South Africans in New York

SA News for SAPeople

A Slideshow Like No Other!

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If you mention a slideshow to someone – if they even remember what slides are, in this digital age – they will probably start yawning before you have finished the sentence. They think: long drawn-out evenings of auntie’s trip to Wherever and snaps of cousins they have never met. But along comes the Slideluck Potshow, a classy colorful mash-up of slideshow and potluck, and you have a whole different ballgame.

Started several years ago in New York, the not-for-profit event now takes place every month or so in 40 locations as extreme as Seville, Los Angeles, Berlin, and Bogota. Artists from professional to amateur are asked to submit up to five minutes worth of slides or multimedia, and the best are then chosen for the evening’s event. Anyone who wants to come brings some food with them, and after a few hours of mingling, the show begins. And it will take your breath away!

Mesmerized in Chicago

The most recent event in New York, last weekend, was held in a warehouse in Brooklyn, with a wide mix of downtown stiletto-cool and Brooklyn jeans-and-lumberjack-shirts. The first half of the slideshow focused on ‘Upheaval’ and the submissions included Libya, Egypt, the Gulf Oil Spill, and a trip across the Caucasus. More than a dozen SLPS events have taken place in New York, and to get an idea of what you’ll see, click any of the slides here.

(And for anyone in South Africa reading this, there are no events there yet. So someone down there should contact SLPS soon!)

Causing an Uproar

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The subject of Dereck and Beverly Joubert’s full-length documentary, The Last Lions, is simply – and sadly – just that. It’s about the last lions of Africa. Which is exactly what they will be unless people take action. Fifty years ago there were 450,000 lions; now there are an estimated 20,000 left. All that in a mere half century. This has been caused by the encroachment of civilization, poaching, and sport hunting.

Watch the Trailer and $10 Goes to Save Lions

It’s a fact learned by few people who go on safari. They don’t realize that the animals they are watching, enjoying, enthralled by, might not be there for their own children to one day see. And that’s what the Jouberts, who have been filming predators in southern Africa for twenty years, mostly for National Geographic, are trying to do with The Last Lions. They want to make people aware of the beauty and irreplaceable richness that will die when the predator cats do.

The Jouberts follow one lioness, who, with her three cubs, flees a pride of females and settles on Duba island in Botswana. The rest of the movie is about her battle to keep her family alive, to feed them, and to fend off attacks by other cats and a massive herd of buffalo. It’s a story of Africa’s wildlife, heartbreaking at times, but it reminds you what’s at stake. Lions in all their glory.

Financed by National Geographic, which has launched Cause an Uproar in order to spread information about the plight of lions.  Also, The Big Cat Initiative, which was started by the Jouberts and National Geographic, is working in Botswana, Cameroon, Kenya, and other countries, to try and halt the decrease in the number of cats. As Dereck Joubert says, “We are fighting for one cat at a time.”

But the Jouberts also do their own share.

As stakeholders in the Great Plains Conservation, which owns properties in Botswana, Tanzania, and Kenya – such as Duba Plains, where the movie was filmed, and Ol Donyo Lodge – the company puts money back into conservation and cat programs and anti-poaching. To support their company and its properties is to support wildlife.

An Italian Takes on NY (or Rather, American) Coffee

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In Ted’s Ongoing Pursuit of the Great Cup of Coffee, I followed illy’s master barista, Giorgia Milos,  around New York recently (prior to my two days at illy’s University of Coffee). We took in four coffee shops of my choosing, and after we had glugged our espressos he gave his assessment of where coffee in New York (and America in general) is today. And, as you will see from the article I wrote for www.salon.com, it’s not in a very good place. The article, posted today, has already drawn a hefty number of comments from around the country. As I say, Americans take their coffee seriously!

Swim New York

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Jumping into the Hudson River

Every summer in New York City, hundreds of people dive into the Hudson River and swim. At the same time, hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers go ‘Yech!’ because they are convinced that the Hudson is dirty, filthy, disease-ridden. Swim there? Never!

I am one of those hundreds of people who swim the Hudson, and I have been doing so for more than a decade. That’s when an organization called Swim NYC first had the idea to, as they say, ‘Take Back the River’ – especially seeing the city had made such great strides cleaning it up. It launched a 2.5-mile swim starting at the 79th Street boat basin and ending at Chelsea Piers on 23rd Street. There were 35 of us who dived in, and we swam one of the rarest routes you will ever find. In between strokes I contemplated the water-level views of the Chrysler and Empire State buildings and marveled at the idea of doing freestyle right under the stern of the USS Intrepid. It was a swim one doesn’t easily forget.

Now, a decade later, NYC Swim offers almost a dozen events in the Hudson and East rivers every summer, and each of them draws about 250 people (that’s the limit – NYC Swim can’t control more than that number in the boat-heavy waters around Manhattan). One very popular route, barely a kilometer long, goes under the Brooklyn Bridge, from Lower Manhattan, near Chinatown, to Brooklyn. Another, this past Sunday, was a two-miler around Governors Island, the little-visited old fortress island across the water from Lower Manhattan.

Freestyling in the Shadow of Lady Liberty

There were over 200 of us who caught the ferry across to Governors Island early that morning, changed into our swimsuits and got our electronic tags, and then were taken by water taxi to the drop-off point directly off of the 18th-century Fort Jay. From there we swam counterclockwise around the island, the Statue of Liberty to our right, the Verrazano Narrows Bridge in the distance, and then, as we turned the corner, the Brooklyn Naval Yard, Manhattan Bridge, and Manhattan. Except that being a left-hand breather, I missed out on all the tourist attractions and saw the island most of the way.

Governors Island

For anyone who doesn’t swim, Governors Island is a great visit anyway. The ferry, right next to the Staten Island ferry, is free, although it runs on a limited schedule. There are bikes for hire on the island, and it’s a good visit for a few hours. Even if you wanted to swim, though, you couldn’t. Uncontrolled swimming in the Hudson isn’t happening, at least not yet. Right now you have to race. So come join us.

Streets Paved in Gold

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Ever since I moved to New York fourteen years ago, I’ve collected things off the street. This is the city of plenty – plenty to throw away. You can find furniture, paintings, lamps, computers, printers, strollers, food, you name it. So impressed was I by the largesse/wastage that I wrote a book, Mongo, Adventures in Trash, about it. (Mongo is New York slang for anything someone has thrown away that you find some use for.)

I’ve since stopped collecting bigger items. I go for the occasional painting that takes my fancy or a lamp. If it’s something I’m looking for – though it’s rare you actually find something you’re looking for when you’re looking for it – then I take it. One thing I have always collected and continue to look for is money. New York is a city paved not so much in gold but brass and nickel. Mostly I find pennies. Pennies are plentiful and most people don’t seem to have the energy to pick them up once they’ve fallen. Pennies are the insignificant coin. So much so that many shops don’t even bother to give you your change of one or two cents. They regard it as so small as to be meaningless. How far away, you might ask then, is five cents and a dime?

But those pennies add up. I’ve collected more than $400 off the streets since I bent to pick up my first coin. Of course that’s not all made up of pennies – there was one very welcome $50 bill drifting around a gas station on York Avenue and 58th Street – but most of it was. I have always put the coins I collect to one side, just to figure out how much I’ve made, how much falls out of people’s pockets, how much people overlook what is right at their feet.

Whenever I see someone who picks up a coin, I make sure to say something, like, “You a collector?” They are always happy to meet a fellow collector/picker/gatherer (that is, unless the collector happens to be a psychotic schizophrenic, many of whom rummage through the city’s trash too). In all my years in New York, though, I can count on one hand the number of people I’ve seen picking up coins. Sometimes it is the kind of person you’d expect (an old lady who, wearing a torn dress and with a Medusa hairstyle, looks like a trash picker) and sometimes it isn’t (a twentysomething on his cell phone). I still feel embarrassed every time I stop the sidewalk traffic to pick up a coin – yes, even $400 later! – but that doesn’t stop me from doing it.

Coins won’t feature in the documentary about mongo that Italian/Australian filmmaker Marco Mona and I are making at the moment, but plenty of other amazing throwaways in New York will. For a taste of what the movie will look like, check out Mongo, Trash Treasure Hunters – and stay tuned for more!

The illy Factor

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This week I spent two days at the University of Coffee. Yes, believe it or not, there is such a thing. Actually it’s called Universitá del Caffé, which, you might have guessed, is Italian. And if it’s Italian and it’s about coffee, chances are illy will be in the picture. Yes, that’s illy with a small i. And it’s illy that runs the UDC.

For $125, Coffee (by Capsule) at Home

For $125, Coffee (by Capsule) at Home

In brief, we learned some coffee history, what elements an espresso should consist of, how to single out the tastes in a good espresso (a bit bitter, sweet, salty, sour), some of the world’s major bean-growing regions (who knew that India is becoming a major coffee producer?), the myths (coffee doesn’t make your heart go faster, coffee is not bad for you – talk to the scientists!), the politics of coffee (direct trade vs. fair trade), the inner workings of an espresso machine (Question: What is that silver screwtop coffee maker we put on the stove called? Answer at the end), and we got to drink various types of espresso to gauge whether we could tell the difference between caf and decaf (no, we couldn’t) or over- and underextracted espressos (yes, we could). And if you don’t know what it means to ‘extract’ coffee, get thee to your nearest Universitá (or just Google it) to find out more. And of course, we got to pull espressos and try to make as good a cappuccino as you can in two days.

I used to be a cynic about illy. For me the distinctive red label was a bit like Coca-Cola. You saw the sign everywhere, which was both good and bad. Good because it meant that If you were in a place where there weren’t many coffeeshops, an illy sign promised at least a decent enough brew and perhaps someone who knew what an espresso was. But if there were other options – which there are increasingly today, as specialty coffeeshops proliferate – you would pass illy by.

The X7 iperespresso - a New Generation

The X7 iperEspresso - a New Generation

But turns out that illy not only makes serious coffee – and has been plugging away at it since 1933, when Francesco Illy started the company in Trieste – but has also been doing some pretty darn innovative things.

Take direct trade (forget fair trade, that’s passé), where roasters deal directly with the farmers, often also teaching them how to grow better beans and get more bang for their beans. Today lots of roasters, especially in America, wear it as a badge of distinction that they work in tandem with farmers in Colombia or Rwanda, but illy has quietly been doing this for a long time without blowing its own horn.

At the company’s Universitás in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and Bangalore, India – there are 10 UDCs around the world, with courses for professionals and consumers – illy schools local farmers in new techniques and technology. Agronomists pay visits to farms to see where they can offer help and suggest ways to improve crops.  Because illy buys its coffee from 9 countries – and from that intake it concocts a signature blend that it tries to keep as constant as possible every year – it pays the company to make sure that the beans it gets are of the best quality.

A Moka

A Moka

Then there’s the coffee-making equipment, an area where illy has been no slouch either. Check out the X7 iperEspresso, part of what illy calls ‘the next generation of espresso’, which uses a nifty-looking, specially designed and crafted capsule to give you an espresso or a lungo or a cappuccino. It might be a bit too Jetsons and space-agey for some, but if illy’s doing it, it’s the future. And you can bet it tastes good.

(Answer: It’s called  a moka.)


Banksy: The Strangest Movie

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Flower Riot

Flower Riot

Most people probably think that “good documentary movies” is an oxymoron. Good documentary movies are what other people (Did someone say the losers and the nerds?) go see. Good documentary movies are what you promise yourself you will go see when the trailer comes out, but never do.

Good documentary movies, I realize every time I see one, suffer the exact opposite fate of bad blockbusters. The one you don’t think twice about going to see (think Avatar) and afterwards you are sorry you did see it. The other you really struggle to go to (A documentary about spelling bees? Are you crazy?) and afterwards you can’t stop telling people how fabulous it was and it’s a shame documentaries don’t get the attention they deserve.

Banksys Addition to Israel

Banksy's Addition to Israel

And there goes Exit Through the Gift Shop, a brilliant film by (and mostly about) the British street artist Banksy. Like me before I saw Exit, you might not know the name Banksy but you probably know lots of the images the anonymous artist painted (or stenciled) on walls in Britain from the 1980s onwards, and then in places like Bethlehem, where he painted a piece of a paradise-looking island on the wall dividing Palestinians and Israelis. His art is satirical and funny, and comments on society and politics. And it’s almost always fun. Remember the British red telephone box sawn in half and reassembled as if it had melted?

Bankys Murdered Phone Booth

Banky's Murdered Phone Booth

In Exit, you are given a whirlwind tour of street art around the world, all pumping along with a great soundtrack by Richard Hawley (listen here). How street art started, why it started, and how it got out of control, becoming a multimillion-dollar industry that had grown very simply out of  a bunch of down-and-outers getting creative.

The Elusive Banksy in the Movie

The Elusive Banksy in the Movie

One person in particular, Thierry Guetta, a French immigrant in Los Angeles, gets major (and not always nice) attention in the movie. In the 1990s, Guetta started documenting street artists around the world with his video camera, hoping to make a movie about it, but after shooting millions of feet of film he suddenly decided to turn himself into the biggest street artist of all, Mister Brainwash. None of this went down well with Bansky, who believes that Guetta made a complete mockery of a genre that had started organically, honestly, and not with the purpose of making money – which Guetta made lots of.

Truth is stranger than fiction, and the story in Exit is proof of that.

A Rant for the Week

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A little video prominently displayed on the New York Times website today by one Patrick Barth is interesting to note. (I won’t give the link because I wouldn’t like to give it a viewership.) The story, such as it is, is apparently about the hopes of South Africans after the World Cup. But one of the first sentences Mister Barth utters is this: “Despite the colorful displays of unity, there are some economists who believe that South Africa is the most unequal society in the world.”

Ten Pieces of Good News

Ten Pieces of Good News

And so begins yet another media story saying, Yes, all fine and well, but…

You know those stories? Remember the one that went, Yes, it’s all fine and well that Mandela is in power, but what about when he goes? Then when Mbeki took over, and South Africa didn’t fall off the edge of Africa, it was, Yes, but let’s see how the first five years go. Then when Zuma took over, it was, Yes, he sounds fine, but just wait…

You pick your event over the last sixteen years, and there will be a naysayer, a complainer, a person who sees the glass half-empty. No, there will be plenty of them. Now it’s the soccer. People who were positive – absolutely and unequivocally positive – that South Africa couldn’t do it, could never bring off such a huge event, are now saying, Yes, but it’s still the most unequal society in the world.

Says who? According to Mister Barth, “some economists.” Yes, that famous group of Some Economists Who Are Easy to Quote When You have Noone Else to Rely On. Many of us journalists know how a story like Barth’s gets produced. He will propose a story that might be more positive – like how the World Cup brought together a black and white couple from Sandton and Diepsloot who never would have met otherwise – and it will be rejected by his editor in New York or London who is still living in 1980 and has this fixed idea about what a news story should be (namely, bad news that makes you go, “See, I knew they would fail. I knew there’d be an earthquake under the stadium. It’s just like I told you. See, it’s in the Times, it must be true.”).

And so Mister Barth puts together a video relying on two interviewees and “some economists.” And once again, people who see it will be left with a negative impression of South Africa – wasn’t apartheid, AIDS, township violence enough to keep them sated for a while? – when the country deserves praise more than anything else.

But praise and good news, as we keep seeing, don’t make a good story. It’s not only no news that is bad news, as the saying goes, but good news too.

The A-Team Meets Van der Merwe

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In the ’80s, the TV series lots of people hated to love and others loved to hate was that oddity called The A-Team. Remember George Peppard playing the colonel with the stogie, and The Face,  and the jewel-encrusted Mr. T? And then, of course, there was everyone’s foil, Murdock.

Well, as with all TV series that generate a following, Hollywood had to make a movie out of the series. And it’s just been released. The new A-Team stars Liam Neeson, Bradley Cooper (the latest movie heartthrob plays, of course, The Face), and Sharlto Copley as Murdock. Yes, that would be the Copley who starred as Wikus van der Merwe in District 9.

Copley at a Premiere

Copley at a Premiere

Copley joins a very elite group of actors who have gone from total unknowndom to a major Hollywood movie. Let’s see if he plays an American in a caper movie as well as he played a bumbling hero in a kind of South African one. Welcome back, Van der Merwe!

Wine ‘n’ Soccer

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wineCome Saturday and the match between… well, I’m not sure who it will be between… but a bunch of us in New York will be at a little bistro called the Rouge Tomate on 60th Street, watching the match and drinking wine. South African wine, of course.

There’s no better time to promote SA wine, which is going through a buzzy time at the moment anyway. People all over America are talking about Goats do Roam and Mulderbosch and Meerlust and Warwick and Boekenhoutskloof, and more and more liquor stores have a SA wine section.

A couple of weeks ago a fab group called Wines of South Africa held a tasting where there were winemakers from all over the Western Cape in attendance, in the dozens if not hundreds. It was the function to go to.

During the World Cup, Wosa will be hosting events around the city, calling it World Cup Wine Nights, mixing two passions – wine and soccer – giving Americans a chance to try figure out not only what the rules of soccer are but also why they had overlooked SA wines for so long.