Tattoos, Ponds and People

This weekend, Cape Town hosted the Southern Ink Exposure Tattoo Convention. It was held at the CTICC, this is where I have spent most of my weekend… and money. Now the CTICC is exactly what the ICC is in Durban, but they couldn’t come up with a better name so they though if they added CT, they’d be one up on Durbs, in reality, they have made their name very hard for dyslexic people to say out loud. In fact it sounds like a close relative of C3PO and R2D2. Despite the name, the venue was quite lovely, there was lots of space, plenty of bad service at the over priced restaurant to ensure South Africa lives up to its name and lots of fossils in glass windows. There was also a pond. Quite a large pond. In fact if you had to Google CTICC, you would see that the pictures all boast this rather large reflective mass of water. But it’s not as grand as it seems in the photos, the pond is in fact a large enclosure for trillions of species of deadly bacteria, it is a stagnant pool of what looks like snot and hair and that slimy creature from the ghost busters. It is a massive mixing bowl of cholera, bilharzias, dysentery and leeches. But that is not what has made this frothy gunk so infamous to the many colourful people who visit the CTICC… it is the smell. Oh and it is tremendous! A smell so foul only the greatest writers could describe it. It smells worse than how it looks and the smell is like a fog which sits over the muck and hovers, a slight breeze carries it to the nearest nostril. It’s a heavy smell, thick, a blind person might imagine breathing in a brown stirring liquid when confronted by it. The odor leaves an aftertaste in the back of ones throat which I imagine is what gangrene tastes like… the pond is like a disturbing Dadaism work of theatre, it attacks your senses on so many levels. Your eyes are captivated by swimming worms and what nuclear waste should look like and your mouth fills with gastric fluid as soon as you get a whiff of it…. It also has a ladder incase anyone should feel the urge to climb in for a dip.

In spite of the all too sudden shock to the body as you absorb toxic waste in the parking lot, the convention on the whole was brilliant! Hundreds of people paying artists to use them as a canvas for flowers, swallows, demons, portraits, bleeding hearts and teacups. Everywhere you look, people lifting shirts and rolling up pants to be admired by other walking pieces of art. Books on everything from Russian prison tattoos to biographies of famous dead people and cute little coffee table books all over priced but wonderfully pretentious! Five hours feels like ten minutes and boredom never sets in, who knew that watching people cringing and in agony could be so entertaining… truly suffering for art! The people are wonderful and friendly and original. And if you took their art away, they’d be so ordinary, if not unattractive. Anywhere else these people would be criticized but here the admiration is not lacking in any degree and it’s like being at an exhibition only you can talk to the art and follow it around and see what it becomes next. And which part of the body will become the next spot for expression. (Imagine trusting someone so completely with something so personal and so permanent? It blows my mind, I feel so in touch with social behavior right now!)

Last night I spend many hours being repeatedly beating at pool and in between that I watched a movie being filmed in the street into the early hours of the morning and shiny confetti was floating everywhere and toothless prostitutes on drugs were singing below the balcony where I sat and street children, unusually small from malnutrition were growing old all too quickly.

Cape Town is a strange place.

I saw a street child peeing on an electrical box.

One girl had a teapot tattooed to the back of her neck. I loved it.

Another had a telephone on her arm.

A lady requested a large unicorn be placed on her back.

A man played the harmonica and played Johnny Cash covers.

I read a very simple little booklet, no more than ten pages long, which I thought was for children, about a chicken and an egg which had profound social significance and blew my mind.

There is an animal, kind of like a seal, I am desperate to find out what it’s called. It has what seems like tentacles, or flinger things on its snout. Perhaps I imagined it?

I have become the Xenia of cockroach killers!

I miss Jimmy

I miss Mom and Dad

And the boys

And my animals

I wish I had work