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Slogans, Spur and Ritual Humiliation

This week I happened to walk into a furniture store with a friend of mine and overheard the sales-person answer the phone. “Hi Sam here. How can I make living easier?” he said, and I was immediately thrust back nearly twenty years to when I worked in a Spur, and the managers wanted me rap along to an insipid birthday song and throw secret tribe hand-signs at the kids. (It turns out, by the way, that when a kid is chewing, shredding, and dumping their colouring-in paper on the carpet, and you know it will take 11 hours to pick it out after he has gone, giving him the middle-finger can’t be explained away as being the sign of the extra secret tribe).

Why do companies make their employees do these things? I can’t name a single person above the age of three who thinks having a birthday song sung to them by a group of minimum wage employees, who are fully aware that they aren’t singing “Happy Birthday” simply because the company is afraid of copyright infringements, is fun. Historically the only people who enjoyed watching the poor undergo ritual humiliation for their amusement while they are eating are billionaire slave-plantation owners and, if you factor in the old-timey American racism of the Spur restaurant theme, we know exactly what they are doing in the modern era.

The thing is these birthday songs, slogans, and phone answering techniques, aren’t the way to make a genuine connection with your customer. Shortly after I heard Sam answer the phone in that contrived fashion I realised the look of mixed disgust and shame that I had shot him was the same one I would get from parents whenever I fired off the secret tribe sign. They are so awful and humiliating that my friends, and I use this word lightly, would regularly come into the Spur when I was on shift, tell the manager it was their birthday, and try to see me singing the birthday song. The joke was on them however as during the birthday songs I was always hidden in the kitchen supplementing my crappy wage by devouring uneaten food. It wasn’t my proudest four months.

Do you really want to learn “how to make living easier”? Stop making your employees belt out fatuous rubbish at your customers. We all know they aren’t happy saying, and doing them, so their being forced to pretend otherwise is just dishonest. I for one would much rather be served my bad steak by a normal person who doesn’t caper like a goat on Redbull at Disneyworld than become an unwilling participant in your charade of lies.

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The Parenting Minefield

I don’t do anything these days without consulting the internet. I no longer prepare grocery lists, but instead look up recipes online then wander the aisles of my supermarket tracking down what they tell me to buy. Buying a toaster has become a three-day exercise in checking reviews vs prices to get the best deal, and I won’t spend an hour streaming a random film in case it’s bad choosing instead to spend an hour online reading movie reviews. It’s making life untenable. Perhaps the most confusing place for this is parenting.

Every week someone somewhere is releasing a new study that seems to completely refute the study released last week, and I read them all. One minute you need to allow your toddler to make mistakes, the next actively engage in correcting them. One week it’s encouraged to keep them constantly engaged, the next you need to give them time to themselves, then engagement is necessary, as long as you are engaged with them. I am told that being overly relaxed as a parent can lead to my son lacking focus, and being incapable of finding the drive to succeed in life (see Mom & Dad I knew this was all your fault), while being overly restrictive can lead to him being unable to make decisions, and incapable of dealing with difficulties. Presumably being somewhere in the middle creates a blend of these two kinds of dysfunctions? It seems no matter how you choose to raise your child, the end result is always going to be an adult whose sense of depression, bewilderment and isolation has left them barely capable of functioning day-to-day.

Causing me particular aggravation is that kind of click bait particular to new parents, the “Watch out your child could die if” news story. Articles titled, “Ten things you should never do with your kids” always get me clicking, and include things like, “let them go online”, or “Let them play on the swings”, but never include the phrases, “Imprison them in a basement” or “Sacrifice them to a dark lord”. Those tips seem obvious candidates for me, particularly given that the articles are written in an era where fake medical professionals tell you not to vaccinate your child, and people not only do that but then also argue with others in their office about it.

“Maureen the article said we weren’t to let Koosie play on the swings, it said absolutely nothing about slathering him in bloody meat and chucking him in a shark tank!”

What recent studies do seem to unanimously agree on, however, is that people who have children are generally happier than those who don’t. Meaning the only way we will ever be able to overcome the general sense of confusion, sadness, and malaise that our parents forced on us through their own parenting choices is to have children of our own and do the same to them.

The Award Winning Podcast – Season 2 – Episode 11 – Casper De Vries

In the 90s and early 2000s you couldn’t move without seeing the name Casper De Vries. He was a mainstream comedy legend, while also somehow maintaining his anarchic sensibilities, and off-the-wall persona. It’s safe to say Casper helped found the alternative comedy scene in SA, and, even today this Lifetime Achiever recipient at the Comic’s Choice Awards continues to inspire. As a podcast host himself on Cliffcentral, Casper is a breath of fresh air as he goes into depth about his career, that movie with Leon Schuster and a whole lot more. Unmissable.

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Predicting This World Cup

Shortly before the beginning of the World Cup former wife of John Lennon and renowned football pundit Yoko Ono unashamedly put forward her opinion as to who the eventual winner would be.

Even though I had “A child who believes in a peaceful world” in our football pool, I was delighted to see tears on his little optimistic face as he was knocked out on penalties in the second round. I am not sure what Yoko Ono was thinking trying to predict football, she is clearly no octopus.

In 2010 an octopus named Paul correctly predicted all of Germany’s results and that Spain would win the tournament. He died of natural causes with a prediction record stained by only a few bad decisions. This time a giant Pacific octopus in Japan named Rabio accurately predicted all three of Japan’s group stage matches, before being chopped up and eaten prior to Japan’s second-round clash. It’s a sad reflection of the times that we don’t even have enough respect for a magical octopus to wait until after the tournament to eat him.

Apart from showing that had Pikachu actually been discovered in Japan Ash Ketchum would probably have been unimpressed and, eaten him with lashes of soy sauce, this story of the Japanese Octopus is also something of a conundrum. For one thing, because he was an octopus, and therefore incapable of human speech, we will never know if he could predict his own grisly demise.

Was he a hapless, unknowing victim of his captor’s meat-cleaver? Or, was he, as I like to think, fully aware of what was to happen to him the whole time? Perhaps he knew that like Paul, psychic abilities only last so long, wrong answers were around the corner, and, true to his Japanese culture, unable to face the shame of his own inevitable failures, he orchestrated his own demise by peeing on his captor’s rug? It is a noble end, and, now that she too has been proven wrong, one another Japanese football pundit, Yoko Ono should consider. You broke up the Beatles Yoko! It’s time to go.

 

 

 

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Lifetimes In One Place

 

Charity shops make me sad. Sectioned in small, out of the way complexes, they are stocked with boxes of unused donations and detail lives, and moments, that were once precious, but are now marked down to just R5. Edwardian wigs, a VHS titled “Diana: The People’s Princess”, pottery figures of once brightly coloured clowns, second-hand sex toys, a rhino horn ashtray, a taxidermied squirrel  – and this is only the stuff I brought in.

These shops feel like forgotten places. Always inexplicably cold, they smell of moth-balls, dust, and Helen Zille’s Twitter account. The customers are a mixture of the kind of people you expect to see talking about past lives in a teepee at a music festival, and retirees who walked through the door in 1967 and have long since given up trying to find their way out. If you leave a rubbish bag filled with a deceased person’s clothes unopened in a charity store for long enough, it will gain sentience, stand up and start working the till.

Despite all this, there is a poignancy to charity shops. It’s difficult to see a Rosewood box of old silver cutlery gathering dust, and not think of the person to whom this was a treasured possession. Undoubtedly it lived in a locked cupboard and was only unpacked when special guests came over, yet now it competes for space with broken plastic kids toys, yellowing pulp-fiction paperbacks, and humorous paragraph ending punchlines.

I am reminded while in these spaces that treasuring things is pointless, as ultimately I will die and the items I keep close to my heart will just become someone else’s burden to be packed in a box and donated to charity. As a result, a visit there functions the same way a near-death experience must. I always leave blinking into the sun, thanking my lucky stars that I am both alive and mentally tough enough to avoid buying a dusty bonnet filled with plastic flowers. I do however miss that ashtray.

 

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I’m Too Good For This

As a newly single person, I have naturally tried out Tinder – if by “tried out” I really mean, “swiped silently left for hours on end while descending into deeper and deeper pits of existential despair”. Wave after wave of potentially wonderful people pass beneath my grubby Nik-Nak stained fingers, swiped forever into some nameless void, from where they will inevitably only return a few weeks later, this time with a new profile picture of themselves stroking a lion cub.

“Don’t worry about the man next to me whose head I have cropped out of the picture in which I am wearing a wedding dress. He is nothing. A mere step towards the happiness we will inevitably be forced to endure,” the profiles all seem to say – their blank-faced yoghurt commercial faces covered in so many photo filters the rabbit ears are the most realistic part.  Some of them aren’t that subtle – “swipe left if …” they state openly before delivering a grocery list of previous grievances. “No married men, cheaters, poor people, fuck bois, liberals, conservatives, short men, posers, anarchist revolutionaries….”. I don’t even read them, I just swipe left assuming I inevitably fall into at least one of the categories on the list.

Why are any of us there? I doubt anyone downloads Tinder dreaming of the day they hear their best-man say, “I remember the day he told me they had met on Tinder”.  Why do we do it? Who are these people who, like me, have signed up to be swiped so far left they get berets in the post from the EFF?

Perhaps we all have too much self-esteem for Tinder? Maybe we really think that four-year-old photo of us holding aloft a fish on the one happy day of our lives will open up a world of soulful romantic connections? If we do, we are undoubtedly wrong. “I love wine and laughing,” says every single bio written by people either too boring to have any real interests, or prepared to cast the net out wide enough to snare absolutely every single person in the world.

Turning on the Tinder app should activate the front camera on your phone thereby forcing you to engage with the mess you have made of your life while you are busy judging others, or maybe, just maybe, we should abandon it entirely and start going on the dates our friends and family recommend?

The Award Winning Podcast – Season 2 – Episode 10 – Schalk Bezuidenhout

Schalk Bezuidenhout is a well known name to Kyknet viewers, festival goers, and Huisgenoot readers and is one of the most popular Afrikaans comedians today. Here he chats about his life in the spotlight, and that time he had to get circumcised.

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How I Became Famous

Americans insist that one must “fake it to make it”. As a professional comedian, this is quite likely good advice. Some of the worst entertainers I know have made it to television, magazines and glory simply through putting up big signs with their faces on, buying a hundred thousand Twitter followers and telling anyone who will listen that they are talented, but I am not built that way. I was brought up to learn that boasting was uncouth and as such would far rather be at home watching Netflix than strutting a red carpet dressed in meat.

As a result, I probably should have been surprised a few years back when I was invited to participate in my first celebrity charity golf day. A total of 24 “celebs” – ranging from sports stars to former news readers, and musicians – had been chosen to participate. Each of us was to be teamed with three players, presumably to fill their days with magic and give them someone to beat. I was casually swinging my driver at the tee when the first couple of my group’s players walked up and introduced themselves. We chatted for a few minutes, I threw in some jokes about golf and things seemed to be going off well, when suddenly one of them said, “I think I saw Victor Mattfield up there. I wonder who our celebrity will be.” I took it in my stride, nodded, and said, “here he comes now” pointing to the straggler in our fourball who was just arriving. I spent the rest of the day digging my ball out of the rough and helping the guys guess just who this new stranger might be. “Wasn’t he on Agter Elke Man?” I said at one point. The other two shrugged, and I knew I had probably gotten away with it.

If I were to obey that dictum in the opening line of this article, this would be the paragraph in which I tell you how, since those first humble beginnings, my fame is now shooting into the stratosphere, and brands are clamouring to get a little piece of me at home in my meat suit. I would describe the lavish red carpet movie premiers (I didn’t make the cut for Black Panther, but did find myself sitting next to someone I think I recognised from a TV advert on the opening night of The Emoji Movie), the free gifts (I was once accidentally sent a pair of large brand running shoes, that fell apart long before they saw the inside of a gym) and the lavish book launches (I didn’t go and Chris Forrest still owes me my copy of Jen Su‘s “From Z to A Lister: How To Get on the Social Scene”).

Perhaps if I had collected, and read, my Jen Su book I would now be paid to market product to the various collection of middle-aged male computer game enthusiasts, engineers, train set hobbyists, rock collectors, card game nerds, sci-fi fanatics and neck-beards (collectively known as MAMCGEETSHRCCGNSCFNBs) that, judging by the people who recognise me in public, seem to exclusively make up my viewing public. In a way, I am glad I haven’t been though. If there is one group that can easily see through a cheap influencer Twitter campaign it’s MAMCGEETSHRCCGNSCFNBs and the last thing I want to do is disappoint my MAMCGEETSHRCCGNSCFNBs.

Note the subtle shift in the last paragraph to “my MAMCGEETSHRCCGNSCFNBs”. This was intentional. Lady Gaga has her “litte monsters”, Beyonce has “The BeyHive” and now I have “The MAMCGEETSHRCCGNSCFNBs”. With this one small shift, fame is inevitable. Until it happens though, I will be at home watching Netflix.

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How To Name The Airport

Politicians are the worst people. At 18 they head to university determined to join the various political party youth structures because at that stage they presume themselves to be already all-knowing, and capable. They leave school believing wholeheartedly that what the world needs is their input, as they know what’s best for you and I. At 18, with no world experience, they think they should be leading you. Over the years we load these mini-narcissists with money and power, and then we are surprised when things get more messed up than beer and candles night at a convent.

Politicians are single-handedly responsible for everything awful that has ever happened. Wars, corruption, apartheid, the Holocaust,  and this Jacob Zuma statue – all these things came about because of the decisions made by people who should never have been given power in the first place.

As a society, we repeatedly elect the worst of humanity, then watch as these mini-tyrants tear their countries apart, and celebrate their own greatness by naming everything after themselves, and their friends. Every government building, every airport, and every stadium gets to be named after them, inspiring yet more people who want things named after them to go into politics. Isn’t it time to stop empowering these madmen?

Now there are calls to rename the Cape Town International Airport and, unlike Britain who would no doubt have wanted it hilariously named Airporty McAirportFace, our suggestions are 99% in honour of other politicians and freedom fighters. If we want to encourage the right people to go into power, we need to avoid honouring them. We need to switch off their access to the front pages, tune down the honorifics we pay them, and have them do more work, and less talking. Let the humble seek power. The only things we should name after politicians are natural disasters because like politicians they are brutal, expensive, and infinitely worse for the poor.

Instead, we should be honouring the people that make us proud to be South African. Like me. As someone who has tirelessly, and humbly worked to achieve acclaim, I think we can all agree that I deserve something way bigger than merely having my name on an airport. So while we wait for the inevitable 300-metre high statue to me to be constructed on Table Mountain may I suggest that we name the airport, and all future buildings, after those who through their endeavours have lifted our country’s name high around the world?

I would love to land at Hugh Masekela International, or indeed any airport named after legendary artists, sportsmen, scientists and authors. Who would argue that Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Ingrid Jonker, Brenda Fassie, Nadine Gordimer, Athol Fugard, Caster Semenya, Hashim Amla, Vusi Mahlasela, Aaron Klug, Abdullah Ibrahim, Sydney Bremmer, and countless others would deserve to be remembered, and honoured in this way?

I understand the need to respect people who dedicated their lives to give us the country we currently have, but our inability to honour anyone other than them reveals a gaping, and dangerous one-dimensionality in our thinking. By my estimates, two-thirds of things in this country are named after Nelson Mandela, but we don’t have a single significant tribute to Miriam Makeba. As long as we honour only warriors and politicians, and neglect those who bring beauty to our country we tacitly tell our children that the arts, peace,  and scientific endeavour are unimportant. We need to do something to ensure this is not the impression they are getting urgently, and the gigantic solid gold, mechanised statue of me just isn’t enough.