Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: festival

  • a homemade flower festival

    A woman in my neighbourhood has put up little signs all round the flower gardens in our local park. Her signs are handwritten, but laminated.

    “INVITATION TO THE FLOWER FESTIVAL, JUNE 16. Yeah maybe ‘festival’ is somewhat high flown. But I will bake a cake and hand a slice of it to everyone who feels themselves somehow connected to these plants and who wants to come by. There have been so many lovely engagements and so much enabling mutual assistance taking place locally, I would really love to offer my friends an impression of it all. And in case we haven’t yet met, then this will provide us an opportunity.”

    She writes a smily face, in her own handwriting.

    “It would be practical, if youse (the informal German you) would bring something to sit on and some stuff that goes with cake eating and coffee drinking. I’ll be glad if you come along!”

    Flowerbeds in Berlin are always overgrown, because the city is broke and there’s no money to pay people in fluorescent vests to destroy our every Sunday with leafblowers. Nearby, even more overgrown and underkempt, a tiny meadow has evolved where consistent and assiduous neglect year after year has allowed all the native flowers and butterflies to come back.

    On the main road, when I reach it, a man with a ZZ Top beard has settled himself and his paunch next to my favourite seat outside the writing cafe. He turns the pages of his newspaper with noisy harrumphs. We exchange a few words. “I’m going inside to order,” I tell him, as Berliners do, “are you here a few more minutes?”

    The informal ‘you.’

    “Then would you mind keeping an eye on my stuff?”

    “Either that,” he says, “or I’ll be gone, with your little red rucksack,” and he laughs, and I laugh, as I’m heading inside where it is shady and the bartender on his stool is reading Camus, in French.

  • riverfeier

    Saturday night festival of explosions, fireworks and low-flying fighter jets scamming the river. I was standing behind five dark rows of people. Festive. Restive. Everybody chatting. The city stood lit up behind its bridge, then the fireworks started. Without hesitation the crowd bloomed like a field of poppies, dozens of tiny, high-held screens. Disbelieving, I looked around. Everywhere people were holding up their phones at arm’s length like you would hold a small child to show them a marching band. It was impossible to watch the world without seeing it onscreen and multiplied, as though we were standing in a broadcast instead of our lives. A girl near me held up her phone for so long that when the fireworks died the blokes behind her asked, “Aren’t your arms getting tired?” She tucked the screen in to her chest and began seamlessly typing and scrolling. No pause. “Imagine there’s no heaven,” I thought. “There was, and there still is, but who cares.” Watching her mouth tuck itself in at the corner I translated, out of the dim bitterness of my heart: At Riverfire. Amazeballs, you shd see it. Luv u Brisbane.

  • a doll, soused

    In my pajamas at 6pm: pajamas are my favourite clothes. The phone rings. It’s a woman I spent a recent evening immersed in, such kinship, a friend who’s an acquaintance, we hadn’t seen each other for fifteen years. We used once to live in the same tiny village, an island in the centre of town. “I’ve just scored free tickets for A Doll’s House, it starts at 6.30, I can pick you up on my way.” “I’m in my pajamas.” “Or you could meet me there.” So I dive through the shower and go.

    La Boite is in a playground of festival furniture, large swings built from slabs of ply painted black, projections onto a huge white screen, an outdoors bar. Under the stars. Too late arriving to be let in for the first act I take my ticket and wander. “Go up the back and read the secrets people have posted,” the lovely usher tells me in a whisper, “you can write your own secrets on a typewriter, get your nails done, get your palm read.” My friend has disappeared and gone inside. I buy a glass of wine in the pallet bar and carry it over to the palm-reading shed and read the wall. Some of the secrets are so lurid surely they must have been confected for the occasion – I can’t believe such a dark confluence of dramas has wandered past this tent, during the week of this festival. It’s my turn to get my palm read. I hold my hand out. “My name,” says the beautiful man in a top hat, “is Tawdry Heartburn.”

    The greatest drag name in all the world. He flexes his fingers round mine and asks questions. Strong, long thumb: do you like standing alone? Emotion line is deep in your palm – Oh, I know, I say – and it runs straight up this finger, the seam of intuition. Broad-handed people are across lots of areas of life. “It may be hard to finesse so many skills.” He drops his voice and confides something of his own. All the stars pricking their way across the roof of this white vinyl tent stand to attention like satellite dishes, I imagine, flowers in the dark sea of night. Salt sea polyps.

    Afterwards he draws out of his holster round the forearm, black leather, a brand-new fresh emery board. On the back is stamped his website name: this is his card. I go over to the theatre and go in. The stage is made from pallets and the second act is starting. My friend and I take seats right in front, where we can see, and be shouted over by the five actors who have each dyed their hair some lambent colour, as Ibsen insisted.

    Did Ibsen really write this way, a string of almost uninterrupted, seamlessly joined cliche? “They’ve rewritten it a bit,” my friend confides, in a whisper, and I whisper back, “Lord, I hate the theatre.” But the game comes down darkly upon us and snatches us away. At the high point where the spare actors rush out of the wings and turn the stage round like a carousel, breath is caught, time is hung. Then in the interval, climbing our way out of the palace of dark attention, I look back and see the immediate blue glow of a dozen screens. Something has happened on facebook, on twitter, on email while I’ve been gone. I’ll stand and suck my thumb, smallest and dearest of my own limbs. I will, I do.

    The music at the end is dense and scoring. It has a three/four beat behind four/four that drives it like a wagon. I stand up with everybody, groping our way back to our feet. Behind me is a face I’ve not seen since New York, a pianist who played on my album. We stand exclaiming, his date is impatient, I turn away and go over to the swing. My friend has gone to have her palm read, she says: I must go meet Tawdry. You will love her, I predict, fearlessly psychic now my palm is read. I lie full-length on the biggest swing under the scaffolding and let my heart hum its own earworm melody, unable to predict the night, sweet and buoyant waiting for the drive home, ready to greet myself, itching for paper, for a typewriter, a studio, for all New York. And Brisbane shines at night, that’s when it’s best and beautiful. Thanks Ibsen for the enduring ideas. Thanks West End for the villagers. I am tired and I drive carefully, the lion on my steering wheel yawns at me all the way home.

     

  • people’s republic of woodford

    Woodford. What I forgot is that it is less of a festival, more of a place. Wherever you go and whomever you see, the valley grounds hold everyone up to the sky and in the natural amphitheatre right up back the venerable trees stand watch. It must be ten years since I was there, the farm is becoming a forest. I looked for the three trees I have planted and could not, as ever, recognize them though I know which creek they bed. People streamed past dressed as butterflies, faeries, warlocks, saggy pyjama case bears, acrobats. A girl in a hammock turned her head and smiled the slowest smile. Children who had just learned a skill in a workshop busked it. Last time I was on this land was for the Dreaming, a festival of indigenous cultures from around the world. That was in winter and only lasted a few seasons of massive fire pits attended by volunteers. My MCing friend said It’s a good day to come, the dust has settled yet it’s not actually raining. At the gate I was nervous, a reflex response from the old days when I always had to perform. This was my first festival as a punter. The ease! We saw in the year on a hillside opposite a booming stage spilling execrable local dub (“all the people are here & the people are grooving, we got the music and the music is soothing”) and then, because someone had decided they would book a Hogmanay theme, blithering Scottish dance music. I have inherited Scottish blood but musically, no Scottish soul. It struck me as comical: imagine the Scottish composers composing this music: they’d have been saying to themselves, Well, we’ve got the solid wall of screeching bagpipes. But it’s just not screechy enough. I know! Let’s add in a screechy fiddle or two! And wait, we can also have screeching penny whistles. It’ll be magic!

    Quiet on the hillside soaking in the presence of the large, grave, lit trees I was glad when a girl came on and announced, “I’m here to calm you down.” She sang a lovely slow ballad and then everybody across the whole site lit candles and stood or sat together in a three minutes’ silence. I stared into my candle and cried, in silence. The wax burned down leaving little fiery blobs on my palm and I peeled them off, in silence. The flickering silence swept all down the hill and you could hear and more, feel it extended over everybody, not one person broke trust to bellow Happy New Year, everybody “set their intention” as the girl handing out tiny turreted birthday candles had advised and I could feel the piety, the wishes of a dozen thousand all resembling one another. Afterwards the band invited yet more people on stage and in front everybody danced. The set-up between the acts was filled with tap-dancers. Body percussionists led the crowd: “Peace and rhythms!” A bare-chested boy tumbled down the hill turning somersault after somersault. A man climbed up past us, almost bent double from the gradient, dressed in a suit made of light bulbs. Five girls stripped off their clothes and danced naked under the new moon, repelling with raised hands the lit LED necklaces with which an infatuated boy wanted to garland them. The grass was filled with tiny creatures biting and climbing, we were barefoot like the moon. The t-shirt I coveted on a bamboo stall had a tiny figure in silhouette standing with a walking stock, head thrown back, among the giant trees that here surrounded us like immense quiet candles and its legend ran along the ground, legend like a snake, Respect Your Elders. Coming down from a noisy dawn in a noisy trail of irreverent pilgrims we rounded a corner and a really drunk man coming uphill said, beholding our two great heights (“Oh look! A giant!”), “Oh. Wow.” Then he folded us into a big drunken hug, a kind of Come here, you, and the three of us murmured into each other’s shoulders “Happy New Year. Yes, You too. Have a good one. Have a great one.”