While We Wait

Yes, I know. You are all on tenterhooks waiting for the results of the Zimbabwe election. At the moment the only news to be had is 15,000 pieces of baggage are stacked up in a huge mountain at the new terminal 5 at Heathrow airport. Presumably they belong to fleeing ZANU (PF) hierarchy members. A search of various web sites has produced comments from all three presidential candidates saying the same thing, ‘I won’, ‘I won’, and ‘I won’ and ‘Any one fancy some won-ton soup?’

This is nail-biting stuff. Well, it is for us, as the Zimbabweans ate all their fingernails years ago! In fact, an old Rhodesian expression ‘fancy a good nailing?’ which did mean getting a hiding, has now become a Zimbabwean invite for a cup of nail soup!

Anyway – as it is Sunday and you all have time on your hands, you thought it might be informative to pop into lore’s blog and see if he has some updates. Well I have. I managed to get today’s exchange rate. As you can imagine, due to the circumstances it is a little volatile –

1US$ is equal to Zimbabwe Dollars. (Er, the counter ran out of digits, so please add four zeros)

Also, for a bit of a laugh - I came across this interesting website with the name Uncyclopedia. It is a very clever spoof of Wikipedia.

Check out this entry –

http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Robert_Mugabe

and this one

http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Rhodesia

and, sadly, last but not least –

http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Air_Zimbabwe

Vote For Me and See What You Get For Free!

Greetings my fellow Zimbabweans.

As you know, today you will go to the polls and vote for me to remain your leader. It is not in your interests to even consider voting for anyone else. Only I can save you and what is left of your family from being colonised again. Imagine, you would have to work for a pittance and take orders from a White ‘Baas’ who would beat you and have sex with your wife at anytime.

Since I have been in charge, more than 80% of you now no longer have to work! Soon we will emulate successful lands such as the very Democratic Republic of the Congo, where they have worked so hard to make sure that 99% of their population no longer have to work. I and my politburo members have to work of course. Such is our burden of responsibility, but we do so with joy in our hearts, as we know our efforts reap joy and happiness among you all.

Because of our brilliant economic plans, there is no need for most of you to get up early in the morning to go to work. Now you can just ‘hang around’ waiting for handouts. Today, because it is such a special day, I have decided to give all of you presents of grandiose abundance. All you have to do is simply click on the gift and save it to use at any time you like.

We all love a good fry-up, so please except this traditional Zimbabwean breakfast dish (the British imperialists stole the recipe, just like they did in India with the curry) -

You need to drive to the polling station? Please, here, have a Rolls Royce. (You can keep the plane as well.) These were made in Zimbabwe before the arrival of the British land thieves who stole the factory and shipped it to their mud island -

You want a new farm? There are plenty to be had now we took them back, click as many times as you like -

Short of a few Bob? (ha ha, excuse the pun), want to go shopping and need some coin?

Click here -

Tired of cooking? Need a Cook-boy? Well we no longer use that derogative racist term. We call them Chink-boy now. Here, click a Chinkie or two, every well run African land should have several millions of them. Very useful, they even come with their own plastic bags! -

Should you be a complete simpleton and still insist on voting for one of the other pretenders, then you better get a tire which my boys will set alight so you will look like one of these sell-outs –

Finally, I recommend a book by Tim Butcher called Blood River. He recently travelled the entire length of the Congo River and reported of the incredible achievement of the government there who have managed to put the clock back to a time before there were any. If you go to his website

www.bloodriver.co.uk

there are some wonderful pictures of the unique system of African reverse progress.

This is it, or is it?

Reading all the blah blah available and watching some of the limited coverage on TV leading up to today’s election, one wonders why Mugabe even bothers.

The old fart rants that should he sort of lose, which is theoretically impossible, he won’t accept the result, nor will his commanders of the army or the police. If he then wins as predicted, all his best mates (leaders of other dodgy regimes), will rush to congratulate him, giving him his tiny mantle of legitimacy, and the status quo remains.

But, and it is a big but, what will happen if the locals actually decide to kick-up if they decide that they have been robbed yet again and face more of the same? That is the big question.

Let us see what happens tomorrow and the next few days.

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I have been away, thus the lack of postings. Sorry about that but there will be a few coming in the next few days.

$750.000 Dollars To Be WON!

Yes people, I am willing to give back to my readers something that they have given me; mainly, not a lot!

I have decided to run a competition. The first prize is an amazing three quarters of a million dollars! All you have to do to claim your prize is to win the competition. That way I eliminate the losers. To win is very simple but you need to be clever, so it is not clever to enter the competition if you’re a bit simple.

If you look at the right hand column you will see a green counter. Every time some one takes a peep at this brilliant blog, it registers them and the number goes up. Well, soon it will reach the artistic merit of 22222, so whoever is that one, two two two two two… er… two, gets the prize. To prove this (and I tried it out, so it works) highlight the counter, save the image, and send it to me in an email ( lore-data@hotmail.com) with a maximum word count of 100, as to why I should give you the prize. (Winning comment will be put up on my blog along with a picture of the winner with his wad of cash, should he send me one.) Please note that thanks to Google analytics, I can see any daft twats who decide to keep clicking till they reach the number. Should that be the case, I will disqualify anyone doing more than 5 hits a day.

Just in case you may start to get very excited, I would like to point out that your prize is a brand new, hot off the press, Zimbabwean 750,000 dollar note that is, at today’s rate, worth about 3 British Pence. The stamp will cost me more!

The competition is genuine and I will post the prize.

The Gokwe Kid Strikes Again

How someone’s innocent search for a DVD film caused uproar in the art world.

Ooh – I was planning on posting some other stuff, but it can wait, as I have sensational news! Yes, little me, the infamous Gokwe Kid, the greatest bush detective ever, has unearthed a scandal of all scandals!

Regular readers (if I have any), may recall that I was checking out the Tate Modern art gallery a short while ago. Who cares, you might say!

Anyway, in the cellar, they got this giant crack in the floor. Now, it cost serious money to put it in there. Last year, some artistic Brazilian genius was given some serious bucks (tax-payers, by the way), to create this.

(Hey, you lot. Give me a tenner each, you can come have a look at the cracks in my ceiling. Women only!)

So far, so good – what’s the big fucking deal about a crack in the floor, besides it must have cost £1000 a foot? Very simple, I, through my pure genius of detection, think the whole thing is a sham! Okay, I admit that when I went and looked at it, I was seriously tempted to deposit the wrapping from my POLO sugar-free sweets in it, but was put off by the amount of refuse already in there. The point I am desperately trying to make; is that I think, the giant crack was plagiarised.

In other words, the Tate gallery fell into a very expensive void which was about as original as Hot Cross buns with an extra 25% more currents for free. How do I know this? Well, that’s another story. It all started, long, long time ago…

Once upon a time, in Zimbabwe, my step-mother, along with her late husband, supplemented her income by being a movie extra. One day, a movie company decides that riding the anti-apartheid ticket was always good for a few bucks and seeing that Zimbabwe was sort of like South Africa (having lots of black people living in huts and a few whites living in mansions), they went there in 1989 and made a film call A Dry White Season. Based on the 1979 novel by Andre Brink, it starred Donald Sutherland and a cast that includes sexy kitten Susan Sarandon (Tell us about it Janet!) and Marlon Brando. The story is the usual genre – Blackman good, whiteman evil etc and all bundled up in the millenniums favourite word; Racism.

My Mom was head of history at the exclusive, private St Georges college in Harare at the time. That’s the same one where Peter Godwin went. Most of her pupils, right up until she ended teaching last year actually, were black. The sixth form whites were also used as extras, popped in South African Police uniforms and had a merry time running around kicking in the doors of black peoples huts. There is one scene where Donald is at a rugby match. The camera zooms up on him in the spectators stands and for a few seconds there are Mom and her husband standing behind him chatting! Great stuff. As Mom will be arriving any day now, having had to flee Robb’in Bob the Hood’s madness for a while, I thought it would be cool to get a copy of the film. That way we can both weep over the locations that were once called home. Sniff, shed a few tears.

Unfortunately, there aren’t any DVD cheepies up on Ebay at the moment, so it will have to wait. I have a taped copy from long time ago, but it is in German.

BUT, what has this to do with the crack in the floor? Well according to the blah blah on the Tate’s own website (So read on, you are going to learn something.) –

Doris Salcedo’s Shibboleth is the first work to intervene directly in the fabric of the Turbine Hall. Rather than fill this iconic space with a conventional sculpture or installation, Salcedo has created a subterranean chasm that stretches the length of the Turbine Hall. The concrete walls of the crevice are ruptured by a steel mesh fence, creating a tension between these elements that resist yet depend on one another. By making the floor the principal focus of her project, Salcedo dramatically shifts our perception of the Turbine Hall’s architecture, subtly subverting its claims to monumentality and grandeur. Shibboleth asks questions about the interaction of sculpture and space, about architecture and the values it enshrines, and about the shaky ideological foundations on which Western notions of modernity are built.

In particular, Salcedo is addressing a long legacy of racism and colonialism that underlies the modern world. A ‘shibboleth’ is a custom, phrase or use of language that acts as a test of belonging to a particular social group or class. By definition, it is used to exclude those deemed unsuitable to join this group.

‘The history of racism’, Salcedo writes, ‘runs parallel to the history of modernity, and is its untold dark side’. For hundreds of years, Western ideas of progress and prosperity have been underpinned by colonial exploitation and the withdrawal of basic rights from others. Our own time, Salcedo is keen to remind us, remains defined by the existence of a huge socially excluded underclass, in Western as well as post-colonial societies.

In breaking open the floor of the museum, Salcedo is exposing a fracture in modernity itself. Her work encourages us to confront uncomfortable truths about our history and about ourselves with absolute candidness, and without self-deception.

So, did you get that? It is all about ‘a long legacy of racism and colonialism’. Any bells ringing yet! So let’s presume that Salcedo wakes up one morning and says

‘Blow me down with a feather, why don’t we dig a huge black crack in a white floor and persuade everyone its all about bad white people.’

And the art world yanks at its hair, grovels to the floor and pronounces the entire concept one of pure inspirational genius. The price tag is so horrendous; it just has to be the ultimate in modern art. Think about it, most people pay to get cracks like that filled in!

OR IS IT?

I don’t think Salcedo thought up anything artistic. Someone has done it before! All Salcedo had to do was steal the concept from the original art work and pay some Polish labourers a few pounds to dig a crack and pocket the rest. The actual explanation for the work of art has also been given to her. Yup, you guessed it – A Dry White Season.

I discovered, whilst looking for the film, several copies of the book. But it is the hardcover version printed in September 1979 by publishers WH Allen, that really blew my mind. Without actually buying the book, I don’t know who did the art work for the dust cover, but…take a look at this!

There you go then. Who do I turn too? How can I profit from all this?