|
 Hagen Engler
is
a word mechanic. A grease monkey in the workshop of verbal
wizardry. A mechanic with a flair for occasional artistry, just
like his dad. He is also on occasions a writer, photographer,
editor, designer, spoken-word artist, vocalist, musician and public
speaker.
His work has appeared in most mainstream South African magazines,
mysterious underground 'zines and a couple of short-story and
popular-culture anthologies. Regular pseudonyms are Haai van der
Schyff and Inspector Ras.
Hagen has published five books so far.
Life's a
Beach, Water Features and
Magnum Chic are collections of columns
and weird-ass musings on modern life that grew out of a devotion to the
surfing subculture. Greener Grass and the latest book, Buttons
For Gaia are novels, set in modern South Africa, and among the
sharpest bits of new fiction in SA today, if he does say so himself.
He has recorded three albums with a
bunch of satirical, lyrical, hip-hop rock 'n' roll soldiers called the
Jedi Rollers.
Check out the archive for a taste of
the wicked humour that keeps Mr Engler from tipping into insanity and
painting his flat blue, with orange bits where the light switches go.
Be nice and support independent, punk
publishing! Buy a copy of Buttons For Gaia.
Here's what it's about...
 As
a chaperone in the Cape Town movie industry, Wax Wilson can organise
anything. But when the pagan high priestess he's fallen for is
abducted from a wedding at the Llandudno Lifesaving Club, things hit a
wobbly. Then the German film crew he's looking after demands
mandrax and a part-time porn queen starts making googly eyes at him.
Pretty soon he's consorting with gangsters, getting stabbed one-time in
the shoulder, and being kidnapped by a satanic sex cult. Next
thing seven people are dead, and it looks like Wax killed them. As
things get more and more hectic, Wax finds himself on a mission of dark
vengeance in magical mysterious Berlin...
It’s on!
We have shot the short of the Greener Grass movie! I went to
Cape Town and watched the shoot under Zaheer Byat’s suave
direction. The idea is to shoot the short, edit it into a sweet 12-odd
minutes, then present it at film festivals and potential investors until
someone stumps up a couple of million dollars for us to shoot the
full-length movie.
The short film stars Rob van Vuuren as Dennis, Louw Venter as Steve,
Catriona Andrew as Layla, Albert Maritz as Venter and Fabian Lojede as
Benjie. It’s super awesome and you can check a whole bunch of
stills
from the shoot here.
Movie update!
My mate and partner in moviemaking
magicalness has been on double honeymoon. Respect to the boy Zaheer! Now
he’s back, we will resume the process of refining the already well fine
script and raising the million required to make the flick. The big
screen version of cult subculture novel Greener Grass WILL
emerge.
My MYSPACE space
Okay, I have reached 2007. The new
myspace space is extant and perusable at
http://www.myspace.com/hagenshouse. I
will also be posting my weekly Weekend Post columns as blogs at
http://blog.myspace.com/hagenshouse.
For a sample of one of those, check “A prophecy that took a while to
come through” in the archive.
|
 New
short story
The Path Of The Seven Revolutions is my latest short story. It
was commissioned for a forthcoming anthology that addresses the question
of identity in South Africa. It was also smartly rejected by the editors
once they had a look at it! Ha! A bit too edgy for their blood, perhaps!
Now it lives on in the pages of Hagenshouse. Click here to check it out
in the short story section...
Cyber book of fiction!
I’ve got a new collection of short
stories out! It’s called Planetary Vehicles and it’s a web-only prose
journey set on Johannesburg. Where Greener Grass was set in Port
Elizabeth and Buttons For Gaia in Cape Town and Berlin, this is a series
of interwoven vignettes set in Jozi, where I’ve lived for the past six
years. Cunning readers will recognise them from a set of columns in
Weekend Post. Here they’ve been imbued with hip new headlines, given a
spit, a polish and a few extra swearwords and sent back out into the
world in collected form.
Read
Planetary Vehicles
You can read them in any order, but if
you insist on starting at the beginning, that would be “Rock songs of
love, guilt and healing” at the top of the January archive list.
Visit me on Facebook here and tell me what you think.
Order it here for R120
email
bread@polka.co.za
What's Buttons For Gaia all
about?
Perhaps this will help.
Read an in-depth interview with me
about the latest novel here
Read an interview I did with The Chiz about
Buttons For Gaia at
www.thechiz.co.za.
After years of slaving over a succession
of malfunctioning laptops, The new novel is complete!
Once again it is published by Pocket
Assegaai Publications, which brought out the four previous books.
Buttons For Gaia is the name of the new effort, and it is a tragi-comic
tale of good versus evil. It is subtitled, "On the use of evil means to
avenge the rape of goodness".
Like the last novel, Greener Grass, this
one dwells on polarity, opposites, schizophrenia, love-vs-hate and the
quest for identity. It also suggests that evil can teach us how to be
good, how no one is completely good or evil and that right and wrong can
be a matter of perspective.
Certain passages will be harrowing to
readers familiar with my columns for the Weekend Post. For the record,
this novel bears no relation to that work.
It is not a collection of columns, it is a
novel about the internal And external battle between good and evil. It's
full of sex, swearing, evilness, comedy, love and redemption.
The action starts in Cape Town and moves
to Mozambique, Johannesburg and Berlin, where it reaches a terrifying
climax on the night of the Love Parade.
Buttons For Gaia is available now for
R120, postage included. So support a gangsta punk self-publisher, why
don't you! Buy a book on the cutting edge. |
