Yesterday I was reading the paper over coffee in a huge, bleak market hall in Berlin. The place has all the atmosphere of an airplane hangar, it was raining hard outside and had turned bitterly cold. I was reading about the coward shooter in Vegas and had screwed up my mouth. He shot from behind the curtains. He had no courage and no manhood. Next to me two people browsed on their phones, one of them breastfeeding a baby. All of a sudden a familiar hoot rent the air. The guy flipping pancakes at the next stall was singing along, joyous and loud, to the Rolling Stones riff everybody recognised, the oooh hoo hoodoo hoodoo hoo from ‘Miss You.’ I looked up, people looked up. It was as though John Travolta had come strolling in, jive talking, with his panther grace and his hands in his pockets and leaving a trail of tiny sequins.
Tag: music
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for the ages
I went to see Paul Kelly play Berlin. I was going with my girlfriend and the evening of, she rang to say: I don’t feel well. I feel so tired and I just need to stay at home and curl on my couch. Can you go on your own?
I went. Since I left my boyfriend I have been going to a lot of events on my own. I sat with a German couple and the man said to me, “Do you know him?” “Oh,” I said, awkwardly. “I once sat in the same cafe with him in Richmond, in Melbourne. Australia’s not quite that small.”
This was in the Richmond Hill Cellar and Larder and Paul Kelly was sitting quietly with his friends and I was nutting out the playlist for my album, listening over and over through what we had made with cat-callers and buskers and students of jazz in New York and I looked round the room with my own music in my ears and saw the love: how everyone tried so hard to be courteous and pretend we had not noticed him there.
“But you know his songs,” this man elucidated now. “I am the same year as him: 1955.”
He patted himself on the chest, approvingly.
The audience was filled with Australians. You can tell by the facial expression. A certain kind of friendly lazy openness that lends itself to generalisation. I looked around. You looking at me? asked an older, Australian man behind me when I glanced round. Oh no, I said, I was just… gazing in your direction. He had hopped up. Held his beer up in his hand. Can I come sit with you? Ok, I said, and so he bought me some beers and talked in my ear between the songs. But I hardly heard. I was transported. Someone brought on a bottle of water and stood it next to the central mic. The musicians came onstage and among them were Vika and Linda, the glorious Islander Bulls, it had not occurred to me they’d travel with him. I know they sing backing vocals on his albums. They were radiant and they owned the stage, from its wing. Paul Kelly introduced the new album he had written and they launched it like a ball of flame. These people, and their music.
Linda sang one song and Vika sang another. In their salty, knowing womanhood they swayed side by side like palms. The beautiful affinity between them bespeaks sisterhood. The rest of the stage was occupied by men. They know each other. They can communicate with a bare glance. I was almost crying. There came a moment when the crowd threw back their heads and yawped, bawling along with the lyrics in our Australian accents: he took it pretty badly: she took both the kids.
Then they sang How To Make Gravy and I was crying. Surrounded by beautiful, healthy, young Australian men in their t shirts I flung my arms open and one of them snatched me up and hugged me harder than I have ever been held. I emerged from his embrace and his face was wet with my tears. Every time I smiled he smiled back at me. The music finished and they all walked offstage and we weren’t having it, we hammered our feet on the ground and yelled and hollered. Paul Kelly broke the glittering curtains open by himself. The closing song had been a quiet one, “Darling, you’re one for the ages,” and he had spoken the lyrics, shyly, in bad German: mein Liebling, du bist zeitlos. It seemed like he had half the crew of Rockwiz on stage with him and half of those were my Facebook friends. Australia really is that small. Now he took up his guitar in silence and the crowd began to sing to him, irresistible, a capella, “Darling – you’re one for the ages. Darling… you’re one for the ages.”
A grin tugged at Paul Kelly’s face. He is not a good actor, he is too authentic and sincere, as I had ascertained this evening by watching the film clip for Love is the Law, in which he looks uncomfortable and the film maker’s directions are almost visible on the screen. “Well this is probably my second favourite moment of tonight,” he said. “My favourite was when someone yelled out, ‘En-fucking-core!’” We laughed, proud of ourselves. He started to encore. We all stood still and listened. To awaken stillness in a big crowd is a consecrated kind of gift. Sweat was rolling down my spine and darling, I was one for the angels. When I got home I would hand wash every one of my garments in a trance of caretaking meditation and the beautiful young man had given me his number and so had the older Sydney guy, who sells Blundstones. But for now the rest of the band came back on and played like emperors. Much later, as I stood collecting my warm wrappings for the long bike ride home, a roadie opened the curtain and out the back I could see their white tour bus, Vika Bull standing beside it waiting for the gear to be boxed up and wheeled out, she was smoking a cigarette and our eyes met, and I felt a bolt of womanhood arc out of me and into the vast cold sweet dark Berlin sky which chuckled with the autumn wind, all the way home.
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music unfolds in the Funkhaus, live and barely planned
Today we will be making a new song, the first towards Cathoel & the New Government’s eventual second album. First album prompted 50s jazz impresario Bob ‘King’ Crawford to say, “In my opinion you will be one of the greatest artists this country has produced.”
He was talking about Australia but I have gathered fellow travellers from New York, Czech Republic, and Berlin. There’s eight of us today and only two have ever met. This is the persistent idea of ‘the new government’ – it is elastic and can consist of anybody who wishes to step up and take care of something they feel moved by. Something musical, something ecological; something furred or feathered, something human. It’s how plenty of people live in the world already. We’ll be recording in the famous Berlin Funkhaus and hope to produce a tiny doco about our day’s work, which will be improvised from scratch around a vocal line of mine. The lyrics were written on a drum kit in an Airbnb apartment in Spain:
you came a-courting me
in your skirt
and no shirt
and no shoesand I swallowed down all that you taught me
in my bed
in your arms
in my youthImagine a bunch of people with jazz sensibilities set out to make an electronica dance track, but using all real instruments and playing the whole melee live, not looped or sampled. Imagine it might build into the kind of trance intensity that explodes. This is my plan, insofar as you can call it a plan. I have only met one of these musicians before now, when he walked into a Berlin bar three years ago carrying a beautiful upright bass and proceeded to set up an irresistible stomp. I’m recruiting interested musicians online through musos’ groups. Song has no title as yet but we will see what evolves.
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a virgin busker
On the subway a woman suddenly opened her mouth and began to sing. Her voice was tentative and good. She had a little loudspeaker rigged up through her mobile phone and had set herself to perform some songs in her own native Spanish. She was rugged up like the rest of us in a puffy blizzard jacket, was in her late middle age, and shy: and I would be willing to bet this was her first day out busking.
She sang, Kiss me… kiss me all over, or as it renders in the Spanish, kiss me a lot. Her voice trembled with nerves but she kept going. She tried to set up a swing with her hips, stiffly, appealing to the stony crowd with outstretched hands. “Music?” her voice, her hands, her eyes seemed to be saying, “remember music?”
I got up and went over to be nearer. She was standing in the doorway with her back turned to the glass doors. She smiled shyly at me and I smiled shyly back, nodding encouragingly, clinging to the yellow pole and hanging my head against it as though it were a mother.
Shyness in public. It makes life so much more challenging. A little way into the song she switched up the tempo and the backing music began a familiar rumble. “Bamboleo,” she sang, wistfully but clear, “Bamboleah…” A moment later she was saying, thank you, danke schön, and pulling out of her jacket pocket a crumpled waxed-paper cup. It is easy to fall on hard times so rapidly. Well-dressed people are begging and collecting bottles for the deposit all over the city. I gave her two euros saying, Sie haben solch eine schöne Stimme, eine echt schöne Stimme. You have such a lovely voice, a really beautiful voice. This was perfectly true and she knew it. We thanked each other bashfully and she went off down the swaying carriage where to my surprise people pulled out their wallets and broke the fourth wall. I, too, am afraid to sing in public; I, too, have a voice. Her courage by this stage had moved me to tears and when the door at my station opened unexpectedly a second early, while the train was still moving, I stood back saying, “Whoa,” and smiling with surprise. German trains are seamless. The man waiting outside the doors stood facing me as the platform slowed. He smiled back. We smiled at one another. In the stairwell a man with his face turned to the wall was shooting up into his elbow, bared in the literally freezing grey cold.
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love is the what
Reaching my Kiez in the late afternoon* I nearly ran into a boy-girl couple kissing strenuously outside the Turkish supermarket. This supermarket annoys me because they always reel off too many plastic bags and I have seen a man who had put his single apple into one bag accept another bag to carry it home in. My, how they kissed. He was twisting on his feet. She opened her mouth and throat, tipping back her head. I was so rejoiced by them I started to laugh, and then the flirty guy on the nub of the corner who sells his own ice cream laughed along with me, though he through an accident of geography had missed the kiss.
I went onto the market. Berlin markets start late. You can go down there at ten or even eleven and find people still sleepily setting up. But as the afternoon ripens it has settled into a groovous swing – that is the opposite of grievous, I suppose – a grievous swing, specially down the other end where there’s a platform built out over the water and it’s filled with people, many of them just gazing and smiling but some with their eyes closed or even eyes open are dancing, from a sitting position or standing up to shake it out. Two guys with a microphone had set up their bag. And were piling us all into it, gleefully. Och music. You’re indescribable, I know. I came through the markets carrying my head on its stalk and I have lost a little weight just lately and with it, years, and the man who sells bolts of plain linen and cotton, unbleached – are there that many painters in the region? – smiled at me lingeringly, when I glanced back and smiled he was still smiling and he tipped at me his head, consideringly, almost obsequious. That is what beauty can do for us and I had forgotten, but now I remembered.
At the jewellery stall set up on a bin with a velvet-clad board clapped over it by a Japanese man who wears busy gathered pants and feathers woven in his hair, another beautiful guy with golden shoulders was standing with his arms out and his hands held up, tilting his head from one ring to another, determining which one set off his gorgeousness the best. He amused but he bored me. I’ve known those men. At the organic vege stall run by curmudgeonly lesbians who all live together on a smallholding outside Berlin I asked, Hey, can I photograph your beetroots? They just look so proud there on their blue background, holding out their leaves. Yes, she said, winnowing flowering green leaves which are sold by the hundred grams for a woman who had two children with her, each child carrying her own tiny handbag and each pushing her own tiny pram. I left off grooving and came up home, walking on the other side of the market street, past the stall which sells nine types of potatoes. And as I came past the cheese lady who cuts pale butter off a sweetly sweating slab I ran across those same two kids, still kissing, wringing the greenery out of this day which as a leaf this afternoon fell past me just as my shutter clicked surely must be one of the last days of the year on which we can wander and groove, we can kiss in the streets and call out to one another, hey Berlin. I passed a discount stall flogging cheaply printed night shirts in cellophane, one of them said, in curly handwriting font, LOVE IS THE but I turned it over and discovered there was a slab of cardboard slid down the back, to stiffen the shirt for display, and that covered the rest of the words and though my mind flooded with suggestions I could not make it out. Now I have to spend the rest of my life wondering. What is love?
*Kiez is the few streets between you and your main roads: your own neighbourhood.
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the oliver twist
I have a friend who teaches piano. Today she said to me, “I have two students now from Australia. And both of them are called Oliver.”
“Wow,” I said, “how many Australians called Oliver can there really be? There’s only like twenty-five million of us.”
“Not that many,” she said, “because they’re all over here.”
“They’re Oliver here,” I realised, making us both laugh, yay me.
There are so many Australians in Berlin, I hear our accent in the streets. And three of my Berlin friends are Kiwis, which means that one in a million New Zealanders is not only living in Berlin but is within my own personal circle of acquaintance. This seems so astonishing and improbable.
We were heading towards the door and she held it open for me so that I could carry my bike through. I was thinking of the election in five weeks which will hopefully depose inhumanity in Australia in favour of humanity; and how I hope all these Berliner Australians will get to the booths. I thought about our strange and resonant homelands so far away and as we parted at the foot of the stairs I burst out, “You know, sometimes I kind of get the feeling, like – who’s looking after the place?”
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the two languages of dream
I went to a strange and interesting event which was sentimental and yet truthful and moving. Afterwards we stood around in tiny groups and two men who had spoken out about crying in public put their heads together and let their voices drop low. A woman who is four weeks fresh in Berlin said to me, “What do you do?” And I answered, like I always answer, “I write ~ ” and then wondered, as I always wonder, how to best finish that sentence. ” ~ poetry and jazz,” I said, and she said, peerlessly, “Oh! But those are two such beautiful languages.”
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angel Bowie
Two hipsters compete in a Berlin bookshop, the day of David Bowie’s death
Hipster One: I know, I mean I was like twelve when I heard ‘Changes’ for the first time.
Hipster Two: I know, it’s like, I just… it’s like I had a personal connection. You know? Like I…
Hipster One, abruptly: Yeah, everybody seems to be saying that.
Hipster Two, hastily: I mean, not that I felt it, I mean like, this morning I was kind of like, Wow… But ~
Hipster One: But now ~
Hipster Two: I mean it hasn’t ruined my day or anything.
I am standing in the window alcove with a volume I saw from the street and have lifted out of the display. This conversation, with its switches from having to care most to having to care least, seems to me exhausting. I think about the beautiful and dignified Iman, Bowie’s wife, whose day the news presumably has ruined. Hipster One, who owns the bookshop, calls across the room.
Hipster One: Kann ich helfen?
Me: O nein – danke, ich kann es selber lesen.
Thank you, no… I can read it for myself. I smile at her lest she think I am being less playful than rude. I am reading a journal called Elsewhere, about place. It is a first volume, compiled by a bunch of homesick expatriates and published locally in English. To get here I walked past a stream of graffiti saying if you want to talk English, go to New York – Berlin hates you. Variations included Not for yuppies and the more melancholy anti-gentrification slogan Wir bleiben alle, written on a building which is about to be mass-evicted and made over for higher-paying expatriates. It occurs to me that Bowie himself was one of the pioneers of this gentrification.
My companion, who made the signage for this shop, comes in and the shop owner realises belatedly why I look half-familiar. She switches from the formal Sie to the friendly du and cozies up, saying: Habt ihr einen guten Rutsch gehabt?
And did you both have a good slip? a good slide? This is how Germans picture their entry into the New Year. After Christmas they start wishing each other einen guten Rutsch, as though all the nation held its breath ready to lurch down wildly careening into the new frontier, meatier, balder, bolder, breathlessly. We’ve arrived!
I buy the journal. We walk on. My companion guides me round a brownish squelch coiled on the stones. I look closer. “That – is just a big fat brown hair scrunchie.” He laughs. “And yet…”
I am pushing my bicycle, I don’t want to risk a bad slip, a bad slide. I tell him about the dog mess I found on my first visit to New York, wrapped in a flattened red singlet bag and shaped exactly like the drawing of a heart. I wrote about it online: I dog poo New York. On the river a circle of ice has formed round the perfect hole where someone threw a chair, a microwave, a bicycle, and the hole has frozen over. Bottles stand drunkenly frozen in place where they bobbed, and a few Christmas trees. Where the water has dissolved into liquid are a dozen ducks cosily chatting on the curving edge of remaining ice, which resembles a beach. It is so cold the tops of the buildings disappear but my breath makes shapes on the air. We are all smokers today. Or maybe, dragons. Breathing ice.
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through Glass, darkly
Philip Glass: a man who halfway through his own memoir, written by himself about his own life, can start a paragraph with: “But look at it from my point of view…” The innocent jostle of his ego crowds every page. He takes up plumbing as a day job in order to support his children, whose appearance in his life occupies one small paragraph out of 396 pages. He and his friend simply walk into the local plumbing emporium whenever they hit a snag and ask “for supplies and advice.” He recounts the time and energy spent by these professionals in training him and his friend and then says, “We taught ourselves basic bathroom plumbing this way.” Having reframed their teaching as his own auto-didact determination he then further undermines it with, “We weren’t that good at first, but it wasn’t that complicated, either.”
Eventually Glass gets work under a proper licensed plumber, an older man who presumably has taken the time and trouble to earn his own certification. Everything works out smoothly for about three years, until one day an artist friend of Glass’s offers him more interesting work at the same price. He immediately dumps the plumber who has spent three years training him: “That was fine with me and I began practically the next day.” Audiences in Europe who didn’t like his music are described as “a bunch of yokels there who didn’t know anything about world music or even new music” – “They didn’t know anything.” How I wish there were a stronger alignment between good work and great character.
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Kurfürstendamm
I saw a woman who looked just like you, I wrote to my friend, smoking a cigarette and wheeling her bicycle, big black spiky thing with a huge basket strapped on front, down the boulevard on swank avenue with her friend, who was peering in the glossy shop windows, also smoking.
Then as I posted the letter I thought: hey. If a red-headed person spots their own twin on the street – is that a doppelginger? The man who last week complimented me, “it looks so lovely with your open hairs”, that is, with my hair unbound, walked past and we were both hurrying in the cold and our beanies pulled down over our brows, still we managed to grin at one another and exchange a few visible breaths. When he said that, I felt so glorious and seventies, platform boots grew beneath my heels and I felt my freedom rising through me like a mist, like the mist on the old airport tarmac, my stride grew longer and the knotty bundle gathered in my parka’s hood felt its roots right to my brain. Oh, the well-placed compliment. It’s that blue light of evening makes everybody pretty. I assembled my adventures of the last several cold days. Crossing the old abandoned airport towed by a dog I felt the mist rising all around and how the sun burned a white hole in the dense white sky. People had erected little winter gardens using pallets and old baskets, others were flying their kites. And the virgin busker I think I spotted one night on the street. He was standing on swank avenue, swaying a little, jerking an empty paper cup and singing beseechingly, uncertainly; he made me think of the Mr Darcy’s younger sister who sometimes introduces shyly a sentence or two “when there was least danger of them being heard.” So I went up to him and gave him all what I had in my pockets (a whole 30c) and said, Beautiful voice. Really? he said. Yes, I said. He looked like a nightclub bouncer who had suddenly discovered folk roots.