Even as someone over 50, I don’t see my generation being represented in the media. I grew up with almost exclusively black and coloured heroes – what was the alternative? Vanilla Ice? Bitch, please. No, my heroes were the real talents: KRS One, Paris, Prince, Lee Perry. Three of the four were kept out of the mainstream and the superstar struggled all his life with the ‘slavery’ that was constantly forced upon him and he was eventually murdered by Big Pharma. Yes, I say murdered because those opiates concocted by evil scientists are so addictive that they have killed millions of Americans with them. Prince was murdered, full stop. And the rest were marginalised.
Even in my thirties and forties, I mainly had to watch ‘heroes’ of the Boomers on the media, endless documentaries about the Beatles and Bob Dylan. And our Bob even won the Nobel Prize for Literature with it – when will it finally go to KRS-One?
A Nobel Prize for Kris, now!
Never, I can tell you that right now. The white old men who still pull all the strings like to select young people around them, and people with the right skin colours, so that it looks like everything is very inclusive and diverse and they can still just pull the strings, but I don’t want to see some random young people and some skin colours. I want the real talents! And such a controlling old white sock among the fake writers, isn’t that just a depressing image for the black population as well? It reminds one of those white missionaries in the old days, when the good shepherds also liked to pose in Africa.
No, this is not about real talent and those who do not know how to select for real talent send out a depressing message: we care about your skin colour. Neske, Piet and Babs in the Akademie voor Kunsten because of enormous artistic achievements – why not Piet Gerbrandy between KRS-One and Paris? Do artistic achievements have to be Dutch? And what are those achievements then, without an oeuvre to fall back on?
No, Piet likes to select his competitors. And then it turns out that he doesn’t have any, huup huup barbatruc. The man already announced his retirement last year, but he continues to stort things up until his deathbed, a contamination between steering and distorting.
Jos J. would devote an entire polemic to this contamination.
Well, boomers and toddlers and that’s all there is to it. I myself still only watch BlackBx, a new television-like channel where the more critical voices are presented. It is not perfect and there are rumours that BlackBx is ‘controlled opposition’ – but in the uniformity soup of the mainstream media, it is at least a place where you can occasionally go and see people with a real opinion.
I consider my generation to be lost. I have sent Piet Gerbrandy congratulations as The Best of the Rest. One day, I will demand my LSD blotter back at his door in a loud voice. But in these times when the predator is doing his stinking best to depress you, listen to the real Nobel Prize winner, KRS-One. Because his music is uplifting, as any good literature is uplifting too.
Controlled opposition
No, a textbook example of ‘controlled opposition’ is Kees ‘t Hart, who now really fell through the cracks as ‘Evi Aarens’ by endlessly praising his best friend Arjen Duinker. And although ‘t Hart is right, of course, I unfortunately know him as someone who knows how to be right just a little too selectively. And that means: always in favour of the establishment. Because I have never seen him write about people like Goudeseune or Ton van ‘t Hof (2). Always and only about his own clique. If you talk about ‘controlled opposition’, this is a textbook example. The reason why Mr. ‘t Hart has to play Evi Aarens is that he himself played a role in the suppression of alternatives (1). And that makes the sight of an old school teacher who has to play alternative criticism with a hand puppet at least as sad as the lack of attention for his best friend Arjen Duinker.
Please retire, schoolmaster ‘t Hart.
ONE AND TWO) Because why else would you keep quiet all your life about the real critical voices and the real talents? Yes, even about me, schoolteacher ‘t Hart has been pretending all his life that I do not exist. Goudeseune was suppressed, not a peep from Kees, van der Holst had to go, not a peep…no Kees, quickly behind the geraniums and hopefully never see you again.
The real talents of my generation. Goudeseune had to die without even being allowed to stand on a single large poetry festival, and the same goes for van der Holst, for van ‘t Hof, for yours truly. All of them are under suppression, not in spite of but thanks to people like this sad schoolmaster who in reality does not give a damn about poetry and is only there to reinforce the school system’s sole rule over literature. Alfred Schaffer professor AND chief critic AND advisor AND prizewinner. That’s good cash for Alfred, but who can take this potpourri of self-serving teachers seriously as authorities?
You want literary criticism, Mr ‘t Hart? Well, let’s see it then. Write an extensive piece about why the collected Schaffer is almost infinitely superior to the collected Benders. Because that is the only thing that can possibly justify the distortions we observe in the mainstream media and the festivals. But you’re not going to do that, are you? Is your whoring aid still on, schoolmaster? I haven’t been able to take your protégé Duinker seriously as an advisor since he informed me that Dylan Thomas is not a poet. Crooked eyeballing may be an art form, but retiring with some glory would be the art form I would concentrate on. And you’re actually fifteen years too late for that, hence the buffoonery with a hand puppet.
And another thing, Mr ‘t Hart. It used to be good practice that if you were unmasked using a pseudonym, you would make that known, and the same applies if someone makes a wrong guess. If you don’t do that and just continue with this hand puppet, then it is not a literary game but a rather cheap and demented marketing trick. So I guess we won’t be hearing from you any more – considering that Duinker has always been your only card, you just showed us that you were a very loyal friend. And it’s nice to know that such loyal friends still exist, even if they are worthless critics and, by golly, if Mr Lunchenmaar is behind it all, so we can indeed look forward to all sorts of lousy sonnet wreaths for years to come. But I don’t think so, because this war is already depressing enough, even you must agree.
