Lipstick on the Pig: Street art in Jozi

Lipstick on a pig
and a jury that's rigged
a crisis you say? what crisis?

(covering the bleak walls of decaying buildings)
stirring words & slogans!
inspiring images of transformation and change!

(as the images decay and slip away
revealing unchanged beneath
cement and brick and fading mortar)

disguise
from our eyes
a State that's captured,
while taxes enrich the entitled

---

Imraan Christiaan does a lot of great work using his camera as a vehicle to further social change. So it makes a lot of sense to extend the reach of that work out into the wider community.

Putting them up, and then letting them wither and decay is, well ~ ironic at the very least. Grand ideas need grand actions, Grand actions need grand funding. If the best we can do is to send soundbites out to our community, and then let it all wither away, what does it say about our grand ideas?

Some say, put up or shut up.
I say, put up and keep up.
And then I say, put and build up.
It's in the doing that we build our nation, not in the speaking.
The doing and the spending.
We know the real intent of a Nation when we see how fairly it budgets it's income, and where it then spends the money.

Image (c) Author: Street art in Jozi, October 11, 2018

A Day in the Life: Window Boxes in the City

Its a long steady walk up Ferreira street from 45 Commissioner.

Its a walk I do often enough, several times a week, and its always a there and back between 45C and the Simmonds street Superblock complex. To the left and right are the magnificent Anglo American buildings ~ some built in the earlier part of the 20th century during the Oppenheimer hey days: low and powerful and redolent of the Mining Magnates who once held sway in downtown Joburg; and one at least, to the left, the stunning Anglo Head Office structure built in the late 80's shows the shift to corporate respectability.

Normally there's not much time for reflection, you head on as quickly as you can because at the nether end of each trip is a meeting room and a waiting group of people. I could take the shuttle bus: but unless I have a laptop under the arm I prefer the walk.

Yesterday I nearly stumbled into the granite "decoration" around the pavement trees, and that started a train of thought. I was headed North down towards 45C, and today, as I made my way back up South, I was wondering about those window boxes.

Well, there you see how blind you can be to small touches of beauty along the way!

Now, my mother loved Geraniums and Pelargoniums.

There wasn't a holiday or a trip where she didn't embarrass the family by taking cuttings, and she would snip them carefully (as all good gardeners do) and bring them back into one of the many pots and corners of her garden and verandas. Even at their scraggliest, the flowers are rich in colour: making up for their lack of perfume, I suppose. And if you watered them often enough, then the greens of the branches are a pleasure in themselves.

So there I am striding South, and blow me if I don't have a mommy moment ...

Up against the walls of the Ashanti building, doing their best to cover the steel mesh burglar protection, are 6 window boxes planted with my mom's favourites. And there they have been, if the bird's droppings are any indicator, for any length of time.

And all that has kept me from seeing them in these many months (years?) of walking backwards and forwards has been the meeting rooms at the ends of a long stride up and down Ferreira street.

And we have, I suppose, the answer to the window Box question: accross Anderson Street and not 40 meters from the Rocks in the City the answer is ~ Yes, Joburg is getting soft in some of it's corners.

And all the better for it, I should say.

All images copyright (c) the author

A Day in the Life: Rocks in the City

Look at them ... just a pile of rocks around a nice shady tree.
You'd know all about it if you stubbed your toes on them, let me tell you!
Which I nearly did ...
And which made me think ...

What does a pile of Rocks tell you?
Especially a pile of rocks in the city centre?
All neatly arranged around a tree trunk, and every tree on the pavement with its own community of pet rocks?

Rocks

Well now, these are granite rocks, Crushed to size after being blasted and brought up from the depths of the gold bearing reef, deep below.
mini Boulders really, as you would quickly tell if you tried to pick one of them up.
Stop you dead in your tracks if I tossed one at you!
Yet you wouldn't notice them, just to walk by, so tastefully arranged around their trees.
The Pavement runs the length of an office block, and fronts a residential hotel in the heart of the City's business district, right around the group of buildings which the Anglo American corporation owns and has its people in.
... and a short walk from the Johannesburg Magistrates courts, where unruly crowds have been known to congregate. Although, not so often any more.

So, maybe the Building owners don't want you to walk too close to the trees?
Possibly, they like the artistic effect of the stark granite against the bark?
Maybe they are aligning themselves to the mining activities which they service?
Maybe all, maybe nothing at all.
Certainly, it would have taken a pick up truck to deliver the payload. There's more than a wheelbarrows worth there, and they would've been carted quite some distance!

Rocks around trees ...

So what should we read into that pile of Rocks?

Progress.
That's what I read:
I read progress.
After all, whose going to stack piles of granite-hard rock in handy sizes if they thought -
if you thought for even one moment -
that someone might pick them up and chuck them back at at you.
or your nice plate glass windows!
or cars, or ... or ...
Ah.
So is our uncivilised, dangerous, scary city centre being tamed then?

(truth to tell ... it never did feel that scary to me, but, well -

 - you know -

tourists and the media do know best ...)

They do look rather nice, though - don't they?
All we need now is a flower box or two ...

All images copyright (c) the author