Evert is a writer-performer. He grew up in apartheid South Africa and was raised to be an elite Afrikaner fascist. However, something went terribly wrong in his choice of teenage reading material, and between Darwin, Freud and Bertrand Russell, he ended up rejecting his nation, his religion and his family. When a riot of white cops vs. black protesters sent a teargas canister rolling into the lobby of an ad agency heʼd just started, he thought about emigrating. Then the apartheid regime banned his first play A Very Butch Libido, and he took off for the freedom of America. He continues writing plays, novels, poetry and songs, and attended the OʼNeill Playwrights Conference in 1993 with a play about torture. In advertising, his work on the Absolut Vodka campaign rocketed the brand from nowhere to the #1 import in four years; it's now the longest-running campaign in advertising history. He performed his one-man show How to Cook a Man on three continents. His rock group, the Dingbots, created the rock opera Kidd Radar, available on iTunes and CDBaby.com; their video The Obama Karma Song is on YouTube. A semi-legend on the 1990s slam poet scene, he won the 1997 National Poetry Slam, and starred in the PBS documentary Slammin'. His poetry is anthologized in The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry and Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, and collected in Suck My Poem from Lulu.com. He's working on his first musical, Cinderella and the Empire of Chocolate. Email: evertcilliers [at] yahoo.com
by Evert Cilliers aka Adam Ash If you're interested in the future, or if you're a sci-fi freak, or a geek, or a lover of science, or a transhumanist, or a singularity nut, or a fan of Bladerunner or 2001: A Space Odyssey, or all of these (like me), this book is for you. Author…
By Evert Cilliers aka Adam Ash When two snails want to get it on, they caress each other with those stalks sticking out of their heads. Then, they act. Each snail drives, deep into the other, an inch-long dart. If a dart pierces a lung, brain, heart – death. Fatal foreplay. But let’s assume they…
By Evert Cilliers aka Adam Ash 1. MEN RAPE FROM LUST NOT RAGE Let me start with a facetious declaration: the only reason I'm not a potential rapist is that I'm 5' 5″ and weigh a 125 pounds. Unless I go on a two-year weight-training regimen, most women would be able to fight me off…
Let’s face it, my fellow Americans: the banality of GOP language has debased all political, cultural and religious discourse in the land, and though it can soar in a speech by Obama — at his best, he can fling banalities pretty close to a semblance of poetic truth — it more commonly paddles no higher than the remains of a dead frog rotting at the bottom of a cesspool choked by strontium-90-enriched pond scum.
For Obama to put CEO Immelt of GE in charge of an American jobs commission is a little like God putting Satan in charge of heaven. But then God doesn’t need Satan’s money to keep getting himself elected God.
by Evert Cilliers aka Adam Ash Whenever I pay taxes, I think of the fact that GE and Exxon paid no taxes in 2009, that Goldman Sachs pays under 2% taxes, and that billionaire hedge fund managers pay a tax rate of 15%. As Warren Buffett says, his secretary pays taxes at a higher rate…
by Evert Cilliers aka Adam Ash If you really want to know what's been happening in Egypt, you have to know what folks there have been feeling for decades, and all the new feelings rippling through them now. Take a basic emotion: fear. Before a revolution can even get started, it has to face down…
by Evert Cilliers aka Adam Ash So some crazy young man (they're always men) shoots a Congresswoman pointblank through the head and sprays thirty more bullets from a gun clip he bought at Walmart, killing a 9-year-old girl and five others in Arizona, “the mecca for prejudice and bigotry” according to the sheriff of Tucson…
by Evert Cilliers aka Adam Ash I usually write about politics here on 3QD, which often means trying to deal with my disappointment in America and the Disappointment-in-Chief Obama. But what with it being Christmas and all, I thought I should take this occasion to tell you a bedtime story for grownups. Here it is.…
by Evert Cilliers aka Adam Ash Just when you think Obama can't be more disappointing, he lets you down again. Yes, he can. The midterm elections have come and gone as blip-quick as the adult mayfly — which gets to live, fly, mate and die in 24 hours (there's some consolation: the males fly around…
by Evert Cilliers aka Adam Ash My name is Obama. But call me Icarus. I soared on the wings of an angel. I was the biggest star the planet had ever seen, without having to go near a guitar. I was dancing on the moon, when suddenly, the moon gathered its bowels and dropped me…
by Evert Cilliers aka Adam Ash There is a certain kind of art made here in America for a lofty but banal purpose: to enliven the contemporary educated mind. You know: the mind of you and me, dear 3QD reader — the NPR listener, the New Yorker reader, the English major, the filmgoer who laps…
by Evert Cilliers (aka Adam Ash) and Wallace Stevens In 1917, Wallace Stevens, to my mind the best American poet of the 20th century (sorry, Sylvia Plath fans), published one of his most famous poems, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” What with Barack Obama being our first black President, and also a leader…
by Evert Cilliers (aka Adam Ash) Five weeks ago I said to my brilliant girlfriend: “I'd like to see my father before he dies.” She said: “Congratulations.” She'd been asking me on and off for two years whether I'd like to go and visit him where he lives in Cape Town, South Africa, and my…
by Evert Cilliers (aka Adam Ash) Today there are three forms of terrorism threatening the world: political, financial and environmental terrorism. These three forms of terrorism are responsible for the destruction of human lives, livelihoods, property and the environment to a degree that rivals the ravages of war. All three forms are executed by global,…
by Evert Cilliers (aka Adam Ash) Let's start with a smattering of metaphors. The world needs the US like a fish needs a bicycle. Or rather: like a virgin needs a rapist. There was a time, a century ago, when Turkey was known as the sick man of Europe. Today America might be called the…
By Evert Cilliers (aka Adam Ash) Tea Partiers: angry independents? extreme conservatives? regular Republicans? racist crackers? none of the above? Before I get down to telling you who and what the Tea Party movement is — because nobody seems to know, least of all the people IN the movement — allow me to lay a…
By Evert Cilliers (aka Adam Ash) Just because Martin Luther King and Jesse Jackson were trail-blazing agents of progressive passion who could stir red blood with a goodly speech, people took one look at Barack Obama and thought: here comes another one. Turns out he's a non-ideological pragmatist, and now progressives are disappointed. Madly, mightily,…
by Evert Cilliers (aka Adam Ash) The main thing you need to grok about the 37th richest person in America is that his media properties are as pervasive as global warming. The same with his worldview. Rupert Murdoch is a Godzilla-sized propaganda shunt in the shape of a dildo jammed up the interior of humanity,…
by Evert Cilliers (aka Adam Ash) America, Britain, France, Germany, China, Japan and Israel all have one thing in common: they're the only countries on earth who think they're better than anyone else. America thinks its Constitution and economy and military make it better than anyone else. Britain thinks its Shakespeare and erstwhile empire and…