Day 62: Street artists

The only street artists I've seen here are the ones, who perform ON the street. In the very middle of it. The traffic light hits red, the cars stop and the show begins.

Of course, most commonly "the show" includes street vendors trying to sell bananas, drinks, candy or cigarettes. As well as window cleaners, who don't understand the word NO in any language, spoken or body. Waving hands, shouting NO or turning on the wipers won't help. And the driver always has to spare a dime or two to the very helpful, yet unwelcome, cleaning boys. It's better to pay a few pesos than to have your car scratched...

But this was supposed to be about ART art, not the art of marketing. It's probably not that easy and more expensive to play a guitar or a violin during the red light, so most street artists choose magic. Sort of. There's quite a lot of silver people. Literally. They are dressed only in underwear and paint themselves silver. And then they perform, of course. The most popular "magic" trick shown in the streets is a "magic ball" - the performer makes the crystal ball float "in the air" (basically, he has very fluent hand movements and the ball just goes up, down, left and right on his arms). Then there are some hula-hoopers and devil stick throwers (I'm not sure if that's the correct word for them, but you get the idea).

And today I saw a guy throwing a flaming devil stick, which was quite impressive. He didn't do cool or difficult tricks. But the sun goes down at 6pm, just before a rush our traffic (most profitable hour), so the guy's choice to use fire is creditable. I wasn't feeling very secure crossing the street when a flaming thing was flying around a lot of not-so-new cars. Hopefully, I didn't see any gas stains on the road and the guy handled his devil stick well. So after I finished crossing the street (was out of the danger zone) I actually enjoyed the show for a minute. Just a minute, because then the traffic light turned green and the guy had to get out of the cars' way.