Wild Sovereign Development Site

Blog

  • world war z

    world war z

    Just saw this terrorizing zombie flick which has Brad Pitt in it, he is rather good but every time he’s onscreen you go Oh look! It’s Brad Pitt! Such an awful experience and I feel traumatized. I feel like a zombie, if a zombie is the ultimate sociopath: no emotion, no response. Cycling home through the cool breezy night I was looking fearfully over my shoulder, left and right, cowering when a bus came past. Apart from fear I’m feeling nothing. Hackneyed exaggerations like ‘dead inside’ seem to me reasonable truisms. The friend I went with, a fan of zombie movies who found this gorefest ‘bloodless’, wants to know isn’t there any sensation of relief? What, that the movie is finally over? That of all the billions of diverse and pulsating people on this earth, one square-jawed blond actor and his immediate family, plus token brown-skinned boy, survived? This… is hope? All the nauseating violence and mean-skinned machine-gunning and desperate stratagems by ill-prepared people have worn me through. My emotions are spent. Then again it was melodramatic and ridiculous, but sore. I’ve never seen a film like this before and never want to again. It was so overwhelming that the nett result seems to me a sodden desensitization. Who made the word zombie, when was this thing dreamed up? Ugh. And only now, writing, do I realize the title of this terrible movie is literal as well as hyperbolic. How exhausting.

    A side-note: Brad Pitt is extremely good-looking. I never really noticed it before. I guess that sounds ridiculous. I mean, he’s built well, he has a sturdy face that takes expression. My companion said: wasn’t there anything that you liked? I like that it’s over. I like that the artificial bowels-of-the-pyramid architecture of major cinemas does not prevail everywhere. I liked the girl who was brave when he cut her arm off. I found it amusing, or do I mean dispiriting, that they had four accountants just for payroll; 49 stuntpersons; five times as many digital effects artists. I liked the ice cream, from an Italian stall that was locked up when we came out. I liked taking off the 3D glasses. I like the quietude.

    H2O HoL frilled lamp's skirt

  • monumentally ill

    Whenever I pass someone having their photo taken by a friend, this is me in Berlin, this is me in front of a famous monument, I feel the urge to put up my fingers in bunny ears behind the head of the one taking the photo. Generally it makes them laugh. I figure they’ll have umpteen hundred snapshots of ‘this is me in front of the museum’ and one where they’re actually laughing.

    H2O HoL strawberry graffiti

  • berserker

    berserker

    Yesterday walking down a very Turkish street I saw four groups of boys, one after the other, carrying large, menacing, (plastic) bazookas. One held his fake sub-machine gun to his friend’s head as the friend squirmed and several times tried to bat it away. An eight-year old carrying the Ramadan bread tucked it under his arm and pulling a pistol from his pocket shot his five-year-old brother in the face. Then they both walked on, their pistols bulging in the pockets, carrying the bread of God and guns like it was nothing.

    H2O HoL gorlitzer park boys

  • the hurly-berlin

    the hurly-berlin

    Berlin, Berlin. Familiar and overwhelming. On the train back from the airport a girl with an extraordinary voice hopped on and busked. At the end of the song, the guitarist accompanying her took a bow and people burst into applause. “Wow!” she said, opening up her hat. A cute couple jumped off and a guy with his afro razored up the sides leaned after them, silently proferring the phone and wallet the girl had left lying on the seat. Two muscular men slightly running to fat had their dog with them, a pug named Princess Sheba. We got talking. The one holding the dog on his lap obeyed signals from the other one who said, wiping his own eye, she has something near her eye, and so forth. Princess Sheba stood upright on her owner’s sturdy legs, balancing against the train’s movement like a surfer. These trains travel high above the street and at intervals feel like you’re lost in the woods. The cool breeze flooded in every time someone got on or got off. “Mind the gap,” the safety announcement said in English. Later in the evening a guy snarled at me for making eye contact and called my German companion a Nazi. He was walking along spoiling for it, followed us, taunting, through some misery of his own. “Like the black women in Brooklyn say,” he said, bitterly, chasing us, “stay away from white people.” Berliners smoke in cafes and the street is filled with old litter. If you eat out, people beg, and sell newspapers, and beseechingly play the harmonica. At the next table a middle-aged blond woman painted her lips against a little mirror while her boyfriend watched absorbedly. It took both of them to make her beautiful, it was their tradition. She made faces at herself as though she were having a very emotional, silent conversation. We saw two Romany boys whom I’d seen busking last summer, a year ago now, the little one is bigger and wirier and his chubby brother is chubbier. The younger plays the trumpet and has a loud ghetto blaster with which he drives away all the other musicians. But he’s getting better. Last year he was confident but terrible. I told him, your playing has improved! so much! you’re getting good! and for the first time in all the dozen times we have spoken he gave me his slow, curling, lopsided and personal smile.

    H2O HoL browsing piano player

  • I slept out

    I slept out

    Last night in Switzerland. I slept out. The moon disentangled itself from the cherry tree and slowly drew a shallow course across the horizon, pulsing through the cloud its fitful gleams. Every time I opened my eyes the stalks and undercarriages of daisies on the bush by me struck dark green and white as white into the grey moon sky. Airplanes drew chalk lines back and forth at long intervals: there is something more for me to learn here. Nearer by far a single mosquito visited, penetrating sleep in its several manifestations. I slapped myself again upside the head. I could hear two people talking quietly on the verandah in the apartments downstream. I could hear the river’s greedy mumblings, little sucking and slurping rushes and a longer, darker bass dragging underneath. In Berlin to orient myself I will dip my feet one by one in the Spree and tell myself as so often I have told, My darling, All water is one.

    H2O HoL golden lamp

  • the coins, the crowns

    the coins, the crowns

    Such a jolly lady in the village post office just now. She really made my day happier. Expertly popping up and then deconstructing one box after another until I could figure out which size I needed to buy, each with a hint of a flourish, like an auctioneer. “And here… we have the Number 3…. This one is the Number 4.” I opened my palm and showed her the mess of Swiss coins, fishing out extraneous Danish crowns, Euros, Australian dollars, and a shard of porcelain I found in Lisbon. “I’d really like to get rid of these,” I told her, picking through the various sizes and counting out the right change with agonizing slowness. “Sie haben gut gesungen,” she offered brightly: You must have sung really well. It took me a moment. “You mean because… people have thrown these… in the street?” “Yes,” she said, beaming, mocking herself just a little. “That is what we like to call Swiss Humour. You sang well.”

    H2O HoL wires in sky

  • elephant in the womb

    elephant in the womb

    A punker girl crossed the street under the shady trees, shouting at some invisible or internal enemy. She was dressed in black from boot to root, her ears infested with silver and bone. Parts of her bristled and other parts erupted with pus. She scraped a chair out at the cafe where we were reading the paper. I can read German upside-down, almighty me. A little girl of eleven who escaped an arranged marriage showed her luscious unformed face and said, if you make me marry “ich werde mich umbringen.” Meantime the blackclad punk had sunk into some suicidal nirvana of her own. Maybe she was married too young, against her will. Heroin came and took her in his boat, she paid the ferryman, they rattled off knocking and whining on the water. Twenty minutes later two police officers appeared, wearing plastic gloves, and stood over her til she roused enough to stagger to her feet and fall to the ground. We felt sad in the belly and my companion pulled me away. Death in public, and the underworld that clings to the surface. Drugs and their many-splintered joys. Just say nowt.

    H2O HoL outback elephant eye

  • eternity’s train

    eternity’s train

    Because I have lots of fears I am constantly setting for myself little and large tests of courage. Where I am staying backs onto a river and it’s out in the country and quiet. So tonight as it grew dark I set out for a walk along the bank.

    This might not sound very scary but the path is narrow and in places, eroded, and more importantly as it grew dark I had a nervousness of who might be lurking in the woods. I said to the trees as I stepped off the narrow footbridge onto a sandy, forested island, Protect me, trees. The water raced by at my side, gleaming and opaline, milky and green, crying out its river sounds. The bushes growing over the path are very often spiky; I think if I were a shrub growing around so many beavers’ nests I would be inclined to be spiky, too. I let my feet fall as quietly as I could. Rounding a bend in the path I saw firelight fluttering up ahead. I stayed quietly behind the screed of trees, knowing that while I could see them I would know that they couldn’t see me.

    Three men; young men; really, boys. One of them was building the fire. The other two got up and flung themselves into the fast-moving current, surfacing with howls of pleasurable dismay at the cold.

    I went round the path to where the boy stood, pulling leafy branches off a pile behind him and stacking them on the blaze. His fire of course was very smoky and looked like it wouldn’t flame so high for long. I was almost upon him. I said, in English, Hi, just loud enough that he would turn and see me before I got too close. As is usual with potential aggressors when you face them, they are a human who has worries of their own. Of course, I had seen that from many yards away, otherwise I would have taken a different path. He said, Gruezi, looking a little nervous, himself, and I said, Gruezi. When it was almost dark I crossed a railway bridge with the water piling and piling round its piers. It was foaming so loud I did not hear the train. It came rushing out of eternity into the moment where I lay, my belly exposed to the armies of darkness, lay in rigid smooth standing position, facing the train and with both my hands holding the narrow railing, there is only a meagre though adequate walkway built alongside the track, high above the river, and people’s faces and meals were passing in the dining car in shuttling fashion segmented by the fast windows, only an arm-length or two arm-lengths distant. Without meaning to I shrieked a long scream like a train’s eerie whistle. The train passed in seconds and I crossed over the high bridge, recovering, thankful.

  • duck surfer

    duck surfer

    Watching an adolescent duck flying upstream and surfing down, flying up and surfing down, over and over on the fast-moving river. Finally he hauls himself out on a low-hanging branch and sits there, drying in the sun, quacking with satisfaction.

    H2O HoL stream indonesien

  • a plan for the rest of the year

    a plan for the rest of the year

    It occurred to me today I might read only Sebald and Shirley Hazzard, alternately, for the rest of the year and read deeply rather than widely. This novel is so good I have just sat down and read thirty pages aloud in the afternoon sun, the leaves scratching shadows on the page and the riverwater spiralling past my feet.