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.

Judd Campbell Interview: from afrodisiacmag days

A Stand-Up City

Hanging With Judd At The Corner Café

 

Durban is not the city to visit if you want to get lost. If you’ve fled to confront your skeletons in Asian closets, Durbanites will know. If you’ve returned with your European backpack, we will know.

We will know and we will mock your temporary and over-articulate exotic accent. No clan makes fun like a Durban clan can. Hell, we say ‘fush’ and operate on a lower internal currency to our sister cities. Durban knows comedy.

 

We’re a city staging stand-up. And if Durbs is comedy central, there’s a man hanging around the sidewalks of Glenwood, right in the belly of the new suburban cool, who is playing host.

 

Even if you don’t know Judd Campbell, you know Judd Campbell. His concept precedes him.

 

I haven’t been able to open our lunchtime meeting before Judd is discussing his love for Pina Coladas, horse-riding (bareback, please), walks in the rain and Puerto Rican girls. At times, I get the feeling that I am in the middle of Mardi Gras, or a roller rink, or that time with my BMX when I was 8.

 

Judd is like that. Disarming. So concurrently genteel and sarcastic that I can’t tell the difference between mockery and sincerity and I don’t really give a continental anyway.

 

I’m suspicious of the trendy hotspots. I find myself treading the dissolve into formula-fetish and fixation on the creases in my lap as I perch on pokey cocktail stools and long for the couch and my flannel jimjams. But Judd’s concept for The Corner Café is a smart one. His is a guerilla cool, unassuming and uncomplicated and damn astute. He tricks us into accountability.

 

Based on the idea of eco-health, Judd tells me about the time he’s spent with chip-fryers and apathy, and how he wants to build a consciousness around what his restaurant  ‘puts into people’.

“It’s our penance”, he says, explaining The Corner Café’s system of environmentalism, avoiding unnecessary waste, microwaves and, basically, doing the cool things for our bodies and surroundings that we’d all love to do but we couldn’t be arsed.

Now it doesn’t seem that much of a mission.The Corner Café is making it cool to go green.

“But I’m no hippie”, Judd insists, with eyebrow raised.

 

My fruit salad smoothie arrives and he leans over to inspect it.

We are sweating out our personalities. It’s one of those Durban days where you hate the city and feel like it’s all you’ll ever need. Where its inhabitants slip into a makeshift island style and our attempts to keep cool turn us into the best kind of unconscious-cool and I decide that we occupy the greatest space on earth.

You’ve gotta meet this guy, man.

“I never wanted to be a manager, or an owner… I wanted to be a waiter until I turned 45.”

Twelve years in the industry, and Judd’s still playing.

The system is simple, Judd on the floor, rocking it; the food is that flawless meeting of fusion-sophistication and a chilled Durban chow you’re craving around lunch. And it’s good for you.

 

Born on the Bluff, raised on the Berea and fiercely loyal to Durban, Judd plays tennis, watches too many films and laughs at stupidity, Monty Python and the folks in our city. He is fragments of the best scenes in your favourite movies, or those moments you share with friends but expect no outsider to understand. Somewhere along the line he leaps up to show me his new step-counter and recalls how he walked 15,000 steps on Saturday. That’s 12 k’s. 203 calories. All in the restaurant. Judd doesn’t stop. When The Corner Café is closed, he works voluntary shifts for friends. This guy is the ‘Where’s Wally’ of the restaurant world. 

“You have 45 minutes to get to know someone. It’s the best job in the world.”

And with that, Judd’s back to work, meeting and greeting and chocolate chip cookie-ing. He closes our meeting so perfectly, he’s even playing host to my writing.

 

Do your fine selves a favour and take a time out in the stand-up city. Chill on the corner like it used to be done, and when your mouth isn’t full, kids, ask Judd about the water. It’s the best part of his set. And he’s there all week.

 

The Corner Café, 031 2010219

Open Monday to Friday 7am – 5pm, Saturday 7am – 4pm  

    

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.

Tree Boy

 

We are of our stories, made from and by them. The distant and humbling command of our past echoes into our present, future perhaps, and so we play our tiny parts in the ‘everything’ which is greater and more grand. Life, we understand, must and will run its course. We will know loss. We will rage, rage if we have the courage. We may, with keen eyes or good fortune, invite joy to settle over the smaller moments, giving cushion to the space between grief and mundane. But in all this, we must know grace. Seek, amidst the flux and chaos, to sit at the feet of our lives and learn. To learn from ourselves, from those who have come before and those whom we hope will follow. We must cast our shadows long and far, if only to soothe the view looking back. We must better the quality of the day. We must build up rather than break down. Give life. Grow. Make the hope of man his creation before his destruction. Question progress. Know value. Live unafraid of whimsy, defiant resistance even when we seem crushed. Easily written but if not, we are to become inevitability’s playthings and our lives little more than folly.

Here is a story neither political nor purely personal. It is a tale not locked to its time but bearing the gravity of a time. Of a people and a country which know extraordinary loss. Of survival, sometimes, on the poverty of hope alone. I have heard it said that memory takes root half in the folds of our brains – the other half, in the land upon which we live. I would hope that this is what you take from Tree Boy, that you offer surrender to a landscape of memory, if only fleeting; that you observe, that you grow, you, companion of your stories.

 

Daniel Botha in 'Tree Boy'

Daniel Botha in ‘Tree Boy’

Stop motion sequence by Tessa Comrie

Daniel Botha during a nightmare sequence

Michael Gritten in the boarding house

Michael Gritten as the postmaster, Cecil C Corkwood

Design by Neil Coppen, animation by Gregg Coppen

Michael Gritten in ‘Tree Boy’