Wild Sovereign Development Site

Category: street life

  • like umbrellas

    Today was a torrent of windiness scouring Brisbane, everybody turning inside out like umbrella-bats. Wind Creates Friction, my hippie ex-boyfriend always used to advise: today is not the day to try transacting any very delicate business.

    However it is the last of June and I had to rush down to the Department of Transport to register my car. My German companion was amazed at the Aussie informality. So many fields to fill out in the forms, but the blonde girl wrapped up in her scarlet scarf helped me through: How much weight can your ute carry, do you think? I lifted my hands. Uhm, uh. Well, she said, you’ll have to take a guess or else I have to make you go get it certified. Shall we say… maybe a tonne?

    Oh, I said, maybe. I mean… it’s not all that big, maybe you wouldn’t get much more than a tonne’s worth of weight in there, unless it was lead.

    One tonne, she typed aloud, to show me. “Oh! Good, we got away with that. Now, two seater? Or five.”

    At the sliding doors – rattling in the high wind – I stopped to touch the screen and let them know their service was great, the girl in Booth One particularly helpful and kind. A gruff voice spoke at my elbow. It belonged to a little boy who had slid in beside me to watch. “I’m not goin’ out there,” he said. “Yeah!” I said, “it’s windy, isn’t it?” He said, pointing to his feet, “I had to put on me shoes and socks.” I said, “Well, you’d need extra-heavy shoes today, maybe with lead in the soles. Or you’d be in danger of just lifting off!”

    He looked me over carefully. Clearly this was silly. But why? “I might just blow away!” he offered, tentatively. “I know,” I said, “and you’d have to be careful not to raise your arms out, like this…. otherwise they might act like wings and you’d be up, up, and away.”

    A moment later he burst out of the juddering doors as we were crossing the pebblecrete quadrangle. “Like this!” he shouted, gleefully, raising up his arms like wings. “Yes!” I said. “And come up on the tips of your toes and feel the wind take you!” We wobbled gleefully at each other for a minute then I left him balancing there, amateur bird, laughing in the wind. We took refuge with our new Queensland number plates in an underground coffee shop with sweet, chirping songs playing softly and the hum of a rather old fridge. “How’s your day been?” asked the barista and I said, cheerfully, “Windy!” He said, “Oh, I know. It’s worst up at the cross-street there, a kind of a wind canyon, and I have to go against it to get here, turn up with tears in my eyes.” “That’s so harsh!” I said, exulting. You see I have a point to prove about winter in the tropics. It’s not cold, but it is rather cold. And cooler inside the house than out. It is hard for a person raised in the northern hemisphere to even imagine how this could be so. At home it is colder and you can die of it. But the sun won’t kill you. And the bureaucracy in the government departments relies on the administration of a thousand ill-paid hands. I remember the waitress aghast in a bar where I simply left my late, lukewarm, unappetising coffee and walked out. She followed me into the street and came up to me where I was unlocking my bike. She said, “We simply don’t do that!” Das machen wir einfach nicht!

  • Wednesday afternoon in the Valley

    Two girls in high heels and tiny skirts chatting outside Eye Candy peep show. A dishevelled guy lying supine in the bus stop bench with his arm slung negligently over the side, as comfortable as if he were in his bath. Guy with a ginger beard that starts outside his face, threading it thoughtfully between his fingers in two skeins while his earnest friend tells him something seriously, endlessly.

    Driver of a dull gold off-roader, stopped across a pedestrian crossing and mouthing “Ah, come ON!” to people who cross, with the lights, in front of him. The sharp calls of tropical birds, the sun pouring over everything. The old fig tree whose high-walled, circuitous roots resemble the coils of some fire-breathing cave creature. Little boy with his father’s smartphone taking a photo of the orange Lamborghini in the display room window. The old man who closes his door on a dim apartment where the fridge is right in the front entrance. Girl in racing togs, wrapped in a damp maroon towel, who is walking home from the Valley Pool, her feet bare and her hair wet, the muscles of her back gleaming.

  • flowers upturned

    Tonight I passed a very low hedge, glossy and cropped to ankle height. Into the shining thicket of its waxy green leaves someone had dropped two white flowers, different flowers, lying face upwards as though growing there… because we are all in the glittering gutter, but some of us gazing at the stars. Earlier in the week I found and have kept the tail of a bright pink balloon, just the knotted end which captures the breath, starfish-seamed and reminding me irresistibly of a belly button. As I walked along thinking of the flowers and remembering the belly button remnant of balloon I saw three people stop at a traffic light. Two large guys wearing black and between them, toes turned out and wearing a gathered skirt, a small woman carrying two hula hoops over her shoulder at rest. She was like a soldier comfortable with her bayonet.

     

     

  • til the day I die

    This morning carrying coffee I walked past the hostel where an old Aboriginal man, gold-chocolate skinned and with a round white beard, sometimes sits in a folding chair under the trees waking up slowly. He and I like each other and we often say g’day. “Might get some rain,” he said, and I said, “Feels like it, doesn’t it?” Above our heads the murky trees were cacophonous with bird squabble. These are the rainbow lorikeets who yesterday dumped a couple twigs on my head when I passed them by underneath. “Those birds’ve got something to say about it, too,” I said. Later in the day I was crying in the car, having had some unexpected news. It’s ok. The radio was spurling some country song I had never heard before, the lyrics masculine and earnest. That’s because I listen to Murri Country, 4AAA. Every time they replay their station tag, “Murri Country,” meaning, Aboriginal, Indigenous Country, I think: yeah, a good thing, too. I think of it like a drip drip on the stone that slowly might wear a hole. So the blood can come out, the more justice and kindness. The singer said something that made me laugh, a kind of watery giggle. “I’m not going to stop loving you,” he sang, “until the day I die.” Immediately I saw him in his death bed, primly folded in the neatly pressed hospital sheets, flapping his hand to get rid of the wife who has not realised this means, “but, girl – on that day you are on your own.” “You,” he says calmly, “get lost.” She says, “But we had a contract! You promised! You were gunna love me until the day…” He says, his voice gravelier now but the same voice still, “Yeah, love – actually you misread that.”

  • the underground birdcage

    Brisbane’s underground opened up unexpectedly and swallowed us whole. Like two fishes we went down, happy to be coveted. Brisbane sprawls on the surface of several hills, sunny and pleased with itself, the city centre sprouting like rockets deteriorates into sleeping suburbs at its very walls, a castle hemmed in by shanties: who knew there was anything underground, mysterious, culturally exploratory at all?

    It’s above ground, it turns out, like a 70s pool. Perched above a suburban railway station in a decayed birdcage shelter like a lean-to, stripped inside, its tin roof bared and its internal walls mostly gone. This might have once have been the house of the shopkeeper who founded the burger bar downstairs, barred and bolted at street level: as we ducked under the sagging verandah to come up we read: Award-Winning Coffee! PLUS: Bacon & Egg Rolls.

    The milk bar was closed, it being late on Good Friday, everything was closed in fact, everyone gone. Miles of car dealerships gleamed up and down the highway. The railway station was empty and cool-lit. Huge billboards loomed. We went up a rickety flight of stairs and into the unlit living room of a couple who host these gigs intermittently, whose devotion to experimental music lies thick like dust over every surface in sight. They had stacks of tapes on a milk-crate table, I’d not heard of even one of the bands. We sat down on a velvety car seat and a milk crate filled with comics. Outside, the verandah was hedged with netting and the lights from the dealership opposite swam. People smoked various plants. Eventually two bands played. One was the Loop Orchestra, which morphed out of Severed Heads, and whose members have been assiduously pursuing the random mismatching of tape loops since 1979. They took a long time to set up. Their equipment was heavy. Their sound was intoxicating and strange. Compelling re-occuring beats splurted from old splices in the tape. One man wore dozens of loops round his wrist like loose dark bracelets, slipping them off when he wanted to change and refit. A young audience member scrolled his phone throughout the set. Another, in his fifties, sat on the floor like a child being told the best stories and when his attention wandered he picked up an old flyer off the floor and held it up close to his eyes to read.

    A girl with plaits attached to her hat turned her head next to me and gazed glassily past. Her smile was vague and convulsive. The man in the Bauhaus t-shirt who kept bending over some detailed arrangement behind the stacks of jars in the cluttered kitchen corner turned out to be the drummer for the second band. He told me their name but I forgot it. It was clever. His drums were built out of scrap. I was perfectly comfortable in my warm car seat, I took many dark photos, my mind just sank away. Everything was dark and people’s shadows cut the reading light delineating the stage. With care it was possible to pick a way along the verandah which felt like at every moment it would dissolve into the highway and disappear in a smear of rapidly swept past headlight. The light from the head, and the light from the heart. The moon climbed impaired and creamy through the dark netting and lighted the shining untouched vehicles displayed forever, from last century, from a comatose time when people thought it was ok to mine whole mountains hollow and smelt their insides into trash. So many different kinds of sleep. Our audience stirred when one set closed and another opened and applause was low to the ground, enthusiastic. Up the back it was possible to buy t-shirts, so I did: five dollars, screen-printed, awkward cut-out letters claiming boldly and purply Real Bad Music. A rack of tapes and records and cds ranged from five dollars to twenty; four twenty-dollar notes unfurled in the tall jar into which I dropped my coins. People came up the back stairs at intervals and slipped in between the shadows watching and swaying. House plants trailed from tins hung from the tongue and groove walls and from the tiny thicket outside, garden plants reached in. The imperfect floor had a board missing here and there and had been repaired with layers of steel shop signs and advertising placards. My favourite said, in white on grey, “…your business the exposure it deserves.”

     

  • underStorey

    Kookaburra under the eaves of the giant Storey Bridge, last night as it grew dusk and we were all gathering to watch Utopia. Laughing and laughing and laughing. The laughter echoed and magnified around the joists and girders and cars passed overhead, one at a time, each one thumping quietly the joints that let that bridge breathe and expand. Maybe bridges don’t breathe. Maybe birds don’t laugh. But I stand here with my human head thrown back and this is about all I see.

  • brisbylvania

    brisbylvania

    Brisbane screams and Berlin roars. Can that be what it is. I ask what do you notice and he says, It’s noisy. Brisbane is noisy and Berlin is loud. My anxiety for formulations. Can there be two towns more unlike. We can hear the freight trains on the opposite hill, buildings are no barrier. Everything is liquid, the hills, my heart, the air, my fears. So many new buildings on the way home from the airport. The tender awfulness of long haul travel, the heart that stays a leg behind. The Inuit woman who said to my writer friend at a first nations’ conference in Canada, Stand on the tarmac and holler out your name so that your soul can find you. The sense that my soul cannot find me. The walk in the dark at eight a.m., which is midnight, down along the river between high screaming trees. The frantic squealing purr of fruit bats. They are huge. The slinky broad river in no hurry to get anywhere. The long roads of hideous Eighties buildings, the tradition of tearing things down. And the empty lonely streets. The lava of cars. The shimmering stench of fuel. The yowling thin cat who purrs as soon as I put my hand on her but keeps her neck high and her ears laid back. The overgrown undergrowth. Of nature and of business. The ruthless wretched finds. The mud and mangrove flats, the sense of things nesting and hidden. The screaming air. The shaft of sun through 6a.m.’s window that is too strong and heats me unbearably, heats into me, the stickiness of me from sleep, I have to shelter from myself in the walls.

    The flimsiness of buildings, walls are no shelter at all.

    “What do you notice?” “It’s so alive.” Not for me. Ghosts of everything, everywhere I look. Ants on the jar of ironbark honey unopened. Everything is teeming with the sense that life is brief, unasked for, lacks deliberation, rots from birth. The blood under the river. The lingering spirits in the trees. The desire to climb and to recline, the rough bark on my dry-skinned face. The passport officer who says, “Thanks, guys.” Peaceable, welcoming, stolen, so laid back. Noisy, rampant, tangling up towards the money. Mining town, rainforest trading camp three days’ journey up the river, flimsy stadium, boat. Leaking boat. Oyster shell. Sharp, sour, over-sweet, festering growth spurt. The few people, who don’t respond when I greet them. Pedestrian place of real estate dreams. This awful, deep, disorienting fatigue. Lost world of flowers, big, as scentless as fabric. Put up adventure and find some shade. Where is art. I mean the sap extruding from the living blood. Not what the anxious local government says is art. The money and the festivals, arranged rather than brewed. The thrumming art of things, the compost heat of ever regeneration, the shelter of the water, the tireless tides. Down among the mudflats. The 1950s. Motor city.

  • snap

    Tonight I saw a man pull over in his shiny red car – more small round bubble than lippy convertible – leave the car running in the empty lane of traffic, as Berliners sometimes do, climb out and stroll over to a tree I was approaching on my walk – a sidewalk tree outside a darkened school, turtlenecked in asphalt – pull down his tracksuit pants, piss, pull his pants up with a satisfied >snap<, climb into the vehicle and drive away.

  • on it, and in it too

    Oh, gosh. A friend of mine is visiting Berlin from Finland with her young family, they came here instead of to Budapest so that we could catch up for only the second time since we were both 11 and schoolmates in Indonesia. We saw each other on Friday and again just now, they are leaving in the morning. What’s happend is her little diaghter, about the same age we were when we were close, fell in love with me and I with her and her mother and I meanwhile have grown apart, though with plenty of mutual liking awash between us and respect, I think; the two of us, plus her fourteen year old brother, had such a good time once we broke the ice the other day, talking to each other in ridiculous accents and assigning magical powers to such landmarks as the scrappy scaffolding you have to pass under in order to reach the supermarket. I say assigning, but it feels more like you understand some genuine enchantment that is lying there, like the face of the moon in a puddle which from another angle reflects only parked bumper bars and tyres, waiting for us to know it and see it as we blindly pass. The parents went methodically through the supermarket, trying to work out which margarine was best for the breakfasts this weekend in their holiday unit. It’s easy for me to be revelrous and unresponsible, rebellious and responsive, I don’t have care of any kids. The girl took me by the hand and towed me to the softdrinks section, which til now I had never penetrated, it is right up the back of the giant side room supplying local Germans with their alcohol. Her brother had found a new variety of Coke and wanted to show it off. Ooh, we said, in our arch voices, eet ees like we are in a seeeeety of all Cokka-Collar, eet ees surrrrounding us on all sides, we cannot escape. Like me the little girl enjoys rolling her Rs.

    Today I caught up with them after their river cruise, my friend texted to say We are still climbing, can you come down, the kids want to show you their moves. I remember how passionately I fastened on any Lady produced by my mum’s social life who had qualities I could identify as those I wanted to embody when I was grown. How I longed to tuck my hair behind my ears with bobby pins, like our first-grade teacher. I went down to the climbing centre built round an old watch tower in the grubby club park. My friend’s daughter came and grabbed me. She was leaner and faster than her brother, both climbing astonishingly like insects climbing water, up and over the sloping walls which lean over forbiddingly, studded with holds. It was fantastic to watch. When her mother said it was time to go she put her regular shoes on and took me round to show all the climbs she had executed earlier, each one a higher grade colour of difficulty than the last. “I did those ones, too,” said her brother, “…. but not that other one.” I ruffled her silky hair. She has slanting Finnish eyes, a witching snow princess. “You’re like Tank Girl,” I said, passing on a compliment somebody paid me when I peeled off all the sweating layers of wool at the end of a not so long forest hike yesterday. “No,” she said, her eyes bold and secretive, her bow-legged aristocratic accent reappearing, “Iiiiii… am: a Niiiinja.”

    You are, I said. I see you are. We all walked up the street together, past the two tall punks begging for their Saturday night beer money at the video store, past the guy who sits cross-legged by the bus stop and does not beg at all. The little ninja spurled her spiels about each local artefact that caught her eye: mostly, people, and their behaviour, alongside reminders of the games we had invented walking two days ago and that had sunk into her imagination. The green signal man in the traffic light who is so busy, so so so busy, who appears to only have one arm and whom we had mimicked, hurrying so-busily over the crossing with our bodies bent forward. The red signal man with his arms spread wide who appears to be blessing the waters. They decided they would eat at a restaurant my friend had noticed. When it became clear I was not planning to join them, my little friend drooped, everything about her sagged. I felt tearful. “Why you not longer?” she said, with her hand on my arm. My eyes met her mother’s. The invitation had been there but wan. Or possibly I was just feeling over-sensitive: very often that’s the explanation. “Because,” I said, “I feel like… this is family time, it seems like you guys have had a big day, a big weekend, and everybody’s tired, maybe people are getting grumpy. Her mother, my friend, did not demur. “I’m not tired!” she said, “I’m not grumpy!” “Oh…” I cast about me, I don’t know why I had to escape. We had our arms around each other by this time and I was crouched so as to enfold her as completely as possible, my little familiar, little kindred spirit, I didn’t want to leave. I told her I would write to her and asked her to write back. Then I came home and phoned a friend and cried about it for a time. “You know how…. some children…. are just so…. special,” thinking how when I was a girl I would have given anything to get to know just one adult who seemed to still have humour without teasing and intrusion, who was like me, who liked me, who had the keys I had myself, given by god or whatever inanimate coincidences take the place of god, the power of noticing and knowing that you cannot know, the feeling that the trees also know you as you know them when you step amongst them on a night when the road seems to lead off right into the sky, the curious power of finding out coded language in the stones and in the curve of the street, I don’t know how to say it and have probably never described this before but I will go to my grave knowing this is what we are for, this is who we truly are, this is what we’re waiting for, the world of moon that is waiting for us despite flags and currency, despite gossip and news, despite additives, work choices, busyness, boredom, underneath and in spite of and above everything, and in it too.

  • reeky dog

    Such a pretty day. When I came out of the Underground station the sky had filled with these tiny white, flat-bottomed clouds, as though they were puffs of steam that had popped up from the chimney of some hidden machinery. It was a pleasure to reach the outdoors. Jumping onto the train I caught the eye of a raddled punk, crouched over his big brown dog. He was petting and soothing the animal, lovingly. I smiled and he smiled. The doors slid shut. But what was that… awful smell? Oh, god, it’s the hound. A guy in workout gear looked over and made an expression of disgust. I looked about me. People were wrinkling their noses. The smell filled the cabin and was unendurable.

    I got up and slid down the far end of the train carriage. Within seconds that end of the carriage was full, as though the track had tilted: the punk and his dog sat up on a vinyl bench by themselves, unsurrounded on all sides. The dog was emitting these edgy, whining noises. Everyone looked strenuously away, in a body, as though they could dissolve him by pretending he wasn’t there.

    The punk guy shrugged at me, the only person making eye contact. “Der reitet nicht gerne,” he said. He doesn’t like to ride. I said, “Tcha…” I was revolving in my mind the most inoffensive way to mention it to him, trying to translate: dude, your dog really reeks.

    The smell was unbearable, a creature rotting alive, I was breathing in little shallow gasps. We pulled in at the next station and the carriage emptied within seconds. Seven people ran pelting down the platform and leaped into the carriage behind. There they stood doused with disapproval, that righteous German indignation people can excite by basic inconformity. Even in a punk city, even in Berlin. I followed, laughing helplessly. Och, the poor old punk with his mangy, stinking, poor terrified animal. The long-term neglect, the isolation. You know that kind of released and loose laughter that feels like crying, feels almost like sex. It was kind of sad but wonderful and could only happen here. All the way home I was remembering him and the confederacy of perfumed people locking him out of their secret, hidden glances. I remembered and kept glancing out the window and smiling to myself. The poor smelly dog and his misery, the poor old drug-fucked oblivious punk who maybe thinks people reject him because he’s rejected society, thirty years ago, with his haircut and his piercings. Making up his stories to himself of why people can’t bear him and will not come near. An almost unbearable ecstasy of shame pierced me, that I had not spoken, that my German is laborious when it counts, that I couldn’t find the words. Berlin, decorous and louche at once. You big old mess of freaks.