What we need is a...

[Petra]

..great big melting pot
big enough, big enough, big enough to hold the world and all it's got
keep it stirring for
a hundred years or more
and turn out coffee coloured people by the score...


:singing:



(Sorry...just had one of those moments where I want to buy the world a coke, or something. :blush: )



Move along...nothing to see here...

[livius drusus]

Have you seen Bullworth? :popcorn:

[Petra]

No! I'm not even sure I've heard of it. What's it about, etc?



/me hands liv a coke and passes the hairbrush-cum-microphone...sing it with me, sister!

[Petra]

I just looked it up - looks like a movie I could dig, yo.

[livius drusus]

Oh it's totally a movie you'd dig, beeyotch. I thought of it cause of the coffee colored people thing.

[Petra]

Oh it's totally a movie you'd dig, beeyotch. I thought of it cause of the coffee colored people thing.


Well, with Paul currently being in Greece and Zoe being back at school - I think I'll go get me that film to watch in peaceful bliss.


Coffee-coloured people....mmmm..... :homdrool:

[viscousmemories]

I love that movie. :yup:

[Farren]

The OP reminded me of a night many years ago. A friend of mine ran a regular open mike event where people could recite poetry, sing songs and so on. I used to do poetry regularly. Not the ethereal, pussy kind. Ballsy performance poetry with blood, sputum, wild-eyed facial expressions and lots of prancing around, gesticulating and getting in individual audience members faces. It went down quite well. The whole vibe was very cool. There was a lot of interplay between performer and audience. People would yell appreciative comments when they concured with some social commentary, f'rinstance. The venue at the time was a smoky jazz club and the patrons put a lot of effort into being urbane and cool and politically informed and artistically refined and stuff.

One night I was performing and it struck me that the audience represented such a broad cross section of colours that if you lined them up right you'd get a smooth gradient from ebony black through caramel to cream and rose pink. It struck me as especially nice because at that period in history we were just emerging from Apartheid and such a mix was particularly rare, especially in a place where people socialised. It also made me realise how artificial race is as a construct, because if asked to self-identify their "race", the majority of the audience would certainly have aggregated into between 2 and four "races" ("coloured" isn't a derogatory term here except in ideologically charged circles because Apartheid effectively seperated mixed-race people to the extent where a culture arose that is very distinct from both "purely" African and "purely" European stock).

I got so lost in the implications and consequences of that line of reasoning that I forgot I was performing and just stopped and stared at them for a while before realising the buzz had died down and everyone was wondering what my situation was. So rather than carry on with the poem I apologised for the interruption and explained what was going through my head and people said "Yebo!" and "Right on!" and the next performer came up.

It was a cool moment. I've dreamed not so much of a coffee-coloured world since then, but of a world where there's stll the same massive diversity of complexions but its all mixed up. Within the white community I grew up in every other guy I knew had a different favourite complexion but it was always limited to racially "white". A dark olive tan could be sexy but finding a lighter "black" caramel attractive was inconceivable. Quite recently, an Italian-Greek friend of mine who's family immigrated from Egypt told me that many members of his family get a "black" tan rather than a "european" tan from lots of sun and it caused his father lots of problems in the old days.

Hearing shit like that convinces me that race is 9/10ths social construct and the only thing that has to change is a few ideas in peoples heads. It seems so simple, its astonishing that the self-imposed divisions remain and are so strong that they still often inhibit even breeding, one of our most visceral instincts.

[Petra]

Farren. You are totally my new crush.

:snogging:

[Ymir's blood]

I would think that if you put a whole lot of people in a big pot and stirred them up, the end result would me more reddish... :muahaha:

[Petra]

Not if you keep 'em whole.


Cheeky bleeder.

[viscousmemories]

That's a cool story, Farren. I've always felt like the kind of guy that would hang out at a smoky jazz club and recite aggressive political beat poetry, but in fact I turned out to be the kind of guy that would mostly get stupid drunk and play pool with college students and ex-cons. Until of course I became the kind of guy who does nothing more than eat, sleep, shit, and surf the Internet. I'll be a different kind of guy one day, the question is will I be the same kind of guy I was before, or a better kind of guy? Time will tell. Meanwhile, it's refreshing to know that there are other guys out there who are more the kind of guy I wish I was.

[Farren]

That's a cool story, Farren. I've always felt like the kind of guy that would hang out at a smoky jazz club and recite aggressive political beat poetry, but in fact I turned out to be the kind of guy that would mostly get stupid drunk and play pool with college students and ex-cons. Until of course I became the kind of guy who does nothing more than eat, sleep, shit, and surf the Internet. I'll be a different kind of guy one day, the question is will I be the same kind of guy I was before, or a better kind of guy? Time will tell. Meanwhile, it's refreshing to know that there are other guys out there who are more the kind of guy I wish I was.

The funny thing is most of my life has been the same kind of shit you're describing, with the really interesting stuff just filling in the cracks, unfortunately :) I had a lot of fire when I was younger, but kept hobbling myself before the finishing line with drugs and laziness. Lots of interesting experiences that I'm glad I had, but countless hours lost in the outer rim of the solar system without a pilot or any input from ground control.

What's worse is that so many of the folks I know that were doing cool shit lead sedentary lifestyles now. The art teacher and political radical who taught me that there is more to literature than crappy science fiction and stereotypical fantasy is now a web design department manager. My ex with whom I had a five year polyamorous relationship that scandalised all our friends is now a devout mormon mother of three. The coke-snorting author of over 40 plays and one-man comedy shows, one music album and a book, burnt out completely and now does radio commercials for a living and spends his spare time writing lurid conspiracy articles online. The kid who marched out of high school history class after giving an impromptu speech about how our history lessons were nothing but racist propaganda now works a 60-hour week managing his industrial paint shop and takes anti-depressents to stave off suicidal depression. And so on and so forth.

Still I get nostalgic sometimes. The end of Apartheid was an extraordinary time of powerful and chaotic emotions, especially if you were at the stage of life where you weren't yet jaded (and, I guess, especially if you were doing lots of narcotics). Luna's OP really triggered a lot of memories.

[JoeP]

The OP reminded me of a night many years ago. A friend of mine ran a regular open mike event where people could recite poetry, sing songs and so on. I used to do poetry regularly. Not the ethereal, pussy kind. Ballsy performance poetry with blood, sputum, wild-eyed facial expressions and lots of prancing around, gesticulating and getting in individual audience members faces. It went down quite well. The whole vibe was very cool. There was a lot of interplay between performer and audience. People would yell appreciative comments when they concured with some social commentary, f'rinstance. The venue at the time was a smoky jazz club and the patrons put a lot of effort into being urbane and cool and politically informed and artistically refined and stuff.
:goodpost:

I can just see this. (What was the venue btw?)

Could you do this now? Or are you jaded, burnt out, or what?

[Farren]

I can just see this. (What was the venue btw?)

Could you do this now? Or are you jaded, burnt out, or what?

Juanito's in Yeoville, which was actually owned by a Rasta but had Jazz evenings too. The "Monday Blues" sessions are still happening. After a long journey via 206 in Orange Grove then Kippies in Newtown then The Bassline in Melville, they now take place every monday night at a restaurant on 7th in Melville, but I forget the name. The guy who organises them, Peter Makarube, was one of the original two guys in Yeoville who put it together, along with Eric Miyene who appears to have vanished from the scene after success as a TV actor.

The answer to the second question is simply that I live miles out of town and at 35 with a bunch of mediocre business ventures behind me am too concerned about getting some kind of financial stability to spend hours or even days working on a single, long poem as I used to.

[Ensign Steve]

That, and most urbane, cool, politically informed, and artistically refined people just can't get into mediocre business venture poetry. I can, of course. But then, I'm not most people.

[Farren]

That, and most urbane, cool, politically informed, and artistically refined people just can't get into mediocre business venture poetry. I can, of course. But then, I'm not most people.

Have you read Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon? One of the characters writes up all the business proposals for the others, who are hopeless geeks. I can't remember it properly and don't have the book to hand but the part where he describes their boilerplate stuff is a work of art.

Unfortunately I'll probably butcher it if I try replicating it here with my poor recollection, but it involved a combination of ridiculously optimistic forecasts, proposals to site offices in the world's most inhospitable places to reduce operating costs and frequent use of the words "maximise shareholder earnings" or something similar.

[livius drusus]

Hey luna, I found the quote from Bullworth I was thinking of when I posted before:

All we need is a voluntary, free-spirited, open-ended program of procreative racial deconstruction. Everybody just gotta keep fuckin' everybody 'til they're all the same color.