Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: cafe

between the fingers of Fidel Castro

I know an eighty-year-old cafe where the day passes smooth and coiling as molasses poured out of a dented tin. I sit in the smokers’ room, not because I smoke but because of the candlelight and conversation. Today I stopped at an antiquarian bookshop that has trestle tables out front. A recent conversation reminded me I had never yet read Machiavelli’s The Prince. The bookseller had two copies, an Everyman and a Penguin; two different translators; a quick skim decided me I would buy both, and I carried them to my favourite table and curled up there, thinking if I read these two versions both at once, maybe I’ll be able to triangulate.

I read very slowly, laying each book face down at the end of a chapter and taking up its companion. Three tall, lanky, and very good-looking men came through in waterproof jackets, carrying boxes and boxes of lettuce and potatoes. Afterwards they sat down at a small table under the pastel portrait of Fidel Castro (cigar) and drank coffee and argued for over an hour. I tried something new off the menu: it’s German food, everything is new. Fidel Castro’s fingers resembled an abstract of a human hand carved from potato. Everything carved from potato. After the War Berliners relied on an American Rosinenbomber (the “raisin bomber”) dropping boxes of foodstuffs and dug up the forest called Tiergarten in order to sow vegetables. I thought of the various cafes I know in Brisbane and wondered how it will feel to adjust. The temperature has plummeted, and isn’t that a most marvellous word: like a fruit yet unripened on the branch, that finally gives in and plunges to the ground. Last night returning from a long forest hike it was perishing, four degrees. I ate my Weisswurst and Brezel and thought about the differences between reading in a cafe full of other people reading, and the dinner experience of last night, in an unreconstituted jazz and blues pub, where the cute barkeep turned down his infestation of immemorial blues and turned on a large white roped-up screen. Oh, God: Tatort. The awful detective show Germans watch as Sunday religion. Somehow the roomful of unstirring people watching a fourteen-year-old girl’s character get raped – the oldest man put his head into his hand, others watched unmoved – was so blinding and so effing awful, we got up and left. That household full of habitual viewers sharing the dirty hot tub of popular TV had somehow less in common than the people crouched in corners at my newly beloved red checked clothed cafe: reading newspapers or, in three cases, books, we were each of us turned away from our commonality but yet reminded me of swimmers foraging deep in the saltiest water, where the sunshine is sweet, where the strands of warmer and colder waters pass over one’s legs caressingly and there is always something further to be discovered. In only the one ocean, in always the one sea.

November 20, 2013
cafe calm

It was breathlessly hot. Almost every inch of Berlin seems to be paved. I went out with a friend who has a dog. The cafe we found has three guardian trees, sentinels of sensibility on a long glaring featureless street. The dog flung himself onto the shaded pavement. The cafe owner brought him a basin of water. He brought us menus written on little lined notebooks, with pictures of writers pasted inside. They made perfect coffee and perfect eggs. The owner, a motherly, middle-aged gay man in a blue gingham shirt, came over and said, holding up two biscuits between his thumb and forefinger, “And is my little friend allowed to have something to eat?” He crouched by the dog and stroked his head, offering the crunchy treats coaxingly. The awning over our heads was caramel-coloured and had strings of golden lights looped underneath. The tables had little sprouting pots of flowers on them and those glass sugar dispensers with a tilted steel nipple like round fat ducklings. We gazed up and down the street, falling into silence, stunned by this unusual heat. I told my companion, cafes save my life every week. What would this street be without this oasis? A bleak, suburban hopelessness. Cafes give the feeling that human civilization has been for something. They collect up the beauties of what we have made. This lantern, this music, this length of printed cloth, this sturdy tumbler just right for the grasp. From a cafe vantage point one can sit and look out. One gazes on the world passing ceaselessly, in starts and spurts, and says, Aye. So it is. Such is life. This is us. Here we are. It’s a funny old world. And so it goes.

July 29, 2013
a bowl of apples

Cafe I used to work in, in Berlin, had sometimes a dozen Apple computers (mine included) lined apple to apple, cheek to cheek across the counters. People forget ‘branded’ is what they used to do to the rumps of cattle. To show they are *owned by somebody*. We think it means, “Now I Own This.”

‘Maverick’, incidentally, comes from the name of the one guy who refused to burn brands into his cattle. So when a steer turned up who had no sign of ownership, they knew: one’s a maverick. But for all those who so proudly claim the term: still means you are somebody’s property. It’s just that the chains are invisible.

July 10, 2013
pearl-sheaves

Ran across the same little punk dog we’d met with last week, a scruffy little dude with green dye in his hair. His name is Schnitzel. I know this because he came scampering up the street and this long knotted rope of a woman, with five colours in her hair and a goodly stomp on her, came bawling after him, “Schnitzel! Schnit-ZEL!!” “Typical punker name,” my friend told me, casually. Really? Schnitzel?

We went to a new place, new to me, for a breakfast roll. “Let’s go to the Greek place,” he said. It’s a spacious, cool, shadowy deli, like an old-fashioned larder keeping its cool via the stone walls and not through the agency of frigid, piped gas. The proprietor Yannis has large colour photos of himself all over the walls, photos he says his customers have taken. Yannis frowning, Yannis carving meat, Yannis folding his arms. He has a wall of certificates for his olive oils. He sells spicy sauces brewed in this neighbourhood, and handmade Greek products with beautiful packaging: a tea made from ginger, mint, saffron, and licorice root. Watching him tenderly sloshing fresh, grassy-green olive oil on our bread and shaving a flapping slice of ham from the hock in his glass cabinet I feel filled with optimism and a sense of slow, rising well-being. Surely we can support small adventurous businesses whose response to a troubled economy is: I will make teas. Surely we can eat fresher, walk on the grass until we find a shady spot to sit, live longer. A dozen dogs tumble and writhe in the unkempt park whose waving dandelions and delicate pearl-sheaves of grass seed remind my lounging friend of “a punk hairstyle. This is how you can see this city has no money.” “It’s even green,” I say, remembering the little scamp Schnitzel. The arse of my dungarees slowly dampens on the dark, damp soil. It rained yesterday. The sun comes and goes like bees. Possibly wind sifting through high trees is my most beloved sound on this half-paved green earth. Wind in the trees, sun in a twitching lace like glass-slippered waves, waving green grasses and the white clouds still passing.

June 10, 2013
whiskey sour

Dear God, if there is a god. Save my soul, if I have a soul. Today grew miserable and I cannot say why. It was silly really. Guy in a cafe was rude. So rude! We grew happy again. The way bean stalks grow beans. Who cares about him. Anyway I set out on some work I have put off a long long time. Perusing old photographs for a publishing project. It took ages. Was frustrating. How unhappy I was, way back then. Finally I took off my computer and turned to my host and one-room housemate, who is also the man I like, and we had a blazing dark anchor lightbulb row. It didn’t make any sense. I hated him for being him he hated me for being me. God, we were furious. I felt like hurling things. I wanted to hurt someone. Not injure them but hurt them. I stormed out, fuck you. He had thrown my suitcase ineinander and stowed it by the door, Get Out~! I found a bar a few doors down. Ich was the only customer. Leaving, three hours later, I hugged across the bar the keep and told him, I was so unhappy when I came in here! Yeah, he said. I know. Anyway at first I asked him could he make me something strong, some kind of cocktail. Maybe something old-fashioned. Maybe a whiskey sour, he said. Sure, I said. I had three of those, then four, then five, Kai (the barkeep) showed me the postcards of his uncanny, dreamlike horse portraits, he used to sing in a band but now more photography is the dream. In his bar the lights were low-low and the music song by song. I think of you Brisbane. I think of you all the stupid men I have loved. Evolution, evolution. A third person came in, a “Handwerker” in heating whose name was Robert. I asked, was this the kind of song you like was that. How was it when the Wall came down. God, it’s ridiculous, we loved each other. Then I spilled out onto the street, I paid with all my hackneyed coins some of which are from Denmark and some Swiss and the rest, we promised we would look up one another’s blogs – cos we are modern – and I came home so enlightened with drunkenness that I just embraced my daft would you agh! lovely loving roommate and all is well, a well of wells, we are one Leute and I am here in Berlin the city which almost killed me and das Kiez, the neighbourhood, that saved my life.

June 9, 2013
while it lasts

One thing I love about Germany is that you can find local bakeries who’ll treat you like diners in a restaurant. You can choose a bread roll filled with lettuce and cheese, or raw mince and onion (“builders’ marmalade”), or some kind of iridescent preserved meat with cucumber, and order a cup of tea and have it all brought to your table outdoors with knives and forks and napkins and not pay until you leave. You can sit under the bower of greenery and watch a skinny mother with a pram and a cigarette flirt with the shaven-headed dude who just leveled a trigger finger at a passing flock of teenagers. One of the teenagers says to her friend, “Do we look like school students?” Yes, you do. Enjoy it while it lasts!

June 9, 2013
beats like butter, baby

Cavernous cafe in Berlin during the changeover period from Friday afternoon caff to Friday night bar. The music is gradually speeding up and the staff become flirtier, including with each other. People still working on their laptops are hunched with concentration, trying to get it all down. Two extremely buff men who came in with an old-fashioned upright pram have their son on their laps, spoon-feeding him. The boy is fat as butter and looks calmly round the shadowy room. In German I read in a gossip magazine how dearly Brad Pitt loves Angelina Jolie and how he was tirelessly by her side during her recent ordeal. Outside, the sun is glary-bright and like snowflakes the fluffy little seeds of some flowering tree pursue their airy way through the day. Things seem slow and sunstruck but with the glimmering promise of sex with a stranger, the inimical glamour and disillusion of city evenings. A thin guy rolls in behind his stack of pallets of soft drinks on a sack truck. A muscular guy whose muscle is running to fat pulls over blaringly in his topless black vehicle, parks at an angle and leaves the engine running with an intolerably loud and banal dance track pumping. I am thinking about running out to turn the volume down, just to piss him off. I’m drinking a milkshake with cucumber and mint. Its clear fresh milky taste pleases my body. Berliners are smokers, people walk by with their head in the clouds. The fat muscleman leaps into his car and pulls out, jerking his hand to let the taxi driver who’s had to screech to a halt know, I am going first. The taxi driver is Turkish: he stretches his mouth whimsically. His hand falls on its back like a cat. He’s relaxed. “If you want to, man. If you have to, dude.”

June 7, 2013
for quitters

I’ve a German-speaking friend who since quitting tobacco suffers terribly from grievings. ‘Grievings’ are what happens when you depend on a drug and then give it up: heroin grievings, nicotine grievings. I quit coffee in January, and today in the Lebanese shop where the machine sent out aromatic blasts and the steam collected on the rainy window like tears, I experienced coffee grievings. Coffee, you sweet sorrow, you sultry wench.

June 7, 2013
coffee breathe

I was in a strange city recently, got lost, felt overwhelmed momentarily, & needed comfort. Ducked inside a Guitar Shop to touch all the guitars. You pluck one string and wait for it slowly to come into stillness. At the back a man in a fisherman’s cap was playing a song of his own, I think, for the politely-smiling Guitar Shop man… they sat on matching, facing stools and one leaned in and one leaned back. Leaving the shop I felt just that bit more tuned in to sounds and to music, the traffic seemed rhythmic and spare, I kept hearing in the street the repeated curve-notes of a wolf whistle from somewhere high, or far away. Five times, six times, seven times, eight: was it a nerdy, somewhat serious guy who having gotten up the courage to catcall was now determined the object of his passing affection would not walk by without learning how beautiful he found her? Actually it was two college girls, leaning out of a fifth-storey window wolf-whistling their friend who was unlocking her bike oblivious in a stand of bikes downstairs, her hair wrapping itself around her in the wind. Wit-wheel! Wit-wheel! is how my ex used to spell it (and say it): Wit-wheel!

I went into a crowded little food boutique that had a whole wall of small-brew beers. They had beautiful, grotesque, weird, colourful labels. They were honey-coloured, molasses-coloured, golden, greenish, dark. I bought a chocolate wrapped in sardine-printed foil for a friend who is overcoming a phobia of fish. I went to the back of the store and picked up the brown-paper packages of whole coffee beans and held them to my face and breathed in.

May 20, 2013
allure

Went out early, the sun through my window a lure. My favourite chic but drowsy wine bar cafe was playing Billie Holiday. Unusually it was filled up today with dishevelled, sleep-drowned people. A shovel-load. I was one of them. We sat in a row sipping & pecking at our breakfasts like a mess of half-fledged birds.

March 26, 2013