La vie comme elle vient

- Mais que fais-tu?

- Je vis. Heureux.

On me demande – “on” tout de suite les grands mots – on me demande donc parfois, au détour de conversations informels, ce que je fais de ma vie. Eh bien je sauve la mienne et puis celle de douze canetons. La vie est un peu compliquée, et sans aucun doute pleine d’inattendus.

Parti d’Afrique je me construit ici un présent ambicieux. Parti de rien; partie de plaisir. Quelle angoisse. C’est très trortueux comme chemin de pensée, un peu confu. Il y ma une nouvelle carrière dans une nouvelle entreprise. Une nouvelle entreprise que je crée et dont j’attend l’officialisation. Il y a cette histoire de chasseurs de primes aussi, c’est très lié mais pour l’instant c’est complêtement différent. Ah il y a aussi cette tête de vache, grande et rouge qui flotte au dessus des blés. Je l’ai accouché enfin ce 26 juillet d’été – à guetter sur dejavu. Il y au aussi le mariage de mon meilleur ami et Paris l’été. Les noces de chateaubreton.com et puis j’en oublie expres.

Mais mines de rien, tout comence lentement a s’assembler, quitte à ce que les choses se téléscopent au final. Le plan est en route et Inchalla on va y arriver – “on” tout de suite les grands mots.

Best Days of Our Lives

So how is it like in New York city,
Where student’s fresh minds run desp’rately free?
So how is it like in your Manhattan
Where mighty pages are being written?

In your own time, in your own time
You are coming to age, I witness that.

Did we ever see on those days,
How fast beauty was fading away?

Why didn’t we know, playing with their knives,

We were spending the best days of our lives?

It does not matter anymore nore does it make a difference:
We are aware now time is passing by and softens our senses.

In your own time, in your own time
You are starting changes, I witness that.

Take it slow-ly and turn things around steadi-ly, our way.
Do you know and do you feel all these people watching you?
Like we used to follow shining stars; these miracles we glazed at.

“Youth is a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children.”

G. B. Shaw

The Breath of Panam

Chop chop sharp boy. It’s been 64 years today since the end of the second world war. Let’s celebrate, karaoke, ok. Korean style.

8:30pm let’s meet and let Min-Sik sing for a while. You, larynx Creep! There was Billy Jean etc baby, you sing it like you can, until the clock says stop. Top notch venue. Let have something to eat, ok: Karaoke. Korean style. We’ll share a soup shall we not, asks Min-Sik. Why do you ask?

Clock says stop and we all end up in Boulogne, Boulouloubi would say Marwan,  on the balcony of a first floor flat looking into a  dark neat night. So what did you say about your holiday in Baly? So what did you say about South Africa? I sing it like I can.  And it all disapears in the wind like a puff of  smoke. We ride back to our houses sliding on the thick grey ribbon, we fall back suddenly into our lives. Doesn’t it feel great?

Be Eaten

So this is it: my last weekend here, another three-day break to enjoy the south-african funfair. It didn’t take me long to decide what I should do to close this memorable chapter of my life: one trip with the beautiful freaks, a tour in real life for a taste of how bad things can get. Kruger here I am; Wam Bam!

So I look for a nice lodge and book a big room for a spoiled boy right next to the park. We arrive Saturday, a little after lunch and take our time to slowly immerge ourselves into the deep thick sent of the wild. We sit next to the pool until the sun gets red and that zebras and warthogs come nearby to sip water before the night. We leave the lodge just before sunset for a night-game-drive in the park. We look for beasts hidden in the dark; apart from lions eating a giraffe in the distance and night insects big like your hand we did not see much more than the usual herbivores.

Before sunrise, the following day, we are already driving to the park with our ranger Heinrich, and his 2.7 tones four-wheel drive. We ride around in the clear light and fresh air with tea and much expectation. Our guide knows a lot and sees so far away it feels he could foresee the future. We quickly start to spot all kinds of odd looking animals (wildebeests, rhinos, giraffes…). I have seen them times and times before but this time it is different, this times it is goodbye.

We drove for twelve hours, stopped a few times for breakfast cooked camping-style – hanks Heinrich – on top of a mountain overlooking a flat field as wide as Manhattan, split in half by a large river where hippos rest and kudus come drink fearfully. We have seen many things that day, a lot that I will not remember, but that’s how things go. I will mostly keep in mind an encounter with a huge alpha male elephant walking on the road. Our guide wanted to get him off of it so he parked the 4×4 in the middle of the road. The beast walked around the vehicle at every try, until finally it got fed up, stopped and looked at us. Although we were sitting in that nearly 3 tones jeep, 2m above the road, the animal still looked huge to us. The words of our driver were echoing in the back of my mind: “We weigh 3 tones in this car, an average elephant weighs 7 tones; for him flipping the car his as easy as tossing a water bucket”. This was no average male.

That’s how it is over there: the stronger is always right. We human are little useless things with no natural defence against nature’s most basic threats. Over there we have just a little more resistance than green grass and harmless-insects. It is difficult to feel how powerful nature is until you get next to it, into it. These animals we usually see on TV or at the zoo have powers far beyond what I could have imagined. Any of them running one a half time quicker the fastest human – you cannot understand unless you have seen it in reel; any predator able to cut through bones like us through carrots human – you cannot understand unless you have seen it in reel; Sight, smell, claws, poison, weight, stamina, you name it it’s all very impressive to the point that even in the biggest car with the best gun you still feel powerless. But wait. Why do we want to know about all that? Why do we need to hear stories about people getting killed and what horrible things hyenas and hippos will do to you if they can? Why does humankind need to be in touch with such violence?

For the last day we wanted to do a morning game-walk but unfortunately all of them were canceled as a hippo had attacked a group the previous week. A woman nearly died and several were injured. Instead we stayed at the lodge surrounded by zebras, and monkeys eating bananas.

And that was it, as fast as it came it was gone. I closed this window on life and came back to our reality.

Elephant in Kruger Park from damien.ldp on Vimeo.

Fear facts:

• A hyenas will eat you alive, no time to kill you. With a group of four/five beasts they will just rip your arms legs apart for each of hem to eat in their corner.
• Hippos are the animals inflicting the most casualties upon humans in Africa, even though they do not eat meat. There are just bad tempered animals.
• A buffalo has so much adrenaline that it seems impossible to kill. Lions (200kg) would need to be five or six together to take one down; that is why a old male buffalos have usually faced and survived several lions attack. A bullet would typically not stop a buffalo unless it hits the brain or the spine.

Personnal Point of View on Tanzania

Mt Meru drowning in clouds

Top of Africa

Going Back Down

Our Team of Guides, Cook and Porters

Tree in a House at Stowntwon - Zanzibar

Daulphins on Approach

Unstoppable Tick-Tock

This is the post that has already been written in countless blogs, in which the blogger apologizes for not having posted anything for a while and comes up with good excuses. I won’t apologize, I don’t owe you.

I haven’t written in a while for several reasons: 1 – I have been busy (surf in Durban, road trip along the garden route, hiking in the mountains); 2 – I have been worried about writing over and over the details of my past weekends and was feeling this exercise was getting less and less interesting; 3 – I have been busy preparing my holidays, a trip I would like to discuss a little.

As told in a previous post I am leaving for Tanzania tonight at midnight – sounds like a death penalty ending – and will be spending the next week climbing mount Kilimanjaro (5985m). We have been preparing physically, technically, financially and mentally for the last two months and it feels today like we are finally setting foot on the starting line.
I am filled with excitement and apprehension. I will surely detail how the journey went, when (if?) I come back, I therefore will not say much more now. All I can say is that the preparation has been quite stressful, especially these last days.

To give you a quick example: we need American dollars (roughly $3,000) to pay out the climb as you can’t pay it by card nor in local money apparently. The trick is that banks will be reluctant to exchange that much money, so you need travelers cheques, and the catch is that Amercian Express will not sell travellers cheques to non residents nor to people working in South Africa… And the banks will only sell to people having an account with them. Having no bank account here, I was stuck in a loophole.

Anyway, we are now ready for departure, starting to think about the actual walk; seven days of beauty and suffering.

Get In The Car Jack

Friday night, end of the week, coming back from the airport where I went to send back friends to the old continent. On the way home I stop at a robot (traffic light) at the corner of Bowling avenue and South Road. Sigh! I’m tired.

There is a man sitting on he sidewalk barefoot, he’s holding a piece of paper folded so that it forms a cylinder; I look at him waiting for a sign from him, expecting him to beg or sell me something but he doesn’t. I look at him for a moment while he stairs back at me, motionless. Then he gets up, walks towards me (right front door) and passes on the side of the car to get around it. I find it a little odd as at that time there was only one other car and it was at the same level as mine, front line on the starting line. Vroum, vroum.

I keep following him in my rear mirrors, until he gets to the other side of the vehicle, approaching the back left door. The robot turns greens, I look again in the rear mirror when accelerating, and I see him going for the door nob and trying to open. He missed it as I was already on the move but the car was locked anyway.

I am still wondering whether he wanted to jump in and threaten me with a concealed weapon (may be inside the folded paper) or if he wanted to grab and steal something inside the car. If he wanted the former, then why go all around the car and not try to get in from the door right behind me? If he wanted the latter then he would have seen while marauding around the trunk that the back seat was absolutely empty (not even a empty bottle of water on the floor). Puzzling. We’ll never know… Or may be unfortunately I will.

It Looks Like I’m Firing You

There is some sort of pressure, when you arrive in Johannesburg, to hire a maid to clean the big house you and your roommate live in. Ok, so be it. The real reason behind this trend is as we spend a lot of time at work (or travelling), we might as well enjoy as much as possible our free time, so if we can get rid if dish washing on Sunday mornings we try to – yes we have a two story house with too many rooms but we have no dishwasher.

So we hire Maria, on advice of the owner, Hi Maria how are you. Good, good. Half a year later we figure out she is only cleaning the sheets, and washing a few plates every week. So we decide to “put an end to her contract”. Fish says, Damien can you please fire the maid. Ok, I’ll put it on my to-do list: between organise my exhibition – www.dejavu-production.com buy my art, many thanks – and find a meaning to life.

(over the phone)

- Hi Maria, how are you?
- Good and you.
- I’m fine. Hm, Maria, I have a sort of bad news. You’ve been very helpful these past months but Fish and I are not going to need your services anymore. It’s complicated… you know… But don’t we’ll pay your next month…
- Ok…
- We’ll need to get the keys back too. I think the easiest for you would be to come by some day, you could give us the keys and we would give you the money we owe you.
- Yes, ok.
- Good, so you don’t have to come tomorrow at the house as we haven’t been there this week. When would be a convenient day for you to meet?
- Tomorrow.
- Ah, yes… ok… as you wish… But you don’t have to come just for that. May be you can come another day, when you are around for some other matter, and we can do the exchange then.
- Yes, ok.
- So when would be a good day?
- Yes, ok. Good day.
- Hm… You know what Maria, may be I’ll send you a text message, you read it and then I call you back so that you tell me what’s best for you.
- Yes, ok.

Sure…

The following week, we put a note on the door of the house asking her to leave the keys and take the money in the envelope. When we arrive back at the house: the note is gone, the money is still there and the keys are missing.

My Grill

Very happy to introduce you to my first comissioned work, a 3m wide x 2m high Grill for the entrance of a domain. Ordered by my father, I designed it, it was constructed by a local retired craftman and set up last week.

Dejavu Collaboration with the Public – I (eye)

Tany, following up on his collaborations with Minibar, Imaginal Disc, Ali, Olivier Gounot and Violaine Prunet, will experiment collaborating with the public.

The idea is to create one collaborative piece of work. The input from spectators will be collected at several stages of conception of a painting via this website and your comments.

Visit www.dejavu-production.com and the post .

First step:
The public – you – provides input for a painting, under any form: a picture, a song, a name, a word, a story, a concept, a colour…

Second step:
Tany will use this input to start working on a painting. At an early stage (painting started but incomplete) the draft will submitted for review by the public.

Third Step:
The public will comment and provide additional suggestions and ideas.

Fourth Step:
Tany will finalize the painting.

This is the first step. Please provide your suggestions by commenting .

Input already gathered: Japanese kanji for “silent execution” ; irony ; cycle within the painting.