Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: Brisbane

  • that lamp

    I have a lamp that is shaped like a shell, was in fact a shell, is a home for a strange and retiring sea creature long now gone. It glows almost red when you plug in the bulb, a beloved’s ear with light behind it. Lately as the days are tropical cold and dim and windy we light the lamps tagsüber. Near the beer factory is a tiny art printer who lays on canvas and on fine rag paper people’s photographs and paintings. We left the lamp on at home and went out. He showed me some of his work. He opened a drawer and let me roll some of the beautiful paper in my hands.

    Nearby is a tucked-in kind of cafe which you can barely see from the road, it is screened. Inside is like a secret fish tank. The chalkboard says You like cake. We make cake. Cake CAKE. We ordered cake. “Eighteen fifty,” said the guy. Cake is expensive. I said, “Now that was a very good year.” “Huh,” he said. We sat down and went over the book I am bringing to print this week: page after page of it, is it still beautiful, does it still hold. You’re looking for the tiny cracks and nail holes that let seep gradually the water. At the far end of the place a handsome man lay back in his chair. Stroking lazily his little device. He didn’t lift his eyes off it. His daughter dressed from head to toe in pink ballerina costume lay in a pile on the concrete playing dreamily with blocks they have stacked down there, singing and rousing on herself. She was in her own world, he was in someone else’s. Two men came into the cafe and I heard the guy recycling my pale joke. “19.90,” he said, “now there’s a good year. You’d be finished school, out into the world…” Behind my back I could almost hear them gazing at him blankly. I felt bad about the failure of the wordplay I’d transmitted, as though I had set him up.

    Later the night turned out fresh and enchanted, so strange, those nights that bring home the spirits from the deep sea and the mountainside. I lay in the hammock between two large trees, watching as the wind rustled and tumbled like cities through surf, down to the bony ground again and again, carrying in itself everything whole and real, everything breathing. This month I don’t know if you’ve noticed but again the full moon was full or albert full for days and days. This always feels like some kind of special benediction to me, as though we have been given a treat, like we have pulled off a trick somehow and gotten away with something.

    I should end there but there is something more to say. You know the night? In the night if you lie in a hammock you are in the air, you’re in the water. I gazed up, mostly with my eyes closed, into the depths of the tree, the sparring webwork of the lazing bed, the night itself drawing its fleece across the stars. It felt like one of those nights you could climb up into, curled as I lay curled, and the night would heal itself round you seamlessly and simply carry you away.

    When I came in my partner called me over to his screen. He loves the new. He wanted to play me a piece of music, piano music. We were silent, listening to the climbing sounds. “Isn’t it beautiful?” Yes, I said, it’s beautiful. He said, “It’s the first piece of music not composed by human~” “What?” I stood up. I think I was shouting. “Why did you play me this? Why did you?” “What’s the matter?” “Why do you show me this stuff?” “I thought it would make you feel good! It’s not scary, it’s just beautiful. Listen how lovely that is.” When someone who understands doesn’t understand: the world is a cyborg desert already. I said, “I can’t take it. I can’t live in a world where machines compose music. I can’t live.” An ache spread inside my chest, despair, hopelessness, rage. Within me I felt the impaired moon, the night, the thoughts of serene pursuit drain like soap scum away. Poke the pearls and they are merely bubbles, evaporating, the >plink<. Someone let the plug out of the sky and I felt all the buoyancy of things drag slowly down, my heart is hot and sore and sleep seems more oblivion than restorative hammock in a sea of quiet leaves which sparkle like near stars.

  • a strange moustache

    Lady Barista and I made each other laugh today, or maybe I just made myself laugh, which is lamer but still enjoyable. I turned up with my curly-handed mug and passed it across. “Just the uzh?” she said, which is her uzhual question. I was reading the band posters behind her. “Oh! I’m performing in that!” “What?” she said. “Queensland Poetry Festival. We have this fantasy that my poetry book & my CD will be out by that time but I think…. it’s not going to be both.” She picked up my loyalty card and said, “Hey! You’ve got a free one here.” Instead of throwing the full card away she passed it back. “You should keep that.” It had a bright yellow postage sticker on it, for tracking an overnight bag. “Ok,” I said, “but I think you better stamp it anyway. Just in case I try to come back and claim that free coffee again.” She said, dryly, “I think I might recognise you.” I said, “Wearing a fake moustache.” We started to laugh. “Dark glasses,” she said. She said, “I think the cup might give it away.” I was lying on the counter, laughing. “So if someone turns up,” I gasped, “in a plastic moustache – and a big hat – and dark glasses… and a shonky foreign accent – ‘Chello. Do you haff ze decaf?’ – I have to confess that might be me.”

  • buried in something

    Waking up on a hill in Brisbane when the sky is white and high, like the city is buried in something. Who can have buried us, where have they gone? No other city has contact with us today, we are a city-planet wandering in its walls. I feel my house like a boat, we are an ark, we are going down the river. Going down. The water drains from the tub. Dragging my hair away from its roots, sucking the spine. I’m in memory of pelting-rain days when it seemed all the tropics had visited at once, the lawn drowned, the garden disappeared, the dim loom of fence line was like a city of spires on the horizon at last when you gaze up the coast, I’d scarcely have heard the phone if it rang and there was only ever me and these small cities luminous in my mind, me and these paints and guitars, me and these pages. Like a cathedral high white sky makes my thoughts small. Closed into my own narrow boat on the gangway jostled with other boats to market, brimming with scented fruit, we gain the free dire deeps of the dark ocean and know it is under us by the change in sounds: engine noises. Confusion of shouting. Blessed quiet comfort of the day. Inside my vessel. Beside a fireplace in my mind. Tending a habitat. On which I fry and dissect things. As a child preparing perfumed essences from the walled garden in which we lived I knew: if you stir in a little of everything, peace rises in the jar quiet as a round gas.

  • drawing from life

    Went to my first life drawing class in eight years. Boy, was that challenging. For one thing, the models were clad rather than naked and I had never tried to draw drapery before. Also, they were never still. The organisers of this local class had asked a hairdresser who operates across the road to bring his barber’s chair and give someone a haircut, on the dais, so that we could sketch them. He had mutton chop whiskers down the one side of his face and on the other temple the tattoo of a flame, which very much resembled a matching sideburn. When he took his shirt off for the longer poses people gasped. Rioting pin-up girls and 50s bathing beauties disported themselves on shoulders and back. I fingered my unpierced earlobes uneasily. How do people get up the nerve to do that to themselves?

    Our barber seemed to regard tattoo decisions as some kind of impulse buy. He pointed out one and another that he had thought better of; one arm was almost entirely blacked over to rid him of some ‘tribal’ tatts he no longer wanted. He’s going to get it drawn over again with white ink. I didn’t know you could do that. His hair was immaculately waxed and the volunteer, once done, looked natty too. Gorgeous boys. I was drawing and drawing. Trying to get the hang of it. Remembering snippets my last teacher had told us: like, Don’t draw the outline, the outline doesn’t exist. Draw the bulk, the heft, the volume, the weight. Because we were seated in the round people ended up as backdrops in one another’s drawings. At the break everybody got up and circled, pointing out pieces they likes and taking photographs. Slowly it dawned on me some of our efforts would be mounted on the group’s Facebook page. Last time I drew, phones were not smart. Facebook didn’t exist. There was no one to hear you in space when you screamed with frustration at the immense difficulty of the line, that doesn’t exist, the weight and the heft, which must be almost felt as much as seen, and the flicking sound one’s eyes make reading the page and then the figure, the figure then the page.

  • some delightful stranger

    Some delightful person left a little note in our letterbox this week, thanking us for something we had not done.

    It is wrapped in a glossy little gift box hot pink with white polka dots, which folds open like a Chinese takeaway. There’s something so satisfying about those boxes. Inside is a mess of silver glitter, a note, and half a dozen transfers which are intended as play tattoos. One says, backwards:

    We accept
    the love
    we think
    we des
    erve.

    Another has a Day of the Dead skull drawn on it with flowers round the bone. The note, when I unfolded it, read:

    “Thank you for being so kind this morning when I parked in front of your house. I was running late & had nowhere else to park, your kindness was appreciated! Have some temporary tattoos for your kids!”

    It is a strange feeling to be thanked for someone else’s kindness. But I loved it. I wish I could get hold of this stranger and put them in touch with their real recipient. Only as I write does it dawn on me the obvious thing to do will be box it all up again, glitter and all, and deliver it to my lovely neighbour, who likely is the real fairy godfather. It is such a lovely sensation to open the crackling box, spill glitter on my toes, read the cutely lettered note and know that some person did some other person a small, meaningful favour and that other person noticed and appreciated it, and has gone to some trouble to thank them.

  • my god, I’m so drunk

    My god, I’m so drunk. What happened is: it’s all Diamond Dave’s fault. What I mean to say is: we went out to see him play. We were walking and on the way several bauhinia trees stretched themselves across the cyclone-wire fence of a local public playground, I pulled them down towards the ground and took half a dozen flowers, thinking: I have never seen Dave play, I can throw these to him on the stage. In the pub.

    The pub it turns out is, like, the happiest bar I have been in for several years. There were six people in there when we came in, plus a barmaid whose long slender legs had tattooed across the hem of her leather skirt, “forever young.” “If only she knew,” I said to my Berlin companion, whose height people in public places remark on. But fuck them. Dave’s number one fan came reeling up to us and gasped and let his hand fall open like a slow present. “You!” he said, “are like the new Jerry Hall. Oh. My. God.” I was laughing. “When I die and I finally get reincarnated… I wanna come back AS YOU.”

    My darling bought us a beer. It was a German beer whose name the scribbled bar girl could not recognise when he pronounced it the German way. “Oh,” she said, “Doppeldingsbum.” Our friend Diamond Dave, or so he claims (“Is that really my name?”) was playing covers as though his life hung from them. I felt ashamed, abashed, totally awakened at the sound, I had never heard him play in all those years we had been friends and yelled into my companion’s sweet ear, “He’s just a natural born rock star!” He was. He is. The bar filled with revellers. Some of them were 21 and some were 62. The bald guy making eyes from across the bar began to dance as Dave poured himself into “Love is the Drug,” an exquisite cover, absolutely defined again by his rolling bass.

    Probably my favourite song for the night was the Sunnyboys, “Alone With You.” Lord, was I dancing. That just never gets old. And then Dave struck up something of Elvis’s, can’t remember what it was, oh! “Hound Dog”! and the bald guy across the bar left off leaning and started slowly grooving. Like he was wearing a hole through the floor. I strode round to join up with him, sashaying good, and we both sang it out as people do who love music and are perhaps drinking, who knows, it’s the Valley. A whole pile of people poured in. There were two gigs upstairs and one in the back room. “It’s a labyrinth,” said my friend when he came offstage. I left my beer standing there and the man I’d been dancing with bowed with his hands, like Thai masseurs do, “Thank you, lady,” he said, “thank you, love.” Later on he turned up at my elbow saying, “Can you introduce me,” and then grinned into both our faces, saying, “You are suited, you look right together.” He told my boyfriend, “She’s a great girl. I mean! She’s super great!” But I let my beer stand and went out to explore the back. It was noisier. Death punk vibe. There was the girl with cherry bomb hair and long black leather jacket. There was – hey! Dusty Anastasiou waved cheerily, next on the bill, I promised I would go see them play but then my boyfriend threw an accidental beer over me, I forgot. Anyway we slunk home cold and reeking of alcohol. “I can’t believe you threw that over me, I am so cold, I’m so wet.” But we had climbed up the stairs and found the skinhead gig right up under the roof, the boys clustered at one end the girls coiled at the other, we looked out the clotted windows on the Valley, Friday night concupiscence, all the sleek taxi cabs stopping and starting at the curb, the people stumbling in and out of places, the girl who looked like Ashley Judd and the post-traumatic-stress-disordered Scottish Falklands veteran who told us all his archaic and sad, tired, unpleasant history and by his side the little punk boy whose girlfriend, fiery-dyed and fearlessly tattooed up like a Maori warrior queen, sang along every word with some Nirvana song I’d never heard of, such is music, the shared ecstasy and the narrow individual dream that takes up all the moors and can encompass every wonder, every effort, every thing. I came home stripping off my beer clothes and barely knowing anything, deep in the serenity, close friend to a rock star and light as lager foam in my soul, on my feet, all down the front of me, wherever you’d want to be: the music has always been there first and is what guides us, canary singing in the coal mine, “You’ll be safe here, you’ll be sweet.” Good night, canary dear. I love you.

  • surprise party

    “Meet us at Southbank on Saturday night, birthday party, surprise party.” We turn up late, missing the great unveiling, and sit at the very end of a long table outdoors. Gray Street is one long dinner party, a half mile of revelry and carousing. How many teaspoons, I’m thinking, how much milk. After dinner there is a general dispersal but seven people close to the bride, sorry, the birthday girl want to have a drink someplace quiet before heading home.

    There’s a bar in Paddington. “Is that quiet?” A bar in the Valley. “But the parking!” It comes down to The End, nearby in West End, or a place called Lefties in Paddington which I have visited once before, hardly quiet but hearty, a merry joint, both of them sound good, no one can decide.

    “The End is nigher,” says my German friend, thus proving if you can make puns in your second language you can make half a dozen people really happy at once. Birthday girl comes weaving through us on her high high heels. She is holding up her loot, a clank of wine bottles in different sparkly carrier bags with gift tags, in bunches either side of her head like a victorious shopper. “I’ve got 6 litres of wine,” she says. “Why are we going to a bar?”

    Later at home I tell my companion, her husband must have said the same to everyone when he invited them. I asked him, “What kind of thing would she like, for a little birthday present?” and he said, “She likes wine…” Her sister is also well-equipped and after we finally find a beer bar that’s open in West End and accidentally shove some other people off their table and buy a round of local brewed beers and down those, she says, “I’ve got a hip flask. Who wants gin?” Someone goes up to buy glasses of tonic and after the G&T spools its way down to my stomach I am feeling so restful, so possum-like, so inexplicably toasty. I dance in my seat, I unwind the scarf from my neck and sling it onto our large pile of coats and bags. Birthday girl opens her gorgeous black purse when I admire it and says, “In the op shop it came with this little wallet inside…” It is Glomesh and came with the original brochure, cunningly tucked in a windowed plastic wallet, the price in the old money hand written on the back, in its satin side pocket. I say, “You want to know the best thing about Glomesh? How it sags into your hand so soft and comforting, like a really old and worn pair of soft underpants, you can just cup it, it just falls into your palm.” “I know!” she says, “I love that!” and her sister says, “Me too!” and we spend some time passing the purse between us to cup the fall of heavy enamelled mesh in one palm after another. Oh, Glomesh. My companion nudges me. “I’ve never seen that before. People dancing on the dance floor to a cover songs guitarist.” It’s true! Lost in a sea of writhing bodies the guitarist is bearded and intently concentrating, oblivious to the girls gyrating in front of him waving their hands like they’re attracting air craft and are stranded on some deserted island. Boys are dancing too, everybody’s dancing, although the song he’s covering seems to be… “That’s Katy Perry!” I slowly realise. “He’s singing Teenage Dream.” He goes on to cover Don’t Stop, by Fleetwood Mac, Africa by Toto which gets half the room singing along with its moving and meaningless lyrics, Girls Just Wanna Have Fun by Cyndi Lauper – “This guy is fearless!” Birthday girl returns from the bathrooms and slaps her Glomesh down on the long wooden table. She beckons me and says into my ear, “In the bathroom? There was this long line and every girl in the queue was on her phone, scrolling and texting. So funny.” I say, “No! What?” She says, “I was watching in the mirrors and it just looked so funny and sad. And then this other girl? came out of a cubicle flushing behind her – with her eyes on her phone, texting and texting – and she stuck out one hand and turned the tap, like this, still texting, and washed that hand and dried it, texting, and went out the door, still -”

    I say, “No!” “I know!” she says. We are both laughing painfully, trying to draw breath, getting out these little squeaks of sounds that resemble those furry animals you keep in a cage and feed on sawdust, mice, rats, guinea pigs, hamsters. We stagger to our feet, weak with laughter, cramming our arms into jackets and coats, winding scarves. The beautiful Indian girl raises luminous eyes to mine and I lean forward, clapping down on the table, and tell her, “You – are one of the most beautiful women I have ever met in real life.” She silently bows her head to one side and glancing at me lengthwise indicates with a wash of one pale-palmed hand, No, you… Between the high tables a couple is dancing, dreamy and fast, he spins her thus and that, forth and back, over, she ducks a quivering ponytail under his arm; they are only in jeans and tshirts but the Viennese splendour of tea dances, gold-rimmed cake dishes, and penguin orchestras wafts round them like smoke in a Berlin nightclub.

  • bicycling on

    Finally my bike! There have been various substitute treadlies in between but my own blue bike, bought in Alice Springs a decade back, is now out of storage and dusted and greased and today for the first time we hit the black road. Wahoo! The freedom and terror. Raced down the tumult of traffic to a sleepy golden markets, where under the trees people had laid out vegetables, sprouting herbs, tempting red circles of handmade saucisson. After a coffee and waxy croissant we sauntered out as the stallholders packed up. One was a big bloke with black beard and a huge smile who stopped packing, and straightened, when I said, “Can I take a photo of your red stuff and the red stuff behind? Would that bother you?”

    He grinned. He looked at the bunch of marigolds and bouquet of red rubber gloves and turned to see that behind him, now that the intervening stalls had folded away, the scarlet florals of a fashion stall made another layer of colour. “The red stuff, and the red stuff behind,” he said. “Spoken like a true photographer.”

    I was rummaging in my bag. “Yeah the professional terminology, eh?” I made a dozen photographs with people swiping by obligingly as my coloured-cotton, human scenery. Showed him the last and most successful shot. We wished each other a good week with enormous cordiality and I had the feeling we both would have liked to have given up a hug. On the narrow, shaded road outside the markets I wobbled and nearly fell as a car overtook me within an arm’s length. He accelerated to pass me, even though the standing traffic was banked at the traffic lights metres ahead. When he stopped I swooped round onto his driver’s side and stopped, and spoke to the guy through his unwound window. “Excuse me, Sir. There’s a new law, you have to stay a metre and a half away from the nearest bike, because it’s much safer. Thanks!” And I patted his windowsill familiarly, patronisingly, and pedalled off. It feels good to be back on the bike. But it wouldn’t feel good to be forever extinguished and flattened like a pizza on asphalt because some guy with “fat eggs” as they call it in German wanted to prove he could escape my hand-built speed.

  • this cat the sun

    I think this cat’s favourite person is the sun. She believes everything he tells her and is willing to let him whisper into her belly and long ears for hours. I don’t think she realises he is distant, to her he is close. And I don’t believe she cares that he sprawls his favours indiscriminately. He is her sun and that’s all that matters here.

  • 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!