As someone who, in the grand old liberal tradition (I’m not sure if there is anything grand or old in the liberal tradition, but, if I had to choose a tradition, that’s probably the one I’d chose in spite of it being utterly impractical and unfashionable) generally considers the rights of the individual as more […]
Lifestyle
Posted inGeneral, Lifestyle
I am not my hair
By Phumzile Twala I hate being called names. I grew up in Soweto, where people come up with interesting and new terms just about as often as taxi drivers cut off other motorists on the road every day. I’ve been called all sorts of names over the years. But none have baffled me as much […]
Posted inGeneral, Lifestyle
Who do you think you are?
Who do you think you are? You who drive in the emergency lane, you who turn right from the far left, you who crawl at 60km/h in the fast lane. Who do you think you are? You who speed through orange and red, you who ignore solid white lines, you who stop anywhere you like. […]
Posted inGeneral, Lifestyle, Media, News/Politics
Beyoncé, ‘Girls’: The new prophets of self-obsession
I don’t like Lena Dunham, but I have my reasons. Dunham is the writer and creator of Girls, one of those “edgy”, sometimes-women-are-naked shows on HBO. Girls follows the lives of four young (and almost permanently and perhaps proudly unemployed) New Yorkers as they navigate the melodrama of their loveless love lives and self-induced trauma. […]
Posted inLifestyle
A choreographed dance through time
“To everything turn, turn, turn; there is a season.” You may be familiar with this verse, adapted from Ecclesiastes for song by the musician Peter Seeger in the late 1950s and later sung by The Byrds in 1965. An excerpt from the original: “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every […]
Posted inGeneral, Lifestyle
Old and unwanted
My home and I have a lot in common. We’re both old and unwanted. Although I will admit that my home is a lot more glamorous than me. And a lot older. Looking for a job and putting your house on the market at the same time can be very testing these days. Especially in […]
Posted inEnvironment, General, Lifestyle
Commissioner Street: An experience of interwoven lives
It’s hard to describe some cities. Perhaps we try to give it an identity based on how it is commonly experienced. But Joburg is a very, very fragmented place – its parts just do not seem to sum up into any kind of cohesive whole. Most cities at least have a river that helps to […]
Posted inLifestyle, News/Politics
Brett Bailey’s human zoo and discourse bunfight
Brett Bailey, an award-winning South African theatre director and artist, thought it would be a brilliant idea to recreate a painful period of colonial history by reconstructing what turns out to be a human zoo as a traveling art installation. In his mind this was going to be a smart aesthetic reminder to the world […]
Posted inHealth, Lifestyle
Tanaquil Le Clercq and the possibility of resurrection
“I’m not a dancer anymore, who am I?” – Jacques d’Amboise When prima ballerina Tanaquil Le Clercq (1929-2000) played the part of a stricken polio victim in Resurgence (1944) when she was fifteen, little did she know that she was rehearsing her own sad fate. The biographical documentary Afternoon of a Faun (2013) tells the […]
Posted inEquality, Lifestyle, Media
Feminism isn’t for everybody, but it could be
This morning I read Danielle Bowler’s commentary on the good versus bad feminist debate in her column “We are all bad feminists, and that’s okay”. While I’m all for a nuanced and reflexive critique on feminisms and their limitations in order to better develop and strengthen the movement, I found myself puzzled by what read […]
Posted inEnvironment, Lifestyle
‘Maleficent’: A sea-change in popular culture
Maleficent (Disney 2014; directed by Robert Stromberg) is a magnificent film, and it almost seems more than fortuitous that the eponymous, powerful faerie is not called Malevolent, but bears a name that rhymes with “magnificent”. Judging by this recent re-imagining of the fairy tale, Sleeping Beauty, which was rendered in its classic Disney animated movie […]
Posted inGeneral, Lifestyle, Tech
Congratulations ice bucket people, we’ve raised $90m for animal testing!
Yaaaaay, ice bucket challenge! I’m totes throwing ice cold water over myself right now to raise awareness for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a disease of the nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord that control voluntary muscle movement. I choose you, Pikachu, as the next one to do it! Yaaaay! And so the craze […]