Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: Australian travel

  • shriveled bulb of god

    shriveled bulb of god

    My stomach feels like a shrivelled bulb after two martinis, no dinner. Whoever invented alcohol is my god: right now, my god. The last time I had one of those (a martini, a god) was in New York, it was summer then, I came out of the studio where we had been working on the album I’d wanted to make since 1999 and whose songs had been written over fifteen years and it was all so exhausting, so wonderful, on the street a man came past me pedalling his cab, a pedal-cab, like the becaks that used to carry us to the markets when I was a child, in old Batavia. “Take me to a rooftop bar,” I said, and the next twenty minutes were alive with light: those huge buildings shooting up into the sky like terraces, palaces, penthouses’ skeletons, every one stippled with windows alight and the warm evening breeze exciting my cheeks. I was crying with joy. New York! New York! Like Berlin she is one of those cities where on the subway, on the bridge, under the trees you would cry out “New York!” and feel like she hears you. So I found a banquette in the scarlet-lit rooftop bar that was rapidly filling with Manhattenites after work and I told the Spanish bar girl, I like olives, so she made me a martini festooned with skewers, each one so laden with green olives it was as though the glass had greenly exploded. I sat and sipped, turned my pages and sipped. After a while the volume level rose and I drew out the headphones I had bought that day, a remote birthday present from my Australian family, began listening back to the work we had made. Tonight was very different but same, same, same. This Russian bar in my leafy street that I’ve passed several dozen times suddenly beckoned, as if it were a painting of a bar that had come to life. I went in. “Can you make me a dirty martini on Bombay Sapphire?” And she did. The bar was tenderly tended by this woman, in 1950s sailor costume, her hair spooled back with nests of pins behind her ears, the luscious soft sound of the ice cubes as she rattled my drink u and down over her shoulder then poured away all the vermouth down the drain. Apart from the dark-haired girl in a beanie studying at the bar I was then her only customer. The dark-haired girl looked up and said to the bartender, This is so hard. I took my drink by its frost stem and the two of us drifted outside, wicker chairs where in a little while the bartender would come round with her basket, lifting aside the daytime posies of flowers and putting in their place red glass candleholders. I watched the street, where nothing passed. In an hour only two cars, ten pedestrians, five bicycles. The sky has changed, it is settled in a grey now and when I mentioned yesterday “you know at this time of year this means it’s grey for another five months,” the woman clearing my coffee cup said, “Ist das nicht furchtbar!” Isn’t that terrible! Well, yes, it really is. In the balcony opposite, on the first floor, three girl-silhouettes were enjoying their cigarettes. I wished I smoked. Occasionally a yellow leaf sauntered down through the still-warm air and landed on the cobblestones, in the garden bed, on the roof of a vehicle. I have never experiences a Fall before: it is what it is: life falls colourful to the ground. The dark cold skeletons reassert their empire. Winter is arriving, time to get out of here.

    ~ from Berlin via New York City, 2013

  • the pickling palace

    The people across the road are drunk and two of them are planning to have sex together tonight for the first time. That’s at this stage, it’s not even dark yet, we’ve still got the Fight that Blows Up Out of Nowhere and Falling Asleep in the Pizza up our sleeves. Their voices carry and then the Friday afternoon traffic will surge up the hill again to carry them away. He says something and she says, “You are fucking kidding me.” “No,” he says, something something. “You’re just making that up!” Her incredulity is a dare. Climb this tree for me and bring that fruit. He says, “No, I’m deadset serious. Anything you like.” One of the other blokes says something and then the girl begins to sing, or chant, like she was at a football game: “Je-sus, Je-sus, Je-sus, Je-sus.” The positive guy sings something over the top of her, harmonizing. He’s making it up. He’s fucking-kidding her. Their verandah falls apart in a seething heap of laughs just as a truck roars down the road. When the noise clears he is saying, aggrieved, “…been doing it all my life.” I know that feeling, I have too. I have just got home from a delicate day of negotiations in my unconscious and as we swept over the bridge with its hanging-lantern streetlights and banners I felt a song unbrew in me. I sang it out the window in handfuls of confetti and as we pulled away from under the biggest fig tree, that the road goes around (the greatest kind of road), I said, to my long-legged companion who was driving, “Did you see that girl on the corner, the beautiful girl, with the guy who’s just so in love with her?” “Yes,” he said, his voice warm as if fond of them. “How she was just standing there in her little purple dress,” I said, “holding the orange flowers he brought her. He’s looking at her so carefully, he’s in love with her every little gesture. She’s not even noticing, telling him something, he’s in love with the way that she says it.” “So is she in love?” he wanted to know. I said, “Could be. But she’s not thinking about it, she is remembering something that happened and telling him. So it was hard to tell.”

    We drove round a sweeping corner prickly with pedestrians. We had watched a giant ibis as it took off from a street sign and flew the length of Charlotte Street, its white wings insignia. The prosperous tropical colonialism and sandstone and big bunches of trees made me feel at home. I wound my seat back and propped my foot out the side window. I said, sentimentally, “Both of them standing there with their bicycles.”

  • dusk, dusk, dusk

    The strange screeching of tropical birds spurling into midnight’s blue sky at 6 o’clock, as the night gathers like a dew, forms like a band, a marching band of strange and unaccountable, uncountable, nasty-beaked bird, weird big birds, glossy little birds, green birds and brown. Brisbanana. You are utterly the weirdest, my sweet suburban love.

  • fear of bunyips

    It’s getting dark. The gentle end of a slow and satisfying farm day. My farm is a tiny lakeside property which belongs to an absent friend. I am alone today. Last night we walked round the lake, or dam, and I told my German visitor all about bunyips. Today he rang from a nearby mountaintop to remind me: “You know, those scary… the obokodies.” “Bunyips?” I said. “Bunyips, yes,” he agreed.

    I let the chooks out to huddle in terror under a clump of some flowering ginger that sings. Its scent sings. They are frightened by the death of their fourth friend, two days ago, who was torn into heedless headlossedness by a hawk. I guarded them all day. Chased them out into the sunshine and leaned over the sagging cyclone wire to pick them up, plumply one by one, and carry them safely home. I bent my back under bushes and collected basketsful of dry kindling. I washed all the rugs and hung them out for sun’s succour. I took the landfill and all our recycling down to the council bins, near the road. In between I was supping and sipping on things that the humming ether brought me, random stories, articles and talks that lit my tiny local and deeply domesticated sky like tinsel snow shaken through a palm-sized dome. I set the axe against the tank and broke some branches over my knee. At the foot of the scored stump on which hardwood is splitted I found the dusty remains of the peeled head, eyeless and gone, of the poor chicken who wasn’t the fittest, on Wednesday, and didn’t survive. This is where my inner-city Berlin visitor had executed her a second time, after she died, so he could pluck her in hot water and rub her all over with red cooking herbs. The whole tiny house smelled of good food last night and I ate my baked potatoes and looked on, unable to stomach it, lacking the courage, picking the eyes out of a salad.

  • vegemite kid

    One’s German companion begins to assimilate. He is working his way through a jar of Vegemite, observing that it contains the exact same colouring as Coca-Cola: 150c. “The trouble with Vegemite,” he says, scraping the traces of its oily residue into his gullet to clean the butter knife, “is it kind of contaminates the knife. You really wouldn’t want it to end up in the strawberry jam.”

    “Ugh,” I say, “no,” thinking of my brother with his webbed feet who used to eat one big bite of his toast with Vegemite and then four tiny bites of his other toast with honey. But Vegemite and honey, like honey with soy sauce, is in a special class of its own. We are on our verandah where the morning sun slants across the houses and I am gazing dreamily at the near corner of our block, a shady spot under the camphor laurel, where the rusted star picket has trapped a flapping shard of paper. “In Germany of course,” he says, “some people eat liverwurst with marmalade.” I put my cup of tea down and stare at it. The milk has turned it to the exact colour, pinkish and intimate, of liverwurst. Life is disgusting and here we are in its midst, chewing and swallowing, digesting and turning everything to shit. Sitting so pretty and containing all the world in minute, pulsing, cellular form, thinking our slow morning thoughts and and gazing at the sun.

  • brisbanally retentive at last

    Brisbane. Took me ten years to settle here, having uprooted from sultry Jakarta and a school which had barely two students of each nation in one class. This was the first time we’d lived in the suburbs, since I was a tiny baby by the sea, a child learning to walk in the desert. I used to lie on my bed listening to lawn mowers almost frantic with the choking feeling that lives go nowhere and end in dust. Lawn clippings and agapanthus and dust. But then there was sultry West End, the village which now has devolved to a suburb at last. And then I moved away and now I am back. It has taken me months to move out of the suburbs and into a place of my own. And six months and tonight I feel the trickle of sweet familiarity at last, a trust in the landscape, a kind of security that releases a kind of intrigue it is hard to feel when you are always new, like how it’s hard to be deeply creative and free and wild with no safe home place and without a routine. I felt I belonged at last. God damn it, Brisbane.

  • the sweetest noose

    Ok, so: imagine you have a lover whose second language is English and who one day refers to you unexpectedly as his spoose. Your spoose is another word for your beloved or your partner and rhymes (conveniently) with caboose. I can tell you that any little irritations you may hold against this person are going to dissolve instantly. You won’t even mind that the last thriller they wanted you to read was so dark and so wiolent.

  • no use to a lizard

    A small scream from the other room. “What? What?” “Can you come here?” On the rug is lying toes-up a small, lucid-bellied, iridescent, recently murdered gecko. Its tail has been severed to a bloody stump: it didn’t just drop, it was ripped off. By its extreme corners I pick up the rug and gingerly carry it to the ferns. “Tisch! Tisch! Where are you, you little cat-monster?” A cat-bell is no use to a lizard. We both stand over it mournfully, uselessly. “Poor little dragon,” he says.

  • sharing a desk

    Brother is staying for a few days & brother and Berliner are sharing a desk. They don’t know each other very well. I walk in on them sitting side by side with their computers open, both are typing furiously and music is playing.

    Cathoel: so are you just taking turns between the songwriters and the techno, then?

    Berliner: yup.

    Brother: and we’ve been making remixes of your songs. Just by playing a song of yours over the top of what’s happening, so that~

    Cathoel (sings): Tuesdays I lie in bed with my ex…

    Brother: exactly, sometimes it works out perfectly. You should do remixes!

    Cathoel: let’s! We can mix them with Tony Abbott’s speeches. Or, you know, sing-song public speakers.

    Berliner (still typing): yup.

  • republic of unicornia

    Making a pun in a foreign tongue: Lord, but it makes me feel smart. My friend is pfaffing about online & calls me over as I drift past. “Look! My unicorn name is: Soft Beautiful Erdbeerkaese.” Soft, beautiful, strawberry cheese. “Wow!” I say. And then lightning strikes. “So if you ever became King of the Unicorns, your unicorn name would be: Soft Beautiful Erdbeerkaiser.” The Emperor of Strawberries.