Gerald sent a pre-dawn Flinders Street pic, autumnal cityscape of leaves, dotted colour, bright lights & geometric forms. Generic postcard product that had momentarily captured the man. Oddly, it brought back the old street-performer on the last night on Malioboro. No license was required there, of course, for such as himself. One laughed at the Sing comparison, but Melbourne’s vetting & licensing regime of the street artists was not much different. Coming back from the ITO supper on the other side of the street, the young sandwich-board no smoking guys were encountered. We laughed at the irony up & down the length of the thoroughfare. The old ancient, a serious bantam, fully fledged fly- or flea-weight, who would have fitted into your overcoat pocket, had not slipped from the previous visit 18 months back. On that occasion the show had been thereabouts too, a quiet, pure performance, without any drawing of attention to itself. Only the sudden spell of the routine, if in passing one happened to look in that direction. It was fundamentally a corso evenings on Malio, lazy shoppers, internal tourists, boys with their gals; trinkets, novelties & sweets. The old guy presented modest artistry that he had perfected over the years. There was no container for offerings, just as there was little direct beggary in Indo generally. A casual observer might have thought the man was merely entertaining himself, though of course he was too old for anything of the sort. The drab, worn apparel was the same as a good proportion on the street. (The shoppers were another class, though very much kampung folk themselves.) Eighteen months ago the man had sat the other side of the path, nearer the road, where his little show had involved a coin. Indo coins were almost weightless, thin and quickly scuffed; one knew the denominations by size. Yet this old man, in his late 70s and possibly pitched beyond, had the Rp500 anchored upright on its rim. With a careful flick of his finger it was sent spinning one & one half / two feet and sometimes more across the pavement tiles. Possibly the man had cleaned the surface, or carefully chosen his place. (The whole of Malio & Mangkubumi on the other side of the line was neatly paved now, with lottsa plantings.) Magic. Beautiful. Even a worn, alloy piece incapable of glinting struck an observer turning on itself like that and capering along the street. A few days ago again, mid-eve on Malio, the same man, this time by one of the columns that divided the veranda from the open passage. There was no coin now; possibly none was in the pocket. Instead, here the chap was found among the throng, amidst the dense crowd opposite the large masjid, amidst all the passing feet, standing on his head. Immediately recognised. No mistake. Even down at ground level like that. The little cap had cushioned his scone; with only that aid he could manage to keep himself upright 30 - 40 clear seconds. Free-standing; perfectly vertical. Only here the classical pose failed as the man needed to bend his knees, which had his feet awkwardly splayed outward. Short feet, not so ungainly. Perhaps he was still perfecting his routine, tired or outta practise. Between times he retreated to rest his back against the pillar. The hard, unyielding surfaced had pained. The cap needed to be removed and a few rub, rub, rubs of his thatch made it better; blinking a little. It must have put strain on the neck too. Shortly, one of the pijut further along would restore him, gratis. Those guys & gals could score decent rupiah for a proper kneading. A child-sized artist; an example of the large number of stunted in Indo. Loner too by the looks, like many artists. Modest, persistent, uncomplaining; managing in his own way. This man’s absence, the lack of his kind in the award-winning most liveable city of the world did make it a poorer place, to say nothing of the Sing scene along its premier shopping strip. (The juggler was absent on the last visit to Orchard, when Donald Barthelme’s Sixty Stories was picked up at Kinokuniya ✅✅✅. The vetted buskers were found in place, different now, but same, same. For some reason the guitar-strumming gospel guy on the corner was absent.)
Yogyakarta, Indonesia
No comments:
Post a Comment