bios

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by Roger Young

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Let’s just call it what it is: Kevin Fraser performs blackface with his character Gladys, has been doing so for a long while – which is what this “best” of tour is all about. You would think, since Schuster’s films were pulled from Showmax in 2020 amid a review of racially insensitive material, that Fraser would read the room. In his defence, that’s hard to do from Australia.

In a reel dropped today on his socials the standup influencer, promoting his South African tour, you know the South Africa he loves so much that he moved to Australia, brings out his old favourite Gladys for a paid spot for Amazon.

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an interview with Yugen Blakrok

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You should basically be ashamed of yourself for not knowing who Yugen Blakrok is. It took a Facebook post a few weeks ago to remind me that she made this deep hip-hop that made me feel like I was listening to Digital Underground, or Massive Attack, or Lovage even, but you know, on shrooms, a music that was effortless and expanding. And then I got to wondering, where the fuck is Yugen Blakrok now?

And so…

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Reactionary Review | Landmyn | dir: Nico Scheepers

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Landmyn ebbs and seethes through a winter family holiday by the beach.

Siblings Colette, Johan and Lisa, one returned from a career in London (or Scotland) apparently making coffee, the other an up and coming playwright and director (plainly the autobiographical hinge of the film – you can tell this because the other characters accuse him of being pretentious) and their younger sister, who is rebelling, presumably as she has dyed her hair red. The three of them find themselves at a beach house somewhere in the Cape, paid for by the older sister, who breaks the news that their mother is coming as well. Portent sets in. Who pays for what is where the faultlines lie.

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by Roger Young

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“Dolly Parton — love her. She nursed her ill husband till the end. She looked like a complete floozy, but she was a strong and deep human being. RIP.” — Helen Zille

After Dolly Parton’s death last week the DA leader and current Johannesburg Mayoral hopeful Helen Zille tweeted the above – in her words, a “compliment” as tribute to the star’s passing, which sparked a mild middle-class outrage.

In Zille’s defence, she was not calling Parton a floozy, she was saying that she looked like a floozy. Parton herself famously said that, “It takes a lot of money to look this cheap.” Zille was merely riffing on this famous line.

But looking “like a floozy” and looking “this cheap” are two very different statements.

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an interview with Boima Tucker

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Boima Tucker has spent the last few years making a film about extraction, energy, colonialism and the slightly uncomfortable question of what happens when the people who need development most are also the people expected to pay for it. After Oil moves between South Africa, Kenya and Western Sahara, following communities negotiating very different versions of the same global system.

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The first question I had when I saw that The Haven Night Shelter are promoting, along with the CCID, a Homeless Golf Day was… When do the unhoused find the time to practice their swing?

However, the unhoused will probably not be invited to the Clovelly golf course, the event is instead to raise money to provide mobile ablutions to the homeless of Cape Town. Clovelly has around 1,550 members, with roughly 164 people playing the course on an average day. So the Golf Day is bound to attract some attention.

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on Data Centres, Funeral Parlours, and Socrates.

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by Roger Young

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“The totality of beliefs and sentiments common to average citizens of the same society forms a determinate system which has its own life; one may call it the collective or common conscience.”

— The Division of Labour in Society — Durkheim

This is an essay about systems overwhelming human capacity to perceive the whole, and I am currently overwhelmed by information that the system has given me in support of the vague feeling I had that this was a thing. The structure document was generated in the no-time of machine intelligence. Humanity is time.

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I Hardly Remember Their Names

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From her kitchen in a container near the rank she arrives at night, scolding and so on, in a huff of takeaway styrofoam containers and things exchanged for left over food. Dadoh settles in to the office chair Jimmy spends his days in.

“No ma, she’s working next door right now.”

Unless Nontle is there, then civility abounds.

Reactionary Review | Benaaihilism | Van Pletzen

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Benaaihilism has to be the dumbest album released in recent times. Big, dumb, and 3am Eternal beautiful. This is a collection of songs entirely for driving from Pretoria to Stellenbosch to meet a girl at Aandklas, and discovering she’s hooked up with someone else, and getting brandy and coke existential about it.