Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: city life

  • story about an artist

    In my twenties I worked at the front desk of the Queensland Art Gallery for a while. It is huge and immaculate and rather hushed. One day an old man came in, wizened and bent. He approached the island of our desk across the marble floor.

    “This the art gallery?”

    Yes, I said. His hands were trembling and his fingers seamed with dirt.

    He had come down from the country on the bus: twelve hours. He set a bag down on the counter and began to open it very slowly. He said, “Got a painting for youse.”

    He unrolled a canvas and showed it to me. The painting seemed to me pretty awful but his courage and his straightforward, honest presumption moved me to tears. He’s a Queenslander, this is his art, this is the Queensland Art Gallery – why shouldn’t he bring it in here and offer to hang it? It made sense.

    I was too gauche to know how to deal with him and his imminent and crushing disappointment. I thought he might never have shown his work to anyone before. He had come all the way down here to make a fool out of himself – a noble, exemplary fool – and in doing so, he exposed the far greater foolishness of our urbanity, our conformity, our stupid ladders and pretentious mores. I saw all of this in an instant and it filled my sore heart with heat. I picked up the phone and called a kindly woman who worked in acquisitions, who had sometimes chatted with me in the lifts. I asked her to come down and see him. I hope she may have taken him out for coffee and talked with him about his work. I hope she encouraged him to paint more. I have often thought about this man and his simple human courage, his artist’s heart. He might be dead now and it’s possible his paintings may all have been thrown away.

  • a happy visitor

    My parents have a spare room which they have been eager to put to use as Dad’s medical expenses mount, so I offered to manage it for them as an Airbnb listing. Airbnb has been so problematic in rapidly gentrifying areas of Berlin that it’s actually been outlawed: developers were buying up whole buildings and certain streets became so filled with short term pleasure seeking tourists it was impossible for residents to find homes. However in a context like Brisbane, filled with overlarge houses where older people like my parents want to continue to live independently, it seems to me one of the best uses of the internet. Meanwhile Berliners have been making new arrivals from Syria welcome using an innovative ‘Airbnb for refugees’ set up by two local men. You can register your spare room and the government, who are not much addicted to locking up children and families offshore in tropical death camps, cover the rent so that a new family can settle in.

    This is the review left this morning by our most recent visitor, who arrived jetlagged and disoriented off an 18 hour flight from Shanghai. She is here to study for two years. I feel good to know we have welcomed someone on first arriving in a brand new country and brand new climate, and I love knowing that people can experience each other, as strangers, through this medium and can build trust. We stayed with an Egyptian family in the Bronx last October and their hospitable kindness was transformative of our visit. In this case the tiny errors in my guest’s English just make me love her the more.

    “This was the first week I came to Brisbane. I really love the house Cathoel offered. She is really a patient and warmhearted people and can offer everything I need when I live here. The room is tidy cosy and quiet which offers me a perfect circumstance to have a good rest and the Chinese decorative style impressed me a lot. The transport is convenient and easy to buy commodities nearby. All in all, it is really a wisdom choice for me to choose Cathoel’s house. Living here for a week was enjoyable experience for me.”

  • New York is hard to write about

    New York is hard to write about. There’s so much of it and it keeps changing. So much human landscape, people breathing, tucking their feet. And the streets, where it lives, with this endless panorama. The feeling of spectacle and the dense sharp wild feeling of endless participation. The relating to the city in itself, a creature of its own. I have every day many tiny full ripe conversations with strangers on subways, in pharmacies (they sell vitamins shaped like Darth Vader’s head!), in bookstores. Sometimes we talk for a little while, like the Hispanic man with his huge happy smile on the way to Yankee Stadium with his kid, his young pretty wife who spoke up now and then “when there was least danger of it being heard,” his two mates who were African American. I love the Bronx-bound trains where racial normality prevails, exposing the patronising lie of that persistent white-privilege word ‘minority.’ He held up the flattened round ball of black when I asked about it, turning it to show that its two steel antennae were its little legs. “I thought it was an alien,” I told him, pointing, “I thought maybe it was your little pet.” “It’s a speaker,” he told me, turning it upright on the grimy floor to show. “When we get there, we going to listen to some music. My little girl loves it.”

    Oftentimes when you have some exchange with a New Yorker you will both turn away afterward, so as to show – or so I think – that there is no harm, no foul, that we are both not crazy people, the city has not unhinged us and there is no intent to latch on and keep talking once the moment’s gone. You might both say, See you later, when one of you climbs out, and I always find that beautiful and moving. And how at the checkout at the grocery store it is normal, it’s friendly, to stand and chat whilst buying but if I were to stand another five minutes, chatting on as the next customer piled their bags, I would become instantly a freaky aberration. All that openness and friendliness now has an agenda: we recoil. And in fact that friendliness and openness often does have an agenda: I want all beings to be happy. That is my secret and now it’s out.

    We walked clear up the centre of Grand Central Park, as my German-speaking companion calls it, til we reached the tiny walled gardens of the Conservatory Garden by East 104th Street. There is a lily pond there where water lilies bloom in threes: pink, and hydrangea blue, and a strange candling white. Fish churn under the water now and then and two gentlemen who bought them, from a shop in Chinatown, and who have wondered, they tell us, every year what to do with the koi when the pond is drained for winter (“they can survive underneath the ice”) stand feeding them, occasionally, lavishly, from a crinkling foil bag that says colour enhancing preparation. This whole day is colour enhanced, to me: I have in my hand the middling growth of a breastplate I’m building on a scarlet leaf that was just lying on the path by the lake, splendidly maple-pointed, and every time I find another blue or purpling spray of berries, a tiny lavender or soft pink flower, I pluck it (“darf ich?”) and add the stem to my thumbsward of stems. The day is purple and blue like a beautiful bruise. The grey winter days have cleared away and we are out, everyone is out, we’re all bleeding into each other in the sun. We are urban animals, we can survive under the ice. The beautiful young Black prince staring at his black sneakers on the subway, wearing his trackpants as though they were a suit, who held himself tensely waiting for the demand when I said, Excuse me. You have such a beautiful, striking face. I think – if you were to go into a really good quality modelling agency in Manhattan – they might be very excited about you. Then I turned away to my friend, to show him this is not a clumsy pick up, the agenda is transparent and shown. My friend said afterwards, casually, relieving me, “That man was smiling so much to himself all the rest of the ride. What did you say to him?” My first time in New York, scared and determined in 2011, I spoke to a tiny white-haired lady on the Harlem bus. This was my first foray into Madison Avenue and the expense had exhausted me. The legions of unhappy looking children, presaging an article I read later online which said How to Tell if Your Child is Spoilt. Question one read: do they find it impossible to be happy? When I climbed on the bus, drawn by the enchanting name Harlem, its juicy community sound, its soft music, this tiny lady was sitting opposite. I said, You’re so beautiful! And she looked startled, to my surprise. “No one’s ever told me that before,” she said. I said, “What? I would have thought people would have been telling you, all your life. You are a beautiful woman.” We gazed at each other til we both had tears in our eyes. I have thought of that lady and her seventy years’ bloom. I have wondered what kind of fears lurk in the hearts of men and families, that we cannot say to a beautiful woman, or man, this is your just tribute.

     

     

  • the wind was rising

    “The wind was rising, so I went to the wood. It lies south of the city, a mile from my home: a narrow, nameless fragment of beechwood, topping a shallow hill. I walked there, following streets to the city’s fringe, and then field-edge paths through hedgerows of hawthorn and hazel.

    “Rooks haggled in the air above the trees. The sky was a bright cold blue, fading to milk at its edges. From a quarter of a mile away, I could hear the noise of the wood in the wind: a soft marine roar. It was the immense compound noise of friction – of leaf fretting on leaf, and branch rubbing on branch.

    “[…] Anyone who lives in a city will know the feeling of having been there too long. The gorge-vision that streets imprint on us, the sense of blockage, the longing for surfaces other than glass, brick, concrete and tarmac. […] I felt a sharp need to leave Cambridge, to reach somewhere remote, where starlight fell clearly, where the wind could blow upon me from its thirty-six directions, and where the evidence of human presence was minimal or absent. Far north or far west; for to my mind this was where wildness survived, if it survived anywhere at all.

    “[In 1990] the American author William Least-Heat Moon described Britain as ‘a tidy garden of a toy realm where there’s almost no real wilderness left and absolutely no memory of it. Where the woods are denatured plantings. The English, the Europeans, are too far from the wild. That’s the difference between them and us.’”

    ~ Robert Macfarlane, opening The Wild Places

  • love in public

    I saw two girls, two women, long-haired and standing round bags, close together on the subway and talking American. The train jolted round a corner and the girl nearer me fell against her lover as if accidentally, snatching a kiss as she fell. The lover was displeased, detached herself, stood gazing out at the striped blackness underground. I supposed that the kisser maybe felt, hey we are so far from home, we are safe here, and nobody knows us. I supposed the kissee felt, now: none of that, people are looking, we’re in public, we’ve got to lock it down.

    I saw two men, two boys, in their middle-age running a bubble stall from a bucket on the crowded square. It is Saturday night and everybody is out. The incredible din. The shrieks and the rumble. A high bus goes past with no lid on its upper storey, crammed with tourists taking pictures who crane as their bus turns a corner then turn their backs, gazing ahead as though now none of this any more even exists for them. The bubble venders are busking, they have two long poles joined by a slack rope and a slightly shorter string, so that when they have dipped their poles and pulled them out and separate them slightly, one string pulls tight and the bubble forms and drifts up into the spangling dark. They must have newly learned this skill and are not very good at it. In between they sneak gasps off each other’s cigarette and the younger one resumes an endless phone call that has now been going for half an hour. I saw one family after another stop to take advantage of the play, their little children grasping after the bubbles to make them sprinkle into rain and the two men gallantly entertaining, letting each child take a turn on the poles, not even screwing up their faces when one after another the families left again, throwing no coins in their yellow hat.

    I saw three girls in their teens chase a boy clear across the square and they were shouting at him, something, all of them laughing, the boy bolted over and collapsed at my feet as the three of them pelted on him and tore him down. They had him there on the stones screaming for mercy, his laugh interrupting him: he asked me for help in Spanish but I said, No, indeed, in English: You probably deserve it, I am going to sit here and take your picture. And I did and the old man in green on the table behind met my eye and we both smiled, in our different languages, a rueful smile. I saw Spring arrive, suddenly it seems across the span of only three or four days; all the delicate trees along the walkways are blooming and shimmering in the light.

  • 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.

  • comfort reading in a world gone wrong

    My comfort reading is romances and children’s literature from the 50s, 60s, and 70s. What I find comforting is that it describes a world I can recognise, whereas the world outside my door feels oftentimes too jarring to be borne. What’s disorienting about it is what’s sprouted and what has been lost. Today I read a novel written by Pamela Whitlock (15) and Katharine Hull (16) and which they sent, with temerity, to Arthur Ransome as he was their favourite author. Ransome fell in love and persuaded Jonathan Cape to publish it. Like most English children’s stories of the time – this one published 1937 – it is the story of wealthy, bored white children on holidays who seek adventure. The world they move in, on ponies and by bicycle, on foot and occasionally by boat, rises off the page crackling and ripe. There is more life in the world then than there is now. “As she dashed through the heather, furry-tailed rabbits scuttled from their earthworks and green lizards slunk from beneath rocks and slid into patches of sparse grass. Kestrels and hawks winged ceaselessly to and fro in the vast sky. Jennifer ran on and reached a pile of boulders. (…) Where was the herd of wild ponies?”

    I don’t know how to put out my hand to the world I so loved and which seems to be slipping, unadvertised and increasingly silent, into liquid and so down the drain. On the way to the grocery store and back I pass people sitting staring into their phones. That lost world must be somehow captured in there, or seem to be, as the wild ocean can seem to be present in large round windows in a rich man’s office wall. Not perhaps its shimmering life and deep sweet sweating intensity, but merely its unpredictable sameness, its free-running ever-altered landscape, its uncontainable never to be urbanised tribal sense of joy and discovery. I miss that and I want to find it outside my computer screen, a porthole on a world now merely mythical.

  • Wednesday afternoon in the Valley

    Two girls in high heels and tiny skirts chatting outside Eye Candy peep show. A dishevelled guy lying supine in the bus stop bench with his arm slung negligently over the side, as comfortable as if he were in his bath. Guy with a ginger beard that starts outside his face, threading it thoughtfully between his fingers in two skeins while his earnest friend tells him something seriously, endlessly.

    Driver of a dull gold off-roader, stopped across a pedestrian crossing and mouthing “Ah, come ON!” to people who cross, with the lights, in front of him. The sharp calls of tropical birds, the sun pouring over everything. The old fig tree whose high-walled, circuitous roots resemble the coils of some fire-breathing cave creature. Little boy with his father’s smartphone taking a photo of the orange Lamborghini in the display room window. The old man who closes his door on a dim apartment where the fridge is right in the front entrance. Girl in racing togs, wrapped in a damp maroon towel, who is walking home from the Valley Pool, her feet bare and her hair wet, the muscles of her back gleaming.

  • bushel of sanity

    When I walk downhill carrying my computer and the old man sitting underneath the tree nods when I say, marvelling, There’s a lovely butterfly clinging to the underside of that hedge, brown one, just hanging there, and he says, Yeah, they coming round, this time of year, I feel like there is sanity in the world, humanity, generosity, kindliness, sense. When I offer my handful of deep pink lillypillies to the girl with the blond mop who makes my coffee and she has lived in Brisbane all her life and had never heard of nor even seen them, and makes me eat one before she will try, I feel like we are building ourselves a hell in which no one can be happy and everyone addicted to their gaming, shows, anti-depressants, painkillers, grog, psychotic energy drinks, caffeine and sugar and fat, and that we have dragged everything living under this falling cliff face with us – all is lost – there can never be any kind of kind world again except what some few shivering survivors might build, round a fire lit in an old fat 1990s television case, as the waters around them surge with bodies and trash.

    The loss is most likely not so cleanly apocalyptic as that, it is rather a creeping, board-meeting, bargain-hunting thing. Since my childhood so much beautiful is gone. We live as though we have forgotten. I remember when you set out for a walk and did not take your phone along: you were untraceable, in the elements; you had stepped into the wild and imagination lit from tree to tree and trundled like an old monkey behind you. But the blond girl in the coffee shop obligingly replays the song that was finishing splendidly when I came in, she is excited, “It’s my favourite song at the moment,” and I read down the sides of their stacked takeaway cups a series of excerpts of someone’s writing, and the clattering jackhammers chatter in the treetops as another giant building is assembled down the street, I can draw no conclusions about anything and I too know by font three thousand different brand names and recognise only a few hundred kinds of plants. The same scarlet beetle drops on my keyboard as greeted me last time, its yellow feelers waving like stalks of pollen in the air, sensing things I cannot know and having no urge I guess to check its emails, write back to anyone, wonder what it is really doing with its life or order more coffee. I feel so hollow inside and so strangely, ridiculously thankful this creature is warming its thin case of body on the quiet warmth of my machine.