Another World under Another Tower

An odd benefit of displacing yourself is you get to look at the world through last views and last eyes. Johannesburg's thick with her own contradictions so even in my love affair with this city I can never be self righteous about her goodness. Jozi's accused of many hideous things and goodness is seldom in the adjectives. Any finger I point at the Mother City on this blog's going to be a truth somewhere in Joburg too.

Here I'm pointing a finger to something sweet under the towers and trusting to taste it too under the shadows of that mountain.

Launching himself into the thin Highveld air in the pic is an Austrian gentlemen becoming the first to BASE the Brixton tower. Good for him. The reason his bright yellow, Red Bull sponsored ass, is on this blog is because its the only interesting picture of Brixton Google could trawl up for me. The reason Brixton's on the agenda is because it is a partly gentrifying, partly rotting little neighbourhood on a hill I drive past often, but know embarrassingly little about. Its one of those places the Beeld highlights occasionally because its poor are sometimes white, a kind of township in town. And the picture is worth a blog because I always wonder about adventure tours that visit townships between the airport and the boutique hotels. Seems something of an extreme variety happens in Joburg too, rich thrill seekers launching off tall things in poor neighbourhoods.

I've also always liked driving through Brixton because it has a street life, kids in parks and people on stoeps. Clearly my bourgeois, Levi branded ass is not so different from ze euro spewing tourists. Yesterday saw me idle nervously down Katjiepiering road in Brixton looking for a friend's new little creative venture.

I felt like a tourist in my own home town, 5 minutes drive from the center of my universe and I was in a place I knew NOTHING about.

Katjiepiering dead ends into a newly built palacade fence and the dark little street was littered only lightly with both rubbish and people. At the bottom a handful of cars cluttered the front of an oddly cheerful house in a starkly cheerless place. A big CD tree split the old pavement. 12 foot of tree had been braved by some adventurous soul and sprinkled with hundreds of glittering CD's. The wall was decorated too with new paint and bits of pretty collaged tile; and four or five people huddled around a big fire on garden chairs.

The house itself had had its old side pulled open and a genuinely inviting little dance floor, patio and chill room held a few more people. Drinks came in the form of tequila, orange juice and curry powder, and food as R 10 soup. This is starting to sound like a venue revue but only because I'm trying to explain how really cool it was. Forgive me Leoni.

Music then came as Brazilian folk and Mozi reggae, which I knew about as little of musically as what I understood of the Portuguese.

This post is like a flag against the slipping I talked about in my first post. A place I found on a rotting, or not, hill that's turning or trying to turn. Around the fire some bright eyed guys tried to teach me venda, made an effort to connect. On the street people peered in looking for and finding something better then the shebeen they expected. And a Mozi guitarist who's playing 88 this week found an appreciative little audience.

Now to find a similar tail in Cape Town and we will have our first flag there too.