Wild Sovereign Development Site

Category: street life

  • Jazzpenhagen

    I’ve cycled past this jazz club in town maybe half a dozen times & never had the nerve to go in. Today in the afternoon sunlight both the doors were standing open and, oddly, two tables with bottles of soft drink stood at the entrance guarded by ribbed plastic cups. A handsome-looking man was pouring. I got off my bike. “Is this – open? I mean,” looking at the people in coats milling around inside, “are you… rehearsing?”

    He flashed me with his blinding Amway grin. “It’s a church. You’re very welcome.” I stepped back. Looked up at the sign. “It’s not a… jazz club?” “It is a jazz club, just not today. But we have lots of music!!”

    Who could rest their faith in a church that’s willing to use disposable cups? Looking back, I could have given him many better responses, the least of which might have been, “My only religion is jazz” (a lie). Instead I had that protective feeling one has around people who seem to look out wistfully from inside their own club and wonder why more don’t join. “Jazz,” I said, “godliness…. they’re related.” And we waved each other off, a pair of heathens, neither one willing to convert.

  • cradle of many things

    cradle of many things

    Cycling home under a high full moon through a dark city so cold it’s as though the streets stand motionless under water. Northern Europe, cradle of so many things, including me. The buildings stand serene on street corners, unafraid of waiting. Traffic sporadic, roads wide and smooth, trees utterly leafless with branches standing separate and bare against the sky but, if I were to reach up and drag one down, already the infestation of buds and bugs that’s Spring.

    H2O HoL leafy smear windscreens

  • with my bare hand

    with my bare hand

    Interesting coincidence between the accidents of physics and the compulsions of human nature: so often when a glove falls, in the street, like a leaf it will lie palm-side-up, as though its fortune is about to be told. That way when you walk past these lost lonely single gloves they are usually in postures of imploring, or appeal. It occurred to me retrieving my own glove outside my door that a nice filmclip could be made by stooping and dropping a coin or small offering – even a leaf, perhaps, as Balinese do – in the palm of each glove, randomly about the city.

    H2O HoL streetlit tramstop

  • only Kneipes

    Went out to a bar with a new friend who is musical, Tuesday nights is quiet night in Berlin so we walked and walked, trampling snow that had reached that pearly soiled colour that is not grey nor is it brown… so beautiful, it’s my new favourite colour, most of the restaurants were closed and only Kneipes and bars left trading and we walked into bar after bar to be beaten back by the solid wall of smoke. The one we loved I had been past many times, a sign in the window says Street Musicians Welcome and after we had fetched our beers to the bar’s corner couch and made friends with the shy, elderly bar dog who curled up under my friend’s musical hand two fellows walked in, festooned with instruments though – when I focused again – they were carrying only one party apiece. Dude with a beaten-up double bass, dude with a steel-strung guitar. They had a beer then they sat at the corner of the bar on stools and set up this most wonderful racquet, a quiet riot of music like water that runs underground. The bass player was fearless and gentle and had this fuck-it air, I don’t mean he don’t care, I mean he would do whatever it takes to get the sound. Would slap, would percuss, would pluctern, would bowie. The guitar player almost honed himself to one note. We were entranced. The dog fell asleep. The girl who had served the beers came to perch on the end of the couch and lit a cigarette and curled her legs. Walking home the streets were the streets of the quietest sleeping city in all the world.

    When they finally brought their first song to a close, it was wordless and almost twenty minutes long, compelling, the guy playing bass held his hand out and announced clearly, “My friend So-and-So is playing guitar with me this evening.” The guitar player shook dreadlocks off his face and held his hand open, like a limp version of one of those guns that says, >bang<. “My friend Charles is playing bass this evening.” But before that the two of them clasped their curled fingers together for a tight moment and then each picked up his beer and they clinked.

     

  • everything soft, and white, and powdery

    everything soft, and white, and powdery

    Tramping through the fresh snow, everything soft and white and powdery. Like daylight the snow lies unequivocally on everything. Six bursting, screeching, whumphing shapes pass overhead like white explosions and resolve themselves, by a process of frantic backpedalling, into swans. As they land on the water they one by one become graceful and fleet. I smile at the tall man opposite, who stops. “I know you! I know your face.” “Well, I don’t think so, I’m Australian, I’ve only been here a few months.” “But I know your face! Pretty face, you’ve got. Can I take it?” He holds up a camera with a large, open lens. “What for?” I say. “Nicht zum verkaufen,” he assures me (not for selling), “just because I’d like to.” He shows me the picture, my kilos of red scarf and ridiculous beanie. Around us the world is white and a golden dog plunges through the fresh snowdrifts, spluttering. The swans have forgotten their panic and sail like perfection under the very old, arched green stone bridge.

    H2O HoL everything white and fresh

  • hot pink banners

    hot pink banners

    Tomorrow I take the train back to Berlin, traversing again this ancestral landscape. What a beautiful week it’s been, I’m so thankful. A girl in a sunstruck cafe told me that Denmark is the happiest nation on earth. “Our third year running!” Every time I remember our conversation I mishear it as “friendliest” and have to correct myself. We got to talking because as I was falling into drowses in the afternoon sun through the window a buoyant demonstration flowed past, stopping and starting in laughing clots. It resembled a dance party or flash mob. Lots of young people dressed in black & carrying hot pink banners. What were they so, uh, angry about? She looked wry. She almost sneered. “Well, they are students – like me – only I live in an apartment and pay my own rent – these guys live with their parents and the money is so good, unbelievably good – the government’s cutting it back – we are so lucky – the world is in recession.” I studied her, she was very beautiful. What are you studying? “Law,” she said. I thought of all the Aboriginal students in outback Queensland who would love to go to university or even high school. The little girls in Afghanistan who are barred from owning books. Malala. Those of us who have this spilling, squandering, golden good fortune ~ let’s be kind with it. It may not last and it’s really not rightfully ours. Let’s keep handing it on, like coin. Hand to hand.

    H2O HoL archway to the castle

  • through snow

    through snow

    a bell dings behind me, I step aside and watch the beautiful line of a bicycle’s tyres, drawing like dark pencil on white paper through the snow

    H2O HoL bicycle thru white snow

     

  • manhood: let’s rejoice

    manhood: let’s rejoice

    Six beautiful teenage men were doing parkour across the roof of the sunken restrooms by the harbour. Ropes gently knocking against masts, land-passengers drowsing at cafe tables in the sun, and this buoyant half-dozen pruning their dedication, lightness, skill. It was wonderful to watch. They do it in total silence, wearing soft shoes and baggy trackpants. You see a guy size something up. He makes an internal decision: ok I’m going to take a run up from back here, leapfrog that bollard, then run up that wall and stand upright without using my hands. He goes and does it, successfully. Or, he falls back into a relinquishing roll and laughs softly to himself. God, they were beautiful to watch. I loved how they tried again and again; how they lept across danger and scaled things without a word; how they never paused to congratulate themselves nor erupt in applause, nothing aggrandizing, nothing loud, it was for the skill and the joy of it and utterly silent apart from the brown-haired boy who always said to himself, in English, as he made the last effort: “God, someone’s after me, Oh no! someone’s after me.” Manhood is not extinct, let’s rejoice. Manhood is instinct.

    h20 HoL manhood, let's rejoice

  • the man with bare fingers

    The man with bare fingers playing guitar at the riverside markets, in the snow. He is playing a languid, spooling version of “I’ve Done All the Dumb Things” by Paul Kelly. In his hands it sounds musing rather than regretful. The two Australians drifting in front of me hatless, talking about parties. The boy who writes in the same cafe as me and who gives a shy smile as he passes on the street. The candlelit cafe playing Echo and the Bunnymen: “The Killing Moon.” The shivering persons who have to go outside for cigarettes. The lovely guitarfurl at the end of the song. The manuscript with biro marks all over it.

  • cafe dating

    First date in a cafe. “They always play such excellent jazz here,” he is saying. “Try the cakes, they’re always good.”

    “Right,” the girl says lightly. He has over-ordered, wanting to induct her into his routines. “I think heaven must be an eternal breakfast,” he says. The girl is drinking coffee as though it were ice cream, with a spoon. Elbow on the table she slumps onto her hand. “May I?” She tears the best bit off his croissant, the fresh, unbroken, creamy end of the horn. I watch him watching it all the way into her mouth, his resentment almost audible.

    Now the waitress brings his fruit salad, poignant with yoghurt. The yoghurt shimmers fat and glossy and unbroken. “Go ahead,” he says, “try.” She shakes her head. The third dish arrives, two soft-boiled eggs in a glass, with pretty salad arranged all around it in a tide. “I’ll just try a bit of your egg,” says the girl to her date, having presumably told him she is not hungry, that she never eats breakfast. “Or maybe I can just take half, some salad, a little of your bread?” She draws the saucer from underneath her coffee cup and holds it out.

    “I usually don’t ruin it,” he says. “They always arrange it so nicely here. But – yes! Please! Of course you can! Please: help yourself.” They are neither of them native speakers but both speak in English. I think she is Spanish and I think he is German. His voice is soft and seducing but I think the relationship is off to a stony start. Now they are talking about her work. “It’s an animal. No, it’s a fung, a fungus, right?” “Ja,” she says, “a fungus.” “Have you ever given a name to a bacteria?” he asks her. “There must be some good bacteria out there.” Maybe tonight this girl will call one of her closest friends. “There must be some good men out there,” they will say. Maybe the man will ask himself how come a woman can be so resistant to being induced into the world he has already arranged so perfectly for her. It just has this one hole to be filled, a her-shaped vacancy. Why won’t she fill it? Don’t women want love?