Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: gentrification

  • buy for me

    Young, scruffy, insouciant Indian boy is walking by the greasy canal with his parents. Evidently he’s been showing them Berlin. Lifting his shapeless hand in a vague gesture towards the old, carved terraces he says:

    If I were ever rich –

    the slight rush of his r’s making it clear he quite expects this to happen, doesn’t expect it to be all that difficult –

    and they pass on, his parents well-heeled and looking rather bored as though Berlin in its filthy grey boilersuit does not impress them, barely glancing at the costly apartment houses he has chosen out for them to buy for him.

  • nasally responsible

    On the subway I sat down next to a guy who was remarkably good looking. Tall and well set up, he sat at his ease, one leg crossed over the other and his knee splayed. I glanced sideways at him as I got my work out of my bag: Mmm, cute! Well dressed, too, in an unfussy way. Ah well.

    Next moment a movement had made me look up. There was his index finger, earnestly engaged in a twirling wiping motion, sunk in the nostril nearest to me down to its second joint. He wasn’t just foraging around in there, either: he was after something specific. He found that something and drew it out and rolled it. I felt myself stiffen and flinch. Was this man about to engage the public flick? I was right in his path. He had not glanced up, he was reading. Oh god. Then he did something far worse – and unconscious, and clearly habitual – he stuck his hand under the raised seat of his trousers and wiped his fingers onto the cloth under his thigh.

    Without planning to I had cried out, “No!” I gathered my stuff and struggled to stand. The train had taken off and was rattling through the old tunnels so fast it was hard to get past the vortex of our own movement. Gathering my long umbrella, gloves, hat, scarf, notebook, and pen I got clear of the long bench and began to walk in comical slow motion away from this beast, this monster, this person who behaves as though we none of us exist around him and he is disporting himself in the playground of his own world alone. I was crying with laughter and disgust. The train seemed to grow more crowded as I plunged slowly down, curled forward with effort, swaying at every corner, and I found a ‘sit place’ as Germans call it between a Turkish woman shrouded in her scarf and a young African man sprawled around his phone. Both of them contracted themselves very slightly, out of habit, to make way for the arrival of a fresh human. Thank you, Germany.

  • 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.”

  • rainy childs

    Berlin children are adorable when it rains. I came upon a flock of them, holding hands in pairs and stopped dead at a cobbled intersection wearing bright and varied rainslicks and little hoods. In the winter one sees them bundled in snowsuits, a hundred cossetted little snowmen. Their mamas and papas dress them in primary colours, bold patterns, polka dots. I drew myself and my wet bicycle relictantly away from the tiny plastic-coated crowd and found on the next street a tiny boy doused in yellow mackintosh and giant green boots, wheeling very carefully his wooden walk-bike through every single puddle.

  • everywanna’s an artist

    Giggling to myself at what seems a very typical Berlin expatriate conversation I just passed. American accent. Eight uses of “I/my” within two sentences. One “I need to find,” one “animation,” one “my Dad.” Everywanna’s an artist. Hey I just made that up.

    This week life has handed me lemons & I’ve made lemonade. Actually life didn’t hand me the lemons, I had to go out and buy them but on the Turkish markets they were very inexpensive. We’re having an unaccustomed heatwave in Berlin & das Limo tut gut. The tart citrus and slight sweetness seem to me so unsubtly symbolic, so refreshing, so true.

  • the father & son skateboards

    Bearded guy walking past rather fast along the cobbles holding his cell phone up to type rapidly, with a sprig of green clutched in his other hand, at chest height. As he walks he types and as he types he keeps glancing over at the little torn-off sprout – it’s clear this green is what is informing his flow of ideas this fine morning. I guess he is describing it but can’t shake the sweet thought that it is somehow dictating to him: a poem, a song.

    This street is crowded with ice cream shops which make their own blends onsite. “The surest sign of gentrification,” said boyf as we were queuing in the sunshine to choose between matcha (green tea ice cream) and white chocolate with parmesan. When I first moved in, was it only last week? a man walked past with his skateboarding little son. The father had a skateboard of his own clutched under his free arm and was holding the little boy’s hand. As I watched, the man dropped his boy’s hand, dropped his own much smaller board to the ground, and hopped on. From behind, they were unmistakeably linked: little boy in colourful t-shirt covered with tiny dinosaurs, and drab pants; daddy wearing his own groovy colourful t-shirt (covered in Donald Ducks) and khakis. They set off together, paddling solemnly, right down the middle of the pavement, wearing their genes.

  • hipsteroid rage

    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.

    H2O HoL hipster shroom