Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: New York City

  • shriveled bulb of god

    shriveled bulb of god

    My stomach feels like a shrivelled bulb after two martinis, no dinner. Whoever invented alcohol is my god: right now, my god. The last time I had one of those (a martini, a god) was in New York, it was summer then, I came out of the studio where we had been working on the album I’d wanted to make since 1999 and whose songs had been written over fifteen years and it was all so exhausting, so wonderful, on the street a man came past me pedalling his cab, a pedal-cab, like the becaks that used to carry us to the markets when I was a child, in old Batavia. “Take me to a rooftop bar,” I said, and the next twenty minutes were alive with light: those huge buildings shooting up into the sky like terraces, palaces, penthouses’ skeletons, every one stippled with windows alight and the warm evening breeze exciting my cheeks. I was crying with joy. New York! New York! Like Berlin she is one of those cities where on the subway, on the bridge, under the trees you would cry out “New York!” and feel like she hears you. So I found a banquette in the scarlet-lit rooftop bar that was rapidly filling with Manhattenites after work and I told the Spanish bar girl, I like olives, so she made me a martini festooned with skewers, each one so laden with green olives it was as though the glass had greenly exploded. I sat and sipped, turned my pages and sipped. After a while the volume level rose and I drew out the headphones I had bought that day, a remote birthday present from my Australian family, began listening back to the work we had made. Tonight was very different but same, same, same. This Russian bar in my leafy street that I’ve passed several dozen times suddenly beckoned, as if it were a painting of a bar that had come to life. I went in. “Can you make me a dirty martini on Bombay Sapphire?” And she did. The bar was tenderly tended by this woman, in 1950s sailor costume, her hair spooled back with nests of pins behind her ears, the luscious soft sound of the ice cubes as she rattled my drink u and down over her shoulder then poured away all the vermouth down the drain. Apart from the dark-haired girl in a beanie studying at the bar I was then her only customer. The dark-haired girl looked up and said to the bartender, This is so hard. I took my drink by its frost stem and the two of us drifted outside, wicker chairs where in a little while the bartender would come round with her basket, lifting aside the daytime posies of flowers and putting in their place red glass candleholders. I watched the street, where nothing passed. In an hour only two cars, ten pedestrians, five bicycles. The sky has changed, it is settled in a grey now and when I mentioned yesterday “you know at this time of year this means it’s grey for another five months,” the woman clearing my coffee cup said, “Ist das nicht furchtbar!” Isn’t that terrible! Well, yes, it really is. In the balcony opposite, on the first floor, three girl-silhouettes were enjoying their cigarettes. I wished I smoked. Occasionally a yellow leaf sauntered down through the still-warm air and landed on the cobblestones, in the garden bed, on the roof of a vehicle. I have never experiences a Fall before: it is what it is: life falls colourful to the ground. The dark cold skeletons reassert their empire. Winter is arriving, time to get out of here.

    ~ from Berlin via New York City, 2013

  • shriveled bulb of god

    shriveled bulb of god

    My stomach feels like a shrivelled bulb after two martinis, no dinner. Whoever invented alcohol is my god: right now, my god. The last time I had one of those (a martini, a god) was in New York, it was summer then, I came out of the studio where we had been working on the album I’d wanted to make since 1999 and whose songs had been written over fifteen years and it was all so exhausting, so wonderful, on the street a man came past me pedalling his cab, a pedal-cab, like the becaks that used to carry us to the markets when I was a child, in old Batavia. “Take me to a rooftop bar,” I said, and the next twenty minutes were alive with light: those huge buildings shooting up into the sky like terraces, palaces, penthouses’ skeletons, every one stippled with windows alight and the warm evening breeze exciting my cheeks. I was crying with joy. New York! New York! Like Berlin she is one of those cities where on the subway, on the bridge, under the trees you would cry out “New York!” and feel like she hears you. So I found a banquette in the scarlet-lit rooftop bar that was rapidly filling with Manhattenites after work and I told the Spanish bar girl, I like olives, so she made me a martini festooned with skewers, each one so laden with green olives it was as though the glass had greenly exploded. I sat and sipped, turned my pages and sipped. After a while the volume level rose and I drew out the headphones I had bought that day, a remote birthday present from my Australian family, began listening back to the work we had made. Tonight was very different but same, same, same. This Russian bar in my leafy street that I’ve passed several dozen times suddenly beckoned, as if it were a painting of a bar that had come to life. I went in. “Can you make me a dirty martini on Bombay Sapphire?” And she did. The bar was tenderly tended by this woman, in 1950s sailor costume, her hair spooled back with nests of pins behind her ears, the luscious soft sound of the ice cubes as she rattled my drink u and down over her shoulder then poured away all the vermouth down the drain. Apart from the dark-haired girl in a beanie studying at the bar I was then her only customer. The dark-haired girl looked up and said to the bartender, This is so hard. I took my drink by its frost stem and the two of us drifted outside, wicker chairs where in a little while the bartender would come round with her basket, lifting aside the daytime posies of flowers and putting in their place red glass candleholders. I watched the street, where nothing passed. In an hour only two cars, ten pedestrians, five bicycles. The sky has changed, it is settled in a grey now and when I mentioned yesterday “you know at this time of year this means it’s grey for another five months,” the woman clearing my coffee cup said, “Ist das nicht furchtbar!” Isn’t that terrible! Well, yes, it really is. In the balcony opposite, on the first floor, three girl-silhouettes were enjoying their cigarettes. I wished I smoked. Occasionally a yellow leaf sauntered down through the still-warm air and landed on the cobblestones, in the garden bed, on the roof of a vehicle. I have never experiences a Fall before: it is what it is: life falls colourful to the ground. The dark cold skeletons reassert their empire. Winter is arriving, time to get out of here.

    ~ from Berlin via New York City, 2013

  • parcel in cloth

    One thing I love in Ghana is people seem so good and kind. Not all of them, I guess, but daily life seems to me founded in a beautiful mutual respect and helpfulness. I watched the ‘mate’ in a grinding and crowded trotro (a tiny bus) jump down and help the man who was slowly climbing out, he lifted the man’s parcel wrapped in stained cloth – perhaps his stall – from the front passenger seat and set it down on the pavement. Then the two of them lifted it without a word, one side each, and settled it on the man’s head so he could carry it home.

    I saw a little boy tapping my Ghanaian boyfriend on the hip, offering a coin. “Boss – you dropped this.”

    Sometimes I think about Australian cities where these days people barely say hello. I think about New York, where I first visited in 2011 and New Yorkers were always saying to me, “You Australians are so friendly. In New York we hate each other.” Then I wonder how much of my experience of being in Ghana is filtered through the privilege of being a relatively well-off visitor, a white woman, someone from whom everybody can potentially benefit.

  • 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.