Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: graffiti

  • graffiti confetti butt

    I was cycling along the river where the water meets the trees, there is a little grove there which is sacred to me and it seems to be a forest in a parallel universe. It is a dreamy Spring day, grey like the winter but unlike Winter, studded with flowers; and I had just finished all the painful difficulties for the day, spending time in the bank explaining for the fourth time, you don’t understand, my card was lost, I had already reported it and blocked the card before this handsome spending spree happened; and then on the phone crouched on a bench at the local junkie corner explaining to one debt collection agency after another: see, you don’t understand.

    Somehow or other they understood. Now all I needed do was scan and email, or photocopy and mail, the stack of documents the nice pregnant police officer had provided to me; and this two month saga during which I had spent entire half days in her company would be finally vorbei.

    So I took some time to just cycle slowly along in my billowing favourite skirt, under the trees, listening to the voices of people who were quietly chatting on the benches and one man, very beautiful and with an outstandingly strong, slender ankle cocked, cross-legged reading his book and turning a page as I passed. I saw the glimpse of his natty sock and the gleam of his wonderful shoe. I saw the girl feeding compliments to her baby in its pram, in a sultry coo, and I followed down the path a little sister and much bigger brother, cycling end to end like a tiny chain of donkeys.

    Her little legs in their candy pink zebra stripes were pumping earnestly; she barely managed to keep up on her little silver bicycle, and as I watched, the big brother, who was barely pedalling, looked back to check up on her and as he did so, he flung up his hand and opened its fist. Out flew a perfect confetti of torn up bits of leaf and as he’d intended, from her delighted squeal, the fragments fell over her and all around her and it made her happy and it made me happy.

    A few weeks back late at night I was cycling home in the dark and my mind was drawn by the voices to the cluster of English-speaking Berliners, or touris, as real Berliners – old school, German Berliners, often themselves migrants who have fled Bavaria or Cologne – sometimes contemptuously call them. Maybe they tend to be loud and expressive; maybe they have money and push the prices up; maybe sometimes ’true’ Berliners can be seen in t shirts which say Berlin ♥ You but with the ♥ struck out; or merely ‘du bist kein Berliner.’ You… are no Berliner.

    From behind me a lighted arc flew up and over and it landed in amongst this group who were talking and clinking their beers. It is a delight to young people from Barcelona, from Zurich and Copenhagen, and from Seoul, to learn they can buy beer for about a dollar and can drink it here anywhere they please, just about; when you’re done you just leave the bottles standing for some less privileged person to pick up for recycling; maybe the place feels like one great big nightclub; maybe it feels like a music festival that goes on unending and to which you need have bought no ticket and where there is no ID check. Who knows.

    So it took me some time to work out that this lighted missile flying so gently through the air like a badminton shuttlecock was in fact a lighted cigarette butt, and it had landed — I could see it — in the black hoodie crumpled at the back of one girl’s neck, they had started slowly to go, Whut? Hey… and she had turned her head, just slightly, and I could see the dense cloud of her hair and that in another second she’d have swept her curls across the lit butt and she would go up in flames.

    I was shouting, in English through sheer discombobulation: Hey! Look out! Hey! Cigarette! There, uh — there on your back, it’s just —

    Slowly the group of them gathered what had happened and she stiffened and her friend brushed his hand round the back of the neck and shook the lit thing off and then I realised that the slowly strolling trio who had now caught up with me had sent this flying in on purpose, it was a tiny form of terrorism.

    They were Turkish Berliner kids, from the accent, and they snarled at me lazy and unhurried when in English I shouted, Hey, you — next time, don’t throw your fucking cigarettes at people. “Ja, ja, mach mal weiter,” said the girl who was already lighting another, yeah just keep walking, get lost, she was not interested in being told by one touri how she must treat another touri on her own god-given turf.

    I was pedalling again as my bike started to wobble and I felt a fear of this girl, with her massive sense of entitlement, and switching to German, hurried, unkempt German, I tried, “That was idiotic. It’s dangerous. Don’t fucking throw your fucking butts at people’s heads.”

    And I rode home, past the hipster cafe where I wrote every day all through the winter and which some local person with a very distinctive handwriting had labelled in great big black spider letters out the front where people sit in the sun, “If you want — to speak English — go to New York. Berlin hates you.” I had marched into the art supplies shop and bought my first ever spray can, in a decent hot pink, in order to amend this so it read, “Berlin hates hate.” I put a ♥. Because I so strongly felt that in this city with its devastated history of what can happen once you let hatred of Those Kinds take hold, we ought to be more conscious, and we ought to take more care.

    It did no good. My amendment stood for a month or two and then the disgruntled local struck again, writing boldly, harshly over my edited text and reinstating their insistence on hate. It is still a world though where older brothers collect bridal confetti for their playful little sisters; and graffiti and confetti and hurled butts of half-smoked cigarettes conflated in my mind and at the far end of the same street I passed the second instance of this same graffitied complaint which I had also amended, in full view of the people standing outside a restaurant across the street, where eventually the Hausverwaltung sent painters to clean it up by whitewashing the whole conversation away, but not without leaving the love. The painters chose to blot out everything that had happened on that stretch of wall except for the neon pink heart I had left there and there it stands, for all the world like it was put there on purpose, for all the world to see, for all the world — from me to youse.

  • pure new cold all over

    It’s snowing! It’s snowing! It’s snowing! I came into a cafe going, It’s snowing, and she said, I know, and I said, But – it’s snowing! and then hours later walked out into the dark and under the golden lights every car wore a fresh crisp white bonnet, my old tears burst its banks, oh – snow.

    In my cafe two fellows in black beards were drawing at a big round table and as the cafe closed two girls in long tresses came up to say, So? Are you drawing? They looked up, patiently. The girls were pretty and the boys kind. “So do you do this professionally? Or…”

    Ah, yes. That tasteful first question, also asked of every dentist and every builder’s labourer – so how much do you get paid for that? The taller girl plumped her bag down on top of the nearer guy’s paints. She got out her phone. “May I?” Yes, he said, standing back so that she could take a picture of his work. Her friend said, Doesn’t it bother you, working in a cafe? Behind her packing up my laptop and my notebooks I answered for him, only quietly – the only thing that bothers me about working in a cafe is that people come up and interrupt, this has happened to me many times, someone actually waving their hand under my nose to get my attention so that they can say, Doesn’t it bother you working in a place like this, how can you concentrate?

    Coming out into the fresh snow, unexpected and perfectly flawless just yet, I saw a man – let’s say a man – had drawn a huge erect penis on the rump of one of those anointed cars, cos some people don’t understand perfection. I could hear children cluttered round the corner shrieking in their snowsuits, that time of year! is here! so I put down the palm of my hand on someone’s bonnet to make a snow angel of five long fingers, marking: I too see this snowing time of year. This indoor landscape. Domain of families and gold. I too am here.

  • the black hamburger of weddingworld

    On the bus coming home from our forest walk we passed a billboard for Hochzeitswelt: Wedding World. My partner says it’s a giant sales emporium but I am convinced it is some kind of fun park. At the market hall we got out and walked. I was noticing the graffiti – hereabouts is my own minute but weirdly lasting contribution to Berlin’s conversation, in chalk, a grammatical correction: I added an apostrophe two years ago to someone’s vehement caps-lock scrawl WONT DIE IN SILENCE. On a windowsill stood a half-eaten hamburger, which at first glance seemed to have molded over. I started think of the experiments people do with processed food where you stand a burger under a glass shade and months later it has not rotted. I remembered the droll jazz lover I befriended in an Ethiopian jazz cafe in Melbourne who rather lucidly summarized this result: If microbes won’t eat it – neither should you. Whilst putting all this together in my mind I realized there was something strange about this burger’s black mold. It was paint. Trailing up the pebblecrete wall to the sill was a long swab of black spray paint, part of the grafitti. A man in his sixties, splendidly dressed in a mohair overcoat and Russian fur hat, stopped to see what we were looking at. I showed him. He rocked back on his heels to laugh. As we came round the next corner my partner, formerly a product designer, said, looking up at a sign he had made for a local late-night kiosk, “Really I think I did a good job on that one. It’s so eye-plopping.” “It is,” I said, with difficulty, “really it is eye-plopping.”

  • grafitti cake & cold wind

    Walking past yet another housing estate whose walls are festooned to arm’s length with torn posters, glued art, endless tags. A small, modest sign up top reads: Nothing is to be stuck on here. “Nothing is to be stuck on here! Yeah… so I see.” “Yes… it’s hopeless.” “No, no. I think it’s absolutely hopeful. Beautifully so.” We walk past another building which reads, in part, Love is not a private possession. We wait for the dog, who is snuffling round a tree trunk with great assiduity. How does he know how to measure out his urine so as to have a little to offer every staging post and chat point, but without finding himself trapped back in the apartment all night with a half-full bladder. “I guess every young man has to have his tag. And then he has to stop on every corner to pee a little bit and mark it out.” “Just imagine if every young man had his favourite plant. And everywhere he went, he just had to plant out some of those plants, to make his mark on the place.” “Place sure would be green.”

  • election earring

    A federal election approaches Germany, they’ve a Conservative government to vote back in. It’s an unequal fight: the sitting Chancellor, Angela Merkel, is called “Mummy” by the press and one of her would-be opponents is the Pirate Party (they’re good, but they’re goofy). This town is festooned with candidates’ placards. Barely a one unadorned with some form of wry or dark or daft commentary. Most common, because easiest, is the black-marker scribble under the nose which denotes A Moustache Like Hitler’s.

    One of the locally beloved candidates approached in the markets last weekend, handing out leaflets in person. He is well into his eighties. On his election posters he appears to be wearing lipstick and a light powder, has in his glaringly perfect false teeth. His posters are the least defaced. Today I saw a poster on a bus stop which had grainy B&W pictures of the two major party leaders with the legend, “Who sucks most? Vote with your gum.” People had stuck wads of gum onto the faces of each, an almost literal vox pop. On the poles down the cafe strip I noticed official campaign placards have been interspersed, must have been overnight, with photos of cheesy-looking 70s fashion models from large-format old magazines. Mounted on cardboard and strapped between candidates they look to me eminently electable. Though possibly the recent experience of picking through the bizarre and downright crazy single-issue Senate candidates for Australia may have soured my outlook.

    H2O HoL rainbow spill

  • visiting Berlin Wall

    Passed a remaining section of the Berlin Wall and saw tourists of all languages leaning up against it for photographs, posing with big smiles and often two thumbs up; one Japanese girl had a coy, sexy grin. I wonder what it is they imagine they are visiting.

    photograph is of a building-site skip transformed into street art with the aid of a shopping trolley turret, carpet-roll gun & many layers of clingwrap plastic.

    H2O HoL gladwrap tank

  • unter den berlinden

    unter den berlinden

    When I leave I will miss the magical wildness of Berlin, that is already being built out for apartments and hotels; the overgrown factories with railway lines running through them; the fact that on every sunny spot, a railway bridge, a low brick wall over the river, people will bring out their paperbacks and their beers, arrange themselves quietly, spend an afternoon, publicly lolling. I’ll miss the laundromat round the corner from me which is also a pub and has a pool table and couches. Old punks, living in squalor in huge squats but running them as businesses now – showing open-air movies, collecting beer bottles for their glass deposit. “Was your father a glassmaker?” my dad used to say to me, when I was a kid and would sit hunched too close to the screen blocking his view of the TV. I set my TV out on the nature strip seven or eight years ago, I do not miss it, but in Berlin my whole of life is like a child’s, sitting too close up against the screen – everything in colour, everything sharp and growing and broken, everything wailing and wrecked. On the medieval bridge I pass five buskers, all with their CDs out. The bricks smell of piss. This besieged city, surrounded by untouched ancient villages which were, until a few years back, clammy East Germany. The Wall runs like a cold seasnake through the town, you can look down at your sneakers and gasp, it has grasped you, the double line of bricks that show us: here is where we once were two. Isn’t it strange how a city itself can hold our patience and attention, an affectionate contract – the unending tolerance one will bring to one’s surroundings: like Melbourne, like New York, though perishing of loneliness some afternoons I’m in love with the stinking vile city as a whole. I love its dogs, haunting and purposeful and striking out each alone on some adventure of perception, one by one, differently spotted and scarred and with or without a collar, muscled or fat. Berlin, its train rides, the foul breath of the underground, I love its filthy pavements and its skies, almost invisible now that it’s autumn but breaking out late in the day with a luscious deep Fabergé blue that brings cameras up from chests and phones out of back pockets. I specially love its bicycles, spindle traffic of a woven city. I know nothing I experience or say here or see can make sense, not ever ever, I could grow old here (oh! a year, give me a couple of years yet) but I still would never know the deep dark nature of our violence, the way we entertain each other like guests on the front porch, the beeriness, the weary wary tolerance and mighty longing that like an oily octopus deep in the works drives this city and all who sail on her: show me the way to the next itch to scratch. “Berlin”, the name has become a spell, to me. I’m bound, bonded, blinded. In Berlin a spell.

    H2O HoL greened bench

  • tower of rage

    tower of rage

    Yesterday morning I woke in that state known so satisfyingly as A Towering Rage. Must’ve had infuriating dreams. The sun came in my window and all the injustices of life lined up around me and stared like palings. It’s not a very usual experience for me and I wasn’t well equipped to deal with it. I didn’t stop to reason with or resolve my mood, just strapped some shoes around my feet and spilled out into the street. People were out. The sky was blue and clotty. The riot of graffiti seemed selfish and pointless. I travelled fast, towering and glowering. Took a sharp detour through the ruined industrial park where newer tourists than I stood about in shambolically worshipful groups, staring up at things with cameras in their eyes. Everyone was annoying. Before long the fury had burned off like a dew but for twenty or thirty minutes it was quite a lot of fun, in a yah, boo sucks kind of way. People got out of my way. The best and strangest, most irritating part was as I strode along not bothering to alter my misanthropic expression, men marvelled and turned and stared. A fellow in a schnitzel cafe craned round his wife’s back to gaze and blink. A tall man with a redheaded child on his shoulders met my eye with that slightly goofy, astonished, almost grateful look by which strangers compliment each other wordlessly. I was too angry to be gratified but I kept noticing. Each time I thought, like an incoherent teenager, As! If! The young, bearded, beautiful man who lies supine with his begging bowl annoyed me more than usual. The day before I had noticed his sweatshirt said, I laugh at you all because you’re all the same. He rattled his tin at me wistfully and I said, spreading my hands, Are you going to give *me* something? Sure! he said, digging into his coins with a big smile. I laughed, which annoyed me the more. As ever the sky and the water were beautiful, the sneer in my mind, more than love, seemed to distill every atom of the day into a burning clarity.

    H2O HoL ashtray hearth

     

  • exact same clothes

    Landsakes, do I feel cute. I helped someone out with some really boring writing work and feel all neighbourly & useful. We decided to celebrate with a beer. I had opened my two storage boxes (for posting back to Australia) and after months of wearing the exact same clothes ~ same jeans, same orange jumper, same ratty old Tom Waits~as~Jesus t-shirt ~ had dug out my ugg boots: ugg boots! And also a pair of huge dungarees: dungarees! So me and Tom Waits and the dungarees and ugg boots set off for the beer shop. Berlin is twilit. The streets are damp and swishy. Two guys were arguing at an Indian restaurant trestle and the end of their table said, in thick black marker pen, I love you. I loaded up four pockets with beers and came back with my friend’s dog whom he had dressed in honour of my new old clothes in a natty neckerchief. We were the wild West. Which is tame in this town. This looping, roaring, sprawling, sunbathing, dog-loving six-storey city.

     

  • heart of stones

    heart of stones

    I walked downstream to the picnic place where someone had made a heart of stones and filled it with pads of moss. The stones have gone now but the moss remains and some of it has taken root. A wet Spring. It makes not a green heart shape exactly, but something like. Heart like a blob. Heart like jelly, like a cloud.

    H2O HoL apple blossom