Imagine a South African suburb without electricity- it’s easy if you try. Now imagine it without water. No fuel to sate the now stagnant Land Cruisers and stand-by generators. A not so distant future, where escalating inflation and galloping food costs will mean only Cabinet ministers can ever afford to stop off at Woolies.Imagine two beleaguered couples in this affluent suburb, the Dlaminis and the Goldbergs say, living on opposite sides of the formerly electrified picket fence. Shacked up, waiting in their three-storey mansions, for their numbers to be called on the overcrowded emigration list for Aus!
Pity Madame Dlamini, who in the absence of her microwave and electric grill, has resorted to cooking on her show- piece fireplace in the dining room, its synthetic rock embers replaced by wood salvaged from last season’s Weatherly’s lounge suite. Certainly, the wood- smoke redolence of a Transkei hut would take a little getting used to, as would doing her daily dishes and laundry in the now fizzless Jacuzzi.Read the rest of this entry »
On a hospital slab. Insides out, body parts in plastic bags, cotton wool taped over eyes. The anaesthetist reaches over and touches a braid of his dying patient’s hair.
Admiring the simple tapestry, he meditates on the day when devoted fingers (whose?) combed and collected each thread of fine hair. Each tightly woven braid the product of what? A mother’s love? Aunt’s persistence? Daughter’s reluctance? Hairdressers indifference?
He will never know though he likes to imagine she laughed at least once during the sitting. Laughter in between shrieks of hair wrenched at the root, laughter delirious on some stoep out in the August sunshine.
As he detaches his machine and watches her body wheeled unceremoniously from the theatre, he focuses again on this head of knitted hair. Zigzagging contours rising from the neckline.
Each braid: three rapids, tributaries tumbling and tied inseparably into one. Unity, he thinks, unity when everything else has unravelled. Unity in a body come so irrevocably undone.
Last Thursday I happened upon an episode of Top Billing on SABC 3. What ensued over the next hour was something, that as much as I try, I will never be able to forget.Excuse me then if you are one of the brides who have in past flashed your million-rand wedding ring at the camera (while the impoverished masses watch on) or if you happen to be one of the interior decorators or house owners responsible for the over the top atrocities that weekly assault our disbelieving eye- balls.
You need only posses a reasonable sliver of intellect to see that Top Billing (henceforth and aptly abbreviated in this column as T.B) is full of utterly useless information. One minute seducing you with a calorie infested cooking master-class and the next showing you how to burn it all off in time for the summer. In fact here is a show that aims to teach you a hundred and one ways how to guiltlessly indulge yourself to death in the new South Africa.
Of course if scrap booking, paper mache or mosaic are how you choose to idle your precious minutes away then you will find this essential viewing or if you are one of those house bound mommies who spend fortunes on a themed children’s party for a two year old– who let’s face it– will have absolutely no recollection of the costly celebration in a day’s time. Read the rest of this entry »
It’s vaguely terrifying speaking the words of a Pulitzer winning playwright as she sits inches away from you in an opening night auditorium. Almost impossible to inhabit any semblance of a character when you find yourself imagining her ears to be pricked by your mis-delivery or mis-interpretation of her precious prize- winning words.
Margret Edson, celebrated American Playwright of Wit, was recently flown out by the American Embassy to attend the opening night of Kickstart’s version of the production, directed by Steven Stead and featuring Clare Mortimer in the role of Professor Vivian Bearing.Read the rest of this entry »
I am at a loss trying to write about Steve McQueen’s debut Camera d’Or winning film Hunger –and much has already been written on it. In a nutshell the filmfollows the death of an IRA hunger striker named Bobby Sands in Belfast’s claustrophobic maze prison in 1981.
McQueen, a visual artist, has a patient and poetic eye, an intuitive sense of how images work alongside and against one another. Images with an accumulative cinematic clout that left me gasping. It was about twenty moments into the film that I had to press pause on the DVD and step outside to breathe and then sob. Such emotion, while incited by the narrative events (and harrowing they are) was mixed with elation at the sheer artistry of it all.
A cat’s eyes feral and luminous crowns this carnival of cut-outs. A badly drawn man, erratic in ink and clutching a baton stands amidst swathes of suited businessmen.
Hands make wings, ears and antlers, eyes make mouths, agape and colgate toothy.
Mutilated fashion models, moisturised men with designer stubble wince through wrinkled cynical eyes. A Korean film actress with diaphanous (glass and a half) skin and purple angel wings is rendered speechless by pair of ill fitting lips. Read the rest of this entry »
