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Mail & Guardian, 11 May 2012
A week well spent
A Cape Town deli boasts recipes for for a fit lady and for the rest of us. 
Popular daytime eatery the Kitchen pioneered the gastronomic revolution in Cape Town's Woodstock, which has experiences a number of restaurants opening in the neighbourhood in the past few years.
The shop front for Karen Dudley's catering business, which devises dinners and cocktail parties, has a bric-a-brac feel in keeping with this inner-city suburb's numerous junk shops and second-hand stores strung along Sir Lowry Road. The Kitchen's grid wall of wooden shelves and a glass display counter are crammed with old crockery, ornaments, vases and baubles. Yet, if you offer to buy any of these tchotchkes, you will be flatly turned down.
As one enters, there is a cardboard lampost flaunting the newspaper headlin "An Obama in my kitchen" from when United States first lady Michelle Obama popped in for lunch in June last year. Popping in, of course, involved cordoning off Woodstock's main arterial road and included a convoy of 18 vehicles as well as an entourage of secret servicemen.
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Daily Maverick, 25 April 2012
Being a moffie from Zeerust in libertine lanes of Amsterdam
Richard de Nooy’s second novel, The Big Stick (Jacana, 2011), reminds us we still live in dangerous times, writes DIANE AWERBUCK. Especially if our sexuality deviates from the norm...
The Big Stick is Richard de Nooy’s second novel. In it, Alma Nel, bereaved and bewildered battleaxe, journeys from Zeerust to Amsterdam to investigate the circumstances surrounding the death of her gay son, Staal.
De Nooy doesn’t think of his work as the product of a particular literary tradition: “I made no conscious effort to place the book within a certain track or frame, although I fully understand that it is likely to be considered within certain traditions and compared to precursors. If anything, I hoped that the book would give straight people – people who might never pick up a book from the ‘Gay’ section of the bookstore – greater insight into various aspects of gay lives, by weaving various issues into a story that readers would find interesting and entertaining… I set out to tell a story, not to write a controversial novel.”
Be that as it may, The Big Stick does deal with some of the concerns specific to “queerlit”, and Staal’s evolution from mere moffie to twink is the central preoccupation of the book. His sudden and unexpected happiness makes the circumstances of his death all the more poignant.
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Witness, 27 March 2012
The strange and sinister world of Lolly Jackson
When he died, shot six times, in May 2010, the cars in Lolly Jackson's garage were conservatively estimated to be worth R96 million and on the surface his Teaazers' business empire seemed to be flourishing ahead of an expected influx of tourists looking for adult entertainment on the fringes of the Soccer World Cup. But his death blew the lid off a shadowy world of tax dodges, money laundering, intimidation and some very frightening people.
A new book about Jackson's life, death and financial shenanigans has just been published. The authors are Sean Newman, who was Jackson's media, marketing and public relations manager at Teazers and who now runs his own massage business which Lolly had helped him to set up; investigative journalist Karyn Maughan of eNews and Peter Piegl, former editor of Playboy South Africa whose role has been to pull Newman's memories of Jackson and the Teazers' lifestyle and Maughan's forensic investigations together into a readable whole.
The book opens with Jackson's death but the killings did not end there. His attorney Ian Jordaan and his former partner Mark Andrews have both been murdered, while underworld boss Cyril Beeka was killed two months before Jackson. Beeka had close links to Czech fugitive Radovan Krejcir who was also a friend of Jackson's and is a major player in the story and, say the authors, is happy with the accuracy of the content. Probably wisely, they checked everything with him before publication.
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Star, Tonight 16 February 2012
Photos so powerful you can taste them
One of the things that first struck me about Obie Oberholzer's photography when I first saw it some 10 years ago was his use of colour.
Colour throbbed in his pictures, with a vividness I had never seen before. Today, Photoshop makes it easy to boost vibrance and hues in a photograph; the patience and intricate knowledge of chemicals that was demanded of professional photographers who worked in a darkroom are now anachronistic.
So before viewing this, his latest photographic journal, which tracks his journeys across the southern (Botswana, Namibia, SA) and northern tip of Africa (Egypt, Yemen), I wondered if modern technology had essentially robbed him of his palette.
I needn't have worried. The man's talent is boundless. The colour is still there, of course, and the rich detail, and, so far as I know, Oberholzer is still shooting on medium format film rather than using digital technology but, whereas many photographers use Photoshop to the maximum in order to make colours "pop", especially in fashion shoots, Oberholzer's colours seem embedded in his pictures rather than make-up that has been thickly applied on after the event.
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Citizen 16 February 2012
Living life outside the ordinary
THIS book is a creation by a master writer, spiritual explorer, fantasy blender and miracle worker, all of it for the price of one.
We travel with a shaman, locally known as a sangoma, and his apprentice to the Cape platteland and outside our borders and experience spiritual encounters with the most unbelievable characters and creatures.
The story takes us outside our daily environment to see something unreal and lovely.
It shows how the power of imagination by one can enrich the life of another and leave something more than just a good read, give spiritual understanding of how rich and delightful life outside the ordinary can be.
Mail & Guardian 3 February 2012
Wit leavens exploration of human foibles
THIS is a remarkably accomplished debut novel in which the author addresses issues that are common to most of us — what to make of one's imperfect parents, how to survive a broken heart, how to be in the world we live in.
Alice, a young white Capetonian, is the main narrator; her relationship with her brother, Andrew, is fraught with repressed memories that blind her to him. His gorgeous socialite girlfriend, Veronica, is anathema to Alice, but central to the plot because she is killed in a car accident. Alice claims to have been driving, but one suspects it was Andrew. The event changes Alice's life forever.
She is known for being accident-prone; she has many scars to prove it and some disbelief attends her stories of how she came by them.
In this clever examination of different, parallel versions of "reality", Alice's name has been carefuly chosen.
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