A Congregation of Vapours

Festive season horror

2008-12-23T11:37:00.000+02:00

Yes, folks, it's the true symbol of Christmas. Have a good year. Blogging hiatus caused by hospital-ridden ill health.

Sick note

2008-11-25T17:38:00.004+02:00

I hasten to reassure readers (if any) that I have not retreated back into hiatus. The only hiatus I have right now is hiatus hernia. Alas, would that it were the worst of my woes. I have suffered some kidney failure resulting in a lot of other nasty symptoms. Going into hospital for an op on Thursday November 27. Just a mild one, scraping the prostate again. In the meantime I feel like an old rag. Blogging will resume after a brief interruption.

Long Street shuffle

2008-10-16T20:28:00.007+02:00

The thing about Long Street, the best damn street in Cape Town, is that it tries to be tacky but somehow it always turns out cool. Every square foot of it, from the lacy ironwork of the Victorian facades, through the sidewalk cafes -- big as the Long Street Cafe, with its airy ceiling fans and Fifties wooden furniture, small as the sandwich bar slices the width of a shop door, with two tiny tables huddled on the pavement -- the black widowed porn shops, the backpackers' lodges with sharkdiving adverts, the lush life bars and street-smart clubs, the style stores, book labyrinths, mannequin fantasies, half-recognised languages and secondhand faces, the purple hearts of psychedelia, goths and hipsters, fashionistas, the flash, the trash ... to the old Turkish bath house at the top of the street where it is finally forked by the roads of the rushing city and lost in concrete.

The picture is of the button emporium's SUV, suitably decorated.

2008-09-27T17:58:00.004+02:00

The great gales may have ripped tiles off the roof, but the accompanying squalls of late seasonal rain in the Cape Peninsula have endowed us with a sumptuous spring. The clivia this year are the best and most abundant I have ever seen in my garden. They don't last all that long, so a picture was mandatory to remember them by. Double-collared sunbirds are ecstatic under an intense blue sky today, glissading streams of notes from the trees after a week of heavy showers. The front yard is a bit dispirited, generally shady with two big trees erupting from a bricked central bed, and it's difficult to find anything that will thrive there. That will have to be my next mission for the summer.

Bonjour tristesse

2008-09-21T21:17:00.010+02:00

No, not a 1960s New Wave movie actress -- Francoise Hardy perhaps? -- but my granddaughter Juliet, at Camden Lock during our recent London jaunt, her first ever trip abroad. Gosh, I never realised how many shoe shops there were in and around the West End. Or clothing stalls in Camden Lock market. I needed a new pair of shoes myself after the apparel adventure. Still, Julie finally came up with a cool leather-style jacket and a pair of ankle boots that apparently gained her supercool status among her pals. And I did get to Forbidden Planet for a book buying spree.

Downsides: seeing off Julie's many admirers, or chancers, who popped up every time my back was turned. Just about everywhere. And given the value of our rand (1 pound = 15 rand), we did a lot of gasping in horror: R50 for a coffee! R30 for a busfare! And so on. In general, transport and food prices seem to have risen exponentially. Clothing, books, music, DVDs and entertainment, reasonable. However our accommodation was a beautifully appointed four-bedroom house in Acton, free, thanks to an internet house swop. They got my two-bed pad on the mountainside in Fish Hoek, near the beach.

Am enthused by the internet thing. Paris next ( had to turn down a nice central apartment) , or Rome (ditto).

Breaking news

2008-09-13T18:35:00.007+02:00

They don't call it the Cape of Storms for nothing. After a mild, not to say serene winter, September 1 marked the first day of spring, ushered in by an almighty gale and a deluge that battered our little town into submission. The catwalk that runs from the beach along the rocks to Sunny Cove station was savaged by raging waves that hurled concrete paving slabs around like playing cards. Not to mention what was left of the old changing room. A reminder that the sea must be treated at all times with extreme respect.

Not that this lesson was taken by the merry souls who celebrate the official start of spring every year with a dip. With the temperature not much above freezing, in they went to frolic in enormous swells that continued to chuck the furniture about after the storm. They were out in a flash. No deaths or injuries but, as one survivor put it, "It was instant brain freeze." Yeah, well, better than being flung against the rocks.

The catwalk was pretty dangerous that day. I picked my way among scattered paving until a big swell sneaked in and sent me scurrying up the grassy bank to cling to the lifesaver's platform. Retreated and squished home on the road.

Today I was sunbathing next to the pool. Glorious. Gotta love the old Mother City.

Sleeping with the fishers

2008-04-13T19:59:00.005+02:00

I have become a victim of crime -- a very sneaky, creepy kind of crime. It happened on a Saturday afternoon, sultry and clear, a typical late summer Cape afternoon. I bestirred myself from a fitful doze in the Laz-e-Boy in my study to go out and wash the car. In a couple of minutes the pool guy arrived, bent on installing a new pump (painfully expensive).

When I returned to the study I found the side table next the recliner had moved to the window, and a broken stick lay nearby. My wallet, which I had thoughtfully slapped down on the table earlier, was gone. I found the rest of the stick outside. Yes, the mysterious wallet fisher had struck again.

I finally worked out that, humiliatingly, this could only have happened while I was comatose in the chair. Didn't think to survey the room before going outside ...

Then the cards had to be cancelled, yada yada yada, following which I made a very interesting discovery. Credit cards can be used after they have been cancelled. Probably not possible with a chip card. The bank's "customer care" dude explained that banks have what is called a "floor limit". This is the minimum amount below which the transaction will not need electronic approval from the bank. The sneaks know how to play their cards right.

"What's your floor limit then?" I asked. I mean, you never know when that might come in handy, right?

" Oh, I'm not sure," he vagued. Yeah, right. "It varies from one bank to another."

What's worse, merchants generally do nothing, even if it's obviously a scam, the guy explained. "They fear there are consequences." The reason is that the scammer usually has a heavy dude hanging around outside.

I do believe that not many people know that.

Oh, and the wallet angler is still at large, according to the local cops. What really creeps me out is the thought that he or she must have been watching over the wall from the lane outside.

At least the guys with knives who mugged me on a dark rainy morning in the city had the decency to chuck the wallet away after cleaning out the cash. A very attractive blonde from the financial management company near my office found it, traced me and gave it back. And the city council stuck a CCTV camera at the spot afterwards.

New arrivals

2007-10-13T00:21:00.000+02:00

Just opening up the old place, blowing the dust off and sitting in the comfy chair to say: My book has been published TADAAAAAH. It looks absolutely great, thanks to my wonderful editor and her team. Bummer is that they won't pay for a launch because it's only poetry, and so far all the reading venues are booked up till after the "holidays", so at the moment I have to hope their sales and distribution people are doing their job.

The cover photo is is spookily like my inner landscape: a gaunt dark man with a beard (cut mine off), hurrying hunched against the cold along a pocked road lined by flowing concrete and a still canal towards the grey loom of a cruel city (I think it's Leeds).

Second development: meet Jamie, three months. He's a lovely kid, so I won' t hold it against him that he has sent me tottering into great-grandpahood, thanks to my teenage granddaughter. It's been decided by my daughter that he will refer to me as Granddad, so that's great.

Oh well, that's it then.

Wellingtons victory

2007-07-23T07:00:00.000+02:00

Right now, as I recline in my La-Z-Boy in a small seaside town not far from Cape Town, Sky News is all floods, all the time. I feel a strong tide of empathy with my native land at the same time as I feel a certain amount of relief that I am far away from the misery. Wellie-shod locals trudge across the muddy waters between the houses, their faces stoical. Cheery chappies paddle canoes around village streets. A home owner wades through his kitchen with a Sky reporter . "Dishwasher -- that's done. Freezer -- write-off," he explains with a hint of ennui. "Washing machine -- had it." And so on. He's sticking it out to deter looters. Amazingly, Blitz spirit lives on!

I am finding the TV hyperbole a bit confusing. "Unprecedented floods" can't simultaneously be " the worst in 60 years". Another Sky caption exclaims: "Worst floods in modern British history." Eh? 1947 is ancient history? I was five years old then.

Here in the Cape Peninsula it's just started raining, and the wind is squalling. We're getting the first of four successive storm fronts expected this week, roaring in on gale force winds to boil up the ocean, deluge the city with rain, cause rivers to burst their banks and basically be bloody foul. Not for nothing is it called the Cape of Storms.

Interestingly, a chap on Sky was suggesting the UK flooding was a hint of global warming to come. Well, around here, the approaching weather counts as extreme, but it was worse in the days of Lady Anne Barnard, wife of the Secretary to the British Colony, who recounts in her wonderful diaries that the Cape Town Castle (HQ of the British forces) was flooded to unfeasible heights one terrible night at the start of the 19th century.

Toda, with the sea having receded over the centuries, the Castle is safely on dry ground a good way from the shore, but at that time the waves all but lapped at its ramparts. Lady Anne recounts that water burst into the officers' mess, drowning numerous unfortunates. When told of this at the government house, the governor, General Dundas, had a good chuckle. "... all (the brass) had ho-hoed because the general did when the account was carried of the officers of artillery being drowned in their mess room -- a method of taking it which did not much suit the officer who had brought the allarming situation at the Castle to the General", notes Lady Anne drily.

The British were newcomers then, having just chucked out the Dutch, and when calamity struck, they believed it was a kind of tsunami. In fact, as Lady Anne explains, they learnt that the flood had rushed down the mountain on which the city perches.

I experienced a smaller deluge of this kind when a localised storm cloud broke over the mountain behind my house, basically dumping a couple of feet of water on us in a few minutes, followed by a giant wall of mud, growing and gathering speed as it ploughed down the mountain, barrelled into the suburb and right through the town. Houses built on old water courses were actually buried, with people leaping on to their roofs to safety. I slopped around in a few inches of water in the kitchen, but the mud missed my house by a yard; my neighbour's garage was filled to knee height.

Climate change, feh.

Benediction

2007-05-21T06:47:00.000+02:00

Not much to say at the moment, but I enjoy contemplating this photograph taken from the top of Elsie's Peak above my house in Fish Hoek, Cape. Yes, it's that old standby, another COV sunset.

Of human Bondage

2007-05-01T08:13:00.001+02:00

I have been pondering the new James Bond. I mean, I enjoyed Casino Royale, but somehow it lacked the distinctive feel of a Bond film. Daniel Craig is well suited to the craggy action hero role, but can you imagine him stripping off his diving suit to reveal an immaculate dinner jacket and black tie? I think not. He's certainly better than Roger Moore, who I cannot imagine doing any stunt riskier than shaking his vodka martini. He's better than the overly actorish Timothy Dalton. But he isn't 100 proof Bond like Pierce Brosnan.

Let's go back to the founding template. It's pretty well universally agreed that Sean Connery is the echt 007. He had the easy glide of the leopard, an aura of menace laced with charm, a whiff of cruelty suggesting he'd as soon kill you as kiss you. Pierce Brosnan didn't have that exactly. But he was suave and indomitable. He occupied the persona, even if he wasn't the Scottish player.

Bond's background was Naval Intelligence, public school, all that. Craig is the first Bond to suggest Secondary Modern and School of Hard Knocks. Now, I know we're supposed to be getting a Bond for today, a grittier, icecold and efficient hitman. But there are a lot of those about already. As a Bond fan, I enjoy seeing Pierce Brosnan adjust his tie in the side mirror as he escapes from his sinking car, the groan-worthy one-liners, the ridiculous villains, the weird weaponry and gobsmacking gadgets. Le Chiffre weeps blood (very discreetly) from one eye? Where's the fun in that?

I don't go to Bond movies to see an action hero. I go for the joy of Bondness. The conventions and rituals offer us a warm sense of participation. That said, John Cleese was a caricature of Q. Perhaps the producers felt there was only one Desmond Llewellyn. I miss the introduction of the latest cutting-edge killing technology.

SPOILER: How could anyone be so soul-dead as to destroy an Aston-Martin Vanquish? That kind of sums up the emptiness at the heart of the film.

Now, there is much to praise about this film: super repartee between Bond and Vesper Lynd, and a terrific performance by Judi Dench as M; a wonderful opening sequence, one of the best in the history of the franchise; an amazing battle in a building collapsing into the Grand Canal; the high-tension poker game (although there is some confusing cutting to and away from the card-play scenes).

Martin Campbell is one of my favourite action directors, and he has Bond form. He is at the top of his game here. There were sly digs at and comments on the Bonds of yesteryear, notably Craig doing Ursula Andress emerging from the sea. I buy Casino Royale as a great, slightly cerebral action movie. I just don't bond with it.

The sheds of war

2007-01-26T08:34:00.000+02:00

A film critic whose name escapes me once observed that one's memory of a movie is often curiously reshot by some auteur of the cerebellum, and when viewing it a second time, a scene or scenes you thought you saw are missing, or the images in them are in different parts of the film.

This may be some kind of faulty compression device, or perhaps the brain needs defragging, but at at any rate, the observation was resoundingly validated when I saw Where Eagles Dare on DVD this week, more than 30 years after the first viewing in a cinema. I remembered it as a cracking good action-adventure with a couple of great sequences vivid in memory after all this time.

This time around, although the film is visually pristine and the sound remastered in DD5.1, I became irritatedly aware of Alistair McLean's wordy script, with leaden dialogue and ridiculously improbable plot twists. However, McLean was tops at action writing and my memory of those scenes turned out to be pretty accurate.

The plot basically revolves around a mission to rescue a captured American general who knows the plans for the D-Day landings, before he can be forced to spill the beans. He is being held in an awesome Alpine schloss that seems to grow from the unassailable peak of a mountain. (This place actually exists, I discovered.) The only access is via helicopter (apparently fairly novel then) or cable-car.

The film revolves around the daring rescue bid, involving spies posing as pretty frauleins, a German admiral (Michael Hordern) complete with monocle, SS brutes, mission infiltrators, a plot within the plot, double and triple crosses (almost Goon Show-like in their improbability). And sheds. Lots of very handy sheds in the Bavarian Alps. Need to change into German uniform? Shed just round the corner guv. Shed for a secret romantic rendezvous, for hiding from the Nazis, assembling bombs ...

However, the action sequences are superb for their time. The best is probably the fight on top of a cable car traversing a dizzy drop. I won't spoil it for those unfamiliar with the film.

The performances are uneven, although Richard Burton is steely as the mission leader, and a youthful looking Clint Eastwood, fresh from the saddle, stamps his trademark laconic menace on the US Army Ranger on a mission of his own (little do they know the little that he knows). Anton Diffring, who looks like a poster boy for the Hitler Youth, plays the brutal SS officer -- a role he was condemned to repeat in many other films.

It's a shame the director and producers didn't have a go at trimming the fat of McLean's script (apparently they were extremely respectful). Great wodges of exposition may work in a novel, but they kill the suspense here.

What did occur to me was that this is one of those rare films crying out for a remake. It could be spectacular.

Where Eagles Dare is one of a trio of war movies in this box set: the others are The Dirty Dozen and Kelly's Heroes. That is excellent value; all are remastered in DD5.1 and look great.

Update: I forgot to mention that one of the gnadige frauleinen is played by Hammer House of Horror favourite Ingrid Pitt. I almost didn't recognise her with her clothes on. She was great in Countess Dracula, roughly (very) based on Countess Elizabeth Bathory, who, legend has it, bathed in the blood of virgins. And got her kit off at a moment's notice, apparently.

I think I am going to look for Von Ryan's Express next.

Turn up the volume

2007-01-06T19:01:00.000+02:00

Bit of a swagger really, this post. The new year begins with news that my new collection of poems, A Book of Lives, has been accepted for publication, and I'm waiting for the contract. It's been a lean time between slim volumes, although I have kept my hand in with magazine one-offs, anthologies and so on. So I'm not finished yet.

Perhaps this will even bestir me to sort out the problems with the damn screenplay, bloody frustrating because it is really just one scene I can't crack. It happens to affect a lot of others, otherwise I'd just try faking it, skidding over it. Sid Field's Screenwriters' Problem Solver points out it's a problem of structure. Very helpful I'm sure, since the (very ambitious) structure of the script is one of its big selling points .... Oh, was I thinking out loud?

Bought the box set of Rome: Season 1 yesterday. It's a whacking great thing, and once you remove the outer sleeve, you find an actual box, made of some composite, probably from paper pulp, but which gives a fair sense of "boxness". I have't seen any of it before, because of the lateness of the hour when it was broadcast, with an 18SNVL rating -- the full set of sex, nudity, violence and language, yay! Now I will try to ration myself to one episode at a time, although there are a lot of 'em, raising the danger of overrunning the second season.

While on this subject, does anyone know when or, indeed, if there will be a second season of Life on Mars? After a favourable mention by Pashmina, I bought the first season at HIV while in London in May. Now I have two copies, because it had slipped my mind that I had already advance-ordered it from Amazon. To my great irritation, the secod copy arrived shortly after my return. So I lent my set out to friends and gave the Amazon box to my daughter. Now they all plead piteously for news of a second go-round.

The series did not make it on to BBC World, due to a schedule gunged up by almost daily episodes of Keeping Up Appearances and other old favourites. Are we really so unsophisticated in the colonies? The only new arrival is Cutting It, which seemed very lame and silly judging from the single episode I watched. However, the new Lynda LaPlante series The Commander is on another channel late at night. Spiffing, especially the formidable Amanda Burton, but past my bedtime. So I am now the owner of a settop box with 80 hrs of recording time, so I can "time-shift" all the stuff I haven't got time to catch -- and then sit looking at the playlist and wondering how I am ever going to watch all of it anyway.

Other interesting TV stuff: Invasion (aliens splash down to breed with our wimmin, an ancient plot updated very well). Curious coincidence, the arriving hurricane bringing the alien hordes is called Miranda, which is what I called the one in my SF screenplay (with The Tempest as its template). So I'll have to hope Ariel doesn't get taken before I can get greenlighted (yeah, right). In Justice: law firm takes on unjust convictions, headed by Kyle McLachlan, whose abundant sweeping black hair is starting to look like a stealth jet. It's very amusing to see him trying to do "emotion". And I've become addicted to House. I missed it first time round, when I was on a "no-TV" diet, but the "Series Channel" is rerunning the first series. I fear Hugh Laurie is destroying his vocal cords with that coffee-grinding bass baritone. Ian McShane is also swimming back on to our screens in that stream of fascinating filth that is Deadwood. It's a bit disconcerting because I keep on thinking of him as the lovable rascal in Lovejoy.

Why I am watching so much TV is painfully obvious. I can kid myself it may trigger an idea of how to solve my structure problem ...

Wassail!

2006-12-27T20:50:00.000+02:00

Well, it's been real. Almost. When I ate a piece of Christmas cake for breakfast on Boxing Day I knew it was all over. It started promisingly on Friday the 22nd, when I motored down to the whale capital, Hermanus, to join my daughter and her brood in a timeshare chalet with a magnificent sea view. Now the best description for Hermanus is that it is a resort in denial. In fact it recoils in horror from the word resort. The locals treat the pillaging hordes with a distant contempt. The roads are terrible, signage sparse, the shops eccentric and lame. Even the supermarkets are useless. The restaurants are plentiful but unimaginative and service can be somnolent. After an hour waiting en famille (eight of us) for lunch one day, I accosted the waitress, who explained in a reasonable tone that they were busy at this time of year. No shit? They wouldn't last five minutes in Cape Town. Parking is a joke without a punchline. The harbour is a sad agglomeration of concrete and down-at-heel shipping. No waterfront precinct here, thank you.
And there were no whales. Notable prezzies: I gave Thomas the present I wanted: an amazing robot dinosaur that seems almost alive. Zara had a bevy of Barbies. My sister is a collector of the doyenne of dollies in all her manifestations, but I bet she doesn't have the ballerina Barbie that actually dances (battery-powered Barbie must be a first). The Barbies were christened: Princess Glitter, Maribel and Ginger. But Zara sooo wants a robot dinosaur. Thomas also got a very large remote-controlled motorbike which he raced up and down the road, bringing furious stiffs out of their holiday snooze to remonstrate. Well it was midnight. How come I had to wait till my dotage for the kind of Christmas present I dreamed of as a kid? There's a blog to be written on the convergence of adult and childish pleasures in our brave new battery-operated, microprocessed, digitised, virtual world. The food, the food ... Christmas Eve was spent in the only restaurant that could seat eight on a late booking. It has apparently been an eaterie since 1822, and some of the deeply marinated, glowering guests could well have been sitting there since then. They stared with loathing at the small children as they made as much noise as possible to enliven the funereal proceedings. The highlight of the set menu was venison rolled in bacon. My 14-year-old granddaughter refused to eat hers because it looked like a bobbited penis. Christmas dinner, in sizzling heat, was al fresco with the inlaws. I was very impressed to learn that my son-in-law's stepmother had cooked the turkey, tongue, lamb and other items three weeks earlier and stored it in the deep freeze. The fun parts are in the photos. A prosperous posting year to all my bloggy pals. I am just off to join the kids bomb-dropping into the pool.

Re: crunching the stone

2006-12-13T21:04:00.000+02:00

It's been a while. Not surprisingly, no one's come calling in a while either. I've just returned home from hospital after an operation my urologist calls "a scrape". I always thought that was a term for an abortion, and indeed, the same body area is involved. Chaps, brace yourselves. The procedure is as follows. They thread a kind of loop down the hampton, into the prostate, and proceed to whittle it down to a more reasonable size. As awful as it sounds, I was ready for anything after a few months spending most of the night standing groaning in the loo to little effect. Still with me?

So I checked in on Friday, thinking, no worries, it's a minor procedure and the only hassle is the four-day hospital stay till the bleeding dissipates. They wheel me into the theatre waiting area, alongside an elderly woman with yellow hair. We nod and smile ruefully. C'est la guerre.

Along comes the anaesthetist to check up how far he can go without offing you. This is a guy with a small head, exceedingly wizened face and huge, muscle-knotted forearms like a superannuated Arnold Schwarzenegger. He has an intense, jiving style. Usual list of questions re health. Then: "Not necessary to do a general, we'll give you an epidural (yes, ladies!) and drift you away with a light sedative. OK?" And off he goes to the woman next door.
Anyway, to the theatre and he finally does his thing. "Where's the music, sister?" he asks the masked auntie-like figure patting me on the shoulder. "You bring any CDs, Mr F?" By now I'm numb as a crash test dummy, and they arrange my limbs for a full-frontal assault. I'm giving birth in reverse.

I drift off for a bit and come round just in time to hear the surgeon say, "Good heavens. There's a stone in your prostate. Well, I never." I check this out on the large plasma screen nearby. The stone appears to be the shape and colour, although not quite the size, of a mussel shell. (The picture doesn't get the colour right). He commences thrashing it about with his loop, getting it stuck in various apertures. "It's no use. It's very large and I'm going to have to break it somehow," he explains.

Now at this point I lose track of the narrative, because, I suspect, Arnie the Anaesthesiologist gives me a merciful extra jolt of joyjuice. The next thing I remember, the surgeon/urologist is leaning over me, saying: "It's all over. Interesting case!" he adds.

Much later, I'm lying in bed attached to the catheter and a lot of other stuff, and the urologist comes in, merrily shaking his head. It turns out the op took an hour and a half, not half-an-hour as scheduled, and I don't remember all that much. "Hell of a business," he says. "I finally found some (sounds like) duck tongs to break it and that did the trick. Otherwise I would have had to order the laser from the other hospital, and then it would have gone on a lot longer." The good part is that he gives me this perspex container with fragments of stone. They are a malevolent black. They're on my mantelpiece as I write. Now you must excuse me, I have to ...

The horror, the horror

2006-11-13T19:59:00.000+02:00

I had long avoided viewing the most recent iteration of The Island of Doctor Moreau (1996), having heard tales of a production out of control and a bizarre mess, which is what you deserve if you uncage the runaway egos of Marlon Brando and Val Kilmer in the same movie. But last week I found a copy of the director's cut (nominally John Frankenheimer) in a bargain bin and decided to slake my curiosity. I have to say I enjoyed every insane, outrageous camp minute of it.

The production had a checkered history. This was originally a project of the very talented (and now seemingly vanished) South African film maker Richard Stanley, whose cult horror movie Dust Devil (1992), shot in the Namib desert, is exceedingly fine. Stanley wrote the script and presumably on the strength of Dust Devil's powerful visuals and dark, twisted atmosphere, got the directing gig.

That lasted until, according to the gossip, he fell foul of Kilmer, who had a number of "suggestions" about the script (basically inflating his role). Stanley balked, was fired or walked, and was replaced by Frankenheimer, a fair choice to handle a rescue job and perhaps rein in the worst excesses of Brando and Kilmer. In a bizarre sequel to the production crisis, Stanley smuggled himself back on to the set in heavy disguise as one of the many grotesque animal/human extras; I'd love to know which one. I assume he was planning to write something about the whole mishmash, or perhaps planned some kind of revenge.

At any rate, the finished product bears all the scars of having been redacted by Marlon and Val. Brando as Moreau channels Charles Laughton, who played the role in the 1933 production. And doesn't he have fun. This is the lighter side of his Colonel Kurtz. He is first seen being carried on a sort of palanquin by grotesque hybrid creatures (his "children"), face daubed white, bishop's hat on his head, clad in a flowing djellaba, and doing the papal wave with barely suppressed glee. He wears a buckteeth prosthesis, the better to trick out his plummy English accent.

Sinister sidekick Dr Montgomery (Kilmer), who we have met earlier, is also clearly mad, although he keeps it cryptic at first, working himself up to the excesses he scripted for himself (in an interview on the DVD he explains that in his "mad scene", daubed white and wearing Brando's get-up, he recycled a performance of Kublai Khan that had been cut from another movie. I can just see Frankenheimer nodding resignedly, wondering what had possessed him to take the gig.

As the two eccentrics raise the stakes to demented levels, the fine English actor David Thewlis copes heroically with his luckless role as straight man. This frequently means trying to keep a straight face under severe provocation. Brando is hugely entertaining and outrageously inventive. Kilmer isn't.

Even Stan Winston, monster manufacturer extraordinary, is caught up in the madness. Dozens of phantasmagorical creatures creep, stomp, hobble and leap across the screen. Some look like refugees from Cats, others have tusks or simian variations, and yet others are designed to be just plain Texas Chainsaw Massacre ugly (particularly Moreau's immediate "family"). They are, though, bloody brilliant.

Fairuza Balk is Moreau's daughter, and does her best as she "reverts" to being, tadaah, another Lloyd Webber feline, Ron Perlman, he of the unfeasibly gargantuan jaw, makes a good fist of the Sayer of the Law, a Winston riff on the orangutan. And chop-schlocky star Mark Dacascos, dark good looks hidden under an off-kilter mug with appalling dentition, is oleaginous as Lo-Mai, Moreau's favourite aide-de-camp. Moreau has a tiny manikin at his side, a precursor of Mini-Me (he even has a miniature version of the grand piano Moreau plays in a totally gratuituous scene). Either he's the world's smallest actor, at about 18 inches, or a Winston tour-de-flaws.

The plot, which allows a perfunctory nod to the evils of totalitarian rule, is not worth recounting. It ends, suitably, in total chaos and destruction, Moreau is torn to pieces by his creations, Dr Montgomery (Kilmer) is shot dead -- and the director's cut adds a fusillade of additional bullets, perhaps at Val's request. Certainly he deserves it. The compound burns, and once again Apocalypse Now is evoked ...

A curiosity, well worth a look for cinema buffs. The musical score is a hammering monstrosity too.

Update: I've done a bit of poking about to see what R Stanley has been up to. No features since Moreau, but several acclaimed documentaries and some short films. The bit part in Moreau is described as "melting bulldog", which I don't recall seeing. He has also appeared, oddly, in Deadwood, as "Deep Throat" and in one of my scifi favourites, 12 Monkeys. He hails from Fish Hoek, Cape -- which is where I live now.

Defenders of the Patagonian toothfish

2006-11-01T20:59:00.000+02:00

Simon's Town is in full naval fig right now, not to mention all the magnificent yachts skimming the bay in summer regattas. The harbour and town were photographed from the top of a winding mountain pass that leads to Redhill/Cape Point. The comely vessel in the other picture is, if I am not mistaken, one of the four new corvettes bought at a cost of countless millions instead of building houses for the poor or fighting Aids, just for starters. They were just one batch of goodies in an arms deal that also includes Swedish jetfighters. It comes in at about 90 billion rand or $15bn dollars.

The thing is, who are we going to fight to get our money's worth? The corvettes, apart from taking part in incessant war games, will seemingly be used to pursue and interdict rogue fishing vessels from naughty countries trying to scoop up stocks of the Patagonian toothfish -- dubbed "black hake" -- which are off limits. There have been a couple of chases ending in pirate trawlers being boarded by armed sailors off the southern tip of Argentina, which also polices the Southern Ocean.

Buying four state-of-the-art corvettes to chase sleazebag trawler captains strikes me as extreme overkill. Perhaps they could also be deployed to shell the bejesus out of the Great White sharks that have come ever closer in shore at our gentle cove and taken bites out of surfers -- and in one case gulped down a very sweet and dignified elderly woman who took her swim every day, winter and summer, from the rocks -- in a red bathing cap. The shark homed right in on her and basically just carried her off. The remains were never found. This sort of thing is bad for tourism, although I haven't noticed it in any way inhibiting the invasion of coaches carrying hordes of Chinese visitors ready to photograph absolutely everything. I expect they'd see a shark attack as a fine memento to show the folks back home. Still, various non-injurious methods of shark deterrence have been broached, since these horrific creatures have their defenders (they seem to suggest we should get out of the water, since it belongs to the sharks). But our brave little flotilla could be profitably employed exercising massive deterrence off the swimming beach.

The downside to the navy's new toys is that guns are tested every summer and tend to scare the whales away. An outcry finally forced the admiralty to do its shooting before the Southern Rights steam in around August. In the navy's favour is the beneficence it bestows on Simon's Town, preserved in all its Victorian splendour, and cared for in absolutely shipshape and Bristol fashion.

Shopping and yakking

2006-10-25T20:16:00.000+02:00

I'll know I'm finished when I join the ranks of ancients causing traffic jams at supermarket tills, post office counters, hardware stores and even bank teller windows, as they prolong the transaction with garrulous recitals of their seemingly aimless lives. It's cruel, I know, but sometimes I long to administer a good arse-kicking to these obstructive lumps in the smooth custard of daily existence.

Yes, they may be lonely, I'm sure many are -- but how can you be so lacking in self-awareness to assume the (usually expressionless) minion behind the counter gives a shit? Or fail to notice his (or her) deep and murderous look, or sense the seething tide of anger rising behind you?

And while I'm standing in this queue spewing lava, I'm wondering what is it that makes women delay doing anything about actually finding money to pay until the total is rung up. Surely, if you know you are going to have to rummage in the mysterious depths of your bag for the exact sum required, you must realise you need to set about it a bit sooner? Have you no regard for others?

I expect it's part of that curious female hunting instinct that enables women to shop for hours on end, trying on many items of clothing to no apparent purpose, accumulating awesome numbers of swag bags, tramping tirelessly around comparing prices, for god's sake. Given the option, no red-blooded male would spend even a minute on these safaris through mall land.

I never try on clothes. I pick 'em, pay and take them home; I can always flash through again if I need to find a different size. I never use a trolley in the supermarket. Baskets allow you to zip in and out of the trundling traffic, swerve round the cellphone simps asking headquarters whether they should get the "sinful" choc chip cookies or the virtuous kind (which come in bulk bags).

I can fill two or three standard shopping bags from one basket (great way to tone the biceps and forearms).

I will admit to spending hours in music and DVD stores, hifi establishments and these new glorified pawnbroker shops called things like Cash Converters or Cash Crusaders. I love to unearth a bargain bit of audio gear or find a favourite album going cheap. It's a vindication, it somehow assures me I am not abandoning meaningful life (am I?). This is not so much shopping as collecting, an activity programmed into the genes of us hunter-gatherers. This activity cannot be indulged in when accompanied by the other half. The incomprehension is total and the patience very short.

Lakes of light

2006-10-25T19:37:00.000+02:00

Marched from Muizenberg and Sunrise Beach, the captive pools mirror sky just after Sol heaves up. The days are getting longer as we creep into the shimmer of summer. I wouldn't want to live anywhere else, really.

Yet another photo figleaf for my shameful failure to blog righteously. Well, I'm only a lizard, and I must bask, basilisk-ly.

Cape windows

2006-10-10T20:51:00.000+02:00

This post is sort of inspired by known and unknown expat Capetonians reading my blog for a taste of home and its glories. Now that I know you are out there, it's a jolly good excuse to open a window or two on our summer -- at present rudely interrupted by a ridiculous cold spell (that's the Cape weather for you, four seasons in one day, as they say, every bleedin' time).

We clambered up Elsie's Peak, the highest point in my Fish Hoek fastness, on Sunday, right to the marker on the summit, and gazed out at the entire vast yawn of False Bay; its sweep gives the sensation of standing on a map of the peninsula. In the photo here, K shows off the God's-eye view (although this is by no means the entire panorama -- more like half -- my little Pentax Optio lens being inadequate to the task).

A great many flowers are out now, none more profusely than the small trees of bright yellow pincushion proteas. But there are intense colours along the paths, tiny sparkles of blue, purple and magenta. And glissandos of tiny green double-collared sunbirds, darting from tree to tree. We saw a dassie or rock rabbit, somewhat rare here now, probably because black eagles (aka Verreaux's Eagle) hunt along this range.

Ride it till it crashes

2006-10-04T20:17:00.001+02:00

You never know when a milestone in your life is going to sneak up and bash you over the head. And
delivery by telephone is fate at its most sadistic. I was merely asking some functionary in Human Remains (Resources) how much leave I had left in the cycle.

"Er, but you're retiring soon aren't you?"
"Not to my knowledge," sez I.
"Yes you are," sez she. "The rules of the Provident Fund require you to retire on your 65th birthday."
"Well, I, er, I ... I want to stay on for my end-of-year bonus," I say lamely, as earth tips over a bit.
"You'll get a proportionate bonus. Up to the end of October."
"Oh, OK ..."
I hang up and tell the chief sub: "Guess what? I'm retiring at the end of the month."
"Oh yes," she says irritatingly; like she knows too? "C (the editor) wants to offer you a contract. We have to go and speak to him."

So long story short, I "retire" on October 31. On November 1 I come to work and sit at my usual "workstation", but now I am not "backbench splash sub" -- I am "independent contractor", and in the process of designing my own contract. Four-day week, lots of leave ... much money.

So why is it that this week I have this sensation of falling, adrift in an alien cosmos? It's life, but not as I know it. Anyway, shouldn't I be off to see the world, finishing my eternally postponed second draft of the movie script ... or, I dunno, just kicking back and letting it all go?

The thing is, I strongly object to society's attempts to shape my life or for that matter its concluding chapters. I refuse the "pensioner discount", the assumption of clapped-outness, the extra courtesy of the young; call me a senior and I'll pop you one. I walk, I jog, I lift weights, I do Pilates, I'm ready for a love affair ... sod it -- I'm not bloody old!

Ride it till it crashes has always been my mantra. No reason to take my foot off the accelerator now.
Victor Meldrew is dead.

Thar she blows

2006-09-20T21:15:00.003+02:00

It's been a long time between blogs, and I don't have a decent excuse. I've been wondering if I'm not just temperamentally unsuited to running an actual blog. I enjoy contributing comments to other people's blogs, but for me as a writer, blogging feels uncannily like exposing the process to readers: the little man behind the curtains furiously tugging on strings. Or perhaps it's simpler: I don't have all that interesting a life.

I could mention that the whales have arrived in force, breaching and blowing, basking, making thunderous love. Trails of sand track the inshore area, now a busy labour ward as the midwives close in and the big males circle to keep off predators while the calf is born -- great whites are multiplying in this area, and they are very hungry. But I haven't managed to get one usable picture. So that's a bit of a crock.

I'm not sure what I'm going to do about the Vapours. I may just post on the odd occasion when life actually happens. Or not. I'll probably still hang around other folks' campfires. See you around.

I spit on your grave

2006-09-05T21:18:00.001+02:00

It didn't occur to me to blog about the death of the Aussie wildlife populist (and conservationist) Steve Miller until I realised I was going to have to say something to get the foul taste out of my mouth after reading comments, ranging from mean to outright malevolent and even celebratory, that brought it home with renewed force that the blogosphere sometimes reveals some of the darkest depths of people who would never dream of uttering such thoughts in "real life", where there are consequences. Such as other people thinking you are a repulsive human being.

It seems to me that blogging is encouraging the birth of a misshapen kind of consciousness. I have never seen one of Steve Irwin's shows, but no matter how irritating they might have been, nothing he said or did could justify the poison pen scratchings (what's left of Germaine Greer is a spiteful, dried-up, self-publicising creep, and a raging colonial snob). Right now I want to close the door on the whole cacophony. And go and do something worthwhile, like writing some more poems.

Crap artists

2006-08-31T20:15:00.000+02:00

So it appears that Tom and Katie have had their baby's first turd bronzed. Not a joke, well just a bit: it has been reproduced in a bronze casting exhibited by edgy artist Daniel Edwards, and is on display at a Brooklyn gallery. Under glass, of course. Nothing very novel there, with much modern art consisting of bodily emissions in various settings. But it is the explanation that takes us into the Twilight Zone: apparently Daniel's doo-doo is commenting on a Gen X trend to do exactly that -- bronze the baby's first production. I ask you: are these people human beings? Or are they, as Scientology high priest Tom might suggest, aliens from a dark and malevolent galaxy?

An episode of The Outer Limits tonight featured two aliens who can control men's minds to make them think they are hot babes; but as the first flush of love fades, the poor putzes start to find their gorgeous wives, well, unappetising, slimy to the touch and smelling like a sewer. Till they see what they have been sharing a bed with: a grotesque misshapen horror that drips stuff like the creature in Alien. Then they go mad. (Did the writer have a recent messy divorce, perhaps?)

Anyway, I've started wondering when Katy will start smelling something a bit off, finding her matinee idol husband slimy to the touch, etc. Unmask Tom Cruise, the Thing that Ate Hollywood! And bronze its poop!

Exterminate! Exterminate!

2006-08-28T18:00:00.000+02:00

It's spring, and a glorious Sunday at Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens on the slopes of Table Mountain. The giant parking lots are full, the massed ranks of the picnic hamper regiment stream over the rolling lawns accompanied by their offspring. Pretty well everything is flowering enthusiastically, strelitzia straining to fly, red ericas, proteas of every hue, the purple blooms of the keurboom (tree) emitting a heady scent. The guinea-fowl, perhaps the stupidest bird in this region, peck away at the grass; a mongoose comes out for a swift and sinuous inspection.

We went on a good walk up the mountain from the garden, into the peace of Cecilia Forest, a peace which is about to end, as the envirofascists bark-strip the eucalyptus and other "aliens" and tar their flesh. Many are dead or dying and bark lies thick on the ground. Others have already been logged. The declared aim is, as one of the more extreme "conservation" groups puts it "to rid our nation of all invasive aliens". South Africa, plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.

Just up the road from my house, the poplars surrounding the Noordhoek common were scythed down almost overnight, to the horror of incredulous locals. It seems the environazis want to create a museum to the distant past, when the Khoisan roamed the scrub and vast beaches, without a scrap of shade. The snag is that this is a metropolis of 3 million people, not a giant nature reserve. Dunno how concrete fits into this "vision". Petitions are now being drawn up, but the Parks officials are a merciless and literal-minded tribe.

Conservation here seems to be mainly about killing things. Already the tahrs, shy Himalayan mountain goats, aliens without passports, have been exterminated by sharpshooters. Next the fallow deer, also foreigners, though the parks death squads won't be involved; they are being relocated, mainly because there is only so much the people of Cape Town will tolerate.

The last vestiges of the colonisation of the environment by everyone from the Dutch to the Brits (and Cecil Rhodes in particular) are not yet threatened: the great oaks of Newland Forest and Government Avenue -- and, indeed, as can be seen, Kirstenbosch -- with their thriving population of grey squirrels that shamelessly panhandle the tourists for nuts. Lazy little sods. Still, they wouldn't dare -- I think.

The green men

2006-08-16T19:45:00.000+02:00

You know spring must be on the way when Tatooine sends its strimmer crew to start whizzing off winter's lush coat. The signs are everywhere: the first shark attack of the season; a mass of tiny double-collared sunbirds, like shards of jade, trilling a liquid celebration in the wild cherry tree; the Namaqualand desert flower fields flourishing glorious swatches of colour; the whales on their way. Winter, as is its wont, is at present spitefully swishing its chill tail across the Peninsula as it makes a reluctant departure.

I do love my city at the change of seasons. Its never-failing effort to put on its glad rags shames the cloistered couch legume. What on earth was all that gloom about? I ask myself as I trot off to the beach, hoping to sight the first southern right behemoth breaching in the cove.

Goodnight nurse

2006-08-11T20:52:00.001+02:00

Having bravely seen off first edition this morning, I struggled home and succumbed to a really vicious, muscle-twisting, fever-pitch, axe-in-the-head flu. Why does bad flu make you groan? (Or maybe that's just me.) The day has passed like a kind of nightmare, me lying in bed fully dressed while Sky drifts in and out with all the worst news in a long time. Still, I have improved a bit this evening, and after lying on the La-Z-Boy channel flipping, have dragged myself into the typist's chair to blog aimlessly.

I almost never get ill. This is a once-in-ten-years event. But being a typical kind of bloke, I really need someone to fuss over me and unfortunately there isn't anyone around to do that. I thought of phoning my Pilates instructor Justine because she's so empathetic, but it seemed a bit of a cheek. And she is seven months pregnant. When she kneels on my back to unkink me she feels pretty heavy now.

So here I am, over the groaning now, although it still feels like someone worked me over with a baseball bat. Pathetic, really. The worst part right now is that I don't feel like eating anything. Which is good, objectively. OK, end of moan, reader, I roped you into my misery and I don't even feel bad about it.

I'm going to scan the DVD collection for a suitable movie. Can't figure out what will work. High Fidelity? Mmm. Record fanatic (like me) loses girlfriend ... maybe not. The new James Bond collection released by MGM? Too painful for the old head. Eric Rohmer, here I come.

Menage a trois

2006-08-09T19:18:00.000+02:00

The humping dolphins of Sunny Cove. There's also a bronze at the beach entrance of a chap in "trunks" dragging a girl in a two-piece to her feet, presumably to go watch the dolphins at it. I couldn't bring myself to post a snap of this work, titled (gaah) Frolic.

The shopping bag collection

2006-08-08T20:04:00.000+02:00

This is a post inspired by the ongoing shopping-bags-of-the-world discussion over at Pashmina's cutting-edge chronicle. Here in Sarf Africa we have recently undergone one of our periodic revolutions; people never tire of them since the big struggle, it seems. This one was extremely painful. The government decided to "phase out" the paper-thin shopping bags used in profusion at shopping emporia and subsequently recyled as urban decoration, flapping gaily on power lines, fences, hedges and trees. The plasti-bag industry was outraged, saying thousands of bag men and women would be put out of work.

The government pointed out that it simply wanted 1 sturdier bags; 2 a charge to be levied for every bag provided at checkouts. This went to and fro for some time and then the great leap forward began. Shoppers turned out to have been itching to reuse their bags and what's more to buy doughty holdalls of fabric manufacture.

These days the assistant asks "Would you like a bag?" to which the usual reply is, "Oh no, I have my own [brandishing same]." And those buying, say, just a loaf of bread, a jar of coffee and a newspaper will eschew any bag and simply carry them out of the shop.
So, of course, the bag industry and the retail shopping chains realised they were on to a nice little earner; and now new bag styles appear regularly. Another big plus: the urban ornamental bag is no more.

At top left, the original Woolworth's (think M&S) art bag, with works commissioned from artists in the townships and the Cape Flats. Very cool until it gets creased and battered. Obviously this means lots of repurchases.

Top right: the common or garden Woolworth's fabric bag, in various shades including lime, plum, sky blue and blush pink (I once saw a male customer carrying one of the last; women in the queue were speculating somewhat maliciously ...)

Above left: Tesco equivalent Pick and Pay's nucular suitcase. I have one of these, as a completist, but have never used it.

Above right: Woolworth's Stealth heavy transport, my favourite bag, and, I fancy, the most stylish: note the military-style ribbing and the fluted shape. Toughened fabric, holds a week's groceries plus your library books. Indestructible.

What's hot

2006-08-04T20:18:00.000+02:00

What is up with this wall-to-wall Paris Hilton mania? The girl who's famous for being ... famous. It is quite clear that she is utterly gormless, yet she's on every red carpet and redtop. "That's hot," is her catchphrase; indeed it seems to be the limit of what passes for conceptual thought in her pretty little head. I've just seen a report that someone asked her what she thought of Tony Blair. Well, he's not hot. Her response was "Who?" and after a little explanation, "Oh yeah, he's like, your president? Uh, I don't even know what he looks like." Whatever.

Of course, without Paris, and her fucked-up friend Nicole, E! Entertainment TV would be somewhat short of "material". Paris was also asked -- perhaps by the same wicked British interviewer, which showbiz icon she would like to be. The answer: "Marilyn Monroe mixed with Princess Diana." That explains the worldbeating pout. But she can't do smoulder like Diana. Paris just isn't hot enough.

I must stop watching E!

French leave

2006-07-31T21:50:00.000+02:00

I am just snuggling down to watch Le Rayon Vert, one of the EIGHT Eric Rohmer films in a box set I picked up cheap at HMV in the West End. Rohmer's movies absorb you into a benevolent conspiracy; it's like you're sitting at the next table to those two lovers arguing in a Parisian cafe. I started with L'Ami de mon Amie (My Girlfriend's Boyfriend) last week, which is about nothing more than the title promises, but manages to raise all sorts of subtle moral dilemmas in the way we relate to others. That is Rohmer's genius. I won't review them right now, except to say that I feel like I just rediscovered a great bunch of friends. How on earth did we manage before DVDs?

Mean machine

2006-07-28T20:55:00.000+02:00

How difficult can it be to purchase, stock and maintain a sweet-vending machine? We have one in our office next to the watercooler and the microwave, around which vile vapours swirl. There used to be a coffee machine, but it croaked after six months, all its arteries clogged. There's also a Coke machine which seems to be lurking uneasily waiting for customers.

Anyway, about this sweet-vending machine: I suspect the bean counters bought it as a reconditioned unit from the Seventies. The choc bars and other comestibles are inserted into metal coils. When you put your coins into the slot, the coils turn and slowly expel your chosen bar, which then falls a long way to land with a thump like a suicide in a kind of trough. You then have to rummage around in this filthy recess to find your bar which is, natch, broken. All this is on a good day. In practice, several odd problems tend to thwart the purchaser.

1. The person who packs the coils has a policy of using up the old stuff while pushing the latest overstocked items from the canteen. So if you want, say, a mint Aero, you may find the new stock queued up behind a plain brown Aero and, say, a Mars bar. WTF? as they say.

2. The machine has a mercurial disposition when it comes to accepting coins. One two-rand piece might be accepted, the next declined. And so on. Or it takes the money -- and doesn't record the fact ...

3. OK, let's say the conditions are right, your payment is registered in the little display, and the bar of your desiring is available at the front of the coil. You press the tit. The coil slowly unwinds like a satiated snake; and jams with your Aero poised above the chasm.

This is where it gets interesting. Some people swear and shoulder-charge the machine. Others try to shake loose their choc. This is sheer macho overreach; the machine weighs tons, apparently. Yet others bang on the glass. Nothing ever works. You have to get on the blower to the canteen manager.

You report that the machine has eaten your money but failed to deliver on its side of the bargain. After a couple of hours, she comes down and says: "Who was trying to get a green Aero?" You trot up, get the once-over and finally the machine is unlocked and you are given an Aero. If you haven't gone for lunch or died..

I say again: How difficult can it be to purchase, stock and maintain a sweet-vending machine? And hasn't the technology progressed at all in the past, say, 50 years?

Let us pray ...

2006-07-28T20:25:00.000+02:00

That no one ever explains the problem here to the Christian Union bookshop chain.

Living with the enemy

2006-07-22T14:11:00.000+02:00

I'm beginning to think that work stress is nothing to do with the actual work, and instead the result of spending eight or more hours a day in the company of people you can't stand. That's more time than I ever spent on average per day with my wife or partners, or even my daughter.

I keep my head down in the trenches these days, instead of succumbing to my instinct to go over the top with guns blazing. The last great battle resulted in a page editor fleeing the office in tears, a savage stand-up row with the chief sub, disciplinary charges, legal appeals and permanent no-speaks with the deputy editor.

There are several really annoying people in my office. The aforementioned chief sub is gratingly shrill under pressure, admits she has no life outside the office and really seems not to relate to other people or have any idea that they might have feelings of their own. Feelings are not her bag. My approach now is, to hell with it.

But an inexorable drip-drip of stress remains. Administered by a woman with whom I used to have regular bouts of snarling hand-to-hand fighting. Having inflicted a provocation or started an argument, her tactic was to keep up a rapid-fire defence of her position. Any attempt to respond was met with a loud "Let me finish!" So one could either insist on interrupting the flow or just take the medicine.

This year, a strange transformation took place. She started breezing in to work, greeting each colleague by name, inquiring as to their welfare, personal lives and tribulations (as a compulsive nosy parker with a line to the management). But it was obvious to me and everyone else that the insistent bonhomie was entirely insincere. Who whistles while they work, for God's sake? I find myself gritting my teeth as she inquires about my weekend or my health -- and the reason is that I know she doesn't care and dislikes me intensely. At first I assumed she was on some powerful mood drug or anti-depressant. But her approach reminded me of something: the techniques described in How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie, the bible of Rotarians everywhere. Anyone who has read that know that it is a paean to insincerity, indeed falsity, from start to finish.

I think it's time I read Sun Tzu's Art of War.

PS: in case anyone thinks I have a problem working with women, it's simply a numerical disparity. My fellow senior colleagues are almost all women. And I enjoy professional relationships based on mutual respect with most of the others.

The show must go

2006-07-16T20:14:00.000+02:00

I went to see a play by a bunch of amateurs at my local little theatre and was astounded at the high standard of performance. It was one of those really sharp bittersweet comedies about three sisters meeting in their mother's house prior to her funeral. It's played out in mom's bedroom with the coffin in the corner. This is a contemporary English play with very cutting, funny dialogue and superb characterisation. It was so superior to the fare we were reduced to in my amateur theatrical days that I am tempted to get involved again.

Then I remember the hotbed of sexual pursuit, jealousy and the brandishing of bigger egos than Tom Cruise that got into full swing after the latest play had been chosen (this process itself an orgy of political backstabbing that would have appalled Machiavelli). And the kind of plays we could afford or get permission for without royalty payment were fairly creaky.

I was lured in by a talented ingenue who subsequently became my wife. The marriage only had two acts, alas. My first role was as a police constable, Lewis to the Inspector Morse of a very bad ham actor called Jack who regarded learning lines as an irritating detail.

One night we did the play in a community centre without a set except for the furniture. "Draw the curtains, Nash," ordered the inspector, despite pre-performance approaches imploring him to omit the line. I knew I was made for the stage when I turned, very slowly and theatrically shrugged my shoulders, and drew imaginary curtains at the rear of the stage. Jack was comically disconcerted at the laugh that greeted this, since he hadn't seen the business. And my exit drew applause. I was hooked.

This play also featured a misfiring gun, a common nightmare for props people. The Hungarian playing an English lord in the shooting scene clicked the hammer a few times as he tried to put a bullet through Inspector Jack, and finally shouted "Bang!"

I read an anecdote somewhere about a more creative solution when this happened in the West End. The actor playing the victim engaged in a brief struggle, whispering to the wouldbe killer: "Kick me up the arse!" When the other obliged, he staggered back crying "Aaagh ... the toe of the boot ... was poisoned!" and fell to the floor.

In an Emlyn Williams play called Trespasses, I played an Italian medium called Saviello, who is basically a victim of his powers and at the climax of the play falls back dead in his chair during a seance. The curtain came swishing across the stage and closed, I started to leap from the chair ... and the stage manager at that moment, inexplicably, reopened the curtains. This early version of "corpse suddenly comes back to life for cheap scare" earned a shriek from the audience before I fell back, fully dead again. That's the beauty of stage cockups in the amateur scene: people think it's all part of the script.

Because I could do accents and was very intense , with a huge appetite for scenery-chewing, perhaps to do with the tradition of drinking port in the dressing room before the performance (I have never had port before or since), I got some pretty juicy parts: Danny the psycho in Emplyn Williams's Night Must Fall (he had a head in a hatbox), for which I did a South Wales accent, fell for my co-star, much to the chagrin of her husband, who expelled me from a rehearsal in his house ... and I nearly killed her in the climactic scene one night, as she made her entrance. I was supposed to have a chair aloft but stay my hand when I saw who it was. I lost my balance and the chair came down hard enough to brain her. Her terror had never been more convincing ... I got an offer to turn pro on the strength of that performance. How different my life could have been: sitting in the canteen at the Space theatre with all the other umemployed thespians swapping info about parts available in crowd scenes.

There was the sex farce Hot and Cold in All Rooms, about the various denizens of a boarding house. I was a south London car salesman, and got to do a love scene with the luscious landlady in my pyjamas. My wife, knowing my dedication to the Method, sewed the fly shut. She hadn't enjoyed living with Danny the psycho killer the last time out. There was a drunk scene in this play involving most of the younger members of the cast. We got drunker every night, until the occasion when I crashed into the scenery. I remember this play very fondly for a sex scene involving a beautiful wanton called Jo, who stripped to wispy undies as several of us watched from the wings. We enjoyed it, but it caused a bit of a stir in the small town where I lived.

Well, must dash. Have to find a performance piece for the audition. Trippingly off the tongue and all that.

Michaela and me

2006-07-13T18:08:00.000+02:00

So my Pilates instructor is chatting away about the various shortcomings of life in South Africa as she painfully stretches my hammies, glutes and other innocent bits of string that hold me together. "I have this client Michaela who's a TV presenter and she says she loves it, but ---"

"Hang on, you mean Michaela Strachan?" I say, forgetting my pain.

"Yes, I didn't know she was anyone well known till I told my husband and he said she's FAMOUS," Justine giggles. "Elephant Diaries hadn't started by then. And you know what she told me?
She's allergic to elephants!"

Sadly, I'm not likely to meet Michaela because she goes to the posh Constantia studio and I go to the one near my house.

Justine has also stretched the glutes of Rutger Hauer, who she says is a really nice guy, and done some neck work on an actress (not famous)I saw in a play the other evening. I ought to pump her for blog fuel, but it isn't easy when you're crunching your abs.

Still, Pilates does bring you into contact with a better class of fitness fanatic.

Lays of Ancient Dave

2006-07-08T21:08:00.000+02:00

I have of late, but wherefore I know not, been haunted by earworms of childhood chants and songs. They're particularly annoying because I only seem to remember snatches and opening phrases. Does anyone else know this one:

One fine day in the middle of the night
Two dead men got up to fight
Back to back they faced each other
Drew their swords and shot each other.

There may be more, but I can't recall. Another one goes:
"Ask your mother for sixpence
to see the big giraffe
with spots over his body
and pimples on his ---
ask your mother for sixpence ..."
and so on through the bestiary, skilfully avoiding the naughty rhyme.

Then there was the spiteful "Adam and Eve and Pinch Me ..." accompanied by a pinch.

My daughter and granddaughters all had rhythmic skipping chants, which I think are traditional and passed down from mother to daughter. They were fascinating, but I can't for the life of me remember any of them. Perhaps readers can?

Digging the dirt

2006-07-02T19:23:00.000+02:00

I became a pornographer at 14. I am prompted to share this unappetising confession with my reader by the current moral panic in Britain (and isn't there always one?) over the pornification of the mainstream and how young minds should be protected from absorbing the objectification of women by putting Maxim on the top shelf, banning, etc.

The fact is that the more difficult it is for young lads to get hold of porn, the harder they will try (sorry) to obtain it. At 14, I was a member of the most sexually oppressed class of one of the most repressive countries in history. Sex, what was it like? I wondered feverishly, prefiguring a Monty Python character. Its very cloistering drove my sloshing hormones into great swells. Clearly, wanking, being freely available, had to be a very inferior substitute. I was ravenous. There was nothing for it but to write my own. Indeed, I believe my porn story was my first piece of creative writing, which tends to affirm the link between sexual repression (see Harold Bloom) and poetry, which I began writing at 15.

The tale of lust was, necessarily, almost entirely imagined, drawn from wild speculation and boasting in the schoolyard, my mother's bookshelf and so on. We were very backward at 14 then ... I showed my best friend this grubby effort, written on paper from a school exercise book, and he begged piteously to be allowed to keep it for a while. It was only by accident that a month or so later I discovered the class cynic had been flogging copies all around the school. It was my first experience of royalty theft.

The point is, even if you don't mention the porn, this mix of sexual hunger and verboten thrill will always have the young stalking through the undergrowth of libido. Purdah has precisely the reverse effect to what is intended. I think the Danes have it right. Get everything out in the open and exorcise the power of the porn industry, along with the appalling attitudes towards women that it promotes.

I am not referring here to the really disturbing trend of sexualising children with junior thongs and the like. That is altogether a different issue, one of amoral commercial exploitation aided by parents so desperate to be thought cool (which they cannot be) that they have abandoned common sense.

Fleurs du mal

2006-06-25T20:53:00.000+02:00

In South Africa, suffering from one of the highest rates of violent crime in the world, people don't just want to catch evildoers. They want to make them suffer, and have come up with inventive ways of doing so . The photograph depicts a rare instance of the now vanishing Eina Ivy (translated: Ouch! Ivy). This decorative product of the booming home security industry looks like ivy, but in fact it is metallic, and conceals sharp spikes to penetrate the hand of the unwary wall scaler.

I think it has probably been banned, like the anti-hijack car flamethrower invented by a Mr Charl Fourie, which was designed to shoot gouts of fire up alongside the doors and crisp the gun-toting robbers as they loomed up at the windows.

I am not sure of the current status of Rapex, the vagina dentata device worn internally and designed (by a woman) to bite down on a rapist's knob. Forced to seek treatment, he would be instantly identifiable as a sex attacker.

The Independent Online reports: "The ... device is inserted into the vagina by a woman who feels she is at risk of rape, and if she is attacked, small burr-like teeth will attach themselves to the tip of the rapist's erect penis, inventor Sonette Ehlers explains. As he withdraws and becomes flaccid, it is only possible to remove the device by surgery, Ehlers said ahead of a launch and demonstration at Kleinmond near Cape Town."

A demonstration?

In fact, the high rate of carjacking is at least partly due to the efficacy of antitheft devices on today's vehicles: immobilisers, alarms and steering wheel locks. It's easier to just get it while it's hot: buy yourself an AK-47 for about twenty quid, station yourself near a traffic light in an isolated spot, and wait.

And the high walls favoured by suburbanites actually facilitate crime, since perpetrators are invisible to passersby once over them.

I have no burglar alarm, and my walls aren't high. I do have burglar bars on the windows and a Trellidor -- a concertina-type steel gate -- and an intercom for callers. My car has an immobiliser (electronic engine disabler). These measures are considered antediluvian. What, no motion sensors, spotlights, electronic alarms or "rape gates"? (The chilling name is given to interior concertina doors that seal off the bedroom areas from the rest of the house. As it happens, I don't need a rape gate ... I hope)

I have had two car breakins and have been mugged at knifepoint, and there is nothing I could have done about any of it. I am relying on statistical probabilities to support my feeling that I have had my share of victimhood.

Early riser

2006-06-25T19:21:00.000+02:00

Proteas, the hardiest and best known species of our Cape floral kingdom, are now beginning to emerge in their full glory, as we pass the winter equinox. This early riser was photographed high on the mountain at Silvermine Nature Reserve, in the far south of the Cape Peninsula (and about 15 minutes drive from my house). Proteacious flowers, in their infinite variety, will soon be opening all over the Table Mountain chain.

Floating away

2006-06-18T13:15:00.000+02:00

Despite its worthy intentions, is Memoirs of a Geisha a glorified chick flick? I ask because until my date last night indicated a preference for it, I had marked it down as one not to see. Despite the obvious brilliance of director Rob Marshall (whose Chicago was electrifying), the film is curiously flat, although mostly watchable, thanks to the moody, evocative cinematography. The action progresses through the elements -- at first drenched in rain, then building up to the fire of passion and finally resolving amid cherry blossoms in the spring air.

But I subsided into a fitful doze round about the middle; it is just too long and the voice-over of the memoirist too languid, the Desperate Housewives narrator on Valium. The movie eschews the vivid possibilities in the merciless training of the geisha, the artist of the floating world, for a protracted love story, shades of Madame Butterfly. Because of this soft-pedalling, the engineering of female submission is given a kind of cultural pass. No doubt Marshall wanted to tell the story without passing judgement, but that has created a certain detachment from its subject.

Plus points for set design (pre-war Japan) and wonderful lighting. Minus points for the most jarring element: supposedly Japanese characters -- although Chinese actors take two or three leading roles -- speaking English, ranging from almost unintelligible to that artificial-sounding Americanese dubbed on to non-English films. I suppose getting the Chinese cast members to speak Japanese might have been a bit difficult, but then again, hiring box office-friendly Zhang Ziyi and Li Gong was a commercial decision and rather gutless.

Tarantino's bastards

2006-06-13T18:39:00.000+02:00

The wave of ultra-violent British films that arguably began with Guy Ritchie's Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels reaches its nadir in The Business (2005), a bloody celebration of greed, brutality, misogyny and murder, not to mention a paean to the worst excesses of Thatcher's Britain. Directed by an unpleasant, dead-eyed poseur called Nick Love, it follows the exploits of a bunch of south London gangsters on the Costa del Sol over the period 1983-1989.

The Brutalist wave, imitated in miniature by the happy-slappers on cellphone screens, owes its beginnings, of course, to the happy-slappy violence of Quentin Tarantino's films, in particular Reservoir Dogs. But Tarantino is a brilliant dialogue writer, whatever his amoral take on mayhem. There is humour and there is heart, even if only as pathos in his most repellant characters.

The Business is the kind of film Tarantino might make after a prefrontal lobotomy. Its only stab at humour is a scene where the likely lads test bulletproof jackets by shooting at each other. And it is a film without a heart; indeed, it is heartless in the worst sense of the word.

The plot is the old standby, new kid Frankie (Danny Dyer) taken under the wing of a thug called Charlie "the Playboy" (Tamer Hassan), becomes as depraved as the rest; and is finally triumphant, punching out a dead mobster's wife he's been having an affair with and driving off in her car with the hood's money. On the voice-over he boasts: "I got it all, the money, the girl and I rode off into the sunset too."

Women in this movie are either harpies or bitch whores. The most graphic violence in the film is inflicted on a woman who objects to the duo ripping off her guy's coke consignment. Charlie "the Playboy", whom we are expected to indulge as a wide boy with a heart, punches her into a bloody pulp and finally smashes her face in with his boot.

The only really scary character is the psychopathic Sammy, played by Geoff Bell, who I understood to be a former armed robber. Danny Dyer's Frankie is a one-note performance. That goes for his irritating voice-over narration too. Wearing a kind of sour moue, he is never convincing as a thug or a lover (well, there is only one actual and rather perfunctory sex scene, fully clothed). As the director explains, these are "the boys". Yes, the kind of boys, bright with avarice and aggression, who moved into the financial markets in Thatcher's boom time.

Not for nothing does Love conduct an interview beneath a portrait of the Blessed Margaret with a Union Jack hairdo. He tells us that his main concern was to ensure the designer goods and bling were accurate for the period. Nick loves the Eighties. And he says he has a very good memory of the things, like Filo and Adidas sportswear, that characterised the "greed is good" era. The film's look is that of a Cinzano commercial, lovingly lit, sun-burnished, with glittering azure pools, glowing tans, dazzling whites and splashes of primary colours.

The producer declares in the "Making of" documentary that this movie is going to help bring the Eighties back. There isn't any doubt about where this lot stand on that.

Love reveals in an interview with Film Focus that his intended audience is 18- and 19-year-old youths. He dismisses any notion that he is encouraging the kind of pointless yob violence that is distressing Brits right now. But in a very real sense he is validating a culture of random cruelty, kicks for kicks. I have an uneasy feeling that it probably elicited a lot of mindless laughs in the cinema. And it won plaudits from several critics, including one in the Observer, which is very discomfiting. I shan't be subjecting myself to Love's previous offering, The Football Factory (2004).

The Business is not the business. It is a very nasty piece of work.

Sick notes

2006-06-12T10:12:00.000+02:00

It's almost worth my current debilitated state to be able to have a sickie on a Monday. In short, I was woken by the painful twanging of every muscle in my lower torso and legs, weak as water and with stomach cramps. Good enough for me. Too sick for work, not for blogging.

Shortly I shall journey to my doctor's magnificently dilapidated Victorian mansion beside the sea. My doctor is an unusual representative of the medical profession: conducts his surgery (mostly impoverished fishermen and other deprived people) with a fag between his lips, and often just gives medicine away from his cabinet of samples. He's a well known poet and a commentator on architecture in his real life, not to mention a dab hand at the violin. His home is a museum of art treasures and antiques, and his sustenance is spent on horn gramophones and 78 shellacs of operatic music. He is a qualified psychiatrist of the Jungian bent, and gives his services at a rundown state hospital. There aren't many doctors like this left.

There is no NHS here, and my experience of Britain's (although I think it a Good Thing) was somewhat mixed. When my regular GP retired, his practice fell into the hands of a band of female doctors with some kind of agenda. They weren't keen on treating members of the male persuasion, seemingly regarding us as an unwanted inheritance. When my double pneumonia was dismissed as flu until it was too late (I ended up with pleurisy), I began to sense this agenda might just be injurious to my health. I found a new GP who was thoughtful and caring, but was unfortunately misdiagnosed as having a hiatus hernia when in fact I was suffering from angina. My heart attack took place, rather satisfyingly, at my desk, making my employers feel rather guilty. After a spell in hospital I was pronounced OK, but as it turned out, I wasn't. Found myself on an emergency ward bed with a panicking consultant at my side (she'd sent me away).

The triple bypass at Barts treated me to the NHS at its best. A crack surgeon who did a first-class zipper, sympathetic nurses, tremendous op aftercare, including a physiotherapist. The last consultant I saw before setting out on my own, armed with a fitness programme, was a Russian. "David," he pronounced, "your arteries are in better than new situation." And they're still letting me run up hills without a murmur of complaint, 15 years later.

Now I must hobble off to Doctor Phil (yes, really).

The education of the idle

2006-06-06T21:10:00.000+02:00

In my continuing attempts to avoid tackling the knotty second draft of my screenplay, I have resorted to watching the television. Usually I limit my viewing to Lost, Desperate Housewives and the odd bit of sport (currently the tennis), but this past few days my evenings have been spent sunk in the recliner, remote to hand, flicking through 50 channels of shite, mainly. I have learnt a few things that are of absolutely no practical use and now intend to share them.

1. Most interesting discovery: the very funny boys' own series called Mythbusters, in which an odd couple of very entertaining American techies puncture various urban myths by subjecting them to rigorous -- and occasionally explosive -- scientific testing. Thus I found out that when your lift plunges out of control, jumping in the air as it hits the concrete will not prevent your being mushed. This was established by finding a disused lift and shaft, resuscitating same and constructing a giant pogo stick on which a dummy was placed. The lift's brakes and other safety features were disabled and it was duly sent plunging to the basement. If the theory panned out, "Buster" the dummy would bounce upward at the moment of impact and "survive". He bounced -- at 15omph ... result, total dismemberment. It was a splendid smash-up though.

2. Manhattan real estate agents have offices done out like the court of the Sun King, where young women preen and bitch and swoon over guys, but never show any properties to anyone -- at least not in the first two episodes of the ditzcom Hot Properties, which is to Sex and the City as an estate agent is to Mother Theresa. This truly dreadful assemblage of unlikely setups , improbable characters and heavily recycled one-liners is produced by the creators of Roseanne, which seems even more improbable. There may be a good series to be made about ritzy Manhattan real estate agents, but this isn't it. It is an act of supreme optimism and wanton cruelty by our main pay channel to buy this turkey and inflict it on us until it expires from a surfeit of nail polish.

3 In the pointless movie Final Cut, Robin Williams's progressive minimalism, honed by his grimly reductive roles in Photo Shop and Insomnia, finally succeeds in erasing the biggest personality on the big screen. Robbo plays a "cutter" -- someone who takes the place of the undertaker in some very dark future where people's memories are recorded bya chip in their brains and edited (cut) together for a final movie after they go belly up. There's some kind of message wafting around about experiencing the real world instead of the TV one, but it never gets anywhere. Williams gets shot dead for being a hack, basically. Avoid.

4. The mysterious and rather sinister Hanso Foundation, which apparently built and staffed the bunkers on the Lost island for the "experiment" has a website. By all means pay a visit and expect nothing but circular non-explanations and some very annoying music. Oh, and an orangutan.

5. For this year's French Open, the ravishing Maria Sharapova (we are not worthy!) settled on a fetching ensemble of pink Stevie Nicks-type dress and canary yellow hotpants. Perhaps her design consultant has been watching the Oscars. Mind you, that girl could wear anything and get away with it as far as I am concerned. Tragic that she was knocked out by the very butch and snarly Dinara Safina, sis of the equally butch and snarly Marat Safin. Oh well, come on Vaidisova!

Time and the city

2006-06-03T19:31:00.000+02:00

Long Street is my favourite street in Cape Town. It runs the length of the central city from the old Turkish Baths near the foot of the mountain to the intersection with the modern highway system that leads out of the city to the Atlantic Coast. Walking in Long Street is time travelling. Its old Victorian buildings, lovingly preserved and featuring yards and yards of ironwork "broekie lace" (pantie lace) decoration on their upper verandahs rub up against some of the city's trendiest discos clubs and cafes, which come and go with changes of fashion; sit cheek by jowl with tiny Edwardian bookshops, antique sellers, junk emporiums and a new crop of backpacker establishments. It's a busy street, narrow and therefore one way only, taking the traveller to the junction of Kloof, the street of high-class restaurants that climbs the lower slope of the mountain; and the route to De Waal Drive above the city and thence to the motorways south. But by night it becomes a de facto pedestrian mall as clubbers, pubbers and other visitors stream to its neon pleasure palaces. At right, the tiny, perfect city mosque finds itself in the shadow of late twentieth-century concrete parking garages. This is the shape of things to come for Long Street. Up to now the little shop owners have clung to their emporiums of the arcane as rents have risen. But now as they finally close their doors, the excavators and demolishers are building a new, chrome, glass and concrete Long Street. This is to serve not only the tourists but the many well-heeled Capetonians who are returning to live in the heart of the city, as the magnificent edifices that once housed great finance and insurance institutions become plush apartments and loft spaces. Their former owners are leaving for the fashionable, crime-free Waterfront, or the Highveld skyscraper suburb of Sandton that bears down on old Johannesburg's flank. Much of this development is being undertaken by filthy rich Irish builders, bent on reviving what they call "the Old Town". The renaissance of the abandoned corporate fortresses is to be welcomed, but the old town I know and love will live on in the crannies of this prosperous "lifestyle" precinct.

Evil eye

2006-05-29T20:33:00.000+02:00

The plot of the Pang Brothers film The Eye (Gin Gwai) can be summarised as: blind girl sees dead people with someone else's corneas. It is a well-worn theme: transplanted body part has a mind of its own (or its previous owner's). Still, Oxide and Danny Pang marry a superb visual sense with an atmospheric sound track to create chilling apparitions and nightmarish scares. The film is apparently to be Hollywoodised soon, and I can't help thinking that this will probably improve on the shortcomings of the original. This is the ultimate point-of-view movie, but the Pangs cheat: in one jarring scene, they cut away from the heroine's spectral visions to the parents of a dead kid she has been seeing, in order to do a little exposition -- an amateurish lapse. In addition, Angelica Lee as the haunted Wong Kar Mun is an entirely passive participant, required merely to react with her very expressive eyes. Dialogue is lame in parts and the casting leaves much to be desired: her shrink looks about 12, and is presumably a Hong Kong heartthrob. Other characters are mostly cardboard, although the actual spooks are hairraisingly good. The film's big money payoff is the explosion of a toppled petrol tanker in traffic, toasting everyone except our heroine (and shrink/boyfriend), who sees the souls marching off and runs up and down trying improbably to get everyone to flee the scene. Kept me watching and is always visually arresting: action often happening almost off-screen, hinting at much worse things hidden. And the editing is rapidfire, suggestions of enormity built by quick cuts from, for example, bare feet hovering inches above the floor, a ghastly mirror reflection, a wheelchair grinding down a strobing corridor ... some of the tingling intensity of this stuff reminded me of David Lynch's Twin Peaks.

This was also the week I settled down to watch the recommended Life on Mars, and it has been extremely enjoyable. The writers freely admit they wanted to bring back The Sweeney and the period, mid-to-late 70s, is evoked in loving detail. Where did they find all those grimy, slimy bleak alleys and rotting buildings? John Simm is very fine as the time-travelling/comatose 21st-century copper plunged into a policing culture unclouded by issues of suspect's rights or moral minefields, and, of course, no familiarity with CSI as we know it. Simm's sparring partner, DCI Gene Hunt, is a great turn by the splendidly gritty Philip Glenister, but the character is stereotyped. John Thaw's Chief Inspector Reagan lit up the screen. Perhaps Hunt will be better fleshed out before the end of the eight episodes (I have two to go).

The director apparently wanted to summon the hard-faced look of Get Carter, but Mike Hodges has nothing to worry about. I like the look of Life on Mars, but it doesn't abrade me or prepare me to flinch.

Still and all, this is good TV, I have enjoyed it and am looking forward to the last two eps.

Other recent viewing: Mission: Impossible III, a welter of CGI action linked by a McGuffin and little else. Tom Cruise is really past his sell-by date. He is starting to grate on me.

The Squid and the Whale, which has been acclaimed as a deeply emotional experience, is a cold film (which suits the material), and seems to end at a random point. Good character work by Jeff Daniels and Laura Linney as divorcing parents, and Jesse Eisenberg and Owen Kline are even better as their conflicted sons. Absorbing, but there's no must-see here.

Finally, at Forbidden Planet during my London jaunt, I picked up a no-budget indie SF movie called Primer, written and directed by Shane Carruth, a geeky genius (who also plays one of the two leads). Two keen garage inventors come up accidentally with a time travel device while working on superconductors -- and then find themselves "way over their heads" as things get very complicated, with scenes repeated but modified by changes wrought in the future. The dialogue is rapid and not well-recorded (as the director admits), making all this difficult to follow, but what makes it watchable is the way mundane reality presents huge moral dilemmas to those who can influence it. I am going to give it a second spin. Archeology of the Future, this one's for you.

Adventures in Mommyland

2006-05-25T19:37:00.000+02:00

This is the soaring atrium of the posh Cavendish Square multistorey mall in Cape Town's southern suburbs, otherwise known as Mommyland. Here the suburban princesses and queen bees come in their giant SUVs and Mercs to shop at designer fashion stores, handcrafted furniture joints, Body Shop and the like. Waterford/
Wedgwood's grand emporium, opened with a supernova of publicity a couple of years ago, appears to have closed its doors, but business is pretty brisk in boutiques and upmarket chain outlets alike. Vida e Caffe (which I think should be Vita e Caffe) serves the best macchiato in Cape Town. And Cinema Nouveau offers us arthouse freaks eight screens. Unlike the supersized N1 City mall sited amid a wilderness of freeways outside the city, or the vast Waterfront development, which is tourist paradise, Cavendish is an ancient Cape Town institution in a class of its own, although it has been completely rebuilt for the new century.

The teeming hordes on its three shopping levels seem to grow by the day, illustrating the fact that consumer spending is at an alltime high, driven by a boom economy and gargantuan plastic debt. Perhaps because it is vertically arranged, without wide open floorspace, it's a strangely soothing place to shop, swirling with heady scents, cellphone murmurings and discreet music. Even little kids seem too blissed out to yell. Although today I saw a five-year-old wannabe gymnast performing cartwheels in Woolworths (M&S in SA) in a pink leotard. She was jolly good too. I missed the photo opportunity, sadly.

Bagfuls of therapy for someone feeling ripped from London's bosom ...

Moholy smoke, Batman!

2006-05-24T15:35:00.000+02:00

Ten years ago I left London and my job in Canary Wharf, at that time a highrise frontier town, to return to South Africa. This past 10 days or so I have been roving again in the city of my birth and have found it much changed. There are the obvious improvements: cleaner, more service- orientated, facelifted and catered for by a lot of really good restaurants; and there is a more profound shift, to a city of style and extraordinary architectural design. Both are bodied out in the Tate Modern, Pink Floyd cover art come to life. But Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, the sometime Bauhaus artist whose work is currently on show in that astonishing hall of spaces, would probably have felt himself most at home -- although perhaps rather uncomfortably -- in the gigantic geometries of the new city of Docklands, its high-gloss facades admitting nothing and reflecting everything. This is post-human design; its visitors and denizens seem incidental, beetles in a forest of monoliths. The new city is magnificent and it is completely heartless.

Appropriately, Moholy-Nagy finally settled in London and designed, among other things, the visual language of the Underground, including perhaps the city's best known logo. This was once, for me, a cursed sign, 13 years on the Northern Line sufficient explanation thereof. But here in the Tube network -- and the huge shiny fleet of buses -- Livingstone has left his mark. If the Misery Line had been like this, instead of grimy, battered and chronically delay-bound, why, I might have stayed ... I could do without Mummy patiently telling me the names of the stations though.

The tide of change seems to have left the outer suburbs high and dry. High streets in north London, from Golders Green to High Barnet, appear to be beyond our Ken. Passing through by car, I found it all much as I left it, Tesco land, wrapped in chains.

Did I have a good time? Hell yes. Thanks to the electric village of the WWW, I met some splendid blog friends, and wonderful female companions for walks on the Heath, the Tate, the theatre. And chipped and pinned my way through certain stores.

Damn it all, I miss the bloody place. So I am going to make a plan, as we say in SA. I shall straddle two worlds. More of this later. And more frequent entries.

Come, my coach

2006-05-10T19:10:00.000+02:00

There won't be much, if any blogging in these parts for the next 10 days or so -- I am jetting out of here for London and a much-needed holiday. I shall be seeing some of my fellow bloggers and am agog to see the real persona behind the mask, so to speak. Of course, as I'm leaving, the cold weather has vanished and glorious Indian summer is back. Still, I hear London is steaming a bit.

Any ideas for interesting stuff to do? I am going on a few "dates" (ahem) while in the Smoke, and apart from the theatre, which is sorted, don't have a lot of ideas (the Tate is a must, though).

Sundown, Fish Hoek

2006-05-07T19:40:00.000+02:00

I never tire of this sight as I wend my way back down Elsie's Peak, the mountain on which my house just about perches. Today was a dazzling autumn feast after a huge downpour on Friday and a rapid fall of temperature (snow forecast on the mountains at Ceres, inland from here, which means winter is definitely getting in on the act). Today my mountain hike, into a bitterly cold wind, was enlivened by falling off a rockface as I attempted to transverse it from one side to the other, inspired by having just seen the remarkable mountain survival movie Touching the Void. Couldn't they have said, "Don't try this at home"? Anyway, Slipping from a foothold, I hurtled backwards like a stunt double into a well-placed tangle of bushes, which was rather humiliating, unlike plunging into a crevasse. Refusing the attempt by a skinny jogger with a straggly moustache to drag me upright from my cradle of vegetation, I clawed back some dignity and headed home to put Dettol on my multiple scratches and nurse my wounded pride.

It was my third such fall. The first sent me sliding down a steep trail on my arse until I halted my progress by digging in a hand, breaking my thumb. The second was more painful. I fell from a ledge and landed on my backside and back a lot further down. I was very relieved that I was able to stand up after that one, because it felt like I'd been seriously injured for a few minutes. Spectacular bruising was the main damage.

I don't think I'll tackle Everest just yet.

Rejoice! Rejoice!

2006-05-06T20:02:00.000+02:00

Chelsea 3, Manchester United 0. Three-nil! Three-nil, three-nil, three-nil ...

Before the final whistle ended the visitors' public humiliation, Chelsea manager Jose Mourinho hopped over to the Man U dugout and cheekily gave unusually pale redfaced git "Sir" Alex Ferguson a handshake which, as Alan Perry remarked, "he probably didn't appreciate". But the rest of us Fergie-phobes loved it.

How sweet it was to win the championship while crushing the former strutting cocks of the Premier League. Even the sight of the demonically cherubic Roman Abramovich clapping away with a tiny half-smile couldn't dampen my cheer. This was the next best thing to Arsenal doing it. You can't have everything.

I celebrated with two big ostrich steaks for supper. Now I must e-mail Norm ...

Stupid little aerosols

2006-05-02T19:09:00.000+02:00

Victor Meldrew, you're well off out of it. I can hear him now: "Graffiti art? Self-expression? Little swine! They're like dogs widdling against a wall! I'll give them some self-expression. Can you imagine what sort of parents they have? 'Going out dear?' 'Just off to scribble on the neighbours' walls, mum.' 'OK, have fun. Need some money, or will you do a spot of mugging?.' "If I ever catch one of them I'll spray him from head to foot!"

This is my garden wall and door on the lane running past my house. My neighbour, with the yellow wall, kept on doggedly repainting. They patiently came back each time and did him again and on the third occasion did me too. Scribbling blue aerosol paint over the door to my garden was a particularly fine example of the genre. It's a disease round here. The public buildings have cameras and security guards, so residential property gets the ghetto treatment -- from wealthy pimple-faced kids in hoodies and arse-out jeans. I am going to paint my wall and then stay up for a few nights with a videocam trained on the area.

Victor,if wert thou living at this hour!

The naked pine

2006-05-02T18:40:00.000+02:00

This pine tree in Constantia Nek forest, with its root coiling down the bare rockface, is surely a remarkable testament to survival against the odds. I imagine some geological event exposed it to the world. Bet it was surprised .... Where to from here, I wonder?

Jackson bollocks

2006-04-30T19:09:00.000+02:00

So I finally see King Kong, albeit on a DVD. (I have a kickarse home theatre system, and given that Kong is long, nearly three hours, my recliner at least doesn't give you numbbum.)
It begins entrancingly, with Depression-era New York summoned up in lavish scenes of deprivation, and Naomi Watts being a brave little trouper off Broadway who queues at soup kitchens for her dinner. Indeed, her fortuitous meeting with Jack Black as the grandiloquent bullshitter and movie director (same thing?) Carl Denham convinces me I am in for a tale well told and I snuggle down happily. But this euphoria is to be crushed before the hour is out as the Ringmaster hurls wave after wave of CGI at the viewer, seemingly having conceived of a three-hour movie in advance and having to use great wodges of dinosaur filler to eke it out.

It follows the bare outline of the original Kong movie, and Naomi Watts copes exceptionally well to simulate falling in love with greenscreen. But it isn't a coherent movie, it's a few sparsely linked action sequences:

1, The tramp steamer falling foul of the glistening black rocks of Skull Island and the locals, a cross between voodoo shamans and refugees from Michael Jackson's Thriller (hmm, Jackson).

2. The encounter of the brave little trouper and Kong, who subsequently run off together. He's
a lovable bastard type, well rendered by Andy Serkis, who has grown a lot since being Gollum.

3. The dinosaur hoohaa, which is where I finally subsided into resentful endurance mode. It is not being believable even in the context of fantasy, with human beings running between the treetrunk legs of stampeding saurians yet somehow not all being squished. Or a man being cleansed of giant cockroaches by machine-gun fire without catching a few bullets.

4 The capture of Kong. I started laughing when the first bottle of chloroform was hurled. I doubt it woult take just three pints to KO a 25-foot ape, even if he inhaled all of it. Another sequence without credibility.

5. The escape of Kong and the trashing of New York as he is reunited with his very durable beloved. The biplane attack on the top of the Empire State building is clearly all model stuff. Thank God, the big lug finally succumbs to lead poisoning. Naomi swiftly gets together with playwright Jack Driscoll (Adrien Brody), who is remarkably sanguine about being picked up by a girl on the rebound from a giant simian.

All things considered, I found this more disappointing even than Lord of the Rings, which was based on some fairly crappy novels and never rose above the material. It fell way short of the savage innocence of the original King Kong, which I am fond of.

CGI has a place in films, but I think the capacity of the audience to suspend disbelief has long been exceeded. No matter how lavishly it is used, it cannot hide the paucity of story and character, and the law of diminishing returns is now being applied; Kong's box office fell well short of projections, and there's a message there. Of course, DVD sales will put a better face on the figures, but the fact is that the film cost $207m to make (and would have cost about $100m to market). It has grossed $218m in North America in a total of $519m worldwide (latest available). Spider-Man, in contrast, cost an estimated $139m to make (add $80m for marketing) and took $115m opening weekend alone, going on to gross $403m in North America and $827m worldwide (all 2002 figures). Even allowing for inflation, there's only one dog in that fight.

But will Hollywood learn? Not if the trailer stuff for Mission Impossible III is anything to go by. $150m shelled out so far (marketing, I'd guess another $100m). Expect this to be front-end loaded (huge number of theatres, maximum opening weekend push). And then we'll see -- well, those of us who enjoy watching Hollywood throw its money in the air and dance around trying to catch it, that is.

Motorway madness

2006-04-28T19:41:00.000+02:00

Although Cape Town was one of the first South African cities to construct a freeway network, it was eccentrically designed, with unconventional touches here and there that make driving an unpredictable experience, such as occasional entry ramps from the right in a country that drives on the left. The most inspired piece of lunacy is one I have to negotiate every day. Not only does it feature an on-ramp from the right (thus having motorists entering via the fast lane or trying to) but it has a confluence where a two-lane highway (which I use) enters the freeway proper (mercifully from the left). This would be unexceptional were it not for the fact that the meeting point is about 150 metres from a split in the freeway, with the two leftmost lanes peeling on to the airport road (N2) and the two rightmost (the M3) ploughing straight ahead through the suburbs and out to my coastal refuge.

So immediately you gain entry to the freeway from the highway, you must immediately move across two fast-moving lanes to lanes 3 and 4 -- while many other drivers already in the two right lanes are frantically attempting the reverse. Apparently there used to be a road sign at this point which said: "Weave". And that is what you do.

Amazingly, after the first few bouts of terror at the wheel, you get used to it. Providentially, for every driver seeking to weave to the M3, there seems to be another wishing to sashay into the N2. Still, no sooner have you reached the sanctuary of lane 4 than the on-ramp from the right looms -- and the traffic on it, driven by necessity, is travelling faster than you are. Many drivers then dice for the right of way, with sometimes painful results, or simply don't see their nemesis homing in.

On Tuesday, pelting rain was added to the mix. This meant both the highway and the freeway were packed with vehicles and changing lanes was simply a gamble. It was misty, yet most of the idiots didn't have their lights on, or thought parking lights would do. Do they think they're saving electricity? It certainly didn't inhibit their taste for excessive speed.

Anyway, as I tried to see the way ahead while checking my side mirror for an opening, the large SUV in front of me, attempting a similar manoeuvre, was forced to slam on the brakes as selfish sods ploughed past on our right, stranding the cars in our lane. I whacked the SUV very hard indeed trying to brake. Result, total chaos as our lane now became a no-go zone. The nice lady in the SUV had a very large umbrella (the golfing kind) and dashed to my window, to exchange details. Damage to SUV: nil. Damage to VW Polo: shattered light and battered bumper. Damage to my day: total. Cost of new light (the whole fitting): ridiculous. But just enough to fall below the policy exclusion level.

I was hoping to get a photo of the piece de resistance of our idiosyncratic roads network, the Freeway Interchange to Nowhere that rears over our Foreshore like an ambitious sculpture, rods sticking out of the end bit where abandonment took place. But there seem to be none available, as if it is too shameful to expose to the world. I shall take one myself.

Why was it never finished? No one seems to be sure. There is now talk of completing the job as we become a "world city", indeed the city council is still asserting on its website that it will be finished before the International Conference Centre opens, which was in 2003, actually. It is a popular location for action movie shoots, so it does bring in a bit of revenue. Grand plans are a great Cape Town tradition. They make a headline or two and then everyone sensibly forgets about them. Capetonians are like old hippies, still yarning about the same utopian visions but couldn't be arsed to try to realise them.

Completely Lost

2006-04-24T10:45:00.000+02:00

Some unaswered questions – and a few speculative answers -- about Lost , with NO spoilers for Brit viewers:

1. What is the point of Hurley, the fat dude, apart from his "numbers"? He stands around looking uneasy most of the time, perhaps in case someone asks him where he has hidden all the Mars bars) and has never uttered one word that isn't a cliche. And how is he managing to keep the pounds on? Maybe he's some kind of demographic, since, as we all know, gargantuan obesity is now fairly common among young Americans.

2. Why, after all this time, are everyone's clothes still looking pretty crisp and clean? And where are the clean-shaven guys getting their razor blades? In fact Jack takes the trouble to maintain his designer stubble, an awesome contribution to style in adversity.

3. There are polar bears, but why are there no birds? It's a jungle, for crying out loud. Has anyone ever heard birdsong on the sound track?

4. Pretty well everyone has had a flashback, but why are some people getting lots of repeats while others appear to have been abandoned midplot? I surmise the writers have simply given up trying to follow the huge number of personal plot lines.

5. Is the island supposed to be a real place in the actual, you know, world? I mean, mysterious unseen monsters, apparitions, polar bears (again), the miraculous healing of John, who thinks the island is telling him stuff. I still reckon it is a kind of purgatory where all the survivors must atone for their sins (and we know from the flashbacks that they are all sinners).

6. Anyone have any theories -- or more questions?

For those who haven't cheated by checking Television Without Pity (shame on you), I can assure you that things just get weirder and more mysterious in season 2. There are questions I have refrained from asking because they're spoilers. Such noble self-restraint.

Creepy update: In the evil terror mastermind al-Zarqawi's video he looks the dead spit of Sayeed from Lost. Could Naveen Andrews be moonlighting?

Blogged down

2006-04-20T18:43:00.000+02:00

I'm afraid I'm having a tough time finding the inspiration to blog right now. I'm one of those people who endure occasional bouts of severe depression, when my word world fades away and the colour drains from life -- and there isn't an original thought in my echoing skull space. The writer William Styron, author of Sophie's Choice, was stricken by a deep and chronic depression at the height of his powers and was unable to write at all -- or even function -- for years. When he finally did, it was to produce a terrifying, yet very valuable account of the experience. I ain't no William Styron, and I don't have attacks that bad, but the symptoms are quite similar. I've just noticed them coming on, and hence probably my failure to blog merrily. Well, that's my excuse. People who blow children up "in self-defence" may just have lit the touchpaper.

Update: now seems as good a time as any to post the speech from Hamlet which describes the classic symptoms of depression, or melancholia, and from which this blog derives its name (and which is, of course, Withnail's finest ever performance):

I have of late -- but wherefore I know not -- lost all my mirth, forgone
all custom of exercises; and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition
that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this
most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament,
this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other
thing to me than a foul and pestilential congregation of vapours. What a
piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in
form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in
apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals!
And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust? man delights not me: no,
nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so.

Atlantic sunset

2006-04-17T17:57:00.000+02:00

The perfect signoff to the perfect Easter Saturday. A walk to the top of the mountain behind my home, where the view is a sweeping vista of the whole of False Bay and its peninsula. The wind was autumn cold and we didn't spend too long admiring the huge expanse of the Indian Ocean. Then, on the way down, this sight of the Atlantic side stopped us in our tracks again.

Gloom and doom

2006-04-15T16:33:00.000+02:00

From the first scene in a witch's seedy Moscow flat, the Russian fantasy noir Nochnoi Dozor (Night Watch) electrified me in the same way The Matrix did, rendering the mundane world a very strange new place where I could not imagine what would happen next, and couldn't wait to see it. In director Timur Bekmambetov's version, the Matrix is the Gloom, a magic-charged alternate universe superimposed on the ramshackle, decaying apartment blocks of post-Soviet Moscow and the cavernous underworld of the subway (although the St Petersburg subway was the location). Here the Others of the Light (the Night Watch) and the Dark (the Day Watch) monitor each other to maintain a balance of good and evil in the world.

The movie was shot on a budget of around $4 million and looks like $80 million. State-of-the-art CGI is deployed with bravura style around a cast of scruffy, knocked-about Others headed by the terminally resigned Konstantin Khabensky as Anton Gorodetsky, an antihero for our times. His ignoble purpose, which upsets the balance and unreels the entire scope of the action, is unveiled in that first scene, where he is enlisting the witch -- a supernatural Fifties backstreet knitting-needle abortionist -- to get his girlfriend back. The snag is she is pregnant, the witch tells him, but she can fix that (natch). As she goes into her spiel, a couple of Others, in dirty overcoats, materialise to prevent her clapping her hands to abort the baby -- while Anton stumbles into the Gloom and realises what he is. The child is the random factor that is to upset the balance. Yes, it's a pretty familiar plot, but it scarcely matters. I feasted on this movie. In the pervading state of decay and despair, you can almost smell the stale sweat. Even the vampires are crackhead squatters in an abandoned warehouse. The occasional glittering eruptions of mafia Moskva are pure adland scifi in this landscape.

It's a dazzling kaleidoscope of action -- brilliantly edited and moving at breakneck speed -- and the director never puts a foot wrong until the climax, where the need to leave a loose end to pull on for the second film (it's a trilogy) results in a bit of a fizzle.

The visual detail is fascinating and every second of it carries plot and action, whether in the images from a video game or a flicker cartoon (the kind where you flick pages to make the figures move).

The way to see this is in Russian with the subtitles. The ones on the rental DVD were bog-standard, but I understand the original movie version subtitles are highly creative in themselves.

I'm holding thumbs part 2 doesn't fall off a cliff like the Matrix sequel.

Bad Saturday

2006-04-13T19:05:00.000+02:00

Ah, Easter. One of the few holidays on which we don't publish, so it's a long weekend for me. But there'll be no taking it easy come midnight or so Friday, when merry crews will clash bits of metal and drag stuff across the road as they erect the bandstand and deploy the drinks tables and roadblock barrels for the Two Oceans marathon. This is called an "ultra" because the runners cover 56km between the Atlantic and the Indian, near which the Congregation resides. The route passes along the road below my house as it heads towards the ocean. Once the construction crews and marshals have wound up their metal bashing, around 4 or so, there's a quick sleep break for me (if I'm not pumping adrenalin). Then the real din begins at around 7, as the panting hordes are greeted along the way with very loud rock bands, cheerleaders, bellowing, clapping supporters --- most of whom seem to locate themselves near my house. This goes on until about 9 or 10, until the stragglers pass by, egged on by pissed diehards. It's a great Cape tradition. But in my house we call it a fucking nightmare.

Wigged out

2006-04-09T18:06:00.000+02:00

I have just seen what I believe must be the worst science fiction movie of the modern era. In fact A Sound of Thunder is pure essence of badness, with not a single redeeming feature, and thus can be recommended for a fun evening at home with appallingly bad dialogue, lashings of really cheap and nasty CGI and terrible acting from what is on the face of it a decent cast.

It's based on a Ray Badbury time travel story I've read, in which an outfit called Time Safaris sends rich folks looking for thrills to the Jurassic to kill dinosaurs. One steps off the "path" from the future and squashes a butterfly -- thus changing history and sending evolution in a different direction. When they return to their own time, it is already being changed by "time waves", kind of transparant tsunamis that roll over Chicago, changing it more and more radically.

The director is Peter Hyams, also responsible for the risible Schwarzenegger vehicle End of Days and the Jean-Claude van Damme stinker Timecop. His last decent movie was Outland, in 1981, with Sean Connery. Somebody must have thought Timecop was sufficient recommendation. What we get is a movie in which character is a malleable concept, plot descends into a hopeless muddle and the whole thing finally collapses and dies.

It features what must be Sir Ben Kingsley's worst performance by a very long way. He seems to have realised what a mess he is in about 10 minutes in, and tries out several ways of saying the words, all of them totally unconvincing, laughable even, augmented by bits of business, like actorly gestures that belong in some other movie. Indeed his expression, by turns uneasy and baffled, gives away his wish to be in any movie but this one. I imagine the part was originally written for a specific American actor, a blustering, wisecracking type, though I haven't worked out which one yet. The role sits on Kingsley as uneasily as his unfeasible snowy white bouffant wig, with its tall crested coif. It appears to be about to launch itself off his head, perhaps pining for some Arctic seabird colony. It is hair as performance, and the only consistent one of the film.

A haggard-looking Catherine McCormack plays the inventor of the artificial intelligence that runs the time travel trips. She opts for hardtalking bitch mode throughout and if there is meant to be something between her and the expressionless Edward Burns (phoning in his turn as the safari leader) it isn't ever discernable.

Also nonplussed about his character and indeed his motivation is the government inspector from the Department of Temporal Affairs, which sounds like a wing of the Vatican. As Chicago is overtaken by jungle and weird forms of wildlife, he remains a mildly protesting straight man for Sir Ben. With some very sulky closeups. You'd think maybe with humankind about to be extinct, the department or indeed the Feds might just have sent in reinforcements. But plot appears to have been wrenched hither and thither by various credited screenwriters and very likely some who preferred being uncredited. Alan Smithee would have been ashamed to have his name on it.

I've done my best to describe what's describable. To get the full awfulness you have to see it.
Apparently the budget was $55 million, most of it presumably spent on the hokey CGI. Hyams has form in this department: End of Days had really cheap-looking effects too. I see he's since done a TV series called Threshhold, about the discovery of an extraterrestrial craft in the ocean by the US Navy. A team of experts is assembled. Perhaps Ben Kingsley's wig got a casting call ...

Say aaaarrrgh!

2006-04-07T18:07:00.000+02:00

Great heaven, it is slain at last. This the maw of the beast that has spewed its deadly load of toxins into our newsroom these many years, a dark essence of carcinogenic printer's ink sucked from the bowels of the building. And they call it airconditioning! Today it lay grotesquely next to the fire exit, excavated from the innermost recesses of the old building. When our newsroom was given a complete makeover, only a couple of defiant voices asked why the airconditioning couldn't be replaced first. Given an either/or, the company opted for the swank, and to hell with the workers' innards. A lone crusade by an indefatigable revise sub (indefatigable is a job requirement) and threats from the health department finally won the day after a six-year battle. Spiffy and very expensive new aircon system on the way. Oh, how the beancounters are suffering today.

Return of the Native

2006-04-05T19:59:00.000+02:00

I left apartheid South Africa in 1982 as the last of its crusading newspapers crumbled around me, either beaten by censorship, run down by their accommodating owners, as in the case of the late great Rand Daily Mail, or banned outright in one case (over coverage of the Biko affair), neatly severing me from a job. I came back to the land of my birth with a sense of sadness for a life unfinished, and got down to work. In the 13 years I lived in London I knew only Tory rule. Thatcher was a history woman, overseeing the great transition to a consumer society which had no communities, just families, as she explained. I put my cross next to Labour without any particular love of socialism; they were just decent people, they had a chance of power, and that would do.

When Mandela was freed another chapter of my history opened too. By the end of 1995 I had made the great trek back, this time to ruminate in my beloved Cape and eke out a living in a media backwater. How ironic that the next great British event was the coming to power of a Labour government at last.

Now, this May, I am returning for the first time in 10 years, and it is going to be fascinating to see just what hath Labour rule wrought in my absence. Although two and a half weeks isn't a lot of time to cover all the bases, and I probably won't be spending much time cursing the Northern Line ...

It's a curious feeling: I was born in north London and left it as a child, then lived in Finchley for all those 13 years of exile; and this time I am a visitor, though hardly a tourist. I do hope I don't really fancy the old place now. I am not sure I could handle another uprooting and replanting. George Steiner believes that the writer is always in exile, and now I believe he is right. I often feel that I am occupying my own Lost island. Except I have all my bloody luggage to tote around.

London doesn't belong to me, exactly, but I belong to it, in a tenuous kind of way. This post is becoming extremely tenuous too, so I'll wrap it up. Pretty soon the Oyster will be my world ...

Looking daggers

2006-04-02T18:45:00.000+02:00

Having rented the much-acclaimed House of Flying Daggers last night, I almost switched off in disgust when I realised that it was dubbed into sort of Oriental American accents instead of Mandarin with subtitles -- and in a lousy 4:3 format to boot, the local distributor being wont to use the videotape master because of occasional release date anomalies (what is the point of pretending there are still inviolate zones?). But this was soon forgotten as I was drenched in the first lush and extravagant setpiece in the Peony Pavilion knocking shop. The sets are a sumptuous example of Chinese design aesthetic in full flower. And the dance sequence with its electrifying wraparound drum notes is easily the most breathtaking piece of choreography I have ever seen on a small screen (a rather big small screen in my house). I didn't think this could be bettered, only to be knocked about by the fight in the bamboo forest, a scene entirely in shades of green apart from the faces. Again, this is heightened by spectacular sonic effects, placing the viewer amid cracking and splintering bamboo, lashing foliage and zipping knives.

The fights outdo those in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in every respect: the editing is almost symphonic, the movement whirling, balletic, with close-ups of slow-motion savagery. The love story that propels the plot is sweet and sad. Every movement and gesture of the thwarted and feuding lovers is delicate, affecting and beautifully paced. The final duel and denouement rage through a change of seasons, autumn trees becoming fountains of white, heavy-boughed with falling, swirling snow that finally whites out the screen and its two main protagonists.

Zhang Yimou's direction is masterly. There are no gimmicks. Cuts between scenes are formal and clean. Curiously, a Japanese actor was chosen to play the romantic lead; the same kind of cultural blurring which had a Chinese actress playing the lead in Memoirs of a Geisha. Ziyi Zhang, as the rebel girl Mai, has a luminous presence. Her face conveys much with the subtlest movements, a slow raising of the eyes, a parting of the lips. In contrast, her body is lithe and mobile as a cat's, blurring through the fight scenes, and she seems to do a lot of the work herself. A considerable performance.

I guess it's obvious I loved this movie. Now for the proper widescreen collector's edition with subtitled Mandarin.

Dock of the Bay

2006-03-31T19:57:00.000+02:00

Friday evening is a good time to take a drive down the sea road to Victorian Simon's Town, its whitewashed walls gleaming in the late sun, and buy the best fish and chips in Cape Town at The Salty Seadog on the Waterfront. Then take a stroll out to the end of the jetty and watch the dusk gather.

Remaindered species

2006-03-28T20:10:00.000+02:00

White, middleaged male poet? No thanks, we're trying to give them up. About five months ago, I propositioned several publishers with my new collection of poems, thinking my brilliant originality, previous publishing record and good rep might just get someone interested. I'm still waiting. Some have pleaded a logjam of manuscripts, others say they aren't that into poetry any more. But one put it to me rather more bluntly in a reply e-mail: I have the wrong profile. I am not female, black, or beautiful, and certainly not young, and simply wouldn't work as a marketing tool. Thus the new South Africa.

Of course, many would say we've had our whack, the white male patriarchy, and should fold up our manuscripts and slink away. But any publishing sector that silences cogent voices for such reasons deserves its looming fate: good poetry is withering away here, with a few notable exceptions, mostly long-established writers that stuck around during the dark years instead of going into self-exile as I did. One thing has always been true of our poetry scene: leave the country and you might as well be dead.

So when the last publisher has sent polite regrets -- and there aren't that many who do poetry
-- I shall be faced with the option a few others have chosen, self-publishing. It isn't something I am inclined to do, for reasons of credibility, cash and a lack of spare time to become a book salesman doing the rounds of the dwindling number of outlets for verse. All that remains is magazine publishing, very unsatisfactory since they have tiny or non-existent readerships and besides, I want my body of work to have its full effect. And then of course, there is my modest blog. But even here I have a dilemma: I feel reluctant to thrust my work on my visitors in this manner, having essayed it a few times and felt uncomfortable; it feels like boasting or showing off.

I am in a very bad mood about all this. I must ponder my next move deeply. Guerrilla warfare may be inevitable. Ambushing strangers in shopping malls, targeting intense-looking girls with long hair and ankle-length dresses in the street to let them have it. Or join the buskers in the pedestrian mall where I work; God knows anything I do can't be worse than some of the crap they inflict on innocent denizens of the pavement cafe culture. All I need is a cowhide drum and I'm away.

Your captain, speaking

2006-03-26T20:15:00.000+02:00

With a bit of a start, I realised tonight that I haven't posted since Thursday. My mind has been elsewhere, on the second draft of my screenplay. This has ground to a halt as I ponder character development. Do I really want my characters to have goals of their own, as my script adviser suggests? Or do I want them thrust hither and thither at the whim of my supervillain, as at present? Think The Tempest. Except with Prospero as a right evil bastard. I'm tending to the latter course at present. It is an SF action adventure after all. The Tempest was, of course, the template for the very fine Fifties SF movie Forbidden Planet, with Walter Pidgeon as the brooding Dr Morbius (great name) and Anne Francis as his Miranda. Robbie the Robot, with his slot machine lighting effects (later nicked by S Spielberg) , whirring clanking and sonorously declaiming, does double duty as Caliban/Ariel. Leslie Nielsen, oddly in the light of his later career, plays the captain of the spaceship sent to find out what happened to the colony of the planet. If ever there was an actor born to play an airline captain it was our Les. As far as I can recall, he doesn't mug to camera once, although I can't swear to it ... anyway, where was I?

Nothing special about using The Tempest as the matrix, as many films have done. But I can't have my characters darting off to satisfy their own no doubt mundane whims and wants. So I'm pressing on with plain revision later on tonight. It's called Hurricane in Eternity, in case anyone wants to know.

All this ties in rather with Wyndham's recent posting about British SF in which he introduced his fans to the wonderful Archeology of the Future site. Which in turn reminded me of Forbidden Planet. I'm not providing the A of the F link, you'll have to go and have a look at Wyndham's place, if only because he is whingeing about his "stats". I should be so lucky as to have such a thing.

Motionless pictures

2006-03-23T12:31:00.000+02:00

At this year's Academy Awards ceremony, actors and others used the television medium to tell us to er, not watch so much television and go to the movies. Various panoramic blockbusters were cited in support of this appeal, meant to show us you can't get the full experience sitting on the couch before the little picture box. In point of fact, the studios are making their big bucks these days on DVD sales, while cinema audiences continue to decline.

I certainly agree there are films you simply have to see on the big screen -- my viewing of The Matrix was mindblowing; I doubt it would have had that kind of impact if I'd waited for the DVD. The night I went to see it with an SF addict nephew the crowds at the multiplex were heaving in the foyer and the buzz was palpable. By the time we found our seats, the adrenalin was surging. And then we all went on an amazing ride. This is the experience of film that cannot be duplicated in your home cinema, however stupendous. The director John Boorman once said it was like a communal dream, and I like that description.

The dream is fitful now, shot through with the crackle of parody-sized popcorn containers and the slurping of Coke straws, an effect rather like a few mopeds being started with some difficulty. And the constant chatter of those who have simply transplanted the TV experience into moviegoing. Not forgetting the cellphones, of course.

I was wittering on to a friend about needing to live near enough to the city to engage the culture
when she challenged me: "OK, when did you last go to the cinema?" After a bit of thought I realised it was a month or more ago. And I love the movies. The magic hasn't gone out of the films (the few good ones); it's gone out of the audience. We're media-knackered. The most enjoyable way to watch is with a cinema full of kids. My grandkids and I were totally engrossed in Pirates of the Caribbean; if I had seen it with adults in a cinema full of grown-ups, I am certain it wouldn't have been a tenth as gripping ... magical, even. Kids still have it. If Hollywood wants to get bums back on seats, that's the quality it has to rediscover. Marketing is part of the problem, not the solution.

Mi casa, su casa

2006-03-22T10:34:00.000+02:00

What's not to like?

So, not only am I not sexy and alluring, nor is my beautiful mountain home overlooking a seaside village in the stupendous Cape. An aeon or so ago I embarked on what seemed to be a brilliant idea to swap my house for a London pad when I descend on Britain in April. But several dozen queries, a raft of sultry pictures and reams of eloquent travel writing later, no such luck. Home exchangers are as numerous as wife swappers on the Internet, I discovered. But as with my sallies on Guardian Soulmates, they turn out to be a fickle bunch. Initial enthusiasm seems to fade swiftly into complete indifference. I had high hopes of a ritzy flat near the Portobello Road after an eager reply to my offer -- from a freelance shoe designer (I had no idea such exotics existed). Alas, the other shoe never dropped. An obdurate silence greeted my increasingly desperate attempts to press my suit. I was going to post a picture to show what they're missing but Blogger will no longer upload pics to my posts. So take my word for it, OK?

So now I am forced to contemplate a rented studio in leafy Willesden Green with – oh, the parsimony! The humiliation! – a coin-operated washer/dryer, among other spartan features of London fringe living.

Note: Thanks for the concern, Pash and Patro, the personal matters were urgent but not shattering. Now I have no excuse.

Bunking off

2006-03-20T21:36:00.000+02:00

Posting will be light to non-existent for a while due to unexpected personal matters to attend to.

The Fifth Season

2006-03-18T00:07:00.000+02:00

Down on the catwalk at dusk the wind brings
the first skin-tint of ice from the far south
and gulls swoop motionless in its mouth. The tide
snorts over the restaurant steps at the beach,
the rolling swells swing great clouts of spray
high against the rocks. For this small cove
in the flung arms of mountains and for you and I
my dear, a season is about to begin.

My secret history

2006-03-15T11:02:00.000+02:00

For the first time, I failed to post yesterday, for a variety of reasons of which the chief one was that I was fresh out of inspiration. Surely, I thought, my life isn't so pathetic that I can't manage one blogworthy event a day? But that, dear reader, is seemingly what it has become. I blame the social climate. Problems have become issues. Anger must be managed. "Characters" we used to love are become Prozac pussycats. Even criminals are a community. And angry characters with problems are surrounded by an impenetrable ring of shrinks, mediators and caring employers waving codes of conduct written by people who have never had an inappropriate moment in their lives.

"Inappropriate". Even uttering the word purses the prissy lips. I love being inappropriate. To appropriate currently approved formulations, I celebrate being inappropriate, I am EMPOWERED by it, for fuck's sake.

I entered journalism for entirely inappropriate reasons: the drink, the random working hours, the irreverent cameraderie, the drink, the rush of deadline mania, the bylines, the drink, the carousing, and most important, I was otherwise in every respect unemployable. After dropping out of my law studies to be a writer, my first proper job was as an insurance clerk. I wanted to pursue something that would not tax my creative resources. Imagine my annoyance when they demanded dedication to the job. Hah! Sacked once for lateness (chronic), a second time for piling all the claims in a big cupboard while the boss was on holiday (he opened the cupboard, his troubles fell on him).

So it was that I entered provincial newspapering. My introduction to it was by a group of fellow hacks who welcomed me aboard with an all-day drinking session that I have no memory of. This was the job for me. A rampaging, cynical, panic-driven milieu where every reporter worth his salt had a bottle of Scotch on the desk and wrote better pissed than sober. A job whose perks pulled birds and guaranteed free passage though the fleshpots, ushered hungry-eyed by an even lower form of life, PR flacks.

Now all that is gone. Bean-counters shuffle human resources across productivity charts. Shouting at the hired help over cretinous copy is likely to land you in a mediation session, or an anger management course. Which guarantees a future suppurating with cretinous copy. As for the drink, well, I had to pack it in or find a stool in the great pub in the sky.

And all that is my excuse for having no life to speak of. Still, the characters live on in memory, and of that, dear reader, I shall certainly speak, another time.

In Michaela's footsteps

2006-03-13T18:56:00.000+02:00

Thanks to The Beep, I have now become acquainted with the delightful and clearly sensible Michaela Strachan's doings in this her "new home town". It seems Michaela has been with us a while and one of her jobs is the Wildlife Film Academy in Cape Town, launched in January, where Michaela is a tutor, perhaps explaining to students how to crack it as a presenter of The Really Wild Show or Elephant Diaries, of which I wot not. A host of other TV or film microcelebs with a connection to the wildlife thingy are also on board. So the wildlife are about to be overrun with students from the academy, waving DV cameras and sound booms. They'll probably all emigrate to Mozambique.

But Michaela is all right in my book. She says: "Table Mountain is a special place, full of raw energy, and a walk up the mountain at full moon is a magical experience. We normally start at Kirstenbosch Gardens and walk up Skeleton Gorge. It’s not for the unfit – the first half hour is a bit of a killer. You can take a bottle of wine and watch the sunset on one side of the mountain and the moonrise on the other. The trick is not to miss the last cable car back down."

Yes, we love that walk too, Michaela. And I'm sure you have a killer walk of your own. All those sexy pictures I found on Google! Now that is really wild.

A hit! A palpable hit!

2006-03-12T19:31:00.000+02:00

It's been one of those days with four seasons the Cape is famous for: humid and wet early on, then a brisk wintry breeze bringing out the pullovers, then a leisurely clearing of the skies and finally a sizzling afternoon. And meanwhile a thousand miles away, the Aussies and South Africans batted, and batted, and batted and ... ended up rewriting Wisden in providing the greatest game of one-day cricket ever seen anywhere, an epic of Homeric glory.

Surely the Australians must have thought a world record score of 434 would result in their grinding us into the dust. But seemingly captain "Biff" Smith ( a team nickname inspired by his infeasibly large jaw) had other ideas. SA had been widely tipped by the Aussies to "choke", or lose their bottle. But it was the visitors who ended up with the big swallow. They lost to a new world record score of 437 reached with the second last ball of the final over. If you wrote it as fiction it would be scoffed at.

It is occasions like this that turn cricket into great theatre. Or perhaps a movie. Mark Boucher struck the winning runs and was asked how he felt: "I want to get the DVD," he replied. Of course. Cricketers' favourite movies tend to be either Rocky in Sly's various periods, or Braveheart -- which was, oddly, directed and starred in by an Aussie. Mission Impossible would be the appropriate choice here.

My blog, she is dead

2006-03-11T00:15:00.000+02:00

Well, with the best of intentions, bent on an improved product, I have been running around Cape Town today taking photographs of archaic features and details that link the city with its past, so as to feed my new hobby, Flickr. It's been instructive. Up to now I have mostly photographed landscapes and candid portraits using available light. This exercise with my little Pentax Optio forced me to act as a recorder and not a creator, eliminating my main talent, composition, and demanding the kind of painstaking discipline you see CSI photographers using to snap corpses. Very appropriate. Still, it reconnected me with the city in a way I haven't experienced it since I first moved here. Everything had to be looked at afresh.

So anyway ... I rush home, download my wad of pix into Picasa, edit everything, eliminate all but the best, upload to Flickr, I'm cooking, really getting on top of this blogging thing ... only I'm not. Having added Flickr badge code to my template, I find my blog lifeless, unresponsive. The preview with the pulsing picture frame was fiction. There is no pulse ... after republishing about a hundred times, I go back to posting, in the hope that at least that bit of my blog's corpus is still clinging to life. And here goes ...

Update Saturday: "My baby -- it's a miracle!" (Faints).

Benchmarks

2006-03-09T19:52:00.000+02:00

1. Fish Hoek catwalk: 'In Memory of Bill S'

I've been parked by your plaque, Bill, looking out to sea
where once you must have looked as rollers snaked white tresses
up Muizenberg beach, and the southeaster boiled up
the bay. Today a northwester is peeling wavelets back
off white cheek; nimbus curdles the berg top. I wouldn't mind
going here, sailing over the peak as a cloud shadow
while my body sat still on your bench, notebook at the ready,
my passport to posterity. Then, perhaps, I'd see
as you must have seen, where I was going at last.

2. By Dollis Brook: 'In Fond Memory Paddy M'

In midwinter by dark shallows in the park
where I take my new arteries for a Sunday walk
his salute is carved in the seatback. Round here the buggers
prise off plaques, and only aerosols leave testaments
on river wall and derelict wendyhouse. Round here
the wind is hard against the face; you sit with your back
to a Tesco-trolley weir in the muddy stream.
Not a place I'd like to leave my mark; yesterday,
a bit farther on, where the brook slips into the wood
I walked into the past: among lit trees, silent windows
blind with sun, dark roofs cut into infinite blue; a child
descending from mother's call deep into birdsong.
There my memory writes itself, in lattices of
light swaying on water; on whispers in the greenwood.

Completely Lost

2006-03-08T21:18:00.000+02:00

Just when you think Lost couldn't possibly get more mysterious ... it does. I cannot reveal any more except that the latest twist is fascinating, although given the track record of the series, it's probably a red herring or some other odd fish. I suspect writers are drafted in just to write bits without knowing the whole picture (if there is one). Motivation seems to shift in a mercurial fashion. Tonight's ep was somewhat marred by the station losing sound for about five minutes, but since the dialogue doesn't aid understanding, not serious. I'm hooked all over again. Clever bastards.

The well of souls

2006-03-07T20:16:00.000+02:00

I'm not really up to blogging this evening because I am pissed off. I have so had enough of Guardian Soulmates. What fiend invented this ultimate aid to pitiless self-assessment? The details are too boring to relate and I know certain parties round here have been there too. The fact is, I am not a profile, I am a complex ever-evolving being, an imago in metamorphosis. Quick, nurse, the blue pills, hurry for god's sake! I'm so evanescent I can see my hiatus hernia pulsing anxiously away.

Update: perhaps I should explain this is nothing dramatic or tragic, such as love spurned. It's the whole process that gets me down. Profiles tell you pretty well zilch about anyone, like CVs. Even assuming the profilee isn't actually lying or glossing, as many do, the contactee usually turns out uncannily different from your idea of them, because you haven't learnt the important stuff: "Divorced", OK but when and why and how do you feel about that? "Education" is totally meaningless. I've had terrific letters from people with little further education and misspelt, incoherent ones from Ph Ds. Allegedly. And so on. Second beef, extreme unreliablity of many allegedly looking for mates (perhaps one of the reasons they currently find themselves on the shelf). I reckon 90% of the correspondences I've initiated amount to two-and-a-half transactions, with the second shoe never dropping. What's up with that? Some giveaway between the lines? I write pretty good letters. So, unreliable types and possible timewasters abound. Thirdly, the person in the flesh hardly ever lives up to the billing. "Attractive" (until I gave up bothering 20 years ago); "gym junkie" (I just use the jacuzzi and the pool). A big giveaway. And blah blah blah.

The one thing that keeps me from packing it in is that I have made one or two wonderful friends (they know who they are), and that makes up for everything, most of the time ...

Oscar update

2006-03-06T22:21:00.000+02:00

OK, I watched as much of the show as I could stand as a blog duty. I would have had more fun with that second draft. Only a few observations worth making:

Who knew Dolly Parton was animatronic? It's really obvious now, because they've overdone the skinny part which renders the superstructure completely infeasible, and airbrushed her head.

Jon Stewart's schtick was dry as I like it, not bad given the material he had to work with. The "gay cowboy moments" montage was very cute. It kind of suggested the academy had a frivolous reaction to the boys from Brokeback. Which might explain its inexplicable failure to sweep the statuettes.

The choreography for the Crash song was very creepy. How can you do a dance depicting racially charged encounters amid the flames from a burning car and actually play it straight? There was also a reported sighting of two dancers simulating a rape at the edge of the stage, but either this was cut or I missed it. I wouldn't have thought you could top this even in Hollywood, but the "song" It's Hard to Make it Out Here as a Pimp proved that you can get an Oscar for celebrating the sexual exploitation of women as long as you do it in a life-affirming way. I guess it's not that surprising Brokeback Mountain got the consolation prizes.

The clips of PS Hoffman "doing" Truman Capote were as bad as I feared; right up there with Russell Crowe's wibbly-wobbly nutty professor in A Beautiful Mind. So of course he won. Wyndham, your instincts were right on the money.

Culture clash of the night: Isaac Mizrahi interviewing Ang Li on the RC. I bet not even his wife calls him "doll", although he does look a bit ... no, unkind thought, I like his films.

Fashion note: I am probably not the first to observe it, but it seems black really is the new black
-- and what was that Charlize Theron had on her shoulder, a Gucci rocket launcher?

Viva Tsotsi!

2006-03-06T11:17:00.000+02:00

It's been an Oscar night to remember for South Africans, and by and large one to forget for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Tsotsi's victory in the foreign language film category is of far greater significance to our film industry than Charlize Theron's golden guy for Monster. Tsotsi's accolade flags attention to the fact that our talent, production facilities and film infrastructure are world class. The film biz is a key contributor of foreign exchange to the Cape economy, and our skilled crews, production houses and astonishingly varied locations draw big-budget feature shoots and dozens of commercials. This can only boost the attraction.

A studio with enormous soundstages is being built near Cape Town. The idea is to attract not only location shooting but entire international productions. It is supposed to have state-of-the-art post-production and special effects facilities. This is the route Australia went, although I understand their studios aren't getting enough work now that Keanu has left town.

The local industry must be praying the power cuts can be eliminated ... and that our production houses don't get even greedier ...

I'm feeling so good about it I'm going to get cracking on the second draft of my blockbuster. Tonight. Oh, wait a minute -- we're running the Oscar show tonight. Well, I hear it isn't much cop this year, no big winner, no mouthing off, feeble host, etc.

What's the bloody point of giving the big Oscars to little flicks? Surely Hollywood should be hailing the movies that keep it in business, and not the ones that live off its fat? Wonderful as they may be, their audiences are limited. Film is, or should be, mass entertainment. I might like art films, in the same way as I like poetry, but these movies, like poems, rarely enter the mainstream. And I think it's a bad sign that just making yourself fat or ugly or doing a great impersonation should sway the academy voters. It's become scarily predictable.

The Oscars should be a spectacle like the movies that made Hollywood great: Citizen Kane, Gone with the Wind, Ben-Hur, Lawrence of Arabia ... and Crash? It took a princely $53 mil at the box office, the lowest-grossing winner since Bertolucci's The Last Emperor in 1987. Gloria Swanson must be spinning in her box: "When I said it was the pictures that got small, I didn't mean that small."

And let's face it, the famous red carpet has become a supercharged catwalk for the fashion designers, who simply employ the stars as clothes horses. Which is why they have to be scary skeletal. Except J Lo, the Ass that Ate Hollywood. And Salma, the Babe Who's Bustin' Out All Over.

In view of tonight's delayed proceedings I shall defer further commentary until the last contestant -- I mean recipient – has been hurried off the stage, hopefully for summary execution round the back.

Next stop Satori

2006-03-05T20:20:00.000+02:00

For some years now I have commuted in to Cape Town by car, after enduring experiences on the train, despite its picturesque route along the coast, that made the Northern Line seem a model of comfort and efficiency. I leave for work around 6am, and was among the first passengers every morning, two stops down from the terminus and rail yards in Simon's Town. I would often be faced with wet seats and floor in winter, on account of the cleaners had left the windows open overnight. Nor, on rainy and chilly mornings, was any heat available. As for efficiency, Mussolini would have had his work cut out here. A problem not usually encountered on British Rail is cable theft, occasioning an unscheduled stop. And then there was "steaming" -- well known to Londoners -- as gangs roamed through trains relieving the passengers of their valuables and occasionally chucking a recaltricant victim off. On one line, drivers found it was more of a trip than a journey, complaining they were getting stoned witless by the clouds of dope fumes from the smoking carriage in front.

But in the end it was missed deadlines on the paper that drove me off. I still see a lot of diehards -- and people with no choice - streaming off the station in the evening. And the rail operator is being sued by passengers (or their relatives) who have fallen from trains with open doors or been assisted to do so. There are signs it is trying to reform the system, with spanking new coaches. This, inevitably, has been met by a fusillade of graffiti. And its deployment of security guards hasn't worked out because they tend to sit together, chatting over a smoke - plain old cancer sticks, we must hope.

Wise commuters who can afford the time wait for the trains that have the privately run dining (boozing) saloon car, which rejoices in the name Biggsy's Restaurant. "I'm sorry sir, you have to check your gun at the door."

My car journey, about 30 miles, is a pleasure: too early for serious traffic, winding over a mountain pass among scenes of breathtaking natural beauty; then on to a freeway that runs straight as an arrow through winefarms, forested land and fields, the central reservation an island of flowering bushes and trees. I'm soon going to have to pay for this motoring idyll: lone drivers are going to be caught on camera and charged a fee for entering the city, like the London one. Given the choices available, this will be money for old rope.

Today's poem

2006-03-03T22:26:00.000+02:00

A five-hour power cut has eaten all my blogging time. So I'm offering this as today's post.

ON LOOKOUT POINT, SILVERMINE

White wind smokes the beach a long way down and off
the dizzy upthrust of bare rock reared over the firewatch hut.
Yet not bare. Life clings even to the perpendicular:
showers of flowers, founts of grass decline to gravity
yet persist, last-ditch stands bought on invisible niches.
Hunched in my niche under the wind, I drink the force
that split the mountain. I am nourished in its deep silence,
a moment of shock that shudders all the way back to creation.
In this great gasp of time plant, flesh and stone occupy
a brief note drawn by a bellows filling
with voluptuous
temporary
air.

Mouth wide shut

2006-03-02T17:29:00.000+02:00

"Hmm," says Howard the orthodontist, looking at my ghostly gnashers on his laptop. "You've got abscesses on both of those, but the number 4 we can do a root canal, cost you a few thousand, if you think it's worth it. But the No 5, that bad boy has got to come out."

I'm back in his chair and on the clock after a night of torture in the upper jaw following oral surgery and a load of stitches in the lower earlier this week.

"Right," says Howard, whipping out his cellphone. "I'll buzz Annabel [my dentist} and tell her she needs to squeeze you in. We can't have another night of pain." No, indeed we can't. Especially me. Anyway, it turns out Annabel has scarpered for the day but one of the partners -- "Those boys are great," declares Howard -- will fit my mouth into his schedule.

Off I drive, jaw throbbing harder than the engine. This is how I meet the Russian dentist the "partners" keep off the letterhead and stashed away in the only room without a panoramic city view.

"OK David, listen to me, I give you my opinion," says Dr V Avdeev (BDS, Voronezh; Dip Odont., Pretoria). "Number 5, definitely he has to be removed. I don't like it. But number 4, this is my opinion: we extract number 5, we relieve the pain. Number 4, I think now the problem goes away. I don't do root canal yet. Wait two days, if there is pain you call me immediately. Im-mediately! OK?"

Good god, I think, I've found a dentist who isn't on a mission to relieve me of as much cash as possible. I like it. I give him a thumbs up, absurdly, as if he can't understand English.

"Take a deep breath ..." says V. Avdeev, plunging a needle into my palate. "Sorry David, is finished, OK?"

I will draw a veil over what follows out of concern for the sensitivities of my readers. But it is painless. "I don't like it," says V Avdeev. He shows me the offending tooth. "See, infection, very bad. But is unusual. You have double root, not one. Most dentists they have a problem with this, but my post-grad is orthodontist. Not one person in 10,000 has this double root. You are strong, David!"

He writes out a scrip for painkillers. "Now I tell you very cheap pharmacy," he says and gives me directions. I decide V Avdeev in his room without a view is my dentist hero.

I'll be back. Unfortunately.

Pride and Prozac

2006-03-01T19:46:00.000+02:00

I've finally been induced to see this new movie version of Pride and Prejudice, despite my conviction that the BBC one with Colin Firth will never be improved upon. And it was as I feared, chocolate box romance and jigsaw puzzle prettiness. The Janeites I went with adored it nevertheless, but I have a hard centre. Keira Knightley, as beautiful and witty as she is, was entirely wrong for the part. And I wish someone would tell her that crinkling her nose by raising her upper lip in a rictus is not cute in an adult. Still, I could have put up with her if it had not been for the leaden presence of Mr Darcy, played by Matthew MacFadyen, whose emotions run the gamut from clinical depression to glum. This guy would be hard put to find a girlfriend on Guardian Soulmates, never mind the vivacious Elizabeth Bennet.

Every scene is lit, framed and posed in a manner that reminds you of some kitsch painting or other. Even the "earthier" sequences involving pigs, etc, look as if they could have been inspired by a placemat. Rather wasted in this setting is an exquisitely cringe-making performance by Tom Hollander as a very creepy Mr Collins.

Tonight's ominous and creepy episode 2 of Lost 2 was a perfect antidote. Shan't reveal a single thing, except to say, forget getting any closer to fathoming it all. I don't think JJ Abrams remembers what it was supposed to be about any more. This feeling of clinging on to a runaway series is at the heart of its appeal.

Valley of the dulls

2006-02-28T19:38:00.000+02:00

The last of the mist lifts off the village, flung down in a valley, flanked by two oceans. The cold Atlantic is on the left, the warm Indian and our local beach off to the right. The only dull note is the dusty conservatism of many locals, seaside pensioners whose numbers decline annually. As they sell up and move into walled retirement villages, the wealthy refugees from Johannesburg and Zimbabwe turn their snug homes into mountainside mansions and their lovingly tended gardens into pool decks.

Darkness at Noon 2

2006-02-28T10:44:00.000+02:00

This is becoming very tedious. The nuclear generator has crashed again and the power cuts are rolling across Cape Town. It's pretty obvious that we are being lied to; every time some minor fault on the transmission lines is blamed. Either this is not true, or the generator itself is acting its age (geriatric in nuclear terms). And it takes up to five days to bring it up to speed.

So there I was, sitting in a traffic jam as our deadline for the City Late approached. This allowed me to listen to all of Handel's Water Music, a big fave of mine, followed by the bubbly and talented Miss Jane Monheit on her latest album. Of course, what is considered virtual gridlock in Cape Town would be fairly average traffic in London. Here we expect to keep up a brisk clip through the inner suburbs.

Most popular stock items among the roadside vendors who run up and down between the vehicles at traffic lights: 1 Coat hangers, tops countrywide. 2. Wire ornaments, particularly metal flowers, a craft that began in the townships. 3 Jokes -- a small donation buys you a piece of paper with a picture and a feeble joke on it; the sellers grin and clown their pitch. 4 New, and in with a pellet: catapults -- vendors watch out for cars with small boys in them. 5 Newspapers or the Big Issue Cape Town. 6 Grapes or flowers (real).

With the traffic stalled at dead lights, the fearless entrepreneurs did landslide business today. I imagine even the jokers did well.

A walk along the beach and over the rocks requires only leg power and mine today was rewarded by the remarkable sight of a squadron of cormorants banking over the bay, then adopting line formation and simultaneously divebombing the water, having presumably spotted a large shoal of fish. My camera lens buzzed forth just too late. I waited for a while, hoping they might ascend in unison, but no sign. I guess underwater it's every bird for itself.

Must get this posted before the darkness comes.

Lost and found

2006-02-27T09:14:00.000+02:00

Thanks to power cuts and my fumbling efforts to get this blog off the ground last week, I managed to miss the first episode of the new season of Lost. But it's no loss. TWOP's recap brought me fully up to date while making me laugh like a drain. I'm very concerned about Walt, though.

Commenters, if any, are asked to avoid letting spoilers slip. Last season we were way ahead of UK viewers, but for some reason the new series has been long delayed. And Hysteria Lane has yet to hove into view. I'll just have to overcome my phobia about medical dramas and watch House instead. I haven't checked out Weeds yet either.

Having just returned via rush hour traffic from a fullblown gum operation at the orthodontist, I am feeling somewhat ragged, with a mouthful of stitches and apparently no bottom jaw. The dentist has a TV in the ceiling, so I was forced to watch E! Entertainment Television while he rummaged about unspeakably in my mouth, which constituted cruel and unusual punishment. I was scarcely in a position to complain, however.

So it's a nice invalidish evening, with a good excuse to watch my new DVD of David Cronenberg's repulsive but enjoyable Videodrome. "Long live the new flesh!" Indeed, I could do with some.

Hell's teeth

2006-02-26T07:51:00.000+02:00

Ella Watson: "Do you think a woman can love two men?" James Averill: "Sure you can. Why not three? But it sure as hell isn't convenient."

Or 300, if Michael Cimino could have got away with it.

Today was to have featured my retrospective look at the notorious movie disaster Heaven's Gate. But IE swallowed it by closing unexpectedly and it can't be retrieved. It's probably a mercy; it was looking almost as bloated as the film.

I 'd heard all the stories about how this was the most spectacular failure ever bankrolled by a Hollywood studio, and an artistic disaster to boot. So I'd mentally written it off until I spotted the DVD at a bargain price and thought, what the hell, I'll see for myself -- at 210 minutes it would be an absolute bum anaethestic in a cinema seat, but in my recliner with the pause button and coffee to hand, no problem.

The most remarkable thing about this notorious epic, which nearly bankrupted United Artists and blighted director Michael Cimino's sometimes brilliant career, is the enormous scale of the set pieces that provide the only functioning engine to propel this 210-minute behemoth to a non-conclusion. Nothing less than hundreds of extras will do on every conceivable occasion. And these were real people who had to be marshalled, fed and paid, unlike today's CGI clones.

The first two scenes set the tone -- Mr Cimino shoehorns the obligatory army of newly graduated Harvard students into a great hall for the uproarious valedictory ceremony. There are to be a great many more teeming and uproarious scenes before we're done. But here we meet two of the main characters, Kris Kristofferson as the afore-mentioned James Averill and John Hurt as Billy Irvine, the star debater and wit of the class of 1870. The taciturn Averill (natch) turns out to be the good guy and the witty and likeable Hurt a weakling who falls in with the villains, rich cattle barons in Johnson County, Wyoming, who are trying to drive poor immigrants from their miserable patches of land and keep the world safe for steers. This first scene seems to go on for a very long time. But there is to be no still calm moment before we are plunged into a whirl of dancers circling a maypole in the quad -- hundreds of them, inevitably. This very kinetic scene is in some ways brilliant, perhaps thanks mainly to cinematographer Vilmos Szigmond, one of the greats. There are several outstanding scenes in the film and even the set pieces might have been bearable if Cimino just knew when to stop.

One interesting thing I learnt while researching the piece was that Cimino has eked out four movies since, so his career may be in the toilet but hasn't been flushed. A fifth is on the way. And he has regularly churned out screenplays. Some of his work has been uncredited, perhaps because producers fear the albatross effect.

I'm prepared to recommend you see for yourself.

In total contrast, my DVD viewing last night was Flightplan (sic), 85 electrifying minutes on a giant "new" jumbo jet with Jodie Foster doing what she does best, playing a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown, who in this case recovers her wits hunting for her daughter on the huge (fictitious) aircraft. Is the daughter imaginary.? Is she deluded? Or are they really out to get her?

Tight, classic suspense thriller, recommended despite some clunky lines given to lesser characters.

And now I'm going to wallow in the SA-Australia one-day international cricket match. Longer than Heaven's Gate, but hopefully a classic with no long and painful passages.

In other nudes

2006-02-24T20:48:00.000+02:00

From a film review of Running Scared in today's Christian Science Monitor:

Sex/Nudity: 9 instances, including inudendo. Violence: 31 instances. Profanity: 354 instances, mostly harsh. Drugs/alcohol/tobacco: 12 scenes.

Marvellous. If the word inudendo doesn't exist, it jolly well ought to. In fact I invite visitors to give their own dictionary definitions. My first efforts:

Inudendo (n.): the act of undressing with the eyes; a suggestion to slip into something more comfortable.

Black Bart

2006-02-24T19:01:00.000+02:00

Is Cape Town cool or what? Prizewinning public sculpture and mountie in a pedestrian mall that traverses the length of the CBD. There are pavement cafes every few yards with tables under the trees, and stalls of African art and crafts, many of them run by Congolese refugees who will chat away in French if you want.

Cockup on the template front

2006-02-23T20:05:00.000+02:00

Apologies to anyone visiting this strange-looking site at present. It looks like the extra picture width has buggered up the shape. Can't repair it until later today because I'm stuck on a PowerMac at work.

Update: resizing the photo did the trick.

Mobile madness

2006-02-23T19:10:00.000+02:00

I'm one of those people who refuses to have a cellphone, or mobile, as Brits call it. It seems to me this is a modern form of slavery and a powerful addiction to boot. And every day, it seems, my refusenik stance is buttressed by the rude, daft or downright dangerous behaviour of the majority of enslaved mobile addicts.

Today's encounter was an extreme example of the genre. Returning to the office with a cup of coffee, I swiped my security pass over the magic eye and opened the door just as a minion approached it from the other side in a southerly direction, m'lud, trundling a porter's trolley loaded with newspapers. I obligingly held the pneumatic door open, by no means an easy task, but as he entered the doorway -- yes, his mobile rang. He halted instantly twixt newsroom and passage, whipped it out and started gabbing. This was too much.

"Keep bloody moving and get off that fucking phone!" I yelled, straining against the door's attempt to close.

He did not, as you would have expected, respond to this rough injunction immediately. "Yeah ... right ... look, I'd better go, I'm just on my way to the fifth floor with their papers. OK. Catch you later." No forward movement accompanied this monologue.

"For Christ's sake, come ON!" I bellowed.

He tucked his phone away and trundled past looking blankly ahead, like the zombie slave he is, and without a word of apology or thanks. I don't think he even knew I was there. Typical.

When I take power, all mobiles will be tossed on bonfires throughout the land, and I expect many will still be attached to their puppets. "Yeah, did you want the Vesuvio extra virgin cold pressed or the Marks and Sparks house brand extra virgin first cold pressing? ... Oh, hang on -- look, love, sorry, I've gotta go, something's burning. Ohhh. Shit."

Summer's end

2006-02-22T21:48:00.000+02:00

Remember when you were nine or ten and those long summer afternoons seemed to last forever?
And tired as you were as the sun sank lower, still you wandered in the dreamtime, squeezing the last drop of life from this long moment as if it was the last. And now here you are watching the children track the last rays lasering over the beach. And you're impatient for that sunset you stayed for: your clothes are crunchy with sand, your overheated skin is simmering ... you hope you haven't had too much UV. And somebody's got to get the supper on. The hungry monsters won't want to wait even a split second.

Today's poem

2006-02-22T20:45:00.000+02:00

POWER CUT

He was juggling a poem
of her, of Brahms
of a certain plaster head (untitled)
when all the light went
and she turned on him, spitting
and Brahms gurgled into silence
and the bleached blind head said "Death"
and he let all three fall to the floor and smash
being (as he had suspected all along)
blind and powerless and afraid.

Darkness at Noon

2006-02-22T09:57:00.000+02:00

It could not have been a less auspicious beginning. My first post on my brand new blog was rudely interrupted by one of a series of power cuts in the Cape Town area yesterday, the third successive day of what the utility operator fancifully calls "rolling blackouts". So instead of launching into my carefully composed manifesto, I trudged cursing up the stairs, candle held aloft. And so to bed.

The cuts, better described as random crashes of the system, have apparently been caused by a generator failure at the geriatric nuclear reactor which provides a significant amount of the city's power. They would be more accurately described as random collapses of the system. Or else someone is sticking a pin in the map blindfolded. An excuse early on was "damp soot from bush fires on transmission lines". At least it wasn't leaves on the line or the wrong kind of snow. Didn't they lie about Chernobyl at first?

However, the so-called manager of public lighting, no doubt keen to avert the possibility of being hanged from one of his own streetlights, has given one firm promise to this rugby-crazed city -- there will be power at Newlands Stadium on Friday night for the "Super 14 " game between the local Stormers and the visiting Brumbies. Praise the lord! "I may be stupid, but I'm not that stupid," he declared. I rest my case.

Thus this goodly frame is born under a foul and pestilential cloud and I have indeed, for the moment, lost all my mirth. Sorry about that.

So no manifesto except to say this is my baby, it is for my own amusement first of all and, I devoutly hope, the delectation of my bloggy friends. And to any visitors who might be googled into my clutches, come in, pull up a chair and feel free to spout off. To wandering trolls: don't even think about it.

Topics will be whatever my dilettante wafting may alight upon, but will certainly include the odd poem (mine, mostly), photograph (likewise), music bulletin, rant, encounter with idiots, pseuds and posers and more. Anything to keep it going.

Big ups to midwives and cheerleaders Pashmina of Grammar Puss and Patroclus of Quinquireme, and to the eminent Norm Geras, he of Normblog, who first sowed the seed. And to the little circle of blog friends who have endured my incessant and often facetious comments. Welcome to my twilight zone.

FADE TO BLACK