Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: American

  • this one time?

    I came home after a long day, festooned with groceries. The bench on the subway platform was occupied by two girls and their shopping. I said, “Excuse me,” in German, and they said, “Excuse me,” in German, and cleared a space. Then one turned to the other and said, in flawless Brooklyn Privilege, “So I’m like, ‘the person who cooks’ in the relationship, but one time? Eli was like, ‘let’s make spaghetti together.’”

    At the station where I climbed out two men were playing a complex and delicate classical duet on two squeezeboxes. I passed a man in my street who was carrying a double bass upright on his back. Its long neck sticking straight up behind the face made him twice as tall. I’d been noticing the rows of inverted and upright Vs of manspreading and women’s frequent shrinking in public spaces on the train, and I thought: sometimes privilege is visible; and sometimes, it is audible; sometimes it hoards itself, and sometimes it emanates.

  • or anything but

    Two Americans in a coffee shop staffed by Australians. This is Berlin where not everybody bothers to learn German. They come in and order and make themselves comfortable. One starts talking about Sylvia Plath.

    He is reading a book about her life only it’s not very good. “I mean, with Hughes,” he says, sounding oddly over-familiar. They talk about football, which is what everyone is hearing about this week whether they like it or not. Their voices, like the giant screens set up in front of every late night convenience store and in every bar, are loud and blaring. They’ve been raised to expect prizes for participating and the world is their awe, yeah.

    “I’m not patriotic or anything,” the girl says. In my mind I hear: “I’m not racist, or anything, but,” which invariably heralds the most racist remarks. This is my favourite of the yeahbuts, which I pronounce to rhyme with rarebit. Equal favourite is the woeful, “I mean I’m not a feminist or anything, but – ” which, oddly enough, is necessary to preface anti-sexist ideas.

    “I know,” the guy says, quickly. “I’m not patriotic, either.”

    “…But when it comes to football,” he says, ” – I’m strangely patriotic!”

    They laugh, looking away from each other. She confides, “Me too. I just want the little guys to win. I mean, not – win,” she says.

    “No,” he says, “you want them to win.” There is a moment of silence as this sinks in.

    I am writing in a cafe where punks come in to beg from hipsters. Punk is the indigenous nation of Berlin, they built the poor but sexy reputation that has lured all these web designers and makers of cupcakes, now they are thrown out on their own lands and rely on bottle collecting, ingenious begging, ever more resourceful squats. This week I was cycling down a sunny street when a woman accosted me in French. Did I know where there was a squat nearby which she could visit? “You realise these are people’s homes,” I said. “You can’t just go in and… take photographs.” I directed to her to a large, enterprising commune which hosts open air cinema evenings in the warmer months. Her lip curled. “That place… is filled with tourists.”

    This cafe is on a street rapidly filling up with ice cream shops and children’s shoe stores: the twin signs, to my mind, of gentrification. I am part of the problem. But these strange twenty-five-year olds leave me feeling more foreign than any German ever did. They are talking now about their projects, and about some elder expert. “I’m thinking of getting him as my mentor for the project,” she says, as though the famous professor were a new brand of wallpaper. “I think maybe it would be good for me.” As though everything were a new brand of wallpaper. As though wallpaper were a background on one’s sharp black cell phone and would never need to be hung with paper and with sweat and paste, at all.

  • New Zonked

    In New York we had dinner with two New Yorker friends, one from Chicago, who are both broadcast journalists, and a Southern boy one of our friends had picked up in the street and they had bonded. Southern boy had on a Hallowe’en pumpkin shirt over an American flag t shirt. My German companion made me laugh by innocently mispronouncing his views (sane) on American gun laws (insane): you walk into a school and it’s like that film, he said: The Texas Chainsaw Moussaka.

    Many Americans have a naivete that makes me feel protective of them, and not just about guns. More than once I have been complimented on speaking such excellent English, for an Australian. It doesn’t always seem to be because the speaker has confused us with Austria. I guess the sensation of believing one’s nation the centre, and pinnacle, of the civilised world – the use, even, of phrases like ‘the civilised world’ – might engender a certain self-satisfaction. On my very first visit, a few years back now, to New York I would marvel to anyone who’d listen how much better of a time I was having than I’d expected. “That’s because New York is the centre of the universe,” explained four or five unrelated New Yorkers, innocently.

    At JFK we had queued with our passports and I overheard the officer herding the line answer an anxious tourist’s question with, “I’m just doing my job here. Anything else you’re asking – is irrelevant.” “They’re handling people like goods,” said my companion, shuffling forward. Three days later up in the Bronx we went walking through one of the giant parks that make that part of town so beautiful. As we were coming down the hill a crocodile of children was climbing up. A little girl in front was walking rapidly backwards, her head tilted round to guide herself. “You can do it,” the teacher encouraged. “I believe in you, Destiny!”

    I said, to make her laugh, “We believe in you too, Destiny!” A second group of students followed them. One little girl was walking with her teacher, saying, “I’m serious!” “You can’t call a taxi,” the woman told her, “in a park.” It occurred to me I’d never said I believe in Destiny, before. I’m just… not American. Yet the sense of kinship with random passersby as we wandered up Central Park right from the bottom to the top, as we ventured into Harlem, as I got tangled in conversation with fascinating people on the D train, forever a stranger, was so spicy to me and so sweet. I loved the guy on the subway whose Superman socks were pulled high to the knee and inside out. I loved the wide-eyed baby whose daddy was so stoned he gave off a pungent weed reek. I loved the crazy Christian lady who tried to pick up my companion and when she’d asked, are you alone, looked at me and said, “And is that your… sister?” I loved the man who glanced into my camera’s screen when I stopped short at the top of the stairs into the subway station at Canal Street and said, “Nice photo.” It felt as it always to me feels in New York city, one of earth’s prototypical cities, as if we all are engaged on some giant endeavour, and none of us will ever see the outcome – in completion – we are fragments in a kaleidoscope like moths, we are our own art, we are brushing up against each other every day all day long as we go, handling the good like it was people.

  • what ate New York

    The film poster that has Godzilla tearing up great chunks of the city and eating alive New York City should have been a giant Pacman, I think. For technology has eaten New York. And not only New York: Copenhagen, Madrid, Berlin: these are cities where I have witnessed this carnage, sinister and almost silent. We noticed it on the plane, a ride through the sky which has transformed from what was a quiet space, a time of dreaming and half-sleep, into a wilderness of seatback screens. Everything flickers. People feed themselves perpetual stimulation by the handful, like a supersized bucket of chips. As soon as we land out come the phones. Soon the aisles are crammed with people stooping under the bulkhead and standing over each other, so intense is their desire to be free of the traveling life and meet with the destination city, yet all have pulled out small devices and are keenly, yet dutifully scrolling. Oh, the dullness, pervasive and wee. Why travel five thousand miles through the ferocious universe only to read up on what’s happening at home? Instantly to rejoin the same long conversations we were wrapped in on our own soft couch.

    We drag our cases to the A Train. My heart is pounding. This line is the subject of so much damn jazz. But when we get inside and the familiar orange seats are filled with black folks, every one of them inimicable, cool, and beautiful, the place proves to have changed somewhat since 2011. The suddenness of these changes and that nobody notices sometimes makes me despair and grieve. I miss my community, who have turned away from each other. Now even in the most exciting city anywhere, every third person is staring down into their lap, hung over the miniature news from elsewhere.

    Used to be I was the annoying or crazy one, preoccupied and dreaming in a hyperalerted world, clogging up the pavement as I stopped short to stare upwards, to notice detail or jot things down, writing as I walked, holding my breath, my train of thought, my pen. Now I’m the passenger in everybody else’s aquarium world. In the street, people scroll as they stroll. City that never sleeps seems halfawake. And it’s all so iconic. The subway car that looks like every movie scene, the puddles and paddocks of outermost Thingie Island where the airport lies marshily. The Rockaways, Blvd and Ave. “We are passing under the East River,” I report. “We are passing under the World Trade Center. A lot of people died here,” reading the map, my eyes filling with sentimental tears. “True,” says my companion, “and then their friends went out and slaughtered many, many, many times more around the world.” After an hour of train travel, after nine hours of airplane travel, after an hour of bus travel in Berlin we come up out of the subway station at last, at 42nd Street, and the noise – the smell of French fries and traffic and metallic dust – the people and the way they pass, the hoardings, the sidewalks, the way they hold themselves – both of us standing their marooned by suitcases, we each burst into tears separately and hug across our baggage.

    The lights, cameras, action are all around. We drift through the traffic of souls, uncounting. This explicit town, alive in all our dreams, overwhelms with its gross drama and chaotic splendour and decay, while at the same time it speaks to everyone individually. We find the New York Times, Dean and Delucas, the cafe. We find my friend, her black hair everywhere and her familiarity so moving. Even she, an artist, a true lifelong artist, ravels her phone at every opportunity. We buy burgers and a jar of beer, at the counter I worry we are taking too long to order and look up. There she is, hunched over her phone, as thought it were a knot in her hair she is unable to stop from worrying and untangling. Oh New York! Oh humanity! Come back to me! I miss the dreaming, the uncertainty, the hesitation and lostness. This striving, blaring, rushing, overstimulated community premium among the anthills we have built over the world is a place I experience through the dreaming comb, the honeycomb, of sweet nature, and the wild. Within eight stops of the Howard Beach station where the airport train meets the A train I have given up my seat to a pregnant lady and he’s given up his to an elder woman who rewards him with a sweet seamed smile, we’ve admired the pretty girl with green-tinged hair who has filed her front teeth into sharp vampiric points, I’ve passed on the name of an excellent book to a women who accepted my scribbled note and stashed it in her pocket, have told four people how beautiful they are, the tiny lady whose friend took his seat has paused at her stop, the stop before ours, to say, You have a nice day, now, and the beautiful man whose face was so somber and cold has smiled, shyly and ironically, when I said as he got off, You are a really beautiful man and I hope you have a really beautiful life. He said, drawlingly, Thank you. I love him.