On Saturday April 6 the Joburg leg of the Holi One We Are One festival took place at Emmarentia Dam where people congregated to throw colour into the air and at each other to celebrate the fact that “we are all one”. There were no VIP tickets sold but one did have to purchase bags […]
Lifestyle
Posted inLifestyle
Dear atheist, stop talking about Jesus
If you want Jesus to go away you have to stop talking about him, and it’s perfectly okay in modern society to not believe in God, but you have to stop telling the world about it at every opportunity, or you merely affirm its existence. Let me explain: I have been fortunate to spend this […]
Posted inLifestyle, Media
The Harlem Shake and Western illusion of freedom
Co-authored with Arsalan Khan When five teenagers in Queensland, Australia, uploaded a video of themselves dancing to a short excerpt of Baauer’s song Harlem Shake it immediately went viral, garnering some 400 million views and spawning well over 100 000 copycat versions. Critiques of the fad thus far have pointed out that it looks nothing at all […]
Posted inLifestyle
Back to Australia
I’m typing this as I sit in the airport. I’ve been bawling ever since I said goodbye to my parents at the Gautrain and the waterworks have been going like a burst mains on and off ever since. Some of the strangers passing me might have noticed the tears streaming down my face and assumed […]
Posted inBusiness, Lifestyle
An alternative to the typical shopping mall
Not all places where shopping is or may be done, necessarily have to be of the reductive, spatially homogeneous, dehumanising type, exemplified by the standard shopping mall. An example of a shopping space design that is heterogeneously structured, into which ”other” spaces ”flow”, or with which it intersects, is furnished by Erik Grobler, a final-year […]
Posted inLifestyle
The day I became a woman
I woke up in the morning feeling unsure of myself. It was as if the world had been watching and judging me as I slept. I got up and hurried to look in the mirror. Something was not right. My hair was an affliction, my eyes were not bright and my smile did not radiate. […]
Posted inBusiness, General, Lifestyle, Media
The shopping mall as consumer architecture
Referring to the moment, in Plato’s Symposium, where the lover supposedly beholds a completely disembodied, atemporal “beauty”, in the process conforming to the character of this abstraction, Kaja Silverman says (World Spectators, 2000: 10): “This deindividuation of the look represents a crucial feature of the process through which Socrates negates phenomenal forms. This is because […]
Posted inLifestyle, News/Politics
Beyond symbols, we need substance
“The unexamined life is not worth living” Plato says in line 38a of The Apology. The thoughts of an ancient Greek philosopher personally grappling with self-examination and intellectual exploration. But how do we examine ourselves today? What happens when you critically interrogate yourself? What are the consequences when you and I begin to call in […]
Posted inLifestyle, News/Politics
White South Africans are victims too
On March 17 1992 the National Party, under former president FW de Klerk’s leadership, asked white South Africans a difficult question in the form of a referendum. The question was: “Do you support the continuation of the reform process which the state president began on February 2 1990 and which is aimed at a new […]
Posted inLifestyle
We have no cultural icons
Am I the only guy who is fed up with the crisis of creative leadership and lack of innovation in the artistic sector? Where the hell is our outrage at the lack of significant national talent that begins to help us redefine the soul of this nation? We should be throwing stones at the glass […]
Posted inGeneral, Lifestyle, News/Politics
Renaming things: Symbolic or shambolic?
When it comes to renaming things, government suddenly gets goal-oriented. In fact, I’m surprised we’re allowed to choose our own names and aren’t given a pre-approved list of politically correct suggestions. But what’s in a name? A lot, if we go through three recent events. The first involves one Supra Mahumapelo, the ANC’s North West […]
Posted inGeneral, Lifestyle
Meditations in a cemetery — how little we seem to matter in the end
Wolf Ehrlich and I eyeball each other all day. The corridor wall outside our offices is lined with the portraits of former presidents of the SA Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBD), and Ehrlich’s is directly opposite where I sit. He was quite a big deal in his day. Apart from heading up the SAJBD, he […]