Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: New York

  • New York, I fucken love you

    In New York we stayed off-island, on the sprawling mainland of the USA. I found it thrilling to go walking in the early morning light, while everyone was sleeping, admiring the funny little wooden frame houses and hanging over retaining walls at the back of the hill in Union City. From up high there you could see the green troubled plains spurting with industry chimneys which defined the settlement, the invasion – a train was snaking by across an immense landscape the first morning and I said to myself, this is where America begins.

    The name of Union City gave me thrills, and every time I passed the Madonna-blue Union City Laundromat, filled all day long with Hispanic mothers and their children, settled in and gossiping while they fold, the greatest song by Blondie came through my head: power, passion… plays a double hand. Chrissie Hynde, consummate rocker, was interviewed and the journalist said, New York, punk rock women, you and Debbie Harry, ya know… The hissing intake of breath was almost visible on the page. With evident restraint she said, Well… I actually write my own songs, I play an instrument…. Blandly the unhearing journalist persisted with her. “What’s your favourite Blondie song?” I don’t really have one. “Aw c’mon, you must have a favourite Blondie song.” “Oh, must I? Ok… that, like, Union… Union City thing.” That’s what ran through my mind every time I came home along the avenue and passed the dreadlocked barber who is always trying to get my friend to jam with him, the sky blue launderette, the falling-away streets of the dingy houses, and the kids sitting out front on their stoops playing dutifully the games that can be confined to a palm-sized screen.

    New York is a strange and dramatic thing, as much an event as place, a complex of unending events telling stories of itself all day as it rolls round the tilt of the earth, helping to tip the planet perhaps a little further (so it seems) with its wealth of heavy buildings, giant prongs struck into the stone, its thin crummy soil and the island extended by refuse and landfill in the sea, its sprawling park immaculately mowed and spread with bikinis, its returned vets disabled by war and grief and sleeping on the subway on cardboard, its screeching underground trains, its spires into the blue eternity, its forever sleepless bleariness, jostle, crowd, and lace. It exists in all our minds even when we can’t touch it – like the internet – and have never been in it. The dream city hovering forever in your mind gets on the instant dispersed, it never exists again, and the real place you find yourself almost flattened by is more than you even imagined, like nothing you’ve ever known, yet punctuated with known experience like the Monopoly board come to life that is London.

    It was four years exactly since I went over for six weeks to record my first album, gathering a strange international collective of musical souls (the New Government) to work with me and dragging in some of them literally off the street where they had cat-called me and I said, “Hey. I need backing vocals.” Some of those people I will never meet again and some are now among my dearest friends: the guitar goddess who teaches in the West 30s, upstairs from the studio in which we recorded our album Hey, Big Splendour four years ago. Four years exactly. It felt strange to be going back to the same rooms, the same streets. I ate street meat here from a cart, I had a conversation with the man who said, You look like. On this much more recent return visit we stayed with her, in Union City on the Jersey shore, and every day we rode home on the jitney which leaves from outside Dean & Deluca’s every ten minutes all night and all day. You pay the driver in dollar bills – $3 – and he folds the notes in greasy fans stashed in the open-sided cup holder by his steering wheel, you climb aboard and you’re the only white folks on the bus, a more normal kind of normal, in the tunnel you pass a brother jitney from the same company that’s broken down, he takes the corners like a racing driver and at the unofficial stops he lingers, hoping more passengers will show up to make the ride worthwhile, and if he takes too long to get going a huge black lady up the back will sing out, Let’s go!

    Let’s go! A week from today I’ll have landed in New York – and be up in the Bronx – where I have never been before, staying with someone neither of us have ever met. It feels like entering the world’s filthiest cathedral. A fortnight to walk the streets, record maybe two or three songs towards an eventual new album. I hope they’ll be filthy with real soil and not just street grime, I hope they will ring and chant and stomp their feet, I hope they’ll be just divine.

  • don’t shoot

    Jeez, America, stop shooting each other. At least in Australia we only drown refugee babies, jail children, beat young Indigenous men to death in jail cells with phone books.

    I am thinking today of the Albanian security guard who came out of her way to welcome us to the Cloisters, a museum in Tryon Park which seems to have salvaged all the bits of bombed-out churches and cathedrals in Europe that had survived, as splinters, the War to Unending War. We saw the daunting entry price and had retreated to the entrance hall to confer. “We have our tours available in German,” she told my companion, twinklingly. Then, turning to me, the Australian, “I’m not sure we have anything available in your language.”

  • New York meets Berlin

    It’s 3am now in New York but when we landed in Berlin, it was 7 o’clock on a sunny Sunday morning. It is colder. I am tired. My first time arriving in Berlin from the States and the subway, the U Bahn, seems immediately different. People are different and I can’t put my finger on it. “Thinner,” he says, and I gasp. He is right. They do not seem to be eating themselves to death. They are playful with one another, with strangers, in a way that seems to me to take a different kind of things seriously. They chatter and laugh, fall asleep, excuse themselves to one another as they pass. There is a different kind of facial expression, something hard to quantify. There are many many fewer really giant large people. They seem, I don’t know if it’s more alive or simply more awake. I do not cherish myself making these observations but in between the long spells of sleeping sickness on the swaying bus and the whispering silky smooth train I keep noticing. The train platform is not a kind of caged forest. It feels spacious and light. I didn’t expect to feel this way. There is a lot less staring into phones. People look to me fresh somehow. They seem grimmer and less disheartened.

  • what ate New York

    The film poster that has Godzilla tearing up great chunks of the city and eating alive New York City should have been a giant Pacman, I think. For technology has eaten New York. And not only New York: Copenhagen, Madrid, Berlin: these are cities where I have witnessed this carnage, sinister and almost silent. We noticed it on the plane, a ride through the sky which has transformed from what was a quiet space, a time of dreaming and half-sleep, into a wilderness of seatback screens. Everything flickers. People feed themselves perpetual stimulation by the handful, like a supersized bucket of chips. As soon as we land out come the phones. Soon the aisles are crammed with people stooping under the bulkhead and standing over each other, so intense is their desire to be free of the traveling life and meet with the destination city, yet all have pulled out small devices and are keenly, yet dutifully scrolling. Oh, the dullness, pervasive and wee. Why travel five thousand miles through the ferocious universe only to read up on what’s happening at home? Instantly to rejoin the same long conversations we were wrapped in on our own soft couch.

    We drag our cases to the A Train. My heart is pounding. This line is the subject of so much damn jazz. But when we get inside and the familiar orange seats are filled with black folks, every one of them inimicable, cool, and beautiful, the place proves to have changed somewhat since 2011. The suddenness of these changes and that nobody notices sometimes makes me despair and grieve. I miss my community, who have turned away from each other. Now even in the most exciting city anywhere, every third person is staring down into their lap, hung over the miniature news from elsewhere.

    Used to be I was the annoying or crazy one, preoccupied and dreaming in a hyperalerted world, clogging up the pavement as I stopped short to stare upwards, to notice detail or jot things down, writing as I walked, holding my breath, my train of thought, my pen. Now I’m the passenger in everybody else’s aquarium world. In the street, people scroll as they stroll. City that never sleeps seems halfawake. And it’s all so iconic. The subway car that looks like every movie scene, the puddles and paddocks of outermost Thingie Island where the airport lies marshily. The Rockaways, Blvd and Ave. “We are passing under the East River,” I report. “We are passing under the World Trade Center. A lot of people died here,” reading the map, my eyes filling with sentimental tears. “True,” says my companion, “and then their friends went out and slaughtered many, many, many times more around the world.” After an hour of train travel, after nine hours of airplane travel, after an hour of bus travel in Berlin we come up out of the subway station at last, at 42nd Street, and the noise – the smell of French fries and traffic and metallic dust – the people and the way they pass, the hoardings, the sidewalks, the way they hold themselves – both of us standing their marooned by suitcases, we each burst into tears separately and hug across our baggage.

    The lights, cameras, action are all around. We drift through the traffic of souls, uncounting. This explicit town, alive in all our dreams, overwhelms with its gross drama and chaotic splendour and decay, while at the same time it speaks to everyone individually. We find the New York Times, Dean and Delucas, the cafe. We find my friend, her black hair everywhere and her familiarity so moving. Even she, an artist, a true lifelong artist, ravels her phone at every opportunity. We buy burgers and a jar of beer, at the counter I worry we are taking too long to order and look up. There she is, hunched over her phone, as thought it were a knot in her hair she is unable to stop from worrying and untangling. Oh New York! Oh humanity! Come back to me! I miss the dreaming, the uncertainty, the hesitation and lostness. This striving, blaring, rushing, overstimulated community premium among the anthills we have built over the world is a place I experience through the dreaming comb, the honeycomb, of sweet nature, and the wild. Within eight stops of the Howard Beach station where the airport train meets the A train I have given up my seat to a pregnant lady and he’s given up his to an elder woman who rewards him with a sweet seamed smile, we’ve admired the pretty girl with green-tinged hair who has filed her front teeth into sharp vampiric points, I’ve passed on the name of an excellent book to a women who accepted my scribbled note and stashed it in her pocket, have told four people how beautiful they are, the tiny lady whose friend took his seat has paused at her stop, the stop before ours, to say, You have a nice day, now, and the beautiful man whose face was so somber and cold has smiled, shyly and ironically, when I said as he got off, You are a really beautiful man and I hope you have a really beautiful life. He said, drawlingly, Thank you. I love him.

  • a beaker of fruit in the sun

    Some of the friends I made in New York four years ago are so precious to me that I have been saying their names aloud as I walk about my apartment and then smiling and convulsing with love. Flying into New York on the Fourth of July. First time I got there it was Superbowl Sunday: America, I love your peculiar public holidays. It was February and snowing and a lot has happened since then. I am eating up all the fresh fruit in my house and drowning my potplants. The poor sad fig tree by the window drops another sighing leaf. “This. Is not. The tropics.” This time round I want to do all the iconic things I skipped on my first visits, because I was too immersed in the sultry life of the place, the people who surprise you with insightful questions in the street, the man who gazed and gazed at my breasts as we drew closer and gasped, “Oh! I love your… eyes!” dragging his own eyes up to meet mine as he spoke. The longing in his voice, plangent and transparent. The love of life. The piles of people, literally stacked for miles all around, as though the whole population of Australia had been swept up into one giant terrarium. And the way you can feel them in your sleep, breathing and striving and struggling so hard. I want to ice skate in Central Park although the snow has melted now. I want to run into the beautiful man who was reading Rumi on the train. I want to show my Berlin companion the things I found there last time, the Flatiron Building where I laid my hand flat for goodbye and started choking as though I was leaving a lover. I want to point to Trump Towers as we glide past it in a vehicle of some kind and pass on my favourite local pun: “New Yorkers call this edifice complex.”

  • 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