Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: Berlin

the c-u- in court

Drowsy today & introspective and I had to sort of tip myself out of the house like the last olive clinging in the jar. The market stallholders seemed to me noisy and boisterous, cheerful in an inflicted way. When I paused in front of a mound of strawberries the guy shovelled a dozen punnets into a bag and thrust it at me, saying, One Euro. A little further on, a stall of organic produce, flecked apples and satisfyingly plump brown mushrooms. “I’d like 400g of those please and a lemon and a….” Reaching into my stash of German words I realized I’d no idea what is the collective noun for leaves of spinach. A bunch? A bouquet? A posy? I can’t say any of these things in German. “… a piece of spinach, please.” She was already stacking it into the bag I had handed her. “A piece! I like that.” “How would you normally say it?” “Ah, well… I’d like some of that spinach, or a little of your spinach, or a bag of spinach… But I like ‘piece.’”

In German piece and peace are different sounds but I do love the way they have named their cemeteries: literally the resting place, “the peace court.” Court as in shared space: courtyard. So I guess höflich (polite) means really, courtly. God… that was exhausting. But at least I have a mountain of strawberries to fill my bath.

January 30, 2013
I’m not sure you’re taking this entirely seriously

Went to the outdoor store to try on their $1000 goose-down & coyote fur jackets. “Made in Canada,” the sales guy explained as I was falling about laughing at the price: “Canadian wages.” “Ah,” I said. “Everyone wants Fair Trade but no one wants to pay any more for it.” He leveled his trigger finger at me: You Are Exactly Right.

Who has the money for this kind of malarky? They had a hat, with furry earpieces, a snip at 300 Euros. That’s, oh, around 375 Australian pesos. They had parkas in a seductive scarlet which have big hoods rimmed in fur. Magic. You put the hood up and you can’t see two feet in front of your face. The salesman folded the fur back for me: “Now can you see out?” “The street, yes. Stars, no.” He let his head fall to one side. “I’m not sure you’re taking this entirely seriously.”

Finally I bought a more ordinary hat, very warm, so warm it made me want to strip off a couple of layers. Leaving the shop I saw the original salesman, who had been called away to another section, leaning on a display cabinet of vicious-looking knives. He looked so bored. I tapped on the window from the snowy footpath to make him look up. In pantomime I showed him the successful and awesome furry-hat purchase, drew it out of my satchel and put it on to demonstrate how it makes me look like a Russian farmer maiden. His face split in an enormous grin. Thumbs up, he said. Thumbs up, I said. Thumbs up, said his colleague over his shoulder. Warm in the brain. It only now occurs to me the word ‘demon’ is embedded (devilishly) in the word ‘demonstrate.’ So all those door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesmen in the 50s were maybe like the anecdote, I mean the antidote, to God’s helpers who spread out on the ground and say, You take the poor suburbs, I’ll take the rich.

January 20, 2013
tall & straight-sided

Tonight I saved somebody’s life. I cycled past a table on the mall where Scientologists were practising Scientology, just right out in the open as though it were nothing, were not based on shame & rooted in a foul, deliberate dismaying of the self. A beautiful, sumptuous, exquisite black woman sat paying attention and nodding as she was told wonders (presumably) that could be hers ~ the stance of her head & the slightly tall straight-sided hat she wore reminded me, at least, that she is an African queen. I cycled past. My heart roared in me. I swerved and slowed and circled round. When I went back to her she was still listening to this lanky dude in a red Scientology t-shirt. It seems to me funny that only McDonalds ~ almost endearingly ~ are not aware that the prefix ‘Mc’ does not denote corroboration (McFeast, McProfit, McCafe). He wore his Scientology t-shirt & she wore her splendid self & listened. I stopped beside them and waited for the courage. I’d a fear he might reach out some big butterfly net and trap me in glass forever. I leaned over to her over the neck of my bicycle. “This is a cult. And you are beautiful. And there is nothing the matter with you.” I know they start with personalty ‘testing’: presumably, everyone fails the test. The beautiful woman laughed; I spoke in English: she answered in German, “danke schoen”. Hearing me, I hoped; herself, I truly hope.

January 20, 2013
like a cake

Went down to the print shop to ask him to make me a copy of one of the two novels I’m hoping to finalize this winter. Like a PhD student at the far end of his thesis I lean on the counter and say cosily, “I wrote all of that. Can you believe…?”

The man laughs, a friendly laugh. I am thinking of the cartoon where the doctor examining an X-Ray tells his disappointed patient, “I’m sorry, Mr Bundle. I’m afraid you really don’t have a novel in you.” I say to the print guy, “I can see now why not everyone writes books. They are hard work.”

He spends a long time stacking and restacking the pages with his expert hands, the paper silky and obedient. Turning the pile of pages to stand landscape, then portrait, then landscape again he deftly slaps all the spiky leaves into one great block. Then he stows the whole thing in an exactly A4-sized carton which springs open from flat stowage. Glancing at me he reaches behind him and takes another carton, which he fits over the top. “Like a cake!” I say and carry it home in two hands through the freezing wind.

January 17, 2013
we were dancing

On the Weihnachtsmarkt before it closed I had this most marvellous adventure. Rounding the corner my friend & I following the thread of sound came on these two solemn, courtly black American musicians, not young, setting forth the Gospel According to Lionel Richie. I have never been a convert but somehow the lissom groove of All Night Long got underneath my skin. I started to wiggle, stepping tentatively, dancing. My friend went rigid with embarrassment: Cathoel don’t! My arms were full of parcels and my boots were caked in snow but I danced. The dudes onstage picked up their feet, the groove came issuing from them, I love it when music is hired but you feel the mastery and its freedom. You can’t buy me!

Now, I was shy! this took some effort! but I had to, the sinew of the tune was irresistible: the thread. Within a few bars this strange miracle had started to happen. A lady near me raised her beaker of Glühwein and danced a little shimmy for her stolid male partner, jokingly. Our eyes met and she kept dancing. Within moments it seemed all the crowd was moving. We were dancing! We were dancing. At the end of the song another came and we all danced to that too. Then I shimmied away up the alleyway between the lighted stalls, night was coming on and it was so cold, women and men were laughing and showing one another their moves and applauding in little local circles and the sense of a shared joy gave everything this golden warmth; everything but the sky, the snow, the cobblestones. As the strains of sound fell back behind us we came round another corner and there people were skating, silent and as if motionless, around and around in a spellbound circle. Because I constantly battle my shyness I have started groups of people dancing before, but never with such universality. And this seemed a middle-aged, cold-stamping crowd. Maybe that’s why, in fact. Nothing to lose.

January 13, 2013
knifegold

An hour ago I made friends with two Israeli dudes selling Vietnamese knives on a drearily dripping, cheerily lighted Berlin market. It is so warming and cozy to wander under damp vinyl awnings and it has been so frustrating trying to chop vegetables with a bread knife all these weeks.

One was called Coia and the other something even more beautiful which I forget. They stood there in their pigtailed dreads and ludicrously cute knotty woollen hats, relaxed with hands in pockets, offering one carrot after another so I could slice and scrape and find out all the properties of the knives laid out like eyeless sharks on the flowered cloth. Thinner, lighter blades go through things easily and are best for small vegetables and watery stuff (like fruit). Denser blades suit heavier applications like meat and potatoes and bone. You can sharpen your blade every six months or so on the underside of a ceramic plate, and Coia demonstrated for me what the sound should be like (a kind of tabla whoomph). A few stalls along the Turkish keycutter had a whompa-slupf, whompa-slupf going from behind his counter somewhere and I stopped to ask is that music? Or is it a machinery.

Turns out it’s a machinery. But it had this sort of repetitive organic quality like two taps dripping at a sink that made me want to record a sample and build something over the top of it. Key music, knife music. Market friendships. Golden lights.

January 9, 2013
like lamps

Just now walking down the street the most miraculous small experience. It’s growing dark and the shop windows glow like lamps. I came out of a side street full of bars and cafes onto a shopping strip thronged with parcels. Among the clots and clumps of other people approaching from the opposite direction I met eyes with 10, 12, fifteen, twenty strangers: we each of us looked into each other seriously, momentarily: and it felt like we exchanged between us something palpable. Sometimes the early dark and gloomy days here crush me unbearably. Other times it feels like the civilisation that has built itself here and endured and spawned so many writers, so much beauty, so much music and art, says: we have woven something here. We light our lanterns as the cold closes in. We endure and turn our endurance into a survival and our survival into a flourishing life. We defy you, winter! We defy you, death! We defy you, lack of meaning!

Even as I think this I am wondering, too: is it not in fact death, and decay, and winter, that give meaning to life, and evolution, and spring? Seems like it is and I am only too frightened within my own mortal mind to see it.

January 6, 2013
hipsteroid rage

The problem of hipsters. Nobody is one, yet everyone complains about them. It’s a bit like environmental damage: everybody thinks someone else needs to change.

I am listening to the couple at the next table lament how hip this neighbourhood has become. On this leafy street they can no longer find a seat, on a sunny Saturday, and it’s all because of hipsters. The woman has a chic-knotted green scarf and little red shoes. But that’s just the trouble: if I say, yeah, I wish I were cool enough to qualify as hip but sadly, I lack the raw materials… I come off sounding like I wanna be *too* cool ~ hip enough to not even care about not being hip.

Like my neighbours, I like a quiet street which is not too crowded with popularness. Yet I want the cafes to be good enough to draw such a crowd: Great coffee. Decent service. Music that doesn’t depress me. Essentially I am wishing failure & suffering on the businesses I claim to support: or partial success. “Emerging artist” status.

It’s like indie bands. One must discover a talent that is great enough to be worth a thorough listening; but not so great that it’s filling stadiums. Like infinite growth on a finite globe, this enterprise seems to me destined to failure. And failure is to hipsterism as stubble is to chic: a whiff of it, you’re a groovy artist. Too much and you’re under a bridge. Hipster or dumpster. It’s bloody brutal.

The other problem with hipness, or as I think of it, ‘atmosphere’, is it requires a willing peasantry. This groovy part of Berlin is enjoyable because of its mix of cultures and the picturesque and endearing ways that troubled souls, drug addicts and unorthodox people fill the streets with life. I don’t see any of these hipster-allergic folk wanting to move to the suburbs, or to genuine country communities where there may be very few artists. Other human beings serve as background scenery: a form of tourism. The scenery’s got to be grating enough to be ironic, to set the heroic Self free in bold, beautiful relief against its lesser-talented background. Like Park Slope.

January 3, 2013
eros unregulated

On New Year’s Eve after a quiet dinner party at the home of a Romanian artist & Swedish poet, I climbed the round hill that gives Kreuzberg its name: cross mountain. In the dark it resembled Borobudur, with heads facing outwards as far as the eye could reach like ten hundred white buddhas. Three different, unevenly consecutive countdowns announced midnight’s arrival: I was tempted to start a fourth, even more raggedly: Zehn! Neun! Acht! 7! 6!~ Looking back as flares lit the sky I noticed something strange: though walking here we had passed through dozens of gaggles of Turkish dudes with their mini rocket launchers & quivers of searing flares, this crowd was Caucasian entirely. My companion looked thoughtful when I remarked that I could not remember ever being in such a homogenous crowd. Maybe it’s more segregated here, he said at length. Hmm maybe.

Meantime the most unregulated fireworks display in living memory had gotten underway. All around us people let off Roman candles and stepped back (with difficulty) to let lighted rockets propped upright in empty champagne bottles go off. Within seconds of the first countdown the entire city rim was alight. I was laughing with jubilation, such a night: for ten minutes or more the crowded mountain was the sparkling centre (from the viewpoint of those on it) of a sparkling city, its whole horizon lit and sinking and sparking and burning with explosion after explosion. I’m not describing this very well but the effect was just transporting. We screamed and hollered. People waved giant sparklers. And every ghost in the vicinity picked up its tatty skirts and hiked out of there. 2013::EROS.

January 1, 2013
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?

December 19, 2012