Editorial: Summer Lovin’

Editorial: Summer Lovin’

 

So, the month of love and Hallmark cards is done, and I can creep out of my single girl’s shameful closet.

 

I got dumped for Valentine’s day.

 

Don’t feel sorry for me, I had bigger fish to fry; a little dumping was nothing. And he wore terrible shoes anyway, and was far too in need of a mother for my liking. He liked those sandals with the woven straps that only Germans should be permitted to wear. And even then, they shouldn’t be allowed, but they’re German and that means they’re scary and I’m certainly not going to stop them. Apologies to Germans everywhere, but you terrify me.

 

Valentine’s came and went and roses were given and dinners were had and single people ranted about capitalism and the meaningless of it all. I couldn’t leave the house that evening. Flatmate and I wanted to go for dinner - single girls on the town, laughing, drinking wine and watching the couples of the city make eyes at each other and sweat through their romance.

 

But we couldn’t.

We’re tired of looking like a couple.

This isn’t paranoia.

 

A few months ago, while out for breakfast, we requested two glasses of water and when brought a single glass with two straws carefully placed, we realized that we’d been mistaken for lovers. Like two characters at Pop Tate’s in some liberal version of an Archie comic.

 

“Um, it’s just, uh, I thought you were, you know…” stuttered Waitress as I questioned the glass situation. I have never actually seen a person flee before. She fled.

 

It’s happened many times. We ain’t batting for the other team, folks, we’re just finding it hard to hook up.

 

There’s a new trend-word out at the moment. Bromance, referring to the unusually close bond between two heterosexual males.Valentine’s day, across town, two of my most caveman male friends meet for dinner. One is celebrating his birthday, the other arrives with a gift. The two spend dinner making smalltalk and worrying about whether their body language suggests they are engaged in the Valentine’s woo.

 

Oh it’s all so complicated.

I scouted the couples I know. All stayed in on Valentine’s.

Only one pair went out. To Spur at Ushaka. I love Spur, but it’s not exactly the Official Restaurant Of The Subtle Seduction. And as for Ushaka, well, I’m told there was a man wandering through the grounds serenading folks with Dave Brubeck’s ‘Take Five’ on his saxophone. Beautiful. Still, if I’m gonna get Wet and Wild and loony by Cupid’s bow, I’d rather it not be on the supertubes, you know?

 

I had a boyfriend once (it ended badly, surprise) who was perfectly adequate in the romance department. He took his cue and dished up the flattery and smoochy bric-a-brac when necessary. But on Valentine’s day we were not allowed to communicate. Not even a flirty SMS. Nothing. He said it was too much pressure. Something about commitment, something, something, fear, something, change of subject, something, the Blue Bulls are bastards, pass me the remote, something, something.

 

Truth is, I don’t want to hate this stuff. I don’t want to use Bridget Jones logic and curse the smug marrieds and phone up my single friends and drink until I’m slurring about my freedom.

 

In Class One, I put a Valentine’s card in my crush’s chairbag. He was good at colouring inside the lines and I thought he was dreamy. He cried and told on and the teacher made me eat my lunch alone at break. Things haven’t really changed that much.

 

Still, we won’t complain.

Happy month of March everyone. Ding dong cupid is dead.

Highly Evolved

 

 

Just me?

Or are kids these days older than they should be? Smarter? With sharper wit? Streetsmarts? Third-eyed and forked-tongued? It used to be that one’s twenties were the time for exploration and examination and revelations of self. Now, now we are breeding mini rocket scientists; pint-sized Plato’s discussing Sid Vicious and Sandra Dee as they are breastfed skinny decaf cappies and seek identity in Woody Allen’s prose. Claiming adult spaces. Baby beatniks toddling toward some new form of angst, only it isn’t that at all because what was maudlin has become something else ahead of us, us left trailing in the dust where conviction met irony met cyberspeak, what? Something is going on. I heard Sean Penn say in a film once, that the world is run by a computer and seven women. It doesn’t matter what film it was; it was silly and solely highlighted by this line, trust me. And it is a funny and sort of creepy idea, but largely untrue. Because, actually, our universe is run by tweens. Terrorist toddlers, with their eyes on the prize and their thumbs on Mxit. We’re breeding superhuman children who adapt to trend and technology faster than we can say ‘Blu-Ray’ (which really doesn’t take very long to say at all, so that wasn’t a great analogy; it’s just, I’ve recently discovered what Blu-Ray is and wanted to appear current, I’m sorry.) If Charles Darwin were sitting around today in, oh I don’t know, say, Vida, writing an addendum to The Origin of the Species, I bet there would be a significant chapter covering our young’ins.  This is survival of the fittest and the twelve year-olds are winning.

Things are not as they were. Like the tide, it is the cycles in our existence which, largely in retrospect, offer up meaning. Childhood changes. Adulthood becomes the playground of kids. It’s a www.jungle for us new-age apes as we struggle, against all the odds, to lust for life. William Kentridge suggests that things become false when they are declared ‘fact’, rather than moments in a process. We thirst for and dream of the ongoing now, where we are so very much involved, so passionately part of the living of our lives, that we find humour, extract profundity and seduce some higher way of being. We chase meaning. Many believe that it is this chase which separates us from the beasts. I’d argue that Hummers, Justin Timberlake and the chemical peel are also significant dividers, but still. The world is becoming smaller. This we know. We’ve transcended borders and geography to prance in network playgrounds. Cultures turn in on themselves and out on each other. The once un-hip becomes the tragically cool. Age shifts, roles reverse and we stand doe-eyed in flux. What comes next, we’re not so sure. We look back on what we were with the eyes of what we are now and what is still to come, and can only be gracious in our dealings with memory. Everything is starting to become something else and all we have is the chase. The lust for life. We’ve come a long way, Charlie Brown.
We struggle to reach higher. That’s what makes us highly evolved.

 

Editorial: Surrealise this

We called it living-dream, locked by our eyeballs with the boy painted white at the traffic lights. We named fantasy the suspect, dancing in glass castles to furious drums, heat intense, walls running silver, guessing that nothing would ever match this evening, this one evening amongst them all.
But then there were more.

We called in the sunset on Sundays with takeaway chips and baptisms scattered along the shore. I thought I was stuck in dream; my waking life hallucination of something wild and exotic. Then I woke. Woke again. Kept waking until the city wrenched open these eyes and forbade a look back. 

Dictionary: Surrealism, n. Pure psychic automatism, by which one proposes to express, either verbally, in writing, or by any other manner, the real functioning of thought. Dictation of thought in the absence of all control exercised by reason, outside of all aesthetic and moral preoccupation.

It starts with a feeling.
Just a thought. Small, nagging, but there.

It seems to be unreal. Trapped in the bumper-to-bumper of peak hour traffic, look to the left; woman in pinstripe suit and stilettos, sack of maize on head as she makes her way toward home. Right. Bleached blonde man, fan of light beers and betting on the horses, shirt says, I (heart) Soweto. It’s all gone peculiar.

Morning trips to the shopping mall, when you’re paying for groceries with folks in Zionist garb. Distant figures in the cane fields, faces red with clay.
High walls hiding suburban fortresses.

We wish it were all a dream, on the days when choice is one between a rusting dusk, sun dropping behind what may as well be the edge of the world or just South Beach - your South Beach - and working late at the office as your boss tells you about the deadlines you are missing, or the work you should be doing, or how you’re hanging on the lower rungs of corporate success.Then, you wish it were all a dream. You’re getting it now, baby. Now you’re surrealising. We are the dreamers, down here in deepest darkest. Our reality makes clear the concept of suffering, but it also glows gold with a modern day surreal. It seems to me that Africa is a dream.
The reason of the workday grind means nothing to an unconscious mind. What is beautiful is real and what isn’t, well, what isn’t doesn’t matter because it doesn’t exist because it’s all become a mixture of something else, other things, unbridled things, things of passion, things which pulse, things which beat rhythm that screams
“You. Are. Alive.” We bring the unconscious to life, down here, we live the marvellous down here.