The mighty poet, I-Roy, was on de wire…*

LOOKING FOR clips of Jerome Taylor’s five-for against England yesterday, I happened onto two golden oldies, toaster supreme, I-Roy, in a “Tribute to Michael Holding“: “Michael Holdin’, doun in Londontown is golden…” (from the album, Musical Shark Attack, 1976)

So, if you are of a certain age, pickling in collapso nostalgia, tun up de soun’ (No moving pictures):

*Linton Kwesi Johnson, “Street 66″

Alex van Heerden

23 November 1974 – 7 January 2009

Frontier Rogue.

Tribute page at WhatsOnSA.

‘Sissie my kind‘, ‘Vrou van Samaria‘, courtesy of Derek Gripper.

Walcott on Omeros

Via Rethabile at Poéfrika from Lesotho-France, from Geoffrey Philps all the way in Jamdown, an audio file of Derek Walcott reading from and talking about Omeros for BBC World Book Club.

While Walcott sometimes misses the point of a question or his humour falls flat, it is still a pleasure listening to him, where the crack of age adds another dimension to his voice as he insists that Omeros is not a re-writing or a re-framing of Homer in the Caribbean. For me the power of Walcott’s poetry has always been its associative abilities, drawing connections through association, insinuation, rather than any direct line. To him the relationship between Omeros and Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey is one of association, allusion, as it should be with literary ancestors.

My favourite bit is when Walcott mentions his morning ritual when writing:

I live near the sea… on the edge of the beach. And I would get up in the morning – in those days I smoked, thank god – I would get up, and I knew I was getting up not really to work, but to smoke and have a coffee…

You can find the audio file here, where Geoffrey Philps also has links to an extended section on Walcott, one a piece on why Philps would trust Walcott more than his pastor.

Miriam Makeba

4 March 1932 – 10 November 2008

Mail & Guardian.

BBC.

Billy Bragg glasnosting around the USSR, 1987

“Help save the youth of America”

Lyrics.

Billy Bragg.

Hadron Hip Hop

Justin of Urban Renewal and Best Kept Secret (wait for summer) sent me this link to Will Barras’s rap video about the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Check it:

CERN Rap from Will Barras on Vimeo.

The Guardian has a section on CERN, which includes a gallery of photographs of the new Large Hadron Collider, as well as an introduction by Stephen Hawking.

Isaac Hayes

20 August 1942 – 10 August 2008

Obituary at the Guardian.

Official Website.

Afrinauts to free the airwaves in Cape Town

The Pan-African Space Station, a music festival from 1-4 October 2008 and curated by Ntone Edjabe and Neo Muyanga, hopes to broadcast free-format radio from Cape Town sometime from September to October this year. They need your support to help them convince ICASA to grant them a licence. Read about these Afrinauts here and sign their petition.

Art and Politics

It’s good to see political art prosper on the foundations of new technology. In the tradition of Chumbawamba and Consolidated, here is some blowback. Turn up the sound for DJ Paul Edge’s “We will not be silenced“.

Down the Che Guevara Highway

I am reading Billy Bragg’s The Progressive Patriot: A Search for Belonging. Not as good a writer as a songwriter, the book is nevertheless reasonably interesting. It fits into the faddish genre of biography-lite, I guess: everybody who is anybody telling their story in straightforward, often uninteresting prose. By this I mean that swathes of the prose is flat and boring, with nothing to lift it except that Billy Bragg wrote it.