Musings on a Facebook Wall Contents Foreword: Dispatches from an invisible country ix Thank yous xi ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ and the Prince of Denmark 1 Mxed agenda 5 The amazing bionic teenager 7 The agony of being inappropriately dressed in Cape Town 10 And the cars look very different today 13 Gooi it in the pot 15 The benevolent imperialism of the BBC 16 Blood and heart: the day the Springboks came to town 19 Living in the shadow of a fatwa 23 The wolf who came in from the wild 27 The capital crime of using uppercase 29 Remembering the Radio Rats, the eternal hope of Springs 31 Ask not for whom the giant ships come and go 33 Paul Simon, the kid who fell short of his greatest dream 36 Farewell, matric 38 The quiet gift of music when the power goes out 39 When art is a happy accident 42 The curious South Africanisation of Black Friday 44 The oys and joys of Tali’s Wedding Diary 47 A fragment of history from behind the Grassy Knoll 51 A homeless Jesus 54 Dining à la Eskom 55 Mokgadi, the One Who Guides 57 A BlackBerry rings a bell 60 Bias, a street-art archaeologist of the future 62 Barry Hilton and the science of funny 65 Stripping Gatsby bare 67 Long live the academy 69 Bra Hugh, the man who made some kind of noise 73 The Florentine Hustler of Silicon Valley 75 The Master of Whataboutery 77 Mirabile dictu! 79 My fok, Marelize 82 Art is bull 84 The weaponisation of charm 86 The happy-sad afterlife of Ricky Gervais 88 Goodnight, Opportunity 90 Drifting off to sleep on a library of dreams 92 The fleet-footed rising of a new dawn 95 Thirty sows and pigs 98 ‘Si swirt sweeu see sweep swip tsik’ 100 The day One-Shot Mike shot Annie, the Queen of the World 102 Skabenga, the King of Cats 106 Skitching a ride 108 ‘I’m not Charlie!’ 110 James Phillips, the great nobody of South African music 112 Sorry, hey 115 The song that made the walls come tumbling down 116 The trouble with political jokes is that they get elected 119 The whip-crack symphony of a night in the suburbs 122 The meaning of swag 124 The athletes of ballet, poised between pain and grace 126 When some sweet-talking song comes along 128 A signature evening with a literary idol 130 The man who went out of his way to say thank you for his coffee 133 Fire and rebirth 136 Hobbits of the Civil Service 137 The hard-headed meat-eater who wants to save the world from meat 139 Sprinkling Wildblumen over Weimar 142 True confessions of an X-phile 145 No such thing as a free coffee 147 Once upon a Star 150 The Year of the Three Revolutions 152 A six-year-old child could have drawn this logo 154 Bringing home the beacon 156 You’ve got an Uncle Pravin in the furniture business 157 Autumn, you are Winter’s enabler 159 The joy of ambient zhoozsh 161 One small step on a lunar sea 163 Lessons from a kumquat 165 Our tjatjarag nation 167 Leonardo, Master of the Great Unfinished 169 Hey, Google, I’m home 171 I’m All Shook, Because English is Lit 174 Too early for Alan Paton 176 Hey, Siri, we need to talk 178 Beset with Durban 180 The Jimi Hendrix of the illuminating anecdote 183 Same WhatsApp group 186 Vaya, vaya! 188 Drop it like Beyoncé 190 Don’t worry, it’s just a phase 192 How Eskom’s Prince of Darkness saved us from the bees 193 An historic occasion, unless it was a historic occasion 196 The exquisite torture of an unidentified earworm 198 Mispronouncing the ibis 199 A klutz in the gallery 201 The haunted library of my childhood 203 Embrace your typos 205 The Fall of Autumn 206 Hearing aids for bouviers 207 Hi, I’m sorry my autocorrect spelled your name wrong 209 We are all stories, when all is said and done 210 The quiet gift of music when the power goes out ast night, just after sunset, a great curtain of cloud fell from Lthe sky, and there was a whip-crack of lightning, and the power tripped. I’m used to this; it’s a T & C of life on the Highveld. I dashed outside as the first drops began to splatter, and I opened the mains box to flip the switch to the up position. But it was already up. That could mean only one other thing, and it was swiftly con- firmed by the stream of WhatsApps on the neighbourhood group. There was a widespread power outage, stretching all the way from Sandton and across the northwestern suburbs. Someone said it had been caused by Eskom cutting trees to prevent them from falling on power lines during the storm. In the process, a tree had fallen on a power line, cutting off the supply in a shower of sparks. Technicians had been dispatched, confirmed the City Power Twitter account. There was no ETA for restoration. Darkness cloaked the streets, and within, torchlight speared the way down the corridors. The emergency load-shedding light, on the kitchen table, shone too brightly to look in the eye. From the house next door, the smug purr of a generator. We got out the Cadac, its blue-yellow whoosh signalling the backup plan for supper. There comes a point, during a power outage, when you walk around the house and switch the lights off, because by the time they come back on, you would have switched them off anyway. It was around 10 pm, after doing this, that I poured myself a cup of tea from the whistling camping-kettle, and I sat down to flick gus silber 39 through Twitter on my phone, hoping to see if there was an update on the ETA. There wasn’t. Instead, a news item caught my eye. ‘Mark Hollis, Talk Talk star, dies aged 64’. I sat there, in the hush – even the generator had gone to sleep – stunned, for a moment. I pictured a star flickering in the night sky, and then disappear- ing. But the thing about musicians, is that they never fade away. I tapped onto Spotify, and searched for Spirit of Eden. Sometimes, you hear an album that seems to have been made for an audience of one. You imagine that no one else has heard it, that it is a gift to you alone. Over the years, you discover that there are many other people who think this way, for whom the music chimes a secret chord that resonates on a hidden wavelength. In the mid-1980s, Talk Talk were a highly successful synth-pop trio, with a string of Top 40 singles in the UK and beyond. Then, in 1986, they sequestered themselves in a studio that was once the hall of a church, St Augustine’s in Highbury, and over the space of a year, with the only light coming from flickering candles and strobes, they recorded the album that would effectively end their career as a pop group. The legend says that when executives at EMI first heard the fin- ished album, it brought tears to their eyes, not because the music is beautiful – it is – but because, as they later claimed in a contrac- tual-obligation suit that dragged on in court for months, it was ‘not commercially satisfactory’. There are no easy hooks on Spirit of Eden, no hummable melodies, no steel-hammered template of verse-verse-chorus- bridge -verse-chorus. The music on the album is a cycle of six songs, brooding and meditative, with silences you can fall into, and an eccentric array 40 electric graffiti of instruments, including oboe, blues harp, bassoon, harmonium, dobro and muted trumpet, that play their parts in interweaving curlicues of improvisation. There is only one drum-break on the album, midway through the more than seven-minute long ‘Desire’, and it is one of the most ecstatic bursts of pure rhythm in the history of popular music. The vocals by Mark Hollis are sleepy-eyed incantations that ache with yearning, and in hundreds of listens over more than 30 years, I don’t think I’ve understood more than a couple of words; I’ve never looked them up on a lyric site, for fear of breaking the spell. And yet, Spirit of Eden is a daring, mesmerising masterpiece, as radical in its own way as Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring or Kind of Blue by Miles Davis. You can hear in these tracks the eerie pre-echo of Coldplay and Radiohead and all the other downbeat, introspective pop bands that would follow years later, but this is the original, the Rosetta Stone, and it seeps into your pores like no other music ever made. I listened in the darkness, and the songs, and the silences in their spaces, shimmered with an incandescent glow, like the pulses of light you see when you close your eyes. Goodnight, Mark Hollis, star of Talk Talk, and thank you for the quiet storm of your music. gus silber 41 Barry Hilton and the science of funny esterday, just for laughs, I attended Ya workshop called ‘Talk Funny’, run by the well-liked entertainer and funny- talker, Barry Hilton. Barry is one of the few clean comedians on the SA stand-up circuit, which is odd when you consider that he lives in Cape Town and hasn’t had a bath in months.