What started out as a friendship on their first day of school in 1999 for Angela Park and Sharon Wei blossomed into a musical partnership that has carried them…
Some thoughts on the inhabited universe … … and all the science-fiction tales I ve loved before.
By Michael Nesset Text size Copy shortlink:
It s not surprising that, in this new Age of Anxiety, UFOs are once again in the news. Back in the 1950s, when I was growing up, our national anxieties about nuclear war, insidious creeping communism and the United States new role as superpower and global policeman produced many sightings of, even interactions with, UFOs or flying saucers, as in the age of Fiestaware they were known. The government, the military, the scientists all denied that these phenomena were of extraterrestrial origin, attributing them to weather balloons, the planet Venus, mass hallucination, and shared delusion in the case of one couple who claimed to be abducted and who corroborated one another s stories. Discredited, the flying saucer stories gave way to the assassinations, wars and moon shots of the
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Oliver Hermanus’
Moffie opens with an uneasy send-off dinner, followed soon after by a veritable descent into hell. The setting is South Africa in 1981, and 18-year-old Nicholas van der Swart (Kai Luke Brummer), like all other white boys over 16, is being conscripted for military service and a tour on the Angolan border, ostensibly to fend off communist terrorists. After a snaking train passage shot through with mounting terror, he soon finds himself in the darkness of a boot camp, under the thumb of Sergeant Brand (Hilton Pelser), an all-too-believable sadist who takes perverse pleasure in whipping the conscripts into shape. Beyond the usual horrors and humiliations of basic training, Nicholas also has to deal with the fact that, despite his last name (inherited from his stepfather), he is English among predominantly Afrikaans peers, and therefore has to fend off their taunts as well as Brand’s. Add to all this his hinted-at homosexuality, and
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