Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: Kreuzberg

  • the dark lit me home

    I rode home after writing in a large dim room in silence with four other people. The evening blue was ripening to black, like a terrible bruise. In the dark other, unlighted bicycles hurtled past, people were strolling. The cars make way for bicycles and the cyclists make way for pedestrians and dogs. It is warm still and all the bars spill into the street. At a local bar the owner has a shaggy Alsation who was lounging out front, his paws sprawling forward, his orange ball lying some distance away. People walked around him without question. His head was tilted and he gazed into the sky abstractedly, as if he was looking at the moon.

    Today a boat went by under a bridge I was crossing on foot, just a little motor boat. Maybe the length of two bath tubs. Three people were sat in it, two wearing hats and two with dogs on their laps. They made a wide round and turned to the old rusted pontoon which may perhaps be where the bridge was once footed. The pontoon protrudes into the stream and is painted bright yellow, like an inflatable dinghy, for safety. The man with the doggie on his lap cut the engine and the three of them floated, inspecting the guerrilla garden of bright flowers someone has planted in the rusted out hollows.

    To carry the soil there and fill the rusted holes with fertility, to scramble down the bank every couple of days to water the plants: this seemed to me a beautiful enterprise. I showed the photos I made to a friend who said, Yes: I heard the guy who made that garden painted the outer rims black, because it was lovelier. Then he was fined because it was unsafe; and now all the old metal is yellow again. After our conversation I came out again onto the tree-lined street and rode home, following the moon all the way, more white than yellow, and hiding ineffectually in a tangle of treetops, in obscuring golden street lights, and behind partial cloud.

  • reggae punk

    Night walk in the late afternoon. There is a large punk stationed outside the supermarket, asking for coins as people emerge from the light within; he is tall, broad, and mighty, wearing a lycra miniskirt and dark stockings, his hands pouched in the pockets of a worn khaki windbreaker. He has as they say in German few “hairs”, but they are scraped from all corners of his scalp into a wispy but somehow fierce high ponytail.

    There are three Polish tourists who ask us where they can find some reggae. My partner remarks afterwards that the combination of “reggae” with the German, Reggaeveranstaltung, “sounds like the death of paradise”. There is a windblown American stationed at the autotellers who speaks slushy, gentle German and is homeless, or on the skids; his calling is to sweep open the doors of the bank’s glass vestibule with a big smile and a grave, deep, “Well, good evening.” He has his dog with him and a large coffee tin into which people sometimes cast coins. He’s always cheerful.

    There is a demonstration outside the refugee centre which necessitates the whole street being blocked off by police. Around ninety or a hundred people stand about looking, mostly, like spectators who have wandered in on their way home, around a central tableau in which a huge white banner spread on the street is flecked with flowers and lined with flickering golden tealight candles. Two activists in baggy coats pull a blanket and then several cushions out of a large plastic bag and begin setting up a vantage point beside this shrine, on the kerb.

    A photographer is prowling the sparse crowd, attentive but bored. The police all seem like giants in their militant uniforms. They are laughing and chatting. Loud music from a boombox strapped to the top of a van is interrupted by a speech in German-accented English. What enchants me is the two busloads of surplus police officers, waiting in their seats out of the cold, just in case. Their green and white striped minibuses stand parked diagonally across the entrance to the roadway, as an obstacle. At the other end of the barricaded demonstration area five police officers stop us when we would pass: they are jovial and unbudging: even an ID card showing you live in this very street will not get you through unless your apartment building happens to be in this end of the blockaded road. We shrug and turn away, threading our way through the inactive demonstrators to where the police buses parked in the roadway seem weirdly unchanged. There is something so strange about their attitude of waiting. We walk from tail to nose and then nose to tail of the two vehicles slowly, glancing up. Every seat is filled and the seated officers are absolutely motionless, as though underwater. Each has his head bowed and it takes me a moment to work out why this could be. Are they sleeping? Are they praying? Are they each lost in some meditative private world, like soldiers about to go over the top, asking forgiveness, giving thanks? They are on their phones. Each of them curved round the spell of his own little screen. They look monklike and freed from all anxiety.

  • 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

  • eros unregulated

    eros unregulated

    On New Year’s Eve after a quiet dinner party at the home of a Romanian artist & Swedish poet, I climbed the round hill that gives Kreuzberg its name: cross mountain. In the dark it resembled Borobudur, with heads facing outwards as far as the eye could reach like ten hundred white buddhas. Three different, unevenly consecutive countdowns announced midnight’s arrival: I was tempted to start a fourth, even more raggedly: Zehn! Neun! Acht! 7! 6!~ Looking back as flares lit the sky I noticed something strange: though walking here we had passed through dozens of gaggles of Turkish dudes with their mini rocket launchers & quivers of searing flares, this crowd was Caucasian entirely. My companion looked thoughtful when I remarked that I could not remember ever being in such a homogenous crowd. Maybe it’s more segregated here, he said at length. Hmm maybe.

    Meantime the most unregulated fireworks display in living memory had gotten underway. All around us people let off Roman candles and stepped back (with difficulty) to let lighted rockets propped upright in empty champagne bottles go off. Within seconds of the first countdown the entire city rim was alight. I was laughing with jubilation, such a night: for ten minutes or more the crowded mountain was the sparkling centre (from the viewpoint of those on it) of a sparkling city, its whole horizon lit and sinking and sparking and burning with explosion after explosion. I’m not describing this very well but the effect was just transporting. We screamed and hollered. People waved giant sparklers. And every ghost in the vicinity picked up its tatty skirts and hiked out of there. 2013::EROS.