It’s not often that I’m moved to gush. Oh, alright, I’ll be honest. I am frequently moved to gush when it comes to music I love. It’s just that too often I couldn’t be arsed to actually do it.
This time round I am so blown away by the Parlotones’ new CD I have to have my say.
If this didn’t betray a deep and disturbing level of homophobia and a major invasion of privacy, it would be funny.
Courtesy of the Sunday Pepper – a Ugandan newspaper.
This morning I listened to Aden Thomas interviewing Ian Neilson, the Deputy Mayor of Cape Town, on Cape Talk. The interview was about what Eyewitness News is calling the IRT costing “bungle”. The use of the word bungle confuses me. Mixing up your medications and taking the pink pills instead of the yellow ones is a bungle. Wearing one white sock and one black one is a bungle. Spending R4.1 billion instead of R1.3 billion? That’s not a bungle. That’s a screwup of gargantuan proportions. It’s very, very big.
(If you’re reading this in Facebook you may need to come along to http://tonylankester.com/2009/10/music-mash-1/ to do this….or click on “View Original Post” at the bottom of the Note)
A while back I created this audio mashup containing tiny clips from ten songs for a friend’s birthday quiz…Give it a listen and see how many songs you can identify in the mix. Read more…
I don’t know what made me think of Hagen Engler recently, but through a near-random series of mouseclicks I ended up on his website/blog. Actually, that would have been what made me think of him – I was on his website. Hagen is Editor of FHM Magazine and one of the more underrated writers in South Africa.
I remember playing rugby with Hagen. It was the Under-15D team or something equally ignominious or, indeed, fitting. For some reason I remember him having longer shorts than anyone else. If, indeed, shorts can be longer without stopping being shorts and becoming longers. He may have played in the backline somewhere (scrumhalf?) while I sweated up front. We tended to lose, mostly, but that didn’t stop us trying. What stopped us trying was the fact that none of us gave a shit.
Anyway…as I was saying. I came across his website and this gem of a column – written in 1998 called “10 Reasons why Cape Town can fuck off”. At the time he wrote it (when he was a surfing mag editor and I was a radio presenter) I interviewed him about the piece. Given its title it was something of a struggle to get through a 10-minute conversation on live radio without any profanity, but we managed it somehow. I didn’t mention the rugby team or the longers, which probably helped.
Reading it today, 9 years later, as someone who has lived in Cape Town for six years and is about to move to Grahamstown (which is as close to PE as you can get without fear of being glassed on a Friday night for checking out someone’s stukkie skeef) it resonates more than ever.
I particularly like the line: “Eleven degrees? That’s a geometry angle, not a fuckin’ ocean temperature” and it’s probably the only recorded piece of English writing to contain the word “ghoef” (I didn’t even know that’s how you spell it).
If you don’t like the F-word, don’t read it. If you want to have a laugh, click here now.
Jayne and I went to the theatre the other day. For the young among you, theatre is like YouTube but with curtains, an interval and winegums. And no buffering.
The Kalk Bay Theatre is one of those endearing performance spaces that restore my faith in live theatre. No-one is out to make a quick buck, there is no hint of a reality TV show audition, just a sense that you’re all there for the same thing. And that thing is a great evening out.
Here are five reasons you should go there:
When a stranger leans over to me and says “Won’t you keep an eye on my bag/seat/table please…I just need to have a quick smoke/go to the loo/feed my meter” an irrational anger, induced by an icy fear floods my system. Is it just me?
Don’t misunderstand – I have no problem with random acts of kindness. I’m also of reasonably strong limb and can happily fend off marauding teens or hobbling tannies. I have no qualms about that. But I, like most, have a constantly shifting field of personal space that I awkwardly monitor, adjust, compensate for and guard. When a hefty gentleman’s elbow betrays imperial ambitions on my armrest on an aeroplane, for example, I am perfectly able to respond with a well placed elbow jab of my own. But it is an ongoing inner conflict that I don’t particularly enjoy, exacerbated by a (mostly) masked social awkwardness. So being asked by a stranger to exercise any sort of authority over their personal space is, frankly, embarrassing and terrifying. Or terrifying because it is potentially embarrassing.
Came across this video on YouTube – don’t know why it is titled “Banned Advert” because the description says it wasn’t. It’s very powerful…well done SABC 1 (ever think you’d hear me say that???)
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