Adrian Turpin Profile: Sam Rockwell To become a star every actor needs a quirk in his or her private life. A handy hook, preferably unconnected with work, something that allows people to say, “Yeah, that’s the guy who …” For Sam Rockwell, it’s what he does in bed. “My mother, let’s just say, was a […]
David Shapshak Now that Pakistan has shown the world that it could quietly purify enough plutonium for the five nuclear devices it detonated recently – and probably enough for many more – attention is turning to how to divorce nuclear weapons from nuclear power plants. And while conventional nuclear power stations have had a bad […]
Christopher Reed in Los Angeles After an acrimonious debate, the San Francisco school board has become the first in the United States to require students to read books by “authors of colour”. The measure caused conflict when proposed by two black members, who initially insisted that seven of the 10 required books on high school […]
Peter Makurube When Allen Kwela lost his beloved Gibson, the whole nation was up in arms. The daily paper Sowetan ran an article appealing to the muggers to return that national treasure. The criminals returned the guitar to the paper’s offices – intact. Kwela had been out drinking and was staggering home when a gang […]
The Media Sector of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange has risen by 70% since the October 1997 crash, but growth has only begun. Last week’s announcement that the board of industrial giant Johnnies Industrial Corporation Limited (Johnnic) had voted to implement a strategic re-alignment of Omni Media Corporation Limited (Omnicor) sets the sector on a future […]
unrest Mail & Guardian reporters The army weapon and ammunition heists in Bloemfontein may have been intended to fuel instability in Lesotho. This scenario was flighted by security experts this week as police made their first arrests. Lesotho has been racked by protests since claims by opposition parties that the ruling Lesotho Congress for Democracy […]
The issue of child criminals has become a major source of embarrassment for the government, writes Andy Duffy The Western Cape is poised to scrap special schools for hundreds of child criminals, despite the growing number of children in jail. Provincial education department officials have told staff at several of the 15 reform schools and […]
Shopping and Fucking is definitely the most anal play of the year, though whether it is for reasons the playwright intended is debatable. As you enter the Barney Simon Theatre you enviously notice that the actors are going to lounge on a huge, Dali- esque couch, while you have to sit on a backless bench […]
Robyn Alexander, who helped curate an exhibition on the reproductive body, explains the thinking behind the show The Bringing Up Baby exhibition is part of the main programme at the Standard Bank National Arts Festival in Grahamstown. It was first conceived (and, of course, that verb is used deliberately) by its curator Terry Kurgan, during […]
FRIDAY 4.30PM: THE African National Congress has welcomed the conviction of former Civil Co-operation Bureau assassin Ferdi Barnard, but has called his comments likening his cause to that of President Mandela “presumptious”. After being sentenced to two life terms and 63 years for murder, attempted murder and fraud, Barnard said: “When President Mandela got sentenced […]
FRIDAY, 6.30PM: Ethiopian aircraft have bombed the Eritrean capital, Asmara. Two aircraft twice bombed an air force base, hitting workshops and hangars. No injuries were reported. The attack comes a day after Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi told reporters he would accept a peace plan brokered by Rwanda to end the escalating border conflict between […]
As Wall Street pats itself on the back, trouble lurks behind the boom, warn Joel Kotkin and David Friedman With the Asian dragons vanquished, Wall Street soaring to new heights and United States unemployment rates at modern lows, American elites are indulging in an orgy of self- congratulation unmatched since the Roaring Twenties. “France had […]
Shaun de Waal CD of the week In the early Sixties, Ornette Coleman spearheaded a revolution in jazz, and this is the album that gave that new movement its name. Free Jazz is one of a handful of works re- released in deluxe (that is, fiddly sleeve-within- sleeve) packaging to celebrate the 50th birthday of […]
Mukoni T Ratshitanga The African National Congress in the Northern Province this week met one of its allies, the Congress of South African Students (Cosas), in a bid to iron out differences between Cosas and MEC of Education Joe Phaahla. Relations between Phaahla and Cosas hit an all-time low last week when the provincial chair […]
The annual Loerie Awards acknowledge excellence in 18 advertising and marketing categories. But, asks Brenda Atkinson, do the ads actually work? Show me someone who hasn’t been seduced by an advert in their lifetime, and I’ll show you a badly cut pair of Levis. Much as we might hate to admit it, we are critical […]
Know your Mark Hughes from your Marcuse? With the World Cup less than a week away, even the intellectuals are muscling in on the beautiful game. Peter Lennon reports Predictably French philosophers, sociologists and literary critics are muscling in on the World Cup, peddling their cinq sous worth on the origins, motivation and significance of […]
Douglas Rushkoff: ONLINE `They’ll come at night – especially if you’ve got an electric lamp glowing somewhere, a dead giveaway,” warned one member of an online survivalist conference. I had intended to spend the week doing extensive research for a column about the millennium bug (Y2K) – the software and hardware glitch that will prevent […]
and clothes Andy Duffy An independent probe has found that the Student Representative Council (SRC)of the troubled University of the North (Turfloop) spent more than R1,3- million last year on items such as hired cars, catering and clothes. Poor controls had also left the SRC accounts open to fraud – more than half the expenditure […]
THURSDAY, 6.00PM: POST, Telecommunications and Broadcasting Minister Jay Naidoo released his long-awaited White Paper on Broadcasting Policy on Thursday, outlining a vision to turn South Africa into a global multimedia hub. The 46-page White Paper proposes that the the country’s signal distribution network should be opened to competition by 2000. Concluding that the digital route […]
WEDNESDAY, 6.00PM: ETHIOPIAN troops, tanks and heavy artillery crossed the border into Eritrea at dawn on Wednesday morning, the Eritrean foreign ministry said on Wednesday. The invasion, which has not been confirmed by independent sources, is an escalation of a tense border stand-off that has seen at least 100 people killed or wounded since Sunday. […]
WEDNESDAY, 2.15PM: APARTHEID’s chief assassin Eugene de Kock, known by his colleagues as “Prime Evil”, claimed on Wednesday that former president PW Botha ordered the 1987 bomb attack on Cosatu House, headquarters of the country’s largest trade union federation. Testifying at Botha’s trial for ignoring a Truth and Reconciliation Commission subpoena, De Kock told the […]
WEDNESDAY 12.00NOON: THE former commander of the United Nations observer force in Angola says there is evidence in the country of a military build-up that “indicates preparations for a possible return to war”. Zimbabwean army Major-General Phillip Sibanda, who has just returned to Harare from a two-and-a-half-year command of the formerly 7000-strong UN military monitoring […]
TUESDAY 11.00AM: THERE are still a large number of troops belonging to the Angolan rebel movement Unita in several provinces, in spite of its claims to have demilitarised its forces, according to a United Nations official. Quoting a report by the commander of UN forces overseeing the peace process, UN representative for Angola Alouine Blondin […]
MONDAY, 4.00PM: IN an unexpected turn in the Lusaka High Court on Monday, the state dropped all charges against former Zambian president Kenneth Kaunda, after which Judge Japhta Banda declared Kaunda a free man. “It’s great, it’s great,” declared Zambia’s 74-year-old founding father as hundreds of his supporters broke through a police cordon to celebrate […]
MONDAY 6.00PM: FORMER Zimbabwean president Canaan Banana has denied allegations by three policemen, two air force officers, two secret service agents, a cook, a jobseeker and a hitchhiker that he either forced or attempted to force them to have sex with him. Banana, 62, a former Methodist minister, was appearing in the Harare High Court […]
Charl Blignaut Shopping and Fucking, a controversial new theatre production, has, against all odds, ushered in a new era for Johannesburg’s Market Theatre – in the process taking its young cast into uncharted territory. The play, which contains some of the most explicit scenes ever seen on a local stage, was always going to be […]
Neil Manthorp Cricket It has been a silly week on tour. For four years people have complained about the inability of various hosts around the world to organise a sensible itinerary. India, Pakistan, New Zealand, Sri Lanka and even Australia, who isolated the third and final test by sticking the World Series into the middle […]
Andrew Muchineripi Soccer When the World Cup draw was made in chilly Marseille last December, France and Denmark expressed happiness bordering on arrogance after being placed in the same group as minnows Saudi Arabia and South Africa. Recent events suggest it may not be quite so easy for the French and Danes with the Saudis […]
Janet Smith Nine days of the Standard Bank National Festival of the Arts will be turned on by television for the first time this year with the rah-rah arrival of Cue-TV on small screens throughout Grahamstown and surrounding areas. A late autumn lunch is a moment for Christo Doherty, senior lecturer in television at the […]
Alice Walker is a feminist icon and also a defiant individualist. Libby Brooks meets a woman at ease with herself, if not the world Alice Walker pads around her hotel suite like a fabulous cat. Just in from California and weary, she is not particularly friendly, but I would still like to touch her. The […]
Uneven standards of community care mean the state’s new policy of releasing mental patients could be a bad plan, writes Andy Duffy The deaths of seven people at the hands of former state psychiatric patients in the Western Cape have exposed a raw nerve in state health circles. The Department of Health this week slammed […]
Douglas Rushkoff: ONLINE Of all the cool and creepy pieces of vapourware to have emerged since the Web went mainstream, the coolest and creepiest have got to be intelligent agents. And, according to the press releases jamming my e-mail server, they’re here: autonomous pieces of programming trained to race around cyberspace doing our (largely consumerist) […]