I’m writing this in the middle of my Tuesday morning women’s study group. Yes, the goatee and moustache are genuine, but the women let me join their group because I have a couple of hours open at this time of the week.
I can do this –- write in the middle of the group discussion – because the women won’t get mad at me. It’s the whole multi-tasking thing women are about, epitomising the differences in socialisation between women and men.
My study group members have no qualms about knitting or drawing or reading or sorting through a wad of personal papers or texting or having impromptu meetings on the sidelines around the coffee table, totally unrelated to the actual plenary discussion.
Men would be hugely offended that I am sitting here, apparently not totally present, definitely distracted, disrespecting them. My lack of meeting etiquette would not be tolerated.
Women regard being distracted – but not confused – among the 1001 thoughts occupying their life as a necessary part of being human. Men, as we know, can only think of one thing at a time.
Actually, they pretty much think of one thing all the time, but that’s something to explore another day.
I’m sitting in this study group contemplating the really important things about life on our planet across the gender divide because some guy has just paid me a compliment. It was between the third and fourth floors of the building, during my ritual of walking up the stairs to kickstart my heart. Well, crawling really, if truth be told.
This guy – an associate of an associate – comes bounding down the stairs and makes some inane comment, the kind of meaningless pleasantry that is another borderline example of what men don’t do, what separates us from women. And all I can grunt is “Yeah”, having in reality no clue what he just said and being preoccupied with gasping for that extra cubic centimetre of life-giving air.
A few more torturous steps up, I hear him shout out something, and I drag myself back and say “Sorry what?” And he says, “You’ve lost a bit of weight, well done”. And again, all I can muster is “Yeah”, and then an unsure, “Thanks”.
As I continue lugging my heavy backside up the stairs, I’m wondering: what do guys say when another guy pays them a compliment? Because men just don’t do that – pay each other compliments, I mean.
We may, in our adult youth, reflecting (not really, because men don’t reflect, but you know what I mean) on the outcome of a game, say to a team mate who brought down an opposing player with a great tackle, “Jislaaik, boet, you nailed that oke so that he didn’t know who his mother is”. And we’ll all know that a compliment has been passed.
Later on, when you’re in the park with your little guy, one of the other fathers may notice your guy has quite a good southpaw throw on him and may ask: “Did you teach him that?” And you’ll know that, in an oblique kind of way, some guy’s just said a really great thing about your parenting or coaching skills.
As you grow into your maturity, it’s not the done thing anymore for men to be dishing the compliments to each other.
If a woman pays us a compliment, we say a quiet, bashful word of thanks and inside let out a huge “Yeah baby!” Because men really live for women to notice them and say something like “I especially noticed your amazing pecs and abs, and the Richard Gere thing you’ve got going on the side of your temples” or whatever.
Men love that. If any guy tells you differently, he’s lying. Of course, few men realise that when a women does this, it’s how they relate to the world, male or female, and certainly is not the ultimate “come hither” invitation.
But, men complimenting men? We just don’t do that. It’s up there with saying “I love you” to your best male mates, or being ever-so-slightly self- deprecating (we like to deprecate the heck out of that other slob across the room but self-deprecation is not our thing), or feeling each other’s muscles (we learn the hard way how muscled a guy is).
So, how would we know how to respond appropriately to a word of affirmation from one of our own?
Consider this scene from The West Wing, where the American president’s top military aides are proposing the assassination of a terror suspect. A highly decorated admiral asks a general: “Have you changed your shampoo – because your hair looks more bouncy and manageable?”
Script writer Aaron Sorkin has no pithy comeback. He understands the state of total perplexity such moments create for all men. There’s just a lightning quick change to the next scene.
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
Out of all the colours of the rainbow, they chose bland
OUT of all the colours of the rainbow available to them, City Lodge Hotels chose to go with bland for their new beachfront hotel in Port Elizabeth.
Officially a Town Lodge in the “family” of accommodation facilities the group offers, the hotel should have nestled proudly on Nelson Mandela Bay’s beachfront. This is, after all, one of our major attributes.
Instead it sticks out like a sore thumb. There’s lots of facebrick, interspersed with vertical lines of browny-orange and off-white painted surfaces – I’m told it’s a light terracotta, alongside light and dark greys.
It presents a view from Beach Road suggestive of an electrical substation.
An opportunity to create a bright and cheerful new South African building on the beachfront just washed away and we got an image that won’t easily be used on postcards from the Bay.
When I first saw the hotel in its “almost finished” mode, I thought “Eben Donges-goes- swimming”. Imagine relocating the large North End building to the beachfront; it’s appalling enough as a reflection of someone’s sense of aesthetics from so many decades ago. As a memory – for me – of South African history, it’s a terrible feature (an Eben Donges lookalike) to have in such a prime spot on the beachfront. Because architecture is fundamentally reflective of the physical and social environments we find ourselves in at any one time, the kind of buildings which were built during the era – and in honour – of the strong men of apartheid, reflected their impact in dramatic ways.
And once the image is inside my head, I can’t get rid of it.
If this design fits in with the group’s corporate image, as some I spoke to suggest, then it’s really quite a shame. Perhaps some designers don’t get that, or they wimp out when a client insists they must go back to the drawing board.
That’s certainly not the case with Town Lodge architect Jeremy Malan, who tells me from Pretoria the final design of his building must be seen within the context of the constraints that exist – whether in terms of municipal policy, the substrata of the site, busy traffic on a six-lane road or the internal template that hotels must adhere to.
He stresses – and I have every reason to accept – that much design work has gone into the development, from the “podium” on which the structure sits through to the windows which overlook the bay.
Someone asked me if I had been inside, because it’s quite impressive. I haven’t been inside and I don’t doubt it’s impressive all the way through. I can only imagine that sitting inside overlooking this stunning bay has to be a great experience.
And you definitely won’t be wondering what colour the walls outside are painted. But, even though I wish the City Lodge group everything of the best in attracting local and foreign tourists to the bay, that’s not the point.
It’s about how much value these buildings – including the Radisson up the road – add to the aesthetics of our beachfront, for all of us, those who live here as well as those passing through. That value is not discounted by the economic or job-creation impact these investments have in a depressed city like ours.
Malan believes much has been done and they’ve succeeded in “softening the dull monolithic facade” through introducing, inter alia, the facebrick and painted surfaces. It’s here that he loses me, though, as I’m not sure we’ve not ended up with a “dull monolithic facade”.
And, I think we could have avoided having to look on something like that for the next 50 years or more that the structure will be with us.
Our challenge today is less about changing names on buildings and streets, but about developing our cities to reflect the psycho-socio- ecological revolutions we are living through since 1994. Those revolutions are taking place in Africa – yes, at the bottom end of the continent, but in Africa still. Development of our cities must acknowledge and affirm all of this.
Current town planning and building approval processes along the beachfront need to be beefed up – through, for example, introducing a municipal aesthetics committee as in former times, or having mandatory public participation processes. This will ensure even a city such as ours, which too often is seen as the Cinderella of the country when it comes to private sector investment, does not end up giving away the family treasures, even when we may be pretty desperate for some suitor to come along and invite us to the ball.
Officially a Town Lodge in the “family” of accommodation facilities the group offers, the hotel should have nestled proudly on Nelson Mandela Bay’s beachfront. This is, after all, one of our major attributes.
Instead it sticks out like a sore thumb. There’s lots of facebrick, interspersed with vertical lines of browny-orange and off-white painted surfaces – I’m told it’s a light terracotta, alongside light and dark greys.
It presents a view from Beach Road suggestive of an electrical substation.
An opportunity to create a bright and cheerful new South African building on the beachfront just washed away and we got an image that won’t easily be used on postcards from the Bay.
When I first saw the hotel in its “almost finished” mode, I thought “Eben Donges-goes- swimming”. Imagine relocating the large North End building to the beachfront; it’s appalling enough as a reflection of someone’s sense of aesthetics from so many decades ago. As a memory – for me – of South African history, it’s a terrible feature (an Eben Donges lookalike) to have in such a prime spot on the beachfront. Because architecture is fundamentally reflective of the physical and social environments we find ourselves in at any one time, the kind of buildings which were built during the era – and in honour – of the strong men of apartheid, reflected their impact in dramatic ways.
And once the image is inside my head, I can’t get rid of it.
If this design fits in with the group’s corporate image, as some I spoke to suggest, then it’s really quite a shame. Perhaps some designers don’t get that, or they wimp out when a client insists they must go back to the drawing board.
That’s certainly not the case with Town Lodge architect Jeremy Malan, who tells me from Pretoria the final design of his building must be seen within the context of the constraints that exist – whether in terms of municipal policy, the substrata of the site, busy traffic on a six-lane road or the internal template that hotels must adhere to.
He stresses – and I have every reason to accept – that much design work has gone into the development, from the “podium” on which the structure sits through to the windows which overlook the bay.
Someone asked me if I had been inside, because it’s quite impressive. I haven’t been inside and I don’t doubt it’s impressive all the way through. I can only imagine that sitting inside overlooking this stunning bay has to be a great experience.
And you definitely won’t be wondering what colour the walls outside are painted. But, even though I wish the City Lodge group everything of the best in attracting local and foreign tourists to the bay, that’s not the point.
It’s about how much value these buildings – including the Radisson up the road – add to the aesthetics of our beachfront, for all of us, those who live here as well as those passing through. That value is not discounted by the economic or job-creation impact these investments have in a depressed city like ours.
Malan believes much has been done and they’ve succeeded in “softening the dull monolithic facade” through introducing, inter alia, the facebrick and painted surfaces. It’s here that he loses me, though, as I’m not sure we’ve not ended up with a “dull monolithic facade”.
And, I think we could have avoided having to look on something like that for the next 50 years or more that the structure will be with us.
Our challenge today is less about changing names on buildings and streets, but about developing our cities to reflect the psycho-socio- ecological revolutions we are living through since 1994. Those revolutions are taking place in Africa – yes, at the bottom end of the continent, but in Africa still. Development of our cities must acknowledge and affirm all of this.
Current town planning and building approval processes along the beachfront need to be beefed up – through, for example, introducing a municipal aesthetics committee as in former times, or having mandatory public participation processes. This will ensure even a city such as ours, which too often is seen as the Cinderella of the country when it comes to private sector investment, does not end up giving away the family treasures, even when we may be pretty desperate for some suitor to come along and invite us to the ball.
Sunday, November 7, 2010
Values must trump innovation
STEVEN Friedman, in his chapter in Mbeki and After: Reflections on the legacy of Thabo Mbeki (edited by Daryl Glaser), comments on the propensity of government in the Mbeki era to mimic the standards and practices of Western Europe and North America.
It is rooted in the age- old question: can anything good come out of Africa? In South Africa, it was born out of a particular need to show racists that blacks in leadership of the polity and the economy could perform as well as white counterparts.
It is not a new notion – this gentrification of African consciousness – that to be accepted as citizens of the world, Africans need to subsume our identity, ideology and values. Apparently, if I’m a well-heeled black business person wanting to enjoy social status equal to entrepreneurs around the world, I need to be able to eat sushi off the belly of a beautiful model, because that’s what they do in other countries.
Bizarre, but such is the thinking in a not insignificant sector of our society.
There is, however, no basis for a holus-bolus adoption of all the world offers in terms of development and a hatred of our own endeavours, meagre as they may seem.
Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the movie Social Network, the brilliantly written if slightly fictionalised account of the development of Facebook by Harvard dropout Mark Zuckerberg. A low-key campus network connecting Harvard students before being catapulted on to the planet, Facebook today boasts 500 million global participants and has made billions of dollars for founder Zuckerberg, aged 26!
Neither a dating site nor a conduit to people one did not know, it was initially a virtual version of a network of real, close relationships. Its success today still lies in connecting large groups of people with like interests.
Zuckerman’s preoccupation with growth for the sake of it, as his network reached ever-increasing magical numbers of participants, mimics the behaviour of the Facebook adherents fixated on inviting as many friends as possible.
As a means of re-establishing relationships with long-lost friends, or as a low-intensity exercise in voyeurism, Facebook is without peers. But too often after making the contact, the question must be asked: now what?
Facebook has not made it easier to maintain real, meaningful relationships over the ether. That is only possible in real, face-to-face engagement.
Changing lives or relationships for the better around the world was unlikely to be top of mind for Zuckerberg when he invented Facebook. Ditched by his girlfriend and shunned by the exclusive final clubs at Harvard, the tech boffin fled to his keyboard to write a vicious diatribe about his ex and launch a website slating girls on campus.
Rarely does a focus on securing sex, money and status translate into a noble endeavour. In Social Network, we’re exposed to the dodgy ethics which underpin Zuckerberg’s success – from allegedly stealing ideas from colleagues to betraying his partners and cheating them out of profits. And let’s not ignore the misogynist behaviour with women groupies.
All this perhaps epitomises the values deficit of Generation Y (born in the ’80s and ’90s), certainly as they present in first world societies.
Emerging societies like our own must be willing to use technological platforms like Facebook to drive our agendas, even at times leapfrogging today’s technology to the next version of innovation.
This is best evident with telephony in Africa, where communities opt for cellphone masts ahead of cables for landline telephones. The same will be true in our traditional conceptualisation of desktop computing, banking, delivery of health and social services, and even job creation.
In San Francisco today (Tuesday November 9), a Cape Flats-based non-government organisation, Reconstructed Living Lab, will receive a Bees (Best Use of Mobile) Award, an international social media prize, for its work in using especially MXit to reach youth at risk. Its community outreach interventions, which include counselling of drug addicts and gang members, currently serve some 40000 people across the country using their cellphones.
It’s a fascinating case study waiting to be replicated throughout the country.
One imagines Cape University of Technology academic Marlon Parker – who heads RLabs – and his team will be watching with great interest the next waves of technology coming out of Zuckerberg’s Facebook campus. But one hopes that we can do so while maintaining and affirming our core values of human decency.
It is rooted in the age- old question: can anything good come out of Africa? In South Africa, it was born out of a particular need to show racists that blacks in leadership of the polity and the economy could perform as well as white counterparts.
It is not a new notion – this gentrification of African consciousness – that to be accepted as citizens of the world, Africans need to subsume our identity, ideology and values. Apparently, if I’m a well-heeled black business person wanting to enjoy social status equal to entrepreneurs around the world, I need to be able to eat sushi off the belly of a beautiful model, because that’s what they do in other countries.
Bizarre, but such is the thinking in a not insignificant sector of our society.
There is, however, no basis for a holus-bolus adoption of all the world offers in terms of development and a hatred of our own endeavours, meagre as they may seem.
Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the movie Social Network, the brilliantly written if slightly fictionalised account of the development of Facebook by Harvard dropout Mark Zuckerberg. A low-key campus network connecting Harvard students before being catapulted on to the planet, Facebook today boasts 500 million global participants and has made billions of dollars for founder Zuckerberg, aged 26!
Neither a dating site nor a conduit to people one did not know, it was initially a virtual version of a network of real, close relationships. Its success today still lies in connecting large groups of people with like interests.
Zuckerman’s preoccupation with growth for the sake of it, as his network reached ever-increasing magical numbers of participants, mimics the behaviour of the Facebook adherents fixated on inviting as many friends as possible.
As a means of re-establishing relationships with long-lost friends, or as a low-intensity exercise in voyeurism, Facebook is without peers. But too often after making the contact, the question must be asked: now what?
Facebook has not made it easier to maintain real, meaningful relationships over the ether. That is only possible in real, face-to-face engagement.
Changing lives or relationships for the better around the world was unlikely to be top of mind for Zuckerberg when he invented Facebook. Ditched by his girlfriend and shunned by the exclusive final clubs at Harvard, the tech boffin fled to his keyboard to write a vicious diatribe about his ex and launch a website slating girls on campus.
Rarely does a focus on securing sex, money and status translate into a noble endeavour. In Social Network, we’re exposed to the dodgy ethics which underpin Zuckerberg’s success – from allegedly stealing ideas from colleagues to betraying his partners and cheating them out of profits. And let’s not ignore the misogynist behaviour with women groupies.
All this perhaps epitomises the values deficit of Generation Y (born in the ’80s and ’90s), certainly as they present in first world societies.
Emerging societies like our own must be willing to use technological platforms like Facebook to drive our agendas, even at times leapfrogging today’s technology to the next version of innovation.
This is best evident with telephony in Africa, where communities opt for cellphone masts ahead of cables for landline telephones. The same will be true in our traditional conceptualisation of desktop computing, banking, delivery of health and social services, and even job creation.
In San Francisco today (Tuesday November 9), a Cape Flats-based non-government organisation, Reconstructed Living Lab, will receive a Bees (Best Use of Mobile) Award, an international social media prize, for its work in using especially MXit to reach youth at risk. Its community outreach interventions, which include counselling of drug addicts and gang members, currently serve some 40000 people across the country using their cellphones.
It’s a fascinating case study waiting to be replicated throughout the country.
One imagines Cape University of Technology academic Marlon Parker – who heads RLabs – and his team will be watching with great interest the next waves of technology coming out of Zuckerberg’s Facebook campus. But one hopes that we can do so while maintaining and affirming our core values of human decency.
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