Posts Tagged ‘stellenbosch

11
Dec
12

Gerald Clark Becomes The Tiger’s New Favourite Artist

By SlickTiger 2 Comments
Categories: Radass Videos
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Gerald ClarkeI mean shit, this guy had me at stop-animated ratty old action figures trying to murder the fuck out of one another in a dirty, gritty hell-hole, THEN the chorous kicked in.

It’s foot-stompin’ good times from start to finish with this track, the kind of song that makes you want to drive screaming into that black night, firing shotgun blasts out the window of your pickup.

What can I say? Both the song below (“Black Water”) and the video speak to my dark, whisky-ravaged heart and get this, the guy’s from Stellenbosch – how fucking cool is that?! I love what’s happening in the SA music scene at the moment, it’s alive and kickin’ brother, hooo-wee!

 

 

Fucking badass right? Yes, fucking badass.

I’m working on getting more, I feel like this is the kind of dark, gritty blues my summer holiday needs.

There’s other stuff too, ballads, kinder, gentler country, this guy can do it all (here are some videos).

Keep an eye on this mofo, as you’ll see in the videos, he plays an amazing live set.

-ST

24
Jan
11

SlickTiger:2 Moving:0

By SlickTiger Leave a Comment
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Compared to the shenanigans of Part 1, Part 2 of our epic move from Stellenbosch to Cape Town was executed with military precision.

In one day we managed to move every remaining stick of furniture loaded in a solid brick of stuff on the back of the bakkie I was borrowing from a buddy of mine.

It was every Tetris player’s dream – a double bed, a fridge, a two seater couch, a TV cabinet and a table all stacked and packed so perfectly together you couldn’t even squeeze a hand between any of the gaps and that was before Captain Albatross got to work tying it all down.

 

 

I now know that J-Rab and my life can be packed up, uprooted and moved anywhere in 3 car loads and 2 bakkie loads as long as one of those bakkie loads looks like this:

 

 

And so, by 3 o’clock on Saturday afternoon there wasn’t so much as one toothpick of our stuff left in the shed which over the past year we’ve come to call home.

Funny how you can still feel nostalgic about leaving a place that drove you completely insane every second that you lived there. Our little wooden house had a certain charm to it and when all the animals living around us finally shut the hell up it was peaceful out there.

I got some great writing done there. Sundays would roll around and J-Rab would go off to work and I’d get up early, make myself some fresh coffee and wander out onto our balcony into the blue morning and soak up the vineyard and mountains surrounding us.

We walked out to the secret dam near our house for the last time before we left. Captain Albatross, J-Rab and I stood looking over the giant Lillie pads that dotted the surface of the dam and watched some ducks float on by while a Cormorant swooped silently overhead and way off in the distance a car glided past on the R44.

I asked the Captain to get a picture of J-Rab and I before we left.

 

 

And so we left Stellies and finally moved to the Mother City to start a new chapter in our lives. My morning commute has now gone from roughly an hour to 6 minutes and the flat we’ve moved into has actual cupboards! And a kitchen! And a spare bedroom! And no rats!

Life couldn’t be better Winking smile

-ST

31
Oct
10

Red October – A Smashing Success!

By SlickTiger 3 Comments
Categories: Uncategorized
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Well, you may or may not remember the goal I set to post every day for the month of October, but yeah, I flippin’ KLAPPED IT CHARNAS!

Thirty-one days of straight, never missing a beat posting and yes, some posts were a little on the thin side, I’m the first to admit that but considering work is drilling me like a Deepwater oil operation in the Gulf of Mexico, I think I’ve done a killer job of keeping this shit up.

I’m also stoked because I put the second Tiger Life to bed today, cut the whole thing together and managed to actually make Window Movie Maker work for me. Episode Two, unlike the first one, is fucking cool and if you don’t get a few laughs watching it, I’ll eat my shoe.

 

 

What was even more impressive was the fact that I put it together with the mother of all headaches from the tequila I smashed last night. Nothing quite like taking taxis out, it’s like playing a ‘Get Out Of Jail Free’ card.

So to give you an idea of what it’s like to party in Stellenbosch, I present to you the following video which not only captures the music perfectly, but also the people of Stellenbosch.

Watch the whole thing. You think it can’t get any better, but it does.

 

 

Yeah. Enjoy hearing that song in your head for thee next three days.

Heh heh heh.

-ST

14
Oct
10

Help The TIger Find A Flat And Win!

By SlickTiger 1 Comment
Categories: Uncategorized
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Guys, some crazy news.

J-Rab and me are moving out of the wooden shit-shack we’re been living in for the last 8 months in Stellenbosch and are heading into the beautiful sea-side city of Cape Town itself, PRAISE JESUS HALLELULYA!

 

 

It hasn’t been easy living out here on this wine farm in Stellies. I mean, people come around to visit the place and they’re all like “Aww, it’s so cosy!” Which pisses us off no end because it’s not fucking cosy, ok?

It’s a fucking hell-hole of sleeplessness, anguish and rats. That’s right, rats. Our shed-of-a-house is infested with large, nasty, fucking smart rats who break in at night and stomp around eating our food like they own the fucking place!

Or at least they used to. Eventually the lack of sleep drove me insane(r) and I bought enough Racumin to poison an army of the fuckers. I then waited for nightfall and crept around in the dark, mumbling incoherent nonsense and giggling under my breath as I lobbed little sachets of the poison under the house and imagined the evil fuckers twitching and writhing uncontrollably while the poison ripped through their central nervous-systems like loose shrapnel.

And don’t even fucking get me started on the owls, Egyptian geese, Anatolian Shepherds, roosters, tractors and other random shit that robs us of our sleep nightly. I mean fuck’s sake, what the fuck did we do to deserve this hellish existence? What?!?!

 

 

Sure, it’s rent free. Sure living here is part of J-Rab’s job, but y’know what? They can shove this shack-of-shit, we’re done here. The commute in and out of the city centre where I work is killing me, as is the insomnia and the smell of dead, rotten rats under our floorboards.

Anyway. Enough about that.

So here’s the deal. We need a new place, a nice 1-bedroom, 1-bathroom flat somewhere central in Cape Town with a great garden (communal is fine), a killer view, parking for two cars, a nice kitchen and a robot like they have in The Jetsons to clean the dishes and wash our clothes and stuff.

 

 

If you know any friends moving out of a place that fits the bill, fire a mail off to tellthetiger@gmail.com and you could stand the chance to win an official SlickTiger Them’s Fightin’ Words T-shirt that is guaranteed to get you laid.

So don’t delay! Write in now and this amazing T-shirt could be yours! Oh, and I’ll also put up a post about how you are an exceptional human being, cooler than Jesus even.

Fair deal right? 😉

Have a killer weekend.

-ST

16
May
10

Saturday In Jonkershoek – A Photo Journey

By SlickTiger 1 Comment
Categories: Uncategorized
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It’s funny how ‘the real world’ has this way of catching up with you sometime in your 20s. One minute life is kinda breezing along like it always did, and the next you’re elbows deep in bills, car insurance, medical aid, deadlines at work, traffic, grumpy co-workers and then what? Marriage, children and a whole other heap of stuff I don’t really want to think about right now.

Sometimes you’ve just got to leave all that shit behind you and go for a walk. That’s what J-Rab and I decided to do on Saturday. We packed a backpack with a couple of beers and drove about 15 minutes to the Jonkershoek Nature Reserve where we had lunch and took goofy pictures of each other.

 

 

After lunch we entered the reserve, excited as kids at Christmas and got a killer picture of us getting ready to hike the SHIT out of that place.

 

 

The road we took meandered round in a wide circle past a huge dam and through a pine forest. The smell of pine needles, the cool, fresh feeling of winter’s edge biting through the dappled afternoon sunshine.

We talked about a different life for us, a different future where J-Rab becomes a rich and famous model and I become an award-winning novelist and script-writer, and we pose on magazine covers together and holiday in exotic places that we sail to on 500ft luxury yachts with all our friends.

“It’s on the cards babe,” I told her, “it’s fate, you can’t fuck with fate.”

All around us, mountains stretched up to the sky and I wanted to climb the highest one and stand on the top, my arms outstretched in the sunshine and shout down into the valley below in my own invented language until my voice got horse and the people listening all chuckled and, shaking their heads said, “Crazy fucker…”

 

 

I know Saturday is probably going to be a day I’ll remember for a long time because it was simple and easy and filled with laughter, J-Rab’s and mine. Days like that you lock away somewhere deep inside and, when times get bad, you take them out again and hold them up to the light and remember that life was better once, and it will be better again.

 

 

-ST

03
Mar
10

The Tiger Returns

By SlickTiger 4 Comments
Categories: Being Slick
Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

I’ll tell you one thing about Christians, they’ve got the monopoly on guilt. Hell, I don’t even go to church or practise Christianity, but when I do bad shit, the guilt comes thick and fast.

I’ve been meaning to post for a long fucking time, I was in a good routine y’know? People they used to say, ‘Yeah, that SlickTiger guy, funny fucker. Posts every day, EVERY DAY. We love him. We want him in and around our mouths.’

 

 

Now they say, ‘Yeah, that SlickTiger guy, what a jerk. He had something going there for awhile, but it’s clear he ain’t got the stones to see it through. He’s dead to us now.”

Well, I got news Party People, like a cockroach scuttling out the drain after the last nuke wipes humanity out for good, I’m back, and I’m badder than ever 😉

Since I last checked in, crazy shit has gone down. I packed my life up in record time, jumped in The Red Baron and blazed a trail of fire clear across this beautiful, fucked up country of ours.

Joburg showed me its true face just as I left. I saw it the last time the sun set, just as I was about to get on the N1 to Bloem. Its true face looks like this:

 

 

I rolled into Bloem late, my schedule was tight as a drum because my new company had organised a 3 day conference that they really wanted me to attend which started ON the day I was originally going to arrive in CT.

Bloemfontein is a ghost town at 9 on a Monday night. I could count the other cars I saw on one hand. A stray dog nosed through some garbage. An empty chip packet blew scraping down the road.

The next day I got up at 4.30, showered and left by 5. There was about an hour’s grace before the heavens opened like a floodgate and I drove the next 6 hours in rain that fell so heavy it was coming down in sheets.

Try overtaking trucks in weather like that. Visibility is zero, but it’s ok because you can see the other car’s headlights right?

Fuck no. I counted about 15 trucks and cars that were driving with their headlights off, and in every one of those cars I saw my own death, splattered at 120 km/h all over the asphalt.

 

 

I’d be worm food if it weren’t for porn. It saved my life – click this sentence to find out how.

I hit Stellenbosch at around 4.30 and headed straight to Cheetah Outreach where I found her feeding four cheetahs. She had one by the scruff of his neck, a huge handful of fur between her fingers.

‘Hey!’ I said, ‘Stop hurting the animals.’

She turned around to give me a piece of her mind, but stopped mid sentence when she saw it was me.

Two and a half weeks – I could see the difference in her. She’s more tanned, she looks relaxed, more at home here than she was back in the Big Smoke, stuck behind a reception desk, whiling her time away filling in vet boards and staring at nothing.

 

 

She hugged me and the feeling of her all soft and skinny against me was good the way a cold drink on a hot day is good, the way a deep sleep after a hard day is good, good right down to your bones.

13 hours later I’m sitting in a bus with my new co-workers, singing ‘The Wheels On The Bus Go Round and Round’ into a microphone plugged into the dashboard.

6 hours after that I’m line dancing to ‘Sexy Back’ and smashing Jager-bombs into my face with what I can only describe as hordes of women.

In life sometimes, you just go with it. If you’re me, you take that a step further.

I could go on about the conference, a lot went down over the three days, but I think the word I’m looking for to sum it all up here is ‘radass’. I invented that word, you can use it but you have to reference this blog 😉

The weekend was amazing. J-Rab and I hit Bikini Beach near Gordon’s Bay and on Sunday went to meet my buddy Scatter’s 4 week old daughter.

It’s amazing how perfect babies come out. They’re finished so neatly, ten fingers, ten toes (hopefully) tiny mouth, fat arms and legs. Then they grow up and get all funny-looking and full of imperfections, flaws and fuck-ups.

And now I’m in the thick of things. The new job has started guns blazin’ but you know me, it’s nothing I can’t handle 😉 Oh, before I forget, here’s a pic of me on the first night I arrived at my new place:

 

 

Tune in tomorrow for a post I like to call ‘SlickTiger Meets Gary The Cannibal’.

Ka-Pow!

-ST

15
Feb
10

SlickTiger is THE KING of First Impressions

By SlickTiger 7 Comments
Categories: Uncategorized
Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

Hey Party People, wassappenin?

If you’re a loyal TFW reader, I think I should probably start by apologising for being a lazy bastard over the weekend and not posting (it was actually a pretty epic weekend because I by mistake smashed my buddy Peggles’ massive glass table while we were playing darts and I feel really bad about that) and also not posting sooner today, it’s been too hectic.

 

 

But enough of that crap. I’m done grovelling, time to tell you why I’m the KING of first impressions. This is pretty epic.

Here’s the dealy-o (skip this bit if you know me / read this blog often): I’m packing up my life and heading down to Stellenbosch in exactly one week’s time so that I can join my gorgeous lady J-Rab down there and start a new life together, VERY exciting times for your buddy ‘ol pal Slick.

I’ve even got a new job lined up that starts at 8am sharp next week Wednesday because no, I don’t fuck around, I kill everything I see, that’s why God has a hard-on for me (name the movie I bastardised that from and win a prize!).

What’s pretty damn cool is that my new company wants me to start so soon because they’re going on a 3 day conference to kick the year off where we get to know the company, our colleagues, and even have guest speakers come in and speak about industry trends, etc, etc.

I couldn’t possibly think of a better way to start out at a company. After those 3 days of team-building exercises and ‘getting to know you’ sessions, I’ll start work on Monday pretty much knowing EVERYONE! SORTED!

 

 

Only thing I’m a little nervous about is the high female to male ratio at this conference, which I estimate to be about 20:3. I don’t like standing up in front of an entire audience of women because I get really self-conscious and say really stupid things that make me cringe when I think back on them.

One of the first things we’re doing is a ‘getting to know you’ game where you have to stand up in front of everyone and show them a ‘hidden talent’ you have.

I thought of doing a couple of one-arm pushups at first, cause those are pretty amazing, until I realised that I can’t do one-arm pushups. What? You try it! That shit’s HARD!

Then I thought of telling everyone I’m really good at smelling stuff and when they ask to prove it I’ll take a few deep whiffs and then say, ‘Yep. Definitely smelling stuff.’

But then fuck! Outta nowhere! I finally figure EXACTLY what I’m going to tell them.

Before I launch into it, I’d just like to thank The MAEN! for inspiring this one. I am nothing without you, this blog is nothing without you. Is it ok if I show them the picture of your penis? It is? Cool, you just boosted my viewership by probably about 350.

 

 

So anyway what I’ll tell them is that I’m really good at sex.

‘I’m really good at sex,’ I’ll tell them, ‘you laugh, but it’s true. The other day I was having sex with a woman in Haiti and she said it was so amazing, it felt like the earth was moving beneath her.’

Here I’ll pause for a moment while everyone laughs politely.

‘Ok, hahahaha, yeah, she didn’t really say that…’ I’ll concede sheepishly.

‘She was dead.’

Da doom…

TSSHHH! 🙂

-ST

11
Feb
10

Wonderboy Life’s Just Begun…

By SlickTiger 3 Comments
Categories: Being Slick
Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

You gotta love The Kinks, because they’re fucking cool. If you don’t know who they are, please stop reading this blog immediately and go out and buy at least 5 of their albums. In this instance I don’t even mind if you buy the ‘Best Of’ collections, that’s ok, in this instance, because I just want you to get into them and that’s probably the best way.

 

 

They’re like The Beatles, only they never got as huge, which is really sad. Their music is way better than The Beatles in my over-inflated opinion, with the exception of The Beatles White Album – THAT fucking album is amazing. ‘Rocky Racoon’ all the way, that’s my favourite Beatles’ song of all time.

Anyway, once you’ve bought the compulsory 5 The Kinks albums I mentioned earlier, find the track ‘Wonderboy’ and play that fucker on repeat until you hear it in your dreams.

I heard it the first time back in varsity and it’s been there ever since, playing somewhere in the background of my life.

I appreciate irony, in fact, I thrive on it because it’s one of the most powerful forces that governs our world, and the song ‘Wonderboy’ is loaded to the gills with irony.

The lyrics are hilarious because Ray Davies (singer and frontman) sings them in this sing-song way that sounds a bit like a nursery rhyme, with this limp and lifeless vocal tone that sounds a lot like he’s just fucking given up with life and the combination of these two things, for me, makes me piss myself laughing.

Wonderboy life’s just begun / Turn that sorrow into wonder / Dream alone, don’t sigh, don’t groan / Life is only what you wonder

I arrived at work this morning and started playing random songs and “Wonderboy” came on and I couldn’t help but smile because over the course of the last day, my life really has turned to wonder.

As you may already know, I’m moving to Cape Town at the end of Feb because J-Rab was offered a killer job at Cheetah Outreach in Stellenbosch which came with free accommodation on Eikendal Wine Estate, very fucking cool.

 

 

The only snag of course was that I didn’t have anything lined up in Cape Town, which I think was contributing to the impending sense of doom that was creeping up on me a few weeks back.

Well, I’m fucking relieved to say I was offered a job yesterday at an awesome PR agency in Cape Town, which is going to be a great step forward in terms of my career and which means I got nothing to worry about except packing my life up and hitting the open road.

Sometimes in life you just gotta let go. Sometimes you’ve got to put a little trust in whatever Gods may be and have the courage to accept that things have this funny way of working out for the best if you just let them.

Cause really, in the end of the day everybody’s looking for the sun and yes, people strain their eyes to see, but I see you and you see me.

And ain’t that wonder? 😉

-ST