WTF is going on?
A pertinent question considering the world we’re living in
What do you aspire to, if, say, you have already fulfilled all your megalomaniac tendencies? You are riding high on top of the world; you are supreme leader (despite a small inconvenient fact — your guy in America just got booted and moved to Florida). But hey, you’re still living your best life, invading neighbouring nations, shooting down planes, riding the ponies with bare-naked chest, eliminating enemies just like Captain Underpants by poisoning their underpants. Take that, Navalny, you internet resistance freak. What can you possibly still want?
This, O fellow minions, is a very important question and now we have an answer. What you want, what you really, really want, is an AKVA DISKOTEKA. You want two in fact. What, you might ask, is this thing? I will tell you because once you know, you will never unknow it and you, too, will realise that no 80km under-roof pleasure palace is really ever complete without two of these.
The AKVA DISKOTEKA is Russian shorthand for unparalleled joy provided by the benefits of aquatic discotech. (Not to be confused with aqua aerobics — that is for losers.) In case you thought vodka was the only route to ultimate happiness, let me disabuse you — a marine-inspired dance floor that enables you to bust a move under the sea is the only true path to all-consuming pleasure. “Under the sea, under the sea, darling it’s better, down where its wetter, take it from me.” And who doesn’t want to live in a pescatarian fantasy realm like The Little Mermaid?
Who has made this fishy preference for dancing queens a reality? Need you ask? Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. President, prime minister, intelligence operative and oceanic mover and shaker. And that is why I rate him as possibly the bestest and most inspired of supreme leaders, ever.
Can’t you see him, singing his heart out, shaking his booty, immersed in his very own blue planet. “Up on the shore they work all day, out in the sun they slave away, while we devotin’ full time to floatin’ under the sea … under the sea, nobody beat us, fry us and eat us in fricassee …”
Luyolo Yiba (Idols 2019 winner) My Love for You
What better way to kick off Valentine’s Day than with a song that starts with these lyrics: Your gorgeous smile brings light into my life...
Lungisa Xhamela, below iLove Letter
South African recording artist Lungisa Xhamela, also of Idols SA fame, has perfected this groovy yet smooth sound in the new-school afro soul genre.
Lucky Dube
I’ve Got You Babe
The legendary reggae star brings his particular style to this song about finding and cherishing the perfect person.
El Mukuka and Cueber I’ll Hold You Down
Zambia’s top DJ/producer El Mukuka collaborates with South African heavyweight Cuebur on a new single released in December.
Ladysmith Black Mambazo Because I Love You
The world-famous choral group serenades you unlike any other.
KLA
Nobody’s Looking
(Featuring Patty Monroe)
These two great singers combine their styles to create a smooth blend between RnB and Trap. They create this flow seamlessly with sultry, flirty vocals from KLA and an easy, cool flow rap from Patty Monroe, which makes it easy to enjoy in any setting.
Thami
I love You
From his Never Lost album, Thami says those three little words in the way you really want to hear them.
Yanga
Artificial Heart
Taken from the Promised Land album, the local singer brings her stunning gospel and soul vocals to your day of love.
As a sheltered Jewish girl in 1940s New York, Dorothy Otnow Lewis listened to the news of the Nuremberg Trials broadcast on her parents’ radio. She heard the depressing revelations of the psychopathology of what had made the Nazis so evil. When she left home in the ’60s to become a psychiatrist, her morbid childhood fascination with the inner workings of evil men led her to specialise in the investigation of what made serial killers tick.
Over a decades-long career in which she showed a stubborn determination to her cause of trying to understand people whose evils made them incomprehensible to many, Lewis came to be one of the most vocal advocates for the idea of dissociative identity disorder, the more clinically correct term for what in popular consciousness is called multiple personality disorder. She used this as a tool to understand the motivations of these very damaged men.
Alex Gibney’s documentary Crazy, Not Insane offers a fascinating exploration of Lewis’s personal struggle to gain acceptance for her theories. It draws on many hours of deeply uncomfortable video and audio interviews conducted over decades by Lewis, left, with some of the 20th century’s most notorious serial killers.
Lewis’s theory that murderers are made and not born was popular with defence attorneys looking to save their clients from the electric chair but it was deeply unpopular with those who wanted to see killers, like Arthur Shawcross and Ted Bundy, burn in hell for their sins. Her many public appearances in televised trials and on talk shows made her the visible face of a theory that many saw as an attempt to excuse the actions of cold, calculating psychopaths and relieve them of responsibility for their crimes.
But Lewis’s dedication to building a theory based on a persuasive set of recurring patterns offers a strong basis for admitting that external factors do play a role in the creation of these monsters and, to some extent, shows the reasons for their actions. They often had traumatic childhood abuse, which led them to strictly compartmentalise their lives — which in turn allowed them to act in unspeakable ways while still believing that they were not monsters.
Gibney allows his subject and the archive of her research to take the floor and doesn’t intervene with any real analysis of broader social or historical circumstances as he has in his other films. Thanks to her intelligent presence Lewis makes a compelling argument for the significance of her life’s work and its importance in allowing us to think in new, more philosophically productive ways about evil, justice and retribution. You may not agree with her but you’ll find it hard not to at least listen and think about what she has to say.
‘Crazy, Not Insane’ is available on Showmax.