Wednesday 30 April 2008

vertigo, chip rolls, ghosts and colour



Once my dirty shell toes are in the Cape we'll get to that contrast of cities that fuels this blog but for now we're setting tone, taping out the door frames and cutting in...building context. We'll get stuck in with the roller brush soon enough. Bear with me.

Johannesburg is a ghost and rock all at once. Or rather a specter and a highveld koppie. The one is real and solid. It just is, it glistens under rains, warms up in the sun, erodes and grows. Its just a place. The other is the fear of a place. The connotations. A certain ring in your ear and tweaking of your perception. This photo shows that beautifully. They say ghosts show up on film sometimes and you can see them here. Solid buildings and fluid vehicle lights. Nothing to fear, but an ominous feeling for some, an 'other worldliness' for others.

It's taken by Huw Mcdonald, a joburg photographer that knows a fair bit of both the city's rocks and ghosts. And its taken facing West along Market Street from the 50th floor of the Carlton Center, a 70's monolith in downtown Johannesburg. I went up there again today to show friends, an ozzie and a capie/namibian, both living in London. The Johannesburg in their heads and the one they walked through and looked over today are two very different places. I suppose that's true for any place but it seems so much more so here.

The mining and banking strip down Main street's like a baby Wall street. It's about 10 blocks long and three blocks wide. All water features, security guards and sidewalk cafes. People from Standard, FNB, Zurich, Anglo, Billiton, government and a hundred other companies big and small. You bump through crowds of suits with take away coffee in one hand and a cell phone in the other. If you don't believe me you have some ghosts to excise. Come down and see. "Man, this is a choice city", commented the capie. Up on Carlton later, reeling a little from vertigo and the lurching express lift, he was commenting on the colour of it all. He put it so simply and beautifully, I wish I could capture it here. He has that thick and interesting accent of a South African in London. Heavy with its Afrikaans roots but full of the questioning inflection of antipodean friends and words from London's own international lexicon. He stared out at the city in wonder, a good two feet from the thick glass and the 150m drop to the streets. In his head he had pictured it bleak and colourless. But in reality it was all bright colour. Perhaps, he wondered, it was the walk in the streets that had given context.

If you haven't been up the Carlton you really should go. It is a little adventure. From the heaving insides of the mall you wedge along escalators and look down on shoppers and lunch eaters and CD browsers. I remember walking around Sandton City as a kid, passages crammed like London subways. It still feels like that in the Carlton. And from the triple volume bowl of people the masses veer right to more lunch spots and deposit you at a quiet little glass booth. R 7.50 per ticket and you get to push the call button yourself. Standing at the door 50 floors of air swirls around before the door opens for you. The lift is pretty inside, face lifted, with only one button that lights up. 50.

And it is a childish rush to watch the red number click quickly up from 0 and feel the lift sway a little and accelerate. And stop. Getting out the lift is quite normal, it could be the 20th floor, or the second. But swing left and the light and view rush along the corridor from the floor to ceiling glass windows 15 meters away. That same view from Huw's picture but rushing at you, pushed along by clear blue sky squeezing up against the tower, and then that lovely feeling of vertigo as you walk across the polished floor to the glass and peer back along Main. Its cool as hell, you really should go.

My friend drove into town a little nervously and waited for me at the corner of Mclaren and Fox so I could jump in and show her cheap parking. In the two minutes she'd been double parked a metro cop had already blipped her and we edged through the traffic to the open lots where safe parking is cheap. Next to the Mag court there's a square of dirt attached to a motor mechanic's, a grumpy man called Luis. Parking is seven bucks in the sun but its safe. My friends shed valuables and stashed handbags in the boot and we began the 10 block walk to Carlton. The idea was to grab a cheap lunch and a few minutes on the viewing deck.

Between Anglo American's marble walls and prancing statues the renovated Main Street Mall and outdoor mining museum begins and runs the 10 blocks to Ghandi Square. We walked along it and then detoured a few blocks down Simmons to Al Baraqa. The best, and biggest chip rolls, bunnies and toasteds in the city. You have to sidle up the to line at the counter and your cash buys you a little paper number and gentle shove back onto the street where you wait for your bundle of wax paper and ton of slap chips. Freaken great!

We took those greasy packets all the way across Ghandi square, under the nose of young lawyer Ghandi's statue, between the hundreds of roaring double decker buses that snake out from there and into the consumer chaos of the Carlton Mall.

Its like a cable car to a concrete idol rather than a rock one. But the views still tug at me. A view on a world full of promise and working things. I know our land is creaking. From that mountain to this tower it is tripping up and struggling and we feel and see every vaulter. But standing on the top of Carlton, with a little of God's perspective, you can see so much work manifest. Clean streets, running buses, hundreds of working traffic lights, metro cops on honest patrol, offices 100% let and chock full with good people working.

It's an eye opening little walk across Ghandi and up the Carlton and I will think of it often on Loop and Long and the other Market....

Wednesday 23 April 2008

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.

Monday 21 April 2008

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....