Kanye, Kanye, Kanye …
It seems a week can’t go by without the greatest artist of all time (his words, not ours) showing up on our
Trend Report. This week, however, was all kinds of cray-cray. On Monday, Kanye tweeted to Mark Zuckerburg (oh, the irony) asking him to invest $1-billion in him because “for anyone that has money they know the first rule is to use other people's money”.
Wait, what? Why didn’t anyone tell us this? He then went on to claim that he’s $53-million in debt. How does that even happen? PR stunt or not, West sure knows how to trick people into talking about him … including us.
Dammit.
An interesting week for the South African arts industry
Back in South Africa, our local arts industry had an interesting week. On Wednesday, the Design Indaba (#DI2016) kicked off. Some of the highlights included SA music legend Hugh Masekela telling stories about his youth and jamming some tunes as well as a talk from Margaret Calvert that received a standing ovation from the audience.
Thursday saw the announcement of this year’s SAFTA nominees. Satirical show, ZA News: Puppet Nation leads the game with 11 nominations, and Those Who Can’t isn’t far behind with nine. And, in its 40th season, Noot vir Noot scooped up a couple of nominations, too.
Some would say that’s a pretty good week, art wise. But, unfortunately, we can’t mention “art” without acknowledging what happened at UCT this week. Protestors burnt artworks of figures attached to the university, and while they may have their reasons for doing so, they should have done their research too.
They ended up setting fire to an artwork done by Keresemose Richard Baholo, an anti-apartheid artist. #Epicfail
In a parliamentary chamber far, far away…
We’d need more than a Trend Report to properly summarise what happened at the State of the Nation Address. We’re not going to do that. Instead, we’re going to give you a quick overview.
Amid much shouting, finger pointing, walk-outs (those carpets in Parliament are certainly seeing their fair amount of foot traffic), Democratic Alliance leader Mmusi Maimane went and did a Terry Pratchett, creating a parallel universe, Planet Zuma, just for the president.
Whether Maimane’s remarks were insightful or disrespectful, the media picked up the baton, with one Cape daily running a Star Wars-style front page, while another online media outlook cribbed the iconic rolling text from the epic space saga. The most pleased people among all this are, however, definitely the promoters of the latest Star Wars film.
Dammit, now we want to go watch Star Wars again …
National drink wine day
After quite an intense week, we saw the hashtag #nationaldrinkwineday trending on the Twittersphere on Thursday, and our first thought was “Day? Singular?” Although it is an American day dedicated to spreading the health benefits of wine, one can’t help but hope that this trend will catch on globally, and especially here in South Africa. After all, we do have the best wine in the world, and more than enough reasons to drink it.
Then again, in South Africa, Wine Day is every day. YAY!
Til next week ...