RIP Lou Reed

LR with his wife Laurie, one of the coolest chicks ever and their dog!

OK so I lied. I saw several posts on Facebook that Lou Reed had died. I had to come out of blog-hiding for a brief moment and post my condolences to America and the world.

Vince and I loved Lou Reed. We saw him a zillion times - in concert, crashing Bowie's concerts, in conversation at the Tribeca Film Festival when Julian Schnabel's rockumentary of LR's concert of Berlin debuted there, in the audience at a Laurie Anderson performance, on the streets of New York, etc, etc ....
 

our Lou Reed

Lou Reed was one of the four coolest dudes who ever walked the earth. We loved him so much in fact that we named one of our dogs after him. (Our other dog is named Serge Gainsbourg after another cool dude, and if we had a third dog he would have been named Dean Martin. We could not name a dog after Jesus.)

Thank goodness our Lou Reed is still at the kennel in Joburg awaiting our return to Africa. At least he will be shielded from the news until we can break it to him gently. He loved LR too.

Rest in Peace, Lou Reed!

Takin' a little Blog-cation, Africa

I am going Out of Africa for the next three weeks.

Since I will be taking a little break from Africa - and since this blog is nominally about my time in Africa, not Europe or the USA - I will also take this opportunity for a little blog-cation. Off-line. Unplugged. No blogging while I'm away!

See you for more adventures when I return, Joburg! xoxo

Sandton is the New Jac City!

Driving around Sandton today running my errands, I simply had to stop and take some quick snapshots of the Jacarandas. They are blooming everywhere.

The Joburg Photowalkers are planning an outing this weekend to photograph the trees in Pretoria, the city whose nickname is Jacaranda City. The trees are supposedly also at peak bloom there. I unfortunately will miss it, but I can't wait to see their photographs ... and to make a note of their scouted locations for next year.

in front of the Michelangelo in downtown Sandton

I will just have to be content with the blooms in Sandton City ... the New Jac City.

They are everywhere.

Even in my living room!

Dave Matthews's coming to Joburg!

with Stefan Lessard @ a WKA event (2008)

I just bought tickets for Vince and I to see the Dave Matthews Band in Joburg!

I love the Dave Matthews Band! First of all I love their music.

And secondly, they were - and probably still are - big supporters of Waterkeeper Alliance (WKA), a non-profit I worked for in the USA. And I really love that.

The band performed a fundraising concert to benefit WKA and the Band's bass player Stefan Lessard wrote the score and performed the soundtrack for Grand Canyon Adventure: River at Risk, the IMAX environmental documentary starring National Geographic Society Explorer-in-Residence Wade Davis and WKA President Robert Kennedy, Jr.

Amazingly enough, the concerts in Cape Town and Johannesburg are going to be the first time the Dave Matthews Band has ever performed in South Africa. Even though Dave himself was born in Johannesburg. This is probably going to be the concert event of the year in South Africa.

Okay the bad news is that Vince is not a fan. But if I can move to South Africa for him, he can come to a little concert with me, heh?

Art Deco Joburg

I have always loved the Roaring Twenties, the Jazz Age and Art Deco.

wearing 20's vintage in college

I love the spirit of the bright young things of the time,

Great Gatsby Dinner Dance at Mantoloking Yacht Club

their attitude and lust for life, ...

Jazz Age Lawn Party on Governor's Island, NY

their whimsy and freedom, ...

close-up of my butterfly cloche

their style.

Chrysler Building, NYC

Not surprising since I grew up amongst the finest collection of Art Deco architecture in the world.















But I was however quite surprised when on a Past Experiences walking tour recently through downtown Joburg, the tour guide made the claim that Johannesburg has the third-largest number of Art Deco buildings of any city in the world. What? I had never equated Johannesburg or South Africa with Art Deco. New York, Miami, Paris, Chicago, yes. But Joburg? While not an Art Deco architecture tour, she still managed to point out several buildings we passed along the way to begin to substantiate her claim.

And later on when I did the math, I read that Johannesburg had a huge growth spurt during the 20's and 30's that coincided with the emergence of the Art Deco movement. According to an article in the Christian Science Monitor, "The Art Deco buildings of Johannesburg, its suburbs, and the nearby city of Springs are monuments to one of the greatest boom times in South African history - the 1930s. It was during this decade that the price of gold skyrocketed, and lifted this country - and this city founded by gold-miners - out of the Great Depression. The construction boom that ensued saw skyscrapers rivaling those in New York spring from South Africa's dry veld grassland."

The Chamber of Mines

"Art Deco in Johannesburg, writes Frederico Fresch in De Arte magazine, "served to create for this dusty - if rapidly expanding - town in one of the farthest reaches of the empire ... a sense of wealth and glamour." The South African architecture expert says the "would-be sophistication" was meant to "counteract the incipient provincialism associated with a colonial city."




Many of these buildings are luckily protected by heritage and architectural trusts. And many have the coveted Blue Plaque designation. I have not seen an exclusive Art Deco walking tour offered by any of the local walking tour companies, but I plan to put together my own version and visit as many as I can as I move about town. First stop, the Astor Mansions.

And they are not just in the CBD. Outside the city, there are also a number of suburbs which have original Art Deco buildings. Yeoville,  Parktown, Greenside and Killarney to name a few. And then there's the Springs central business center in Sedibeng, home to a large collection of Art Deco structures with a total of 34 buildings! In fact, it claims to have the second largest number of small scale Art Deco buildings after Miami. One of its Art Deco gems is the Central Fire Station built in 1938. 

I found out that Rand Airport in Germiston, Ekhuruleni, was where part of the Amelia Earhart Story was filmed by the Moonlighting Film Production Services. The movie starred Hilary Swank as Earhart and Richard Gere as her husband George Putman. Rand Airport, which was shot to be both the Miami and Burbank airports, was selected because its art deco look and feel resembled those airports in the 1930s. The terminal building has remained virtually the same since it was built. 

Johannesburg continues to surprise me!

(PP: Post this posting I did find an exclusively art deco walking tour of the CBD put on by the Johannesburg Heritage Foundation. It was perfect!)

The Golden Rhino

In front of the Standard Bank building in the CBD is a large-scale replica of the Golden Rhino excavated in a burial site at Mapungubwe. The real rhino sculpture is apparently much smaller than this replica and is made of pure gold.

Mapungubwe is a World Heritage Site about four hours north of Joburg on the Zimbabwe border and it is high on our list of planned long weekend trips. I want to do an archaeological tour of the site and I also want to see the actual Golden Rhino itself housed in Pretoria at the University of Pretoria Museum.

I will surely blog about it when I do, but in the meantime, there is a shocking story about the public disclosure of its discovery I want to share.

Jo 

Mapungubwe is considered by archaeologists to be the very first complex ancient society in Africa. The kingdom lasted from about 1075 to around 1220 AD.

According to Past Experiences founder, tour guide and real life archaeologist Jo Buitendach, a complex ancient society is one that has a king and a class system.




 The kingdom of Mapungubwe was one of the earliest examples of sacred leadership where the king had god-like powers and infallibility. The complex class hierarchy was comprised of specialized craftsmen and artists, farmers and an established trade society. There is archaeological evidence that the kingdom of Mapungubwe even traded gold and ivory with Asia.

Now here comes the interesting part. Since its discovery in 1932 this Iron Age site has been excavated by the University of Pretoria. However, the findings were kept from public attention until 1993, just prior to South Africa's first democratic elections! Why? Because evidence of a highly advanced indigenous society existing centuries before European colonialism spread across Africa ran contrary to the racist ideology of apartheid. The discovery of the Golden Rhino in particular disproved the propagated  fallacies that gold was a European discovery and that the skills necessary to mine, process and craft it into something as extraordinary as the golden figure of a rhino are too highly advanced for native Africans.

Shocking!

Ka-ching

Bull and Bear sculpture

Today I went on another walking tour of the Joburg CBD. This time it was the Past Experiences Ka-ching Tour.

Mining. Money. Ka-ching. Here are some highlights ...

The "new" Standard Bank hanging building replaced the Edwardian era Cullinan building in the late 60's. A plinth from the old building stands in as an entry arch.

The Standard Bank "hanging" building. A revolutionary method of construction at the time, it was built by "hanging" each floor from the building frame from the top floor down to the bottom.

a goldmine stamp mill. If it could talk, it would say "Ka-ching."

the heritage plaque for the Ten Stamp Mill.

The Chamber of Mines

The Anglo-American Headquarters building

impressive art deco architecture

very Mussolini

24 karat gold lettering

public art everywhere. some new, some repurposed.

old mining head gear as art installation.

the first Standard Bank building downtown.

Repurposing a Heritage Building Done Right

We were treated to a behind the scenes tour of a heritage building which is being restored and repurposed in the CBD. Yay!

The building was originally  constructed as a showcase for the Natal Bank in Joburg. It's architecture can be described as "Edwardian Eclectic" with elements of the Edwardian, Victorian and Art Deco building styles. After being abandoned in the 1980's, it was purchased by the Heritage Foundation for R1 ... along with a hefty unpaid tax bill. Sold and resold a few more times, it was recently purchased by a developer and heritage building expert who accompanied us on our Past Experiences Ka-Ching Tour of the Marshalltown area of the CBD.

He invited us inside the building to show us the "before".

This grand space is going to be restored and repurposed as an Austrian style coffee shop!

The vault downstairs will be an international bookstore.

art deco touches

a French trompe l'oeil ceiling in the entry foyer.

perfect for a coffee bar!

Can't wait to see the "after"!

A brief history of the world, according to the Afrikaners

One of the cool things about heritage buildings is that they tell a story. Sometimes by accident. Sometimes on purpose. Sometimes it is subtle. Sometimes it is in your face.

An elaborate bordering on garish nouveau riche mansion may be saying, "Hey world, I have arrived!" An imperial-looking corporate headquarters can be designed to proclaim strength, invincibility, safety. Or a building can quite literally convey the inhabitants' world view of events.

BHP Billiton

For instance, on the front of the BHP Billiton building at 6 Hollard Street is a horizontal Art Deco bas relief. The building was erected by a Dutch mining company and the bas relief was designed to offer a clear message to its neighboring British competitors, "We are here and we are not going anywhere!"

Petrolium, nuclear energy, and mining

Much as the Bayeux Tapestry tells the story leading up to the Norman Conquest with a decidedly Norman point of view, the BHP bas relief chronicles the history of the Joburg and South African mining industry from an Afrikaner perspective.









The story begins at the beginning ...

First God created South Africa for the Dutch.

Then the Europeans came including the Dutch who ...

finally claimed it from the natives.

The British came and took over; the Voortrekkers trekked to Pretoria

The natives were not happy about either of them being there.

Gold was found in Gauteng; Joburg was founded as a mining town ...

The Brits and the Afrikaners fought over it in the Anglo-Boer War.  Peace.

The mining boom resumes.

more industry ensues.

Uranium is a by-product of mining => welcome to the nuclear age

The End