Beach Kangaroos & Other Life Seekers

Maduduzi is a 33 year old South-African living in Barcelona, well, living on Roses beach really, just about where I live, waiting, without much conviction, to find employment of any kind, before the cold sets in again. Meanwhile, he passes the whole day on the beach making sand-sculptures in exchange for whatever people who admire his work are willing to give him. Admirers there seem to be plenty, but the degree of admiration is not always represented in anything more than a couple of small coins. Still, with the long summer days and holiday mood of the tourists, he gets by fairly with between €20 to €30 a day he told me.

The sun, the beach and tourists make an encouraging combination to also attract other 'buscavidas' (literally: life seekers) as the Spanish called them, trying to earn something to feed themselves and their families, doing whatever they think might appeal to the tourists lazing there in the sun: selling bottled water and soft drinks, fruit and ice cream, cheap trinkets of bangles and beads, postcards in case some might suddenly remember they ought to send a few words to their relatives and friends not as lucky as they are, but still labouring over their work. There are artists who draw your portraits while you sit or lie, for the proof you need to take home, to show you have been to the sunny beach, and your tan is not from a bottle.

Those who are not selling any commodities and souvenirs are selling services, taking photographs or videos of you playing beach sports or games, dancing, exercising, reading, eating, kissing .... Then there is the very popular service, masseurs, 'professional' they all assure you apparently. Who is going to argue about that anyway, right? There are foot, hand, neck or full body massages. There are even beach 'kangaroos' (Spanish for babysitters) so that you can swim, play balls or cards, while your babies or young children are looked after, fed, cleaned and amused by these kangaroos, for a fee naturally.

Back to my friend Mduduzi. With the crisis, he had lost his regular job as well as home, to become a beach artist and dweller. He is one of the luckier ones having his artistic skill to fall back on, and the generosity of summer and tourists to tie him over. But, he fears, the warm days will soon go, so will the tourists, and the beach will be deserted. Not just that, the beach is also his home which will soon be inhabitable when winter befalls.

Mduduzi's Lion Head. I quite like it. Looks a bit like himself.

Tags:lifeseekers,kangaroos

Current Mood: Artistic

Forever Young

Nearly a century and a half old but staying young, energetic and trendier than ever. It was in 1872 when a great idea hit Levi Strauss, that there's no reason why the materials like canvas, oilcloth, tarp and denim are used only for tents, covers for transportation trucks or in timber yards. The very strong and resistant material, some are semi water proof too, can also be used for making work clothes and overalls.

He did just that and the Jeans as we know them had since become the longest lasting universal fashion, not looking a day older and with every sign that they will be here to stay. Forever. They are loved and accepted by old and young, rich and poor, by the high society as well as peasants and humble workers in every corner of the planet. An immortal garment that has survived with dignity and ingenuity the passage of time, through war, peace, good times or bad, revolts and revolutions. It has become a 'must' in any kind of wardrobe although, in recent years, some of the innovations had almost all but altered every original structure all together, leaving only the material itself to be identified as jeans, more or less.

There are numerous style, skinny jeans (my favourite, with extra high heels), bell bottoms, high-waisted or hipsters, jewelled studded, sequined, embroidered or with patchworks, smooth or wrinkled, torn or even thread-bare in parts ... simply endless designs and all of them have faithful followers. Apart from the kind with more holes than stitches, I have tried them all and love most of them. I even wear jeans to what's supposed to be posh restaurants and concerts, but taking great care to add expensive and elegant accessories like a jewelled brooch pinned on the small pocket, or several strands of semiprecious beads hanging from the soft belt. Nobody had refused me entry, yet.

Not that I want a funeral (cremation is my preference) but I imagine I will be the corpse with the perfect make-up and mascara, a white silk frilly blouse and in a pair of the most fashionable jeans, with jewel-studded belt and 4 inch high heels; after a sumptuous dinner with Champaign and dancing under the moonlight, followed by passionate love-making, wrapped in the warm arms of my lover, when I am a 90 year old lady.

Tags:jeans,corpse

Current Mood: Artistic

My Life Is F****d!

Hunch.com I talked about in my Blog yesterday is not the only website that separates what is a social website by a very fine line from the world of absurdity. F**k My Life (fmylife.com) is a website where thousands use as personal epitome, something like Twitter, for those who have an urge to share their life practically minute by minute with the whole world, with people who are total strangers in most cases. They post short stories or accounts, supposedly true, in no more than 300 words (only 140 in Twitter) why their life is a mess, a disaster or sheer ordeal, justified or not justified. All of them begin with 'today' and end with 'my life is f**Ed up'. One says: "Today my husband found the box of day-after pill. He had a vasectomy 10 years ago. My life is f**ked." Other users can vote whether this person simply has bad luck or she deserved what she got. In France they have their own version: VieDeMerde.fr Uban Dictionary (ubandictionary.com) is a dictionary of the real academic of the street. It contains all the street slang, expressions and acronyms with which to survive in the city streets of the United States. Users are encouraged to post words and phrases or expressions they know, updating them when anything is changed or added, any linguistic novelties adopted in real time. Indispensable to know that 'bing' means jail, 'bada' is an insult, and LOL, ROTFL ... etc. The Onion (theonion.com) is a web diary. It informs punctually about the parallel world, the absurd one. It was born in Wisconsin in 1988 and there are several editions in the US and in the web. It's a dominion of humour, with videos, recordings of radios, news reported with comic touches in the style of the Marx: 'American bulls dream of escaping to Spain to run in the San Fermin' and "A new mechanical heart let's Dick Cheney experiment with love' or 'A black man got the worse job in America' referring to the victory of Obama. Do we really need all those sites? Tags:ubandictionary

Current Mood: Annoyed