The Sea Point Contact...
...is Farrago. Yeah, I know, but I'm not speaking of blog-related matters here. This has become a serious publication, as many of you will have noted. Focusing on the geology of the Cape Peninsula and the sociology of its primitive life forms, it no longer deals with the neo-Nazis now threatening to turn the globe to glass.
By the way, don't miss Robert Fisk meets Sy Hersh. With Chomsky and Pilger, these guys won't be around much longer, so enjoy them while you can. It's over to Mike Whitney, Chris Floyd, and their ilk from now on in to the Apocalypse.
Yes... Storm Gulls, the fifth album released in as many months by yours truly, deals with the timeless, the inexplicable, that which defies soggy codification by lumpen rednecks touting intelligent design... It's a double album, with an interlude, in the Western tradition. In other words, it starts off pleasantly enough, lulling you into a false sense of time and place. It offers a reflective break and it then builds swiftly to a climax that smacks you between the frontal lobes like a chunk of granite dropped from a skyscraper.
We're visiting the Sea Point Contact today, so beware. This is yet another trip back to what the advertising people call 'prehistory'. So what? We'll keep going there as long as I feel like doing so. It's a damned side more fun than getting mugged outside a Long Street club or dropping bombs on Tehran.
The plaque at Saunders Rocks tells us:
The rocks along this shore record an event some 540 million years ago when molten granite magma was injected into the black sedimentary rocks of the Malmesbury Group. Such was the heat of intrusion that these strata were softened, stretched, and dismembered along the contact, forming a complex zone of mixed rock called migmatite. The transition from undisturbed dark rocks on the right, through intimate and complex mixtures of the two rock types to homogenous granite on the left, may be traced over a distance of 150 metres. Fragments (xenoliths) of the dark rocks are enclosed in the granite, which is characterised by large white potassium feldspar crystals set in a finer matrix of glassy quartz, white sodium feldspar, black biotite mica, and green cordierite.But what am I telling you this for? The South African National Museum plaigiarised the plaque's copy a long time ago. Who cares? Not Little, Brown and... ah, to hell with it. Click on...
Okay, you'll have to admit the bird shots are rather good. In fact, my budget Canon works so well and shoots so clearly, I can now afford to adjust the frames surrounding these birds without having to mess with their photos' pixels. I had every intention of shooting storm surf, but there was none. We set out in good weather which soon turned foul, and I took to photographing sea gulls. The sky cleared partially and we made our way from Moulle Point on the one side of Sea Point to Saunders Rocks on the other side. It was after another squall that we decided to investigate the Sea Point Contact, a site visited by Darwin in 1836 when trundling around the world aboard the Beagle.
The album, by the way, is nowhere as dark as these pictures. I had to dump these things somewhere and, well, here seemed about as good a place as any...
Indeed. Why not? And next week, I promise; security fences. Your contact with the fears and phobias of South Africans with something to hide.
Note: My son gave me an invaluable book voucher a couple of weeks ago. I wandered into Exclusive Books in Constantia Village and asked what they had by Noam Chomsky. The girl behind the desk told me they had no books listed for Trompsky or Trompesky (I watched her type this bullshit into the machine—she didn't try 'Noam'; I could see it was too much for her). I spelled the man's name. They had one of his older titles. I asked for Fisk's The Great War for Civilization — after spelling his name. It's on order. Exclusive Books. In Constantia. Remember it. Don't go there if you want something to read.
