André Wiesner: Professional Writer • Editor  • Media Developer

Firebreak Studios

Hitting Full Contact
Text Box: Dating game-shows: Are contestants just looking for an easy lay after having exhausted the hunting grounds of pub and club, or have they been seduced by the promise in the show’s name – love at first sight? Text Box: Cruising the TV Love Machine Text Box: “Investigating the Aids pandemic, my job tonight is to explore the symbiosis between two industries: trucking and prostitution. In short, I’m cruising for trucker prostitutes, specifically teenagers, the most vulnerable in the sorority.” Text Box: Warning: Killer on the Road Text Box: Leaving Cape Town for a trip to Orania, the whites-only Afrikaner Volkstaat, what do you expect? You pack toothbrush and Mein Kampf, set off carried by native bearers, and wonder if the locals will savage you under a flaming cross. Text Box: Spirit of the Phantom City

The work of private mortuaries is essentially soothing; police mortuaries, on the other hand, are the cutting-edge. There, the dead wash up still soaking from brutal passions and sudden calamities.

The Dead Beat
Text Box: It’s not a club anyone wants to join, but it has no shortage of prospective members. It’s for dead men walking, the near-death survivors of South Africa’s crime wave.

Bullet Club

Feature Journalism
Text Box: How do you ensnare a monkey? An African proverb says you throw a shiny object into the hollow of a tree: the creature can’t pull away because it won’t open its fist. Polymorphously perverse, fraud is rampant in every social strata.

Religious cults: “So many voices speaking in tongues of holy ecstasy, so many voices screaming into their pillows. All walled behind silence in the face of the outside world’s disbelief: How could they let it happen to them?”

“Give me a rock the size of Table Mountain and I’ll ask for two. One is too many, a thousand too little: That’s my disease.” Our reporter visits a well-to-do 12-Step rehabilitation centre.

“How do you kill a stuntman? Drop him from his ego to his IQ. This is the joke doing the rounds on the film set, and it conveys the gist of the stereotype that’s bedeviled stuntworkers: brawny dullards who are just camera fodder.”

“‘The heist robber doesn’t give a shit who he kills. Something’s snapped. Violence is his society.’” An exploration of three lines of high-pressure work: security surveillance, paramedics and oil-rigging.

The Body on Fire

Clean Surrender

The Million Dollar Meat Hook

Collision Course

Jackhammer Heartbeat

Reality-based, full-contact, no-holds-barred fighting: Our artsy writer joins the raging bulls for a close-quarters, bone-crunching appreciation of their sport. “If you attend,” the trainer says on the phone, “you will be strangled.”
Text Box: · Read feature Text Box: · Read feature Text Box: · Read feature Text Box: · Read feature Text Box: · Read feature