From the Tower to the Mountain

I love the way cities have personalities. They have an air about their buildings and spaces that have quirks like families have history, and people have spots...sure Johannesburg feels sometimes like LA minus the sea, and Cape Town looks like San Francisco with a flat mountain, but that's like saying my tonsil of a mate Ray looks something like Josh Hartnett...it doesn't really say anything.

This blog's to log a kind of reverse great trek and all the topics, thoughts and debates that have already spun from it. This first entry is only a place holder to sort out layout but what will come are records of conversations and extensions of thoughts and experiences. I have lived in Joburg for most of my working life and in June I'm taking a new job in Cape Town. Where the idea for the blog started was an irreverent facebook status update I posted last week, "James is walking the tight rope from the tower to the mountain". I wrote it because it sounded good, but it's echoed in my head all weekend.

My flat in Johannesburg faces north from the 3rd floor of a solid and in some ways still grand old complex on the edge of Hillbrow. One of my favourite views in the world is from the spongy water sealed roof after sunset when the Hillbrow Tower lights up behind me and the sirens ring up from the canyons of the apartments blocks sprawling around. I love Johannesburg and all its burnt through edginess and strangely warm people, and I feel a real skepticism for the mountain the colonizers claimed and their clicky descendants in her shadows.

I want to write about so many things that hang from that tight rope. About why I LOVE this city, about how South Africans are all on the edge of something great or something frightening and how I feel somehow Cape Town's slipping blindly while Joburg's trying to build something new. I want to write about how my excitement for supporting the Stormers at Newlands was squashed by a bitter article berating people for supporting the Hurricanes. I want to write about why Joburgers are so genuinely friendly, about why my Canadian friend in Cape Town thinks white Capetonians aren't so much free spirited liberals as blinkered sun chasers, or why she's wrong. I want to write about the perceptions of the cape flats and the realities of the townships...I want to write about leaving a girl behind, and about diving in kelp forests...I want to write about the things no one says in the David Bullard debate and the new wave of Swart Gevaar sweeping SA...

I'm walking a tight rope from the Tower to the Mountain and I think you all will have a lot to say. I'm looking forward to it....