don’t think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if its good or bad whether they love or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more.
– Andy Warhol
Writer, Scribbler and Prompt Alchemist
Once the home to hundreds of German miners desperately seeking their fortune in the Namibian desert. 100 years later it is now a eerie ghost town slowly being reclaimed by the sand.
The mining company De Beers set up a museum in 1980 to preserve some of the history of Kolmanskop.
Kolmanskop was founded in the early 1900s when diamonds were discovered just sitting on the sand – Railway worker Zacharias Lewala found the gem in 1908 as he dug away from the railway line. He showed it to his boss August Stauch, who got the stone tested and had it confirmed as a diamond. The news sparked a diamond rush on the area and within a few years hundreds of Germans had set up home in the Namib Desert.
Kolmanskop grew and soon resembled a German town. Residents built a hospital, ballroom, power station, school, skittle alley, theatre and sports hall and an ice factory.
The town even boasted the first X-ray station in the southern hemisphere as well as Africa’s first tram.
By the 1920s, 300 German adults, 40 children and 800 native Owambo contract workers lived in Kolmanskop.
The Namibia tourist board said: ‘In spite of, or probably because of, the isolation and bleakness of the surrounding desert, Kolmanskop developed into a lively little haven of German culture, offering entertainment and recreation to suit the requirements of the affluent colonialists.’
However when the price of diamonds began to drop after World War One the town began to deteriorate, particularly after richer diamonds were found further south and it was abandoned in 1954.
The ghost town has been used in many South African television series and films and was also the setting for the 2000 film The King Is Alive.
More here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmanskop
http://www.lovethesepics.com/2011/03/devoured-by-the-desert-creepy-kolmanskop-ghost-town-21-pics/
what eyes been working on lately . . . see how many old skool skate logos you can spot
I’ve missed you . . .
If I could say sorry I would but all I can do is lie here and wish we’d never met. Do you remember when we first saw each other, you were so young and so full of energy it scared all of us. You picked me out of hundreds. I couldn’t believe it, I don’t know if it was the way I looked or the way I felt but you spent a long time deciding. I knew we were made for each other and as soon as we were alone you told me as much and I tried to tell you.
You hurt me a lot in that first year, so much so I never really got over it, but it was still fun. The things you made me do were an eye opener for both of us. We went at it for 5 days solid once, you even started to bleed but you wouldn’t stop.
Eventually you got comfortable with me being around 24/7, we did everything together, breakfast, school, lunch, detention and even the toilet. You drew pictures on me and in a way I did the same to you. I remember when I hit you back for trying to kick me away, you lay there for two hours screaming at me, I’m so sorry, I never meant to hurt you.
There were better times, much better times, when it was just you and me, doing what we wanted, we were free. We travelled all over the place, you took me to see my friends in city’s far away, you took me somewhere new every weekend.
I’ll never forget those days.
I’m sorry you had to grow up, sorry you had to get a job, sorry you found that girl, sorry you wear those funny boots. I’m sorry I got old but you put me through so much in those early days.
So, here we are, you going to work for the seventh day in a row, me lying here gathering dust.
I see the way you look at me.
I know what you want to do.
Go on, touch me.
Feel my smooth belly.
Touch my rough back.
Taste the cold still and spin my wheels.
I am your skateboard and I’ve missed you x
Great video capturing the awkward moment Sean Parker tries to tell David Choe he isn’t into the mural he has just painted in their offices.