![]() Picasso is thirsty by now so I give the old boy a top-up. Loxton passes to the left and Carnarvon soon finds me. Driving out of town to find the continuing R63 towards Loxton takes you past the same cottages built when Victoria was young but now they are drab shadows of their former fine fettle, like movie stars jilted by Hollywood and living in penury on the streets brother, can you spare a dime ? It is, legend has it, the only remaining cinema of its ilk in the country, and retains its Gothic Twenties allure. The Apollo recently had a revamp and has occasional movie screenings and live shows. There is no solace for the Karoo Soul in England. Time, the Big Sky, and the yearning for journeys like these would eventually draw us back to the Karoo. But the cost of the TV show took the whole empire down, we were all retrenched, and we went to live in England and lick our wounds. The publisher had started a back-to-back TV show, and I directed a tiny insert for it about the Victoria West festival, with slide guitar creating the kind of mood that might impress people in black coats and scarlet scarves. It was a pivotal time for my family it was the dying days (though we didn’t know it) of the magazine I then worked for. And there was the time, many moons gone by, when I came here for a film festival in the art deco Apollo Cinema, where Karoo flappers and lounge lizards of the Twenties once watched noir silent movies and inhaled hits of snuff before disappearing into their Victorian cottages for a cigar and a Dubonnet before bed.Īt the latter-day festival circa the millennium, cineastes from Cape Town and Joburg clad in black coats and festooned with red scarves draped themselves on chaise longues to discuss directors’ cuts and cinematographic nuance while exchanging knowing glances. Pottie lived here once Johann Potgieter, one of the greatest of Karoo writers and long an inspiration to me. Maybe it isn’t really there at all.Ĭrawling through Vic West brings all sorts of memories. The eye-catching beauty that makes Murraysburg one of the lovelier Karoo towns soon dissipates into arid Karoo as you begin to approach the N1 where you stop at a four-way intersection, check for traffic, and cross towards Victoria West after skirting Hutchinson, an odd little hamlet that seems unchanged in many decades.
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