I hate being advertised too, lumped into a demographic and assumed to be a certain type of individual, who will want to dress a certain way and drink a certain beer while driving a certain car. From a recent experience at the Gateway shopping mall (and more disturbingly a urinal in the gent’s bathroom) I have come to conclusion that advertising has officially gone too far.

Last Friday evening I made the dreadful mistake of braving Gateway (The theatre of shopping) to attend a movie at Cinema Noveau. One of the joys of Noveau is, of course, not having to endure the half- hour bombardment of trailers and adverts used to indoctrinate teeny boppers in the more mainstream movie houses. You know the drill—roller skating meerkats and offensive Kentucky fried stereotypes served up by the greasy bucket load. Teenagers at this mall thankfully avoid cinema Noveau like a plague of impending acne. This, you see, is the designated arena of the ‘arty fartsy’ types. Movies that are just like sooooo annoying cause you have to like read the film half the time. Read the rest of this entry »

Mr Armit Ooka (70) owner of the Shiraz cinema stares out solemnly from his box- office booth onto a bustling Victoria Street in Durban’s rundown CBD. A glass widow, with hole cut in the centre is the only thing that separates him from the adjoining pavement– a pavement once cluttered with gorgeous old cinemas now teems with tikka cafes, Chinese factory shops ,informal trading outlets and pirate DVD stores (most of whom are likely to be selling films months before Ooka has had the opportunity to screen them in his venue). Occasionally harried pedestrians stop to peruse film posters on display, but seldom long enough to ever purchase the fifteen rand entrance ticket. Read the rest of this entry »

Sixty –three old Frank Graham, might easily strike you as the type of eccentric grandpa who never quite got round to pawning off his childhood train set; he would however far rather you refer to him as an ardent mini -railway hobbyist. This is, after all, a pastime best left to grown men (with ample pocket money) most of whom, in order to sate their insatiable locomotive lusts ,are prepared to pay up to R8000 per mini steam engine. Read the rest of this entry »

To the unseasoned classical concert attendee—such as myself—spectating a Symphony concert for the first time can be a pretty intimidating experience. At a Thursday evening concert’ held at the Durban City Hall in February (part of the Kwa-Zulu Natal Philharmonic Orchestra’s (KZNPO) World Symphony Summer Series) I was to learn the hard way—arriving in the somewhat inappropriate attire of slops, jeans and a t-shirt and then proceeding to burst into applause during the performance at the most inopportune moments (after and never between the movements-a disapproving audience member is quick to inform me.) Read the rest of this entry »

Its not easy finding the road that leads into the fabled Colombian town of Aracataca–that is despite its reputation as s Nobel Prize winning author Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s birth-place as well as the same settlement that was to inspire and shape his literary plantation town of Macondo.

I was on the verge of giving up, of supposing that the town –if it had in fact existed at all –had suffered the same fate as its literary counterpart ; those familiar with Garcia Marquez’s masterpiece ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ will recall that Macondo is obliterated in the novel’s catastrophic and concluding windstorm. Read the rest of this entry »

On my drive along the N2 up the North Coast to meet acoustic maestro Guy Buttery, I pop his album ‘Songs from the Cane Fields’ into my CD player. It’s a sound that instantly connects me to the unraveling KZN landscapes. Compositions that reflect none of the clamor evident in the long line of property development that ruins the Indian Ocean side view of my widow, but rather let rip when soaring through those wide open Kwa- Zulu Natal expanses. Spaces where Buttery’s finely plucked strings may conspire with the valley’s that roll across my review mirror while transforming lowly crows into inspired notes along fleeting telephone lines.  Read the rest of this entry »

Under the banner ‘Stone the Crows’ (named after his English grandmother’s frequent use of the expression.) Colwyn Thomas’s illustrative art has set about ensnaring the collective awe -and perhaps more pertinently sales- of both the general public and the discerning art set. With his work being snapped up as far a field as Berlin, Colwyn has become the illustrator to own before one has to plunder their life savings in order to afford the privilege. Neil Coppen treads where imperfect angels fear to. Read the rest of this entry »

When dealing with South American tour Agencies, it is near impossible to separate misleading myth from verifiable fact. With most setting out to entice tourists and their Guinness book of record checklists, with more often then not, bogus and euphemistic claims. Needless to say in each country I visited I was to receive contradictory claims to possessing the world’s highest, longest, deepest, tallest, shortest, coldest, hottest, oldest, most spectacular- natural wonder. Read the rest of this entry »

On my recent three month travels in South America, I picked up a book
by Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing titled ‘The Prisons We Choose to
Live Inside’. In one of its chapters Lessing writes…..

‘We are all of us, to some degree or another brainwashed by the
society we live in. We are able to see his when we travel to another
country, and are able to catch a glimpse of our own country with
foreign eyes. There is nothing much we can do about this except
remember that it is so. Every one of us is part of the great
comforting illusions, and part illusions, which every society uses to
keep up its confidence in itself. These are hard to examine, and the
best we can hope for is that a kindly friend from another culture will
enable us to look at our culture with dispassionate eyes.’ Read the rest of this entry »

Far from journeying to the Colombian city of Cartagena De Indias ,seeking a Caribbean utopia (of which there are many) to sun myself upon, I had come in search of the world ,I had previously inhabited through the literature of Nobel Prize winning author Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Gabo (as he is affectionately known in his homeland) in case you were wondering, is Colombia’s most celebrated writer and export beyond its more inglorious industries of cocaine, emeralds and er… Shakira.Choosing to ignore the alarmist Embassy warning’s, the country shifty international rep as the kidnapping capital of the world (clinging to the intrepid: I’m from South Africa, nothing scares me motto) I had set off. My prior research having confirmed that under the leadership of President Alvaro Uribe, the nation’s priorities had turned from terrorism to tourism while travel brochures had all adopted consoling catch phrases like: The only RISK you’ll encounter in Colombia -is never wanting to leave. Read the rest of this entry »