Vodacan’t: The Ball-Numbing Black Hole of Vodacom Customer Service

So, I’ll be the first to admit that I sit on the bottom rung when it comes to mobile gadgetry. Shiny things entice me, but my need to reaffirm my existence and temporarily stave off those pesky thanatic impulses via the wanton purchases of things that go ‘beep’ is constantly at odds with my more basic and all-together more irritating need for constant sustenance. And since bread is so expensive these days, my desire for upper echelon mobile devices is repeatedly snubbed in favour of a yummy pint at Rafiki’s and maybe some chips.

I will freely admit that I am at the mercy of my Vodacom contract. If it ain’t free, it ain’t mine. To illustrate my point, I give you this: in the world of iPhones, BlackBerrys and Android, I am currently Tweeting my way across the Information Super highway on a Nokia Navigator.

RAM Fest[ation] 2011

I’m going to be honest; it is unlikely that this article is going to be anything more than a blurry summation of my recent experiences at that festival of festivals, that alternative jamboree, that Voltron of teenage angst and masked ball of sub-genres, the ever-popular RAM Fest.

For those of you who don’t know, Ram Fest is what happens when you take a fourteen year old boy from Durbanville, place him in a dusty Converse shoebox with a Klingon, shake it up in a dustpan just arse-wise of Worcester and then sit back and watch them write poetry together. It’s a unique experience. It’s the sort of festival where you wake up each morning feeling like you’ve been roofied by the sun and tea-bagged by a character from peanuts.

This dick.

The Long Finger of the Law

Do you know what I love the most about Cape Town (aside from the barely contained social angst lurking behind the tanned smiles, bleached teeth and carefully lined eyes)? Everything works. I’m not suggesting that the city is a super-streamlined machine, devoid of kinks, functioning at optimal... um... functionality. It’s no utopia, but it beats the hell out of hiking three kilometres up a mountain to fetch your drinking water (Grahamstown) and at least our Home Affairs has shelves (P.E.)

Granted, both my examples are set in the Eastern Cape, and one could argue that they have a valid reason behind their slip in services.

Makana Municipality recently set up a multimillion-Rand government-funded research department to investigate and analyse what is being tagged as ‘The Event’. Two city councillors were sitting by the highway, throwing rocks at cars, when one accidently dropped his speckled stone. There was a flash of light and the surrounding grass began to glow a bright orange and yellow. Almost immediately, the grass began to crackle and turn black. To their surprise, the councillors discovered the strange radiance to be incredibly hot when they burnt their hands trying to pick it up, and inedible, when they burnt their mouths.

Officials believe that this curious energy could be the key to vastly increased production and a drastic change in lifestyle for all South Africans. To this end, the majority of Eastern Cape developmental funding is being channelled into the study and attempted reproduction of this event, what has become dubbed as the “Ow-wi Orange Shoo-Shoo.”

All other provincial services have subsequently been put on hold.

The Eastern Cape Premier takes science seriously.

Other provinces, however, have little to no excuse. Xenophobia in Gauteng, the elderly in the Northern Cape and pronunciation in Kwazulu Natal; all of these are rampant problems that have yet to be correctly addressed.

Cheating the Car Guard and Losing - a hilarious spectator sport

How do I fully express, in simple words, what I witnessed at the intersection of Long and Buitensingel St. yesterday afternoon? How can I relate how this single event seems to have made all the trials I have experienced up ‘till this point seem entirely worth it? (Although, there are still a few hazy encounters on the early morning streets of Grahamstown I could probably do without. And Observatory. And Russell Road, Port Elizabeth.  But, perhaps, I digress…)

Have you ever come to the complete end of you’re tether and just decided, “Fuck it!”?

Passive Aggression and the Cape Town Douche

If Cape Town drivers were just open about their dickness, it would be better. If the bimbo were to brazenly flip you the bird while cutting you off, you could at least yell and curse AT her, rather than towards her retreating back. Instead, she pretends like she doesn't see you as she forces you off the road and through a playground of preschoolers. She is distracted. By her cell phone. Which is also illegal. But how was she to know?

"Who's gonna pay to get this powder-paint off my windshield?"

Cape Town has got to be the drama-queen capitol of SA. It also has, by far and large, the worst drivers in the Southen Hemisphere, a fact that is indubitably linked to the prior.

Sometimes, it feels like I’m living in the world’s biggest girls-only high-school. Someone always has a problem with someone else – someone has always said the wrong thing, spoken to the wrong person, worn the wrong shoes with the wrong pants or boned the wrong ex on the dance floor of Tin Roof. And the condemnations are always so vehement, so pointed and, often time, so face-slappingly biased that the implication that you even slightly empathise with the pouting whiner is enough to make you want to stomp off and whine about it to someone else, then come back and stab the offending douche in the eye with a fork, because they so vehemently and so pointedly complained so quietly.

The Inspiration

So inevitably, this change that came over me worked its way into my work.

My medium of self expression changed from sculpture to illustration and photography (you can check out some of this on my other blog, Poorboy Illustration, at poorboyillustratin.blogspot.com, or follow my link on the left).

This change was obviously greatly influenced by my change of studies to Arts Direction and Graphic Design, but the core of the shift lies slightly deeper. This graphic medium just seemed more suited to Cape Town; more in tune with the ebb and flow of popular culture that wasn’t nearly as prevalent in Grahamstown.

Also, clay costs too much.

My predominant theme in my earlier works dealt with relationships between people and the unspoken narratives that both connects and isolates us. After my move, this shifted towards a more predominant focus on our relationships with our environments. This is what eventually led me to what you are looking at now.

I tried to think of a way that I could trace my life over the last year and a bit. The simple, most obvious suggestion occurred to me in the form the photograph, but was rejected for the same reason – too simple; too obvious. Also, it suffers from the same, immediate process of dissemination that I was discussing earlier. When you look at a photograph, you aren’t really seeing what happened. You’re seeing a bubble of time, yanked out of context, always just out of your grasp and constantly slipping further and further away. Simply by looking at a photograph, you’re forced to admit that those few moments of exposure are forever lost to you and the closer you examine it, the further away it is ironically pushed.

So any sort of direct representation was out of the question.

Then I got to thinking about all that I’ve written so far and about those creases that I’ve worn into the world around me; those traces that point to my past experiences, even when I’ll never be able to truly experience them myself. Surely they’d make for a far more provoking subject matter. But where to begin? What single scenario could be used to successfully represent the last year (and a bit) of my life?

When it came to me, the answer seemed quite simple: that single act that I had been repeating almost every night since I had arrived in Cape Town – sleeping in my bed.

The Move

Just over a year ago, I left the Eastern Cape to live in Cape Town.

Now, I don’t pretend that this is a drastic or unexpected move. People leave the Eastern Cape all the time. It’s one of those things. Some hypothesize that the prospect of leaving the Eastern Cape is the only reason that anyone moves there to begin with, but I digress.

The real crux of the move was that it was the first time in twenty-three years that I had lived anywhere besides the good ol’ E.C. - either growing up with the folks in Port Elizabeth or bumming around in the student/settler town of Grahamstown; a gorgeously buzzing little town of equal parts academic intellectualism and hedonistic nihilism.

The move brought with it the inevitable changes. The small town awe was eventually swallowed up by the everyday humdrum of sitting in traffic (something Western Capers and Josie Goers would tell us stories about like scout masters telling urban legends around a campfire) overpriced drinks and rolling blackouts. The esoteric life of Fine Arts and red wine exhibition openings was replaced by the fast paced world of advertising; all early mornings, late nights and cut-throat deadlines.

And inevitably I changed.

Not in any drastic, personal way, in so far as I can tell, but the basic make up of my day was altered significantly. Something as previously foreign as waking up at seven each morning to beat traffic became routine and in that subtle but significant way I became changed. The way I viewed the day shifted – mornings were now for work and late afternoons were for driving, sweating, swearing, hooting and screaming obscenities at the BMW yuppie and his store-bought license.

For neither better nor worse, Cape Town has marked me. I walk its streets, I drive on its roads, I greet its people and I breathe its air. I wear its traces on my clothes and on my skin and in my head and the crease that I’ve worn into its fabric grows more pronounced each day.