Mein Name war John Travolta

Kofi Fosu Forson

(Translated by Elena Federici)

Das Dezimalsystemist das Mass von Heute
So sagen sie in ihrer algebraischen Sprache
Als Knaben Strichmaennchen Pornografie fertigbrachten
Niemals sich um erschossene Praesidenten kuemmernd
Unsere Zukunft war in Koofern Geisel genommen
Um “Jimmy Carter” in Buchstaben-Suppen zu schreiben
Heir, Mickey Maus is offfiziell eine Jungfrau.

Flugzueg’s Film Leinwand bebte wie eine Disco
Irgendwo zwischen Aufschnitt war ich italienisch
Mein Name war John Travolta, nur fuer diesen Tag
Sinnliche Wolken dem DC-10 Schwanz folgend
Auf Kettenraucherde Gebaude zurueck zufuehrend
Fahrstuehle ueber meine Respektlosigkeit lachend
Zu denken ich haette eine Heimat teure Heimat gefunden wo
Knoepfe druecken fast wie Perkolatoren war.

Das Haus-Personal machte zusammen Musik
Die Ausgelassenheit willkommend – Travolta ist Afrikaner
In einem grauen Polyester-Anzug sich nach Keksen sehnend
Die britische Art: was, vonmeinem Englisch, halten Sir?
Oh liebe Queen-Mutter, Kolonialismus ist tot
Es wird genug Tee fuer alle geben.
Doppeldecker Busse tanzen in London
Hier, bloekende Lkws in der Nacht buchstabieren Schlaflosigkeit

Fernseh Dramas weichen Kugeln von Dogmas aus
Evangelisten halten Formeln fuer Erloesung
Mein Episkopalischer Glaube von Playboy bestimmt
Was Sonntagsschule war, jetzt im Zopf
Sommersprossig, die Schwaenzerei gegeben, faltete ich
Von einer Durchschnitt “1” bis zu der Liste des Psychiaters.
Rohrschach Erinnerungen waren faechtende Kaninchen.
Lang lebe die Karriere welche keine Zeit angiebt.

Adieu Saturday Night Fever
Hallo Ordinaere Leute

Language and the Modern Woman
la Femme et le Chien

Kofi Fosu Forson

Titian’s Venus of Urbino begot De Kooning’s Woman 1. The purpose was to deconstruct the female. Much is due the fault of evolution given the propensity in philosophy, gender structure and an overall development in sexual politics.

Fashion invariably known as style has been given an awareness all through history. That the fig leaf covering the pubic area on Adam and Eve’s body should leave no doubt in questioning the system under which much of who we are is reconstructed and never given a true enhancement.

There is however a notion which defines the personal sense found in how we dress and accessorize. It’s reflective of an inner curiosity to impress another, startle the public, mask our feelings or reveal a cultural and formative code.

Understandably and with semiotics, we are all privy to the same circumvention that which stimulates our need for clothes. The written text as in Vogue helps one surmise what is the day’s trend. It has carried over through to other fashion magazines where haut couture and present day wear are systematically given a form of articulation making known by pattern and design fashion designers and their catalogue.

Mention of a name and one is made familiar with a designer’s truest sense, Gautier and Valentino. On the Red Carpet a woman expresses her nature given her choice of gown and by what designer. This has carried over into society where celebrities inspire women on what they wear.

It once was that the word and style of the street channeled into the fashion industry what was marketed and sold. This was heavily due to street culture as in graffiti, early hip hop and singularly the voice placed upon individuals.

Women were at an advantage when they took from and helped inspire each other on accessorizing, making use of color and texture. Cinema and pop culture would later be interchangeable with how these clothes were marketed to the general public.

Gender politics would therefore determine how men and women coordinated a lifestyle and reaffirmed the commonality or differences between what is accepted as courtship or “meat market.”

Over the years a particular certainty has been divulged in the roles women play, from frontier women to activists, mothers to porn stars. When women like Cicciolina and Candida Royalle are given a voice in sex and politics, a pattern is determined whether women are re-establishing themselves circumstantially as libidinal or have yet to reinstitute the definition of what is sex.

Dismissably, that very act ingrained in the mind has undergone a manifestation and however sensitized we are as a culture, we’ve been desensitized and somehow 9/11 brought to fore circumstances pertaining to love and death, the equation of which is sex.

What sex is now has become a celebration or crowing glory of ones psychological and sexual abuse, intellect and power or gender warfare. Love doesn’t exist in its intimacy. It’s manufactured. If by two people in a human representation most see it as exceptional. Otherwise a lot is done to secure false notions and perceptions.

Clearly enough, the sexual personae within the modern woman has reached an explosive point. What can be estimated from this bears more relevance to female orgasmic pleasure than what suffrage did for women.

A woman and her multiple lovers doesn’t express love and romance as it gives off the notion that the physical male body thrusting perhaps trivializes what love means and is in actuality all a foregone conclusion.

The exaggerated perception in what leads to marriage or good sex is all expressed in the faces of men on Sunday afternoons escorting their significant others as if they were dogs walking the streets, through cafes and shopping malls, expressing to the world that they have survived. They have managed to find a woman.

Given the existences in the virtual and real, most men know for themselves who they are and what they want. The playground that is love, sex and romance continues to be represented by an exceptional crowd; mostly those secure financially and are at a wherewithal to claim a role as lover or future partner in marriage.

Women have found an awakening within themselves as sexual dynamos. Evolution played a part, although it was unfortunately misguided by politics, pornography as an everyday topic, also found in the nature of a bored housewife or teenaged girl or the subtexts revolving around race and generational conflicts.

If a woman is to be president of the free world, much of her profile would eventually be relegated to her role as sex symbol.

Hillary Clinton or Carla Bruni?

Nuff Said.

Cinema Brut
Blind Existence / Virtual Reel

Kofi Fosu Forson

The authenticity of the fool is marked by conditioning. With no where left to stand, he attempts the greatest possible act--- that being himself isn’t a choice, it’s a necessity.

If you rented an apartment that had a prerequisite of living opposite an in house bull dog, would you comply? Knowing full well that the dog was dangerous, would you be willing to adapt to this animal’s needs in hope of changing its demeanor to take advantage of an affordable living situation?

This is a premise for Cinema Brut, a cinematic approach to the conveying of urban life using metaphors, dogmas, surreality and the visceral depicting the circumstances surrounding the options one is confronted with which momentarily defines who we are and challenges our character for life.

The aesthetics surrounding this are gender and fashion, artist and muse, sexual politics and emotional and physical torture. We as a subculture look to our forefathers and others who have helped carve a culture of the sardonic, miserable, haunted and enthused, forever glowing among the mid-city jubilee.

Cinema Brut is the authenticizing of life lived in urban mania in its actuality only given a form of sensationalism and compromising art-effect. What it becomes is exploring the traditional circumstances of life in urban culture represented within the facets of disillusionment, aestheticism, visceral texts both violent and sexual and an understanding bordering closure.

This allows for representation of the minds of a defeated culture whether emotionally, intellectually or sexually to share with the world how the experience in an urban setting is manipulated and allows for the embracing of matters both good and evil.

The basis of this foundation and structure is deterioration as in the inability to process society’s information. Urban culture dismisses the linearity of a supposed life-line. One’s existence is marked by the moment. It furthers a decided hopelessness curable only through immediate gratification. In this circumstance it’s made applicable to art.

What are the aesthetics of this existence? How is art and sex relevant? Does art exist as graffiti and is sex rape or managed as pleasure, driven by machismo, prostitution, muse, model, incest, aggression, murder or death?

Within this subscription one is led to wonder about one’s lifestyle and habitude. Is it camouflaged as urban or does one venture out safeguarded in uniqueness guided by individuality and personal expression?

Is there a contradiction between art and urban culture? How can the artist exist mildly or pronouncedly within the urban traces of music, sex, drugs and violence? There is a sense of the artist as homosexual, psycho, pedophile… The balancing of this and the emergence of the artist as an individual is given a premise along with the existing brutality.

Cinema as such has to refer to Scorcese’s Mean Streets and Bunuel’s Belle du Jour. They manage to capture the allure of sex and violence that which is in a sense the marketing of a particular kind of urban drug, adrenaline, exposed in a beat down, murder or gang-bang. The breakdown in any ghetto results in violence one way or another. The marketing of this is stereotyped which serves as pleasure for a society.

Indeed adrenaline in this case is brought about in the manifestation of the narrative. Somehow the digital video approaches a rush felt in the use of drugs or otherwise.

What becomes of the virtual reel is an example of the digital video imagined conscientiously. The mind is capable of revolving spontaneous movies reminiscent of sexual and violent fantasies. In these movies one is able to remote in turn the speed of motion, although some how it’s captivated as a production.

The difference between the virtual reel and a fantasy is that the video of the reel is qualified in a caption or box inside the mind. It takes on manners of film, manufacturing of lights, shade and colors. There’s that eventual grain and somehow it’s not caught up in time. It’s packaged as history. However one can hardly replay it as before.

Fantasy is envisioned as such. It’s immediate and it takes place in time. It lacks the ability to fast-forward or rewind. The moment has a feeling of excitement realized as sensational. The reel inspires something close to amazement.

Is it possible in this reality to hear a person moan and smell the scent of body?

In the modern sense sitting in reality’s (un)reality thinking and talking is somehow comparable to time spent in a romp. Irrespectively the virtual reel with all its colors and sounds is probably safer and more stimulating.

Urban reality needs the body. It commits to it in violence and sex, otherwise it has no purpose. Virtual reality disposes of the body and is left with conscience. The body then remains afloat. In the virtual reel the body takes on a celluloid form becoming hyperreal.

Our blind existence encourages a sense of development and formation but with extreme caution it is necessary to explore life’s adventures within the real and virtual making possible a world of cruelty tolerable within one’s imagination using signifiers of love and death.

The precept of any artist’s development is the interpreting of love and aggression. Whereas The Pre-Raphaelites represented a nurturing of love, Abstract Expressionism as a concentrated physical act of painting was violent and then rendered as controlled vehemence in the official and titled work of art.

The regard for this in an urban setting is language, whether definable as “street,” philosophy, art, semiotics… the purpose then becomes managing to embrace and in a sophisticated reality questioning reality’s (un)reality by forming a world for oneself based on escape and observation.