Good morning good people Unless you’ve been heavily sedated for the past two weeks, you know that Ms. Beyoncé Knowles-Carter has released a new album, Cowboy Carter. What you may not know is that she watched many different Westerns for inspiration…
Dear Friends I hope you’re enjoying your long weekend. Thursday night took me to Swedish alto-saxophonist Fredrik Kronkvist gig at The Olympia Bakery. If you’ll allow me some stereotyping, I love the contradiction of Scandinavian jazzmen. Invariably they arrive tightly…
Dear Friends On 6 March, one of my teachers, Prof Edward Webster passed on. This weekend was his funeral and memorial service. It is said that when an elder dies it is as if a library has burned down. In Eddie’s…
Happy Sunday friends If you love owls (who doesn’t?) Hirokazu Kozakai’s ‘O Wise One’ will make you smile. Last week, I told you that Cape Town gallery Southern Guild was opening in Los Angeles. Chadd Scott’s Forbes article does a…
Dear All My holiday break, of course, included wine, I live in Cape Town after all. There was a lazy Winemaker’s lunch beneath Rust en Vrede’s oaks. Despite summer’s heat, the sirloins demanded their Estate Syrah, it wasn’t a mistake.…
My dear friends This is our last letter for this year. I will return on 21 January. We started the year reflecting on The Power of the Powerless and here we are. As the world weighs on our souls, I…
Dear friend It’s the last month of the year. Today’s letter is only soul. It’s longer than normal and breaks our normal format. It’s more contemplative, a lot more. I felt that as we approach the possibility of pausing for a…
“Don’t underestimate the value of a good deed. It comes back to you in a blessing – not necessarily material, but in ways you can never imagine”Dr. Imtiaz Sooliman Dear Friends A while back, Mr. Siphiwe Mpye, editor of BusinessDay’s…
“If you don’t know who you are, anyone can name you”Michael Meade Dear Friends Last week’s Rugby World Cup win gave South Africa and Africa much joy. Today’s letter includes two more lessons from Rassie Erasmus’s Stories of Life and…
“If you want to achieve something you’ve never achieved before, you have to do something you’ve never done before” – Rassie Erasmus Dear friends This Simons Town week has been somewhat surreal. The bay has been still, so still that…
“…exclusion levies emotional, financial, social, and other costs that affect not just those who are excluded, but those who exclude and work to keep that exclusion in place. The more inclusive a society, the more it is perceived as a…
Dear Friends First off, please take a moment to congratulate Cape Town author, CA Davids, whose intelligent, life-complicating, and therefore enriching and expanding book, How To Be a Revolutionary, this week won one of South Africa’s most prestigious literary awards,…