Road. Home.

Crisscrossed lashes.

A Perfect Day begins with wind in the curtains
and the silent lapping shoreline of sun rays across
a floor strewn with delicate garments.

A handful of duvet and the warm musk
of night spent breathing deeply
summons a perfect moment to pass by your lips
and across each crisscrossed lash.

It's a moment so perfect you have to lick your lips
and batter your eyelids in want of more... but -

Perfect moments are hard to keep.

So you brush it off and roll over
because a Perfect Day demands
nothing more from you than
your thinking more about it.

Tea on Sunday.

If i smiled at you, 

Cup. 

Curling steams of coffee toward the ceiling. 

Genie. 

Would you tell the truth?

You know -

That I really was older?

I've never noticed it before. 

Have you?

That mop in the corner.

And that chair. 

I've never sat on it. 

I think 

*sip

5 cloud 9's

Open window

The Johannesburg War Memorial

The Johannesburg war memorial.

​

As I sit beneath the shade of imperial light infantry

 and their railway pioneer regiments

 I hear the distant melting wine of an ice cream van

 and try to remember when last i bought a new tube of toothpaste.

Above the skipping chirp and play of small children

It’s the quiet hum of city that embraces this restless, cold body of memorial.

It beckons.

You can hear it in the wind

 through the bluegum and the pine and upon the

 lips of those with little courage.

Dundalk Avenue

Dundalk Avenue

There's an avenue
laid out behind me in the rearview mirror.

The fluctuate tumble of dry leaf confetti

celebrates the arrival of my car in the street

And through the windswept shadows

 I smile at their pulse when

 I pass and pass and pass.

Kicking around in the boot is a blue ball

I once found

On a day much like this one.

And I smile again because

I can smell the evening

Stillness settle in the belly of my ears.

and can feel the subtle touch of everything new

brush my cheek and whisper down my neck

that tomorrow

Tomorrow

Will be better.

Your name here.

There are currently 800 000 displaced people in Johannesburg alone. Wait, actually there are 799 994. I can definitely vouch for six men who are currently “placed” in a group that’s working toward creating something better for themselves.


These are them:



For the last two months we’ve been working toward a theatre project where they’ll have a chance to tell their stories and create a dialogue long overdue between themselves and their environment.
Suffice to say, 799 994 are a lot of random people - people. 

Social development. 

We’re only as fast as our slowest man. 

Considering that a 1/4 of Johannesburg's population are without homes and wondering the streets directionless - I’d say we’re some of the slowest rats in the race.


In order to get to the top of things you gotta know how far you are from the bottom. The homeless are not only at the bottom of ladder but they’re passed out below it, in fetal position under a blanket of newspapers and cardboard.


So what.


So what does that mean – you mean?

Well – I don’t know. I’m still trying to figure it all out. All I know is that these six men keep coming back to meet and share stories together in the cool air of evening on a Monday and Wednesday. This means that something is sticking – something is moving into place - finding a home. Whether that something is just learning a name, hearing a thought or having a conversation i think it necessary for the upward mobility of who we are as a nation and as people.

I took these guys to the theatre on the 19 of September to see Hayani - a beautifully raw and honest depiction of two lives in South Africa in search and exploration of home. It was the first time i've ever been part of such a diverse multi-lingual crowd where we were all moved by the same things.

Home is a topic wrought with both strangeness and familiarity. 

I feel like “home” is not about birth, or heart or housing – but rather a place where you can meet with yourself and become it. This is a tricky and rare space to find because we’re in a constant state of “becoming” which essentially means then that you and I, who are presumably still trying to figure out where we're all going, are.... homeless in a peculiar and first –world- problem kinda way.


See homelessness is more than just being destitute on the street – it’s a profound sense of disconnection from everything that makes you worth something more than just an ID number. It means disconnection from society, from community and from yourself. It means anonymity. Anonymity can be comforting – but for those who don’t have a choice it’s a hack that robs you of your dignity, your humanity - your name.

To solve homelessness in our country we must tackle it within ourselves first.

Here's how: 

Meet new people. Find out someone else's name and remember it. This way, you'll have to say yours too and by saying it out loud, you call yourself out of anonymity and into being - you welcome yourself and the millions of anonymous around you, home. 

Napkin poetry.

All we got is time.

“All we got is time”…
is what KB says about his life spent living on the street. We’ve all been led to believe that time controls, is a teacher, a healer and is for most - money. Time is no doubt a precious commodity and something greatly lacking in all sectors of society... well, except for amongst the homeless.

So what do a bunch of gentleman do with nothing but the shoes on their feet and all the time in the world?

Answer: Nobody knows really... and that's what bothered me most - the ignorance - the disconnection from a sector of society so painfully evident to us all. 

So i was curious - that's all. I was curious to understand these people, to hear their stories, to connect. From what i know about theatre it's been the only real place that i've known with the power to connect and transport a group of strangers to one brief moment of shared reality. I felt like that was maybe all we needed - just a moment in time where we were all seeing the same thing. It's one of the only art forms able to express, explore and communicate the imagination in real time. Theatre transports, transforms and most importantly - connects people to empathy; a psychological phenomenon detrimental to social development. 

Imagine a group of homeless men inquiring into a space that really listened and required nothing from them but what they carried in their hands, hearts and head.

I originally got the idea for this project a while back after reading an article about an advertising company who wanted to use homeless men as vehicles for wi-fi hotspots. I immediately thought it was brilliant – not because it wanted to use human bodies as advertising space but that the homeless would become points of connection for millions across the world. It's a mad idea and carries the DNA of what our lives are guided and punctuated by - Irony. 

So that's where i thought to take a more creative and maybe more ethical spin on the whole thing by opening up a space within which the homeless could reach out to their community - on their terms, conditions and expressions. 

It's been four weeks since the start of the project and since then we've been exploring basic theatre principles, engaging with the body and making it work for the imagination. We've started discussing story structure and the importance of character development. Most recently, we've scheduled to see Hayani at the Market theatre on the 18th of September. This will be the first time any one of them has been to the theatre. 

It's been an incredibly challenging past few weeks - with me having little time to properly prepare for our workshops and for them, to travel the distances they have to, to commit to a project that promises them nothing but the simple act of recreation. 

From the little time i've spent with these men, i've been inspired by their want and need to connect with something much greater than themselves - something that really hears, see's and understands. I'm not sure what that something is, where it is - or if it even exists. But i do think it's something worth imagining first. So watch this space. 

Save the consumer!... and then make them fall in love with you.

  

Aaaah Content marketing….  

Is the stuff we’re all unwillingly walking into on a daily basis, making our heads spin faster than our compass points. At some point of the day there’s bound to be someone in the office fighting off the tangled mess of branded content they suddenly find themselves in.

There’s no escaping it really.

The general consensus is that consumers hate content marketing because:

•     It’s disruptive
•     It’s always in my face
•     It talks too much
•    You can never trust it

Interestingly enough also, here are a list of symptoms commonly associated with paranoid personality disorder:

•  Aggressive

•  Hostile

•  Judgmental

• Suspects, without sufficient basis, that others are exploiting, harming, or deceiving him or her

Maybe the problem with advertising is not really if it lies but rather where it lies.

We are all responsible for the paranoia we harbor against marketing campaigns because we all want things we don't or can't have. But to be fair the majority of bad content we’re forced to consume on a daily basis does little for our neurosis. Unfortunately in the information age knowing what you want is a rare advantage and getting what you want is just plain spooky – especially when you’re using the Internet.

Trouble is, 88% of all brands rely on content marketing to boost their street cred, which means there's an even greater surge of content ready and waiting to drown the masses in gobble-di-goob. It’s a desperate situation really because in an ideal world we’d all just… know. I’d know how you really feel or know what you really need. But we don’t know which is why we find ourselves feeling our way across the cyber abyss in search of answers only to fumble upon adverts disguised as direction.

The word advertising originates from the French word advertiss meaning “to warn” and the latin word advertere meaning to “turn toward”. So when you’ve stripped advertising down to the shivering naked mass that it is, it’s really just someone trying to communicate that we should know better.

So fact is we’re all lost in information and question is: how do we write great content that’ll stand out from the rest and guide the common ignoramus toward knowing something a little better without leaving anyone feeling manipulated and paranoid?

Let’s think about Tarzan for a moment…

We love Tarzan because he’s that good- looking naked guy whose philosophy is to return to the true nature of things – and so should content marketing be.

People love content that wants to reach out and save them from the terrifying grasps of the cyber jungle and its chaos. Tarzan shows a genuine interest in not only helping you – but a genuine interest in… well, just you. Good content should be curious of you, it should smell of sweat, of hard labour, of discovery – of the raw essence of man. It should be filled with wild brilliance, revealing beautiful new views on the world and it’s products you never knew existed. Finally, good content does little to cover the naked truth of desire and above all, its unabridged honesty is so endearing you just have to lean in closer and want to know more

So, it may seem obvious but here are three ways you can save your consumers from the content marketing deluge:

• Be honest. Reveal your ignorance alongside your wisdom and make your consumer your equal.

• Be adventurous. People don’t mind being led down the garden path if they know it’ll be entertaining.  

• Be more curious. Questions are everyone’s kryptonite. Thomas Barret, ‘the father of advertising” began his most famous advertising campaign with the simple question of “Good morning. Have you used Pears soap today?”

We are all in need of saving - especially time and money. But to every advertiser out there, begin with saving your words first. Your customers and your pocket will thank you eventually.