South Africans in New York

SA News for SAPeople

Moer, It’s Coffee! In New York

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When Die Antwoord played in New York a couple of weeks ago, Neville Ross was trying to get them to pay a visit to the coffee shop that he has opened with Nick Carnavale. Nothing would be cooler than to have a South African group that everyone’s talking about hanging out in a half-South African’s coffee shop that people are talking about. Die Antwoord didn’t come, in the end, but Gasoline Alley doesn’t really need the publicity. It’s cool and hip already, right at the crossroads of NoHo and SoHo.

coffee shop new york

Carnavale and Ross On Duty

The location has an extra meaning for Ross, whose family has had a tire and car repair business in Cape Town and George since 1946. The coffee shop is situated on a part of Lafayette Street that used to be known as Gasoline Alley because it was crowded with car-service shops.

“I missed having a small business,” says Ross, wearing one of the bike caps the shop now sells with Intelligentsia coffee beans, “and wanted to open something that I was passionate about.”

That ‘passion’ would, of course, be coffee. Together with Carnavale, a British expat, they waited for the perfect site for their business. Both owners are into cycling, and a racing bike has pride of place hanging from the ceiling above the till. The market they have entered is a tough one – with well-known new-wave coffee shops like Blue Spoon and Toby’s Estate also recently opening in New York – but already they are drawing the numbers. So stop by for a doubleshot.

“Chronicle,” a Movie Shot Where?

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Is this Cape Town?

I don’t know about you, but if a movie is shot in South Africa I can tell. Within five seconds of a Volvo ad screening on TV, I can detect Chapman’s Peak or the Karoo or a shot in Cape Town central – no matter how hard they try to disguise it. So blow me down (and away) if one of 2011’s blockbusters (and one of my favorite movies), Chronicle, wasn’t shot in South Africa and I didn’t even smell a rat or fynbos or the salty spray of the Atlantic at Clifton for one milisecond. Even if you check out the photo to the left, try and see Cape Town in there somewhere. As one American critic noted, director Josh Trank did an amazing job with the movie, not least of all in transforming South Africa into Seattle.

The story in Chronicle is a simple one. Three high-school kids discover a hole in the ground that seems to have been made by a meteorite, go into the hole, and then, zap!, something happens to them. They all inexplicably develop telekinetic powers – they can do fun things like move cars by pointing their fingers and they can fly – and plenty other things an 18-year-old could have fun (and get into trouble) with. But all of a sudden, of course, things start to go wrong in a bad way. It’s a very smart movie, written by Max Landis (whose father, John, made movies like American Werewolf in London) that has you guessing all the time. And I don’t mean just the location.

Pasop, Goldman Sachs!

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The New York Times today carried an op-ed piece by South African-born, Rhodes graduate Greg Smith decrying the state of his employer, Goldman Sachs. Titled “Why I am Leaving Goldman Sachs,” it pulls no punches in saying what most of us probably have suspected for a long time but few people in the industry actually admit to – that Wall Street is greedy and doesn’t care about its clients.Instead of putting customers first, Smith says, it puts them close to last.

Greg Smith's Bio in the Times

The op-ed has generated a slew of comments already, most of them praising Smith, and the Times has now added an article about the controversy, saying that people on Wall Street might be prompted to (but probably won’t) do a bit of soul searching. It is titled “A Public Exit from Goldman Sachs Hits at a Wounded Wall Street.”

Smith, who is a hero to many for his honesty, will doubtlessly be persona non grata in financial circles for a long time to come. However, he will probably be swamped with invitations from the lecture circuit. The ink on his op-ed is barely dry, and already the daggers are out. In Forbes, a columnist says that Smith was not a top executive and he is suffering from a midlife crisis.

In Smith’s article he says that he has worked for Goldman Sachs for twelve years, in New York and London, and the company he joined is not the one he works for now. Things have changed radically.

“I am sad to say that I look around today and see virtually no trace of the culture that made me love working for this firm for many years,” he writes. Many of his criticisms cut deep. “Leadership used to be about ideas, setting an example and doing the right thing. Today, if you make enough money for the firm (and are not currently an ax murderer) you will be promoted into a position of influence.” Perhaps most cutting of all is this comment: “It makes me ill how callously people talk about ripping their clients off… It astounds me how little senior management gets a basic truth: If clients don’t trust you they will eventually stop doing business with you. It doesn’t matter how smart you are.”

The biography of Smith in the Times says that he will be resigning from his position at Goldman Sachs today.

Farewell, Oh Bicycle!

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What My Bike Looked Like

New York City finally got my bicycle. I knew it would happen sooner or later. The warnings were there. The last time I went to the bike shop to check on which locks were best, the owner said, “If you want to park your bike on the street in Manhattan, my advice is, ‘Don’t.” He showed me a variety of chains, but said that all of them were useless against someone who wanted to steal your bike. Plus, you had to get special locks for your seat and your wheels, because those got stolen even if the frame was left behind.

So I knew the odds.

Bicycle theft in the city is out of control, and there is, according to the New York Times, a flourishing trade in stolen bikes. The thousands of young guys crisscrossing the city to deliver takeout pizza and Chinese to apartments here and there all use bicycles, and even they get their bicycles stolen. One of the delivery guys even stolen my bicycle a few months ago from outside my front door. He had to carry it down five flights of stairs, although that didn’t deter him. But him we got on camera, leaving the building with two bicycles, so the police knew where to go looking for it.

This time I wasn’t as lucky. I went to have lunch on Prince Street, in the middle of trendy SoHo. Even though the bike was locked and in full view of the restaurant, I told the manager I had my bike parked out front. Could he please keep an eye on it every now and then. There was also a camera focused on the bike spot. During lunch I glanced outside occasionally to see if the bike was still there. Five minutes before leaving, I saw it was gone.

I got that horrible feeling one always gets at the moment you realize you’ve been robbed. I saw all the hundreds of miles I have cycled around Manhattan, the trips up and down the Hudson and East rivers, vanish in front of me. And yet there was also a momentary sense of relief – weirdly – because I knew I wouldn’t have to be petrified anymore of my bike being stolen. Because it was no long my possession to be worried about.

The police came an hour later, the manager was less than helpful, and the restaurant’s camera wasn’t actually switched on. So there is no evidence and no bike.  So I guess it’s back to walking.

Postscript: Only a few days after the above theft, documentary filmmaker Casey Neistat and his brother made a short film on how easy it is to steal a bike in New York City. It’s both funny and scary.

Safe House

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We all know that Cape Town is being used a lot for movie shoots and ad shoots, often doubling for a city in America or elsewhere. This week sees the launch of Safe House, an action blockbuster that is set smack in the middle of the Mother City and which is getting great word of mouth already.

It stars Denzel Washington as a rogue CIA agent who, after evading capture for a decade, is sent to a safe house in Cape Town, where he is guarded by Ryan Reynolds.

Of course everything goes wrong, and from the very start of the movie it’s chases and shootouts. And, of course, lots of great Cape Town scenery.

The movie is already being compared to the Bourne series because it’s not only as fast as a whip, but it’s smart too, with the actors also including Vera Farmiga and Brendon Gleeson.

The young Swedish director, Daniel Espinosa, spent much of his time growing up in Africa, in Mozambique especially, and he knows South Africa well. “For me,” he said in an interview, “it was like coming home.”

Watch the trailer:

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IfQY4fNcnw

I. Love. Johannesburg.

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I love Johannesburg. Yes, you heard right – I love Johannesburg.

I. Love. Johannesburg.

I just spent several weeks in the city, and it was perfect. I jogged up and down the Westcliff Stairs, ate seafood at the Troyeville Hotel, bought an ‘Igotshotinjoburg :)’ T-shirt (the smiley at the end is intentional; the slogan is not about crime but a photographic project) at the Arts on Main market, visited the Apartheid Museum, ate paella at the Neighborhood Market in Braamfontein, went to the Fort on Constitution Hill, shopped at Art Africa in Parkview, drank coffee at Bean There in 44 Stanley, got lost in Melrose Arch, saw a great cartoon exhibition at Museum Africa, went to an antique fair at Wanderers, sneaked into the amazing new Johannesburg Library, which is meant to reopen in February next year after a three-year renovation, and, best of all, saw possibly one of the most stupendous sights of my life – the jacarandas in bloom all over the city.

The thing that kept baffling me, as I wandered through the city, was this: Where are all the tourists? This is a world-class city. Johannesburg can hold a candle to the best. I love Los Angeles, and to me Johannesburg is just like L.A. The ribbon of highways, the ridges versus L.A.’s hills, the enclave suburbs (instead of Beverley Hills, West Hollywood and Los Feliz, you have Houghton, Parkhurst and Melville), the metropolitan area that runs on and on virtually till the Magaliesberg, the downtown area that noone wants to go to. It might not have the beach, but who goes to the beach when they visit L.A. anyway? In my opinion, it has a lot more energy than L.A. by a long shot.

So, once again, where are all the tourists? Where are all the people who would visit this city if they knew how fabulous it was? What is the Johannesburg tourist office doing to promote the city? Is there even a tourist office? As a journalist, I keep my eye out for things like that, and I never saw a single solitary a single tourist office. What I did see, though, were 1) people who are surprised when you tell them how fantastic their city is, and 2) murder, rape, and muti killings (not real murders, rapes and killings, but I’ll get to that).

The people who are surprised to hear a positive reaction about Johannesburg I can understand. Noone raves about Johannesburg. People rave about New York, even people who haven’t been there. I live in New York and I hear it constantly. ‘Oh, New York is fantastic.’ Even people who haven’t been there tell me New York is the best.

Well, maybe. But New York also has a fantastic PR department. They spend millions and millions to get tourists there to spend money and have a good time. They load the streets with thousands of policemen and police cars to make it safe for tourists to walk around. Johannesburg? Noone visits, so there’s noone to tell you how fantastic it is. And as Julia Roberts said in Pretty Woman, “You start to believe the bad stuff about yourself if you get told often enough.”

Which is where we come to No. 2. Murder, rape and muti killings. Drive around Johannesburg, and that’s about all you see. Not in reality but on telephone poles, on any available pole in sight. Thanks to bastions of journalism like The Star, The Citizen, The Sowetan, Rapport, even people who have never bought a newspaper can read headlines like ‘Terminal Patient Raped,’ ‘Mother Says I Love You as Son Kills Her.’

Great. This is the positive news Johannesburgers need to read every day, every few meters they drive along every road. If Johannesburg did some simple calculations, they would figure out that the revenue they earn from newspapers buying telephone poles to advertise crime is minuscule compared to the money they are losing from a) tourists who are too scared to visit the city and still think of it as ‘the crime capital of the world,’ and b) residents who are too depressed to do their jobs properly because they think they are surrounded by crime.

I’ve got a few suggestions. Plaster a happy face over the next crime headline you see. Tell people how fabulous Johannesburg is. Go see the jacarandas. Visit Johannesburg. You might be surprised.

Africa, the Good News

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The New York Times reporter Nicholas Kristof is two things, 1) a brilliant, unsparing journalist and 2) a lover of Africa. If there’s a story in Africa that needs covering and which the world isn’t looking at – Rwanda, Darfur – Kristof is hammering at that door. Pay attention, he shouts, over and over. He recently held a competition among readers, the prize for which was to accompany him on a trip through Africa. A student and a teacher who had never been to Africa won. The story of the five ‘wretched’ countries they passed through is a story of incredible hope. Yes, hope. Read on…

I Don’t Like Ballet…

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At least that’s what I thought until I saw Jose Manuel Carreno.

Last Thursday Carreno danced for the last time, and the performance was in ‘Swan Lake’ at the Lincoln Center, home of American Ballet Theater and perhaps the epicenter of great dance in America. Carreno, I didn’t know until then, is, to some aficionados, something like Nureyev once was. Which means he’s fantastic. He is Cuban, 42, and after announcing his retirement a while back, last week was to be his final public performance. A friend of mine is Cuban, and he likes the ballet, so he said we must go see Carreno’s big farewell. Two other friends who came along warned us that at a farewell like this the applause could go on for a full hour at the end. “So get ready.”

The applause didn’t go on for an hour, but it went on for a long time. Flowers were thrown at him, Carreno’s friends and family and about sixty people came onstage to kiss and hug him and say goodbye. He made about ten curtain calls. People shouted, ‘More! More!” I thought it was a pretty darn nice farewell for someone who works in a profession I guess lots of us think is dying. But there, at the Lincoln Center, seats were sold out months in advance, the massive theater was packed to the gills, and the audience couldn’t get enough.

I always thought I could do or do without ballet. I was on the fence, probably on the other side of the fence, the wrong side. And then … ‘Swan Lake.’ It wasn’t Carreno who took my breath away, it was the ballerinas. Julie Kent and Gillian Murphy, two names that probably mean zero to you, played the main roles, the white and black swans. When they danced, I suddenly felt like I was taken to another place. I know nothing about ballet, and I have no basis to judge them. But their movements seemed effortless – even though you could see they were the hardest thing in the world to do – and as they waved their arms above their heads in slow control and stretched out on their toes and glided across the stage, they looked like, well, swans. It made you want to cry.

Which made me realize, there is ballet and there is ballet. This was ballet, and I’m hooked.

 

Iggy, the Dog from Death Row

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The Igster

My neighbor Julie’s heart is too big, especially when it comes to animals. She works at New York’s ASPCA and has two rescue dogs, both Tibetan terriers, one of which was in a puppy mill and used as a breeding dog for seven years, kept in a cage all that time with numerous other dogs, and never saw the light of day. Two years with Julie and he is almost not scared of his own shadow and he loves being outside. Watching him thrill in the outdoors is in itself a thrill.

A few weeks ago Julie brought home Iggy, a terrier who was on death row at the shelter where she sometimes volunteers. It is SHOCKING the number of animals that daily get put down/euthenized/killed in New York, and I won’t even give you the figures. You won’t be able to eat your dinner. Animals that people don’t want, dogs that people have used for fighting, animals that are so messed up that no one can fix them up without a lot of money being invested in them.

Every now and then Julie finds a dog she thinks is redeemable, and she brings him home to foster until she can find him a home. It is a reprieve. And that’s where Iggy comes in.

I sometimes take Iggy for a walk. He reminds me of the Tramp from ‘The Lady and the Tramp.’ He is a real character, with a bit of white scruff on his face, a trip in his step, and a curious habit of sometimes walking on three legs like a circus dog. He loves other dogs, doesn’t bark unless he has to, and he walks like a dream on a leash.

In New York, you come to see lots of dogs. Lots of people have dogs. Lots of people who shouldn’t have dogs have dogs. Lots of people who live in tiny apartments and have no time to walk their dogs have dogs. Often they are purebred $1000 specials that are neurotic (possibly because of their owners), yap, go berserk when they see other dogs, pull at their leashes, and are basically the kind of dog that make you not want to have a dog. Then along comes Iggy, a mutt fresh off of death row, pure of spirit, no hangups, walks like a dream, causes no mess or fuss.

The neurotics have a home, but Iggy doesn’t. Yes, life sure is mean sometimes.

Got a Home?

Two people who were sure, absolutely sure, that they wanted Iggy backed out at the last minute. When they give their final answer, my heart falls even more than the previous time. But I am positive Iggy will find a home – I hope, I hope, I hope.

And one final thought: Next time you think of spending a fortune on a purebred or you pass by a mutt without a home, think of Iggy. Mutts can be the best.

(POSTSCRIPT: Iggy was adopted.)

Wedding in New York

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My South African friend Jack and his Japanese fiancee tied the knot in New York this week, Las Vegas-style. Four of us – me being a second South African, and Kris being Indonesian – went down to City Hall, where you line up, get a number and go to a counter when your number lights up on the digital screen. It felt a bit like a supermarket, except everyone was carrying bouquets and the people behind the counter were really nice, like it was your wedding day or something. You filled out a form, showed your ID, and that was it – well, almost. Couples dressed like tourists sat on sofas waiting to go from the counters to the ‘chapel’ ceremony, where the guy asks things like “Do you take this person to be your one and only spouse for the rest of your life, through sickness and health, for as long as you both shall live” and so forth. One bride arrived in a taffeta gown cinched at the waist, her hair swept up. Another came in a short powder-blue smock, white running shoes. Two men arrived, together, both in jeans. Lots of pictures were taken. Bridal parties came and left. It was like being at not one wedding but many. Afterward, pictures in Central Park, with people sunbathing in the background, joggers shirtless running by, carriages carting people on a Carrie-and-Mister-Big ride, lots of them shouting “Congratulations!” to the bride and groom. I think they thought they had caught a very New York moment – two South Africans, one Japanese, and a gal from Djakarta – and I guess they had.