives of Chinese immigrants in New York City (which, along with Taipei, is where he lives).

The image above it manages to trouble, puzzle and amuse. The bridge cabling arcs in the distance into a pair of grasping hands, while the young girl invokes both Edvard Munch‘s The Scream and Japanese manga cartoons.

Chang achieved prominence—and sparked scandal—with his 2002 book The Chain. It documented the lives of mental patients at the Long Fa Tang Temple in southern Taiwan, where patients are literally chained in pairs for “therapeutic” purposes. Shackled together, but cut off from society.

Chang 4

In Orwellian fashion, the monks in charge of the asylum called the shackles “chains of compassion”.

Chang had earlier explored this theme of coerced bonding in another…continued

Hein Marais | Wed, Mar 28, 2012

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