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“In a Dream: Love is a Work of Art” is a fascinating documentary about Isaiah Zagar,  and Outsider artist who has spent the last four decades creating mosaic art on a massive scale in Southern Philadelphia.  “In a Dream” was filmed by his son Jeremiah.

There is no doubt in my mind that Zagar is mad and marches through life to the march of his own internal drumbeat as most Outsider artists do. His strange obsessive creativity falls into the same category as the massive mosaic-covered sculptures of Niki de Saint Phalle’s Tarot Garden in Tuscany and the strange imagery of Helen Martins who created the Owl House in the dusty little town of Nieu Bethesda in South Africa’s Karoo.

I’ve been to the Owl House. The cement owls, figure and camels, some facing Mecca, and the interior walls of the house covered with ground glass are a clear indication of an extraordinary mind or madness at work. In the end Miss Helen committed suicide by drinking caustic soda in the midst of her fantasy world of glittering glass particles, lamps and mirrors, stars, moons, spires and cement statues. Athol Fugard’s play “The Road to Mecca” and the wonderful book “This is my World” by Susan Imrie Ross is good sources if you are not familiar with The Owl House

Back to Isaiah Zagar. The sheer scope and scale of the murals Zagar creates is almost beyond belief. I have done some mosaics and this craft form is hard work being on your feet for hours for long periods. Cutting the tiles, placing them in some pattern, grouting and cleaning takes hours of back breaking labour. I’m wondering how Zagar keep this up at the age of seventy.

It is clear that Zagar is an eccentric, tormented man. Critics dismiss him as an Outsider artist. “No museum was willing to exhibit my work, so I put it on public display in the street,” said this Brooklyn-born bohemian in an Interview. “I use art as a spider web, to trap people and change how they look, feel, dream.”

In 1968, having moved to Philadelphia after several years in Peru (where he and his wife Julia had worked as Peace Corps Craft Developers), he went through a personal crisis. "I attempted to commit suicide. ...I had a nervous breakdown, and it changed me radically. I could no longer solve anything about the problem of judgment, of terminating an object. I could no longer sense right and wrong.

"That's when I started to take up mosaics." Picking up discarded stuff he started putting things together and sealing them to the walls with cement, as a way of radically accepting his new, all-inclusive eye.

For the past forty years Isaiah Zagar has covered more than 50,000 square feet with mosaic murals in the vibrant, bohemian neighbourhood of South Philadelphia. Each wall had been buffed--mirror bits, crockery, tiles and cement--so passersby would not cut themselves on protruding edges. The murals, a hodgepodge of Old Testament prophecy, words and colour, chronicle his private life.

The only person able to distract Isaiah from his mad obsession is Julia, his muse, provider and wife of four decades. “He’s kind of a rare flower, a thistle maybe” she says of him in an interview in the documentary “In a Dream”. The murals chronicle his love for Julia, and subtly hint at the darker corners of an extraordinary imagination.

Julia runs a Latin American crafts shop; Isaiah embellished the derelict buildings they bought and rents out. These buildings which Zagar calls his “Temples of Art” squat along the South Street corridor in Philadelphia. He has blanketed their outer walls with shimmering mosaics of broken mirror, shattered tile, cracked crockery, bicycle wheels, signs and symbols

After transforming his own home and storefront, Zagar progressed to other locations. He's done numerous rowhouse sides and fronts, the side of a church, several community gardens, an arts centre, a high school, and most completely, his own Kater Street studio building, from its basement all the way up to a rooftop garden.

The Magic Garden, Zagar's largest South Street mural, is an indoor/outdoor maze of mosaics inlaid with various pieces of poetry. One line reads, "I built this sanctuary to be inhabited by my ideas and my fantasies." Another says, "Remember walking around in this work of fiction."

Embedded in many of his works are the words "Art is the Center of the Real World". His murals reflect an appreciation for the imaginative human and sensual element in the potentially bleak urban environment of blighted, decrepit neighbourhoods which is transformed to an area filled with quirky magic and mystery.

Zagar's ongoing revelation-cum-rallying cry: "Philadelphia is the Centre of the Art World/ Art is the Centre of the Real World."  To have some understanding of his work Google “Magic Garden – Isaiah Zagar” and view the life’s work of a special genius that truly belongs in this gallery of Visionaries, Maniacs and Wild Eyed Dreamers. It is a mad dance of imagery, beauty and colour that is truly captivating.

After more than four years of not doing any mosaics I started on something for ♥ Girl’s birthday which is in January. The first panel is done and my hand hurts from snippety snipping tiles and my back is breaking.

Move over Isaiah Zagar

 

Once in a while I have one of these serendipitous days that makes me wonder if things happen as predestined or purely by chance. I met up with my first live fellow bookcrosser, Symphonicca, at the Service Station, a deli in Melville, yesterday morning for coffee.

Adjoining Service Station is a lovely independent bookshop aptly named Love Books; www.lovebooks.co.za, and after browsing through the shop I bought a copy of Rian Malan’s latest book “Resident Alien” which was recently published.

Symphonicca is leaving South Africa and we exchanged some books and the conversation soon turned to favourite books and authors. She is Canadian and will be returning to Quebec next week. Before we went our separate ways I showed her “Resident Alien” and told her that Malan’s “My Traitors Heart” is, for me, one of the definitive books about South Africa that she should consider reading.

“My Traitors Heart” is subtitled “Blood and Bad Dreams: A South African Explores the Madness in His Country, His Tribe and Himself” and was published in the early nineties. I’ve had this on my bookshelf for many years and it is one of the truly great books about South Africa; in particularly for white South Africans of Afrikaans descent.

It is mainly about the Afrikaners struggle with their sense of identity, being part of this stubborn truly South African tribe rooted in the soil of this land as deeply as the history and traditions of all other indigenous peoples. It is also about trying to fit into the ever changing political and social landscape of a newly created democracy.

Late Saturday morning I went to Die Pienk Kerk (The Pink Church) also in Melville which is now, after years of standing empty, being used as a creative space for art exhibitions, book and poetry reading with the odd musician giving an impromptu show.

I knew that Brenda Burnit, the South African songstress, would be at Die Pienk Kerk. I’ve been looking for her CD “Strong in the Broken Places” since last year when I heard her song “Afrikaner” for the first time. I’ve used this song in a previous livejournal post titled "El Presidente Zumaletto and the Afrikaners" and it is also part of the South African Surprise CD compilations that I sometime send out to overseas bookcrossers.

I was introduced to Brenda and told her I loved the song but had to pirate it off YouTube in the end as I couldn’t find the CD anywhere. She laughed, shrugged her shoulders and said that she’d changed management and that the CD was unavailable for some time. I bought a copy which she signed “Thanks for the support and also for the pirating!”

Before Brenda did her set I saw another trio warming up. I thought the guitarist looked sort of familiar. Long thinning grey hair, middle aged, attractive in a worn out way. They started playing; the guitarist, a drummer and the angelic bluesy voice of a thin slip of a blond girl. They were really great and the music soared through the old church on a sunny South African Saturday morning.

Only afterwards I found out that this guitarist is …. Rian Malan. I did not even know he was a musician. I hauled my copy of “Resident Alien” out of the car which he kindly inscribed and signed. Oh and I also bought his CD “Alien/Inboorling” which is surprisingly good.

Serendipity, Pre-destiny, Change? I dunno.

When I got home I googled Rian Malan and found the following comment he made about being a musician:

"I’m a kak (shit) writer and a bad human being, man, but I’m a really good rhythm guitarist. I’m really, really, really good. For a white man I’ve got a truly astonishing sense of rhythm.”

Bashful? I don’t think so…but if you’re good, you’re good and I suppose you needn’t be.

Apparently he appears quite often at “The Radium Beer Hall” in Orange Grove which is a drinking haunt and music venue as old as Jozi itself. “Resident Alien” was launched there.

At the launch Malan said his title is “an oblique reference to white people in Africa”. His speech was centred on what he called his “journey of alienation”, a journey occasioned by his contrary opinions. “This alienation is useful in a way because it gives me a great deal of time to think about what the underlying issues are and get away from the drama - to think the thoughts forbidden by the thought police. A lot of people would disagree but I see myself as a regular, ordinary guy. I’m not a bad guy - I also like to have a dop, have a braaivleis, watch the rugby - and I’m certainly not an intellectual.”

Malan continued, “When my first book was published, I was like a prophet and people would come and asked me what would happen in South Africa and I would say it’s all just fucked. I later saw we were living in a pretty happy state and I was essentially just too drunk to register it. So I decided to turn liberal again but this just alienated me further. So I decided to take up boeremusiek and find a gang that would have me.

“Just when I thought my alienation was complete and I was never going to recover, something very unexpected happened: the lights went out. It was the Eskom crisis of 2008, and the collapse in confidence of most people in the future of South Africa. I had been out there in deepest darkest ideological hyperspace for so many years and suddenly found people were joining me.”

Ah well, the thoughts of a true new-Afrikaner trying to make sense of living a life in this strange, sometimes scary but never boring melting pot of a country at the beginning of a new millennium.

Clint Eastwood’s film “Invictus” will be released in South Africa on 11 December. I read “Playing the Enemy” by John Carlin recently and I’m wondering what the movie will be like. I’m sure Eastwood will succeed in running with the main theme, Mandela’s release from prison, the turbulent times in South Africa in the early 1990’s and also the role that the Rugby World Cup played in unifying a nation.

The portrayal of the rugby players in action is another story. A lot of South Africans are true rugby fanatics who understand the flow and nuances of this extremely physical game. To turn the ebb and flow of a rugby match into a believable movie is no mean feat. I don’t know that much about American Football but Oliver Stone did an excellent job with the on the field scenes in “On Any Given Sunday”, and if Eastwood’s efforts are half as good it’ll be good enough.

The players of 1995 that won this country’s first Rugby World Cup has mostly moved on to be national icons and it is very hard to imagine Matt Damon as Francois Pienaar. There’s no actor that can play the role of Kobus Wiese….except Kobus Wiese….and who’ll want to play Joost after his recent bedroom antics?

Maybe Tiger Woods, if he was available but he not the right colour and seems to have Joost-like troubles of his own at the moment. Oh dear

"Aids today in Africa are claiming more lives than the sum total of all wars, famines and floods and the ravages of such deadly diseases as malaria ... We must act now for the sake of the world ... Aids is no longer a disease, it is a human rights issue."

Nelson Mandela at the launch of the 46664 Aids Awareness Campaign

Today is National Aids Awareness Day. This morning I was glancing through “The Times” (that is still being delivered free of charge to my house) before coming to work. I spotted an article about the number of Aids orphans in Qunu, Eastern Cape which is the home village of Madiba. The article states that the number of Aids orphans in the village has doubled in the past 18 months

South Africa has the highest number of people infected globally, estimated at around 5.7 million, including 300 000 children under the age of 15 years, in 2007 (UN 2008 Global Report on the HIV and AIDS Epidemic).

Although prevalence has reduced slightly, South Africa still has the sixth highest prevalence of HIV in the world, with 18.1% of the population estimated to be infected. The UNAIDS 2008 Global Report, estimated that in 2007, 350 000 people died from AIDS in South Africa. South Africa is regarded as having the most severe HIV epidemic in the world

New infections are still increasing. The national average of HIV-positive women attending antenatal clinics in 2005 was 30.2%. The province of Kwa-Zulu Natal continues to have the highest prevalence at 39.1% followed by Mpumalanga at 34.8%.

This cannot be allowed to continue and it is not only the responsibility of government or the many international celebrities like Bono and Annie Lennox who work tirelessly to promote AIDS awareness in South Africa. It is our responsibility. It has become more than a human rights issue, it is a national crisis.

Greg Mortenson’s book “Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace…One School at a Time” was of special interest to me as I’ve been working for a South African Literacy NGO for the past decade. This book is very similar to John Wood’s “Saving Microsoft to Change the World” which is about the establishing of Room to Read that had its genesis in building school libraries in Nepal ten years ago.

Room to Read, according to their latest newsletter, “have opened the doors of opportunity to over 4 million children through our over 7,500 libraries, 830 schools and 8,780 scholarships for girls, and are well positioned to reach millions more in our second decade” As of October 2009, Central Asia Institute (Mortenson’s funding vehicle) has established over 131 schools in rural Afghanistan and Pakistan, which provide education to 54,000 students including over 44,000 girls.

The different approaches of these two humanitarians in fundraising and communication are like chalk and cheese. John Wood is clearly a corporate animal that uses the skills, expertise and contacts he gained at Microsoft to establish Room to Read. It does in no way distract from his wonderful achievement.

Greg Mortenson’s book is more about guts and determination and an inventing-as-you-go-along approach which really touched me deeply. Wood started with a business model leaving a well paid career while Mortenson started with only an idea and a burning desire to make a difference. Again I am not detracting from Wood’s wonderful achievements but hell, Mortenson slept in his car for months on end to save money to build the first school!

Mortenson believes that education and literacy for girls globally is the most important investment all countries can make to create stability, bring socio-economic reform, decrease infant mortality, decrease the population explosion, and improve health, hygiene, and sanitation standards.

He also believes that 'fighting terrorism' only perpetuates a cycle of violence, and that the best way promote peace is through education and literacy, with an emphasis on girls' education.

"You can drop bombs, hand out condoms, build roads or put in electricity, but unless the girls are educated, a society won't change", is an often quoted statement made by Mortenson.

The following passage towards the end of “Three Cups of Tea” describes events in 2003 shortly after 9/11 and America’s invasion of Iraqi using WMD as an excuse that to date has cost thousands of lives with still no trace of either the weaponry or Bin Ladin.

This chillingly illustrate the futility of a misdirected war against terror;

“General Bashir Baz (a retired Pakistani Air force pilot) ruminated on the importance of educating all of Pakistan’s children, and the progress America was making in the war on terror.

Bashir watched a live CNN feed from Baghdad and was struck silent by the images of wailing Iraqi women carrying children’s bodies out of the rubble of a bombed building.

As he studied the screen Bashir’s bullish shoulders slumped. ‘People like me are America’s best friends in the region’ Bashir said at last shaking his head ruefully. ‘I’m a moderate Muslim, an educated man. But watching this, even I could become a jihadi. How can Americans say that they are making themselves safer?’ Bashir asked, struggling not to direct his anger at the large American target [Mortenson] on the other side of his desk. ‘Your President Bush has done a wonderful job of uniting one billion Muslims against America for the next two hundred years.’

Mortenson commented that Osama bin Ladin had a large role leaving America no option to retaliate after 9/11. Bashir replied; ‘Osama is not a product of Pakistan or Afghanistan. He is a creation of America. Thanks to America, Osama is in every home. As a military man, I know you can never fight and win against someone who shoot at you once and then run off and hide while you have to remain eternally on guard. You have to attack the source of your enemy’s strength. In America’s case, this is not Osama or Saddam or anyone else. The enemy is ignorance. The only way to defeat it is to build relationships with these people, to draw them into the modern world with education and business. Otherwise the fight will go on forever.’”

Six years later the war in Iraqi is still raging, and despite what Barak Obama promised there seems to be no end in sight. I realise that withdrawal will be a long and intricate process but in the end War will be the only winner.

Working in the field of previously disadvantaged education the way that Room to Read and the Central Asian Institute seems to measure their successes are interesting. They measure it by the number of schools or libraries build. Maybe the Asian model differs vastly from an African model in the sense that, in my opinion, to build a school or establish a library is only the beginning. Real change can only happen within a print rich environment with adequately trained teachers to facilitate learning.

Mortenson was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 and apparently was one of a handful of finalists for the prize that was awarded to President Obama in October 2009. Mortenson was a more deserving winner as he walked the walk already while Obama is still talking.

The sequel to “Three Cups of Tea”; “Stones into Schools: Promoting Peace with Books, Not Bombs, in Afghanistan and Pakistan” is due for release in December 2009.

Here’s to these two visionaries; Greg Mortenson and John Wood that is making a huge difference in the lives of children not for financial gain but because They Can.

http://www.unitydesign.co.za/

I carry a journal full of dreams

a place where I write fate into being

a journal of free memories that caress the thighs of history

a place where the future awaits legacies from the hands of men enslaved by faith and its present day reality

this journal is a midwife of words delivered to expectant days

days that await the coming of fate

time bleeds

men seek peace

yet peace is still at war with a piece of itself

self remains absorbed in self sacrificial senselessness

so this journal is an altar of belief

a place where seeking pilgrims find the God of the universe in a verse that births word

this journal is a sacred song unsung

a will undone

a truth yet to be perceived

If a man with no formal English education can create such beauty imagine what he and thousands of others can achieve, if we can turn this tide of hopelessness and helplessness around.