An Ailing Witkak And Weekend Concerts

Lets start with the bad news. My car, most commonly and very affectionately known as Witkak, has been through hell lately, and its not really my fault either. The friendly local neanderthals at Hi-Q Melville neglected to do something really basic, according to my learned mechanic friend (don't laugh!), after I had my wheel alignment done there at the end of last year, ultimately resulting in the forced replacement (kinda like forced displacement don't you think?!) of the entire - and previously power - steering rack. Some steering boot-like thingies were improperly twisted, and on departure from this terrible establishment they immediately tore open, the net result being that my frequent driving on dirt-roads in Mpumalanga caused the accumulation of small sand dune-like masses within the broader steering apparatus of my beloved chariot. Now while I am sure that the result was not quite as bad as adding this self-same sand to the fuel-tank, for instance, the damage still amounted to somewhere in the region of eight-thousand Rand. Whats more, replacing a power steering-rack costs almost eleven-thousand rand for just the part so I am now also downgraded to that animated, heavy-on-the-arm turning. This made me sad and I even stopped driving for some days in some sort of pointless protest sulk. I am making plans to storm into Hi-Q in the near future with some choice words and the objective of rattling some cages, at the very least. Today my starter also conked out. I'm bleak. I love Witkak, and when he hurts so do I. But money's too tight to mention too. Ho-hum.

Broken Witkak - look how sad

Now for the good stuff.

So I know its a little belated and all that - I'll explain why in another post - but on the weekend of the 14th of April Charlotte and I went to different music concerts on the Friday and Saturday night, and they were both great.

The first was on the Friday and we ended up schlepping to the North (Fourways) for a reunion concert by Henry Ate. Karma was back in SA for a short trip - she now lives in the US - and reunited with her old band-mate Julian to recreate some of the awesome circa mid-nineties musical goodness that awkward white kids (mostly) freely wallowed in, in their teens and early adulthood. I must say that to see this crowd now in that "thirty-something and older" stage of life, still bopping to the one-time hits like "Just", "Hey Mister", "Pandora's Child" and "0 Miles", was a little weird. I realized that I had lost touch with these people at some stage in my own life and to see so many of the same "genre" in the same place really kind of drove the point home. Needless to say, it was a trip down memory lane and wouldn't you just know it that I would also run into one of my class mates from primary school in PTA. Weird. Any way, check out Henry Ate's Myspace page if you did not grow up in SA during the mid nineties.

Julian and Karma - just like old times

And then it was onto the Jozi Hipster music scene - incidentally, this scene appears to be doing very well, although I am still trying to figure out where all these kids come from. Charlotte and I splurged on tickets for the Clap Your Hands Say Yeah concert on the Saturday night. It took place on the street outside the old Carfax building in Newtown. My personal highlight was Spoek Mathambo who opened for CYHSY. This guy is seriously talented and I'm a little embarrassed to say that I had not heard of him before the weekend. Check out his website here. His wicked lyrics make me think a little of Thumi of The Volume fame. CYSHSY was pretty good too although I was fairly wasted by then so my abilities as a music critic may have been a little compromised by then. I have a fairly good excuse for that too, which I will summarise as follows: There is only one thing worse than a Cape Town Hipster and that is a Wannabe Cape Town Hipster, especially when they are to be found in Johannesburg.

Spoek is Awesome

This looks almost as good as it did through my inebriated eyes