Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: punk

  • 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.

  • my god, I’m so drunk

    My god, I’m so drunk. What happened is: it’s all Diamond Dave’s fault. What I mean to say is: we went out to see him play. We were walking and on the way several bauhinia trees stretched themselves across the cyclone-wire fence of a local public playground, I pulled them down towards the ground and took half a dozen flowers, thinking: I have never seen Dave play, I can throw these to him on the stage. In the pub.

    The pub it turns out is, like, the happiest bar I have been in for several years. There were six people in there when we came in, plus a barmaid whose long slender legs had tattooed across the hem of her leather skirt, “forever young.” “If only she knew,” I said to my Berlin companion, whose height people in public places remark on. But fuck them. Dave’s number one fan came reeling up to us and gasped and let his hand fall open like a slow present. “You!” he said, “are like the new Jerry Hall. Oh. My. God.” I was laughing. “When I die and I finally get reincarnated… I wanna come back AS YOU.”

    My darling bought us a beer. It was a German beer whose name the scribbled bar girl could not recognise when he pronounced it the German way. “Oh,” she said, “Doppeldingsbum.” Our friend Diamond Dave, or so he claims (“Is that really my name?”) was playing covers as though his life hung from them. I felt ashamed, abashed, totally awakened at the sound, I had never heard him play in all those years we had been friends and yelled into my companion’s sweet ear, “He’s just a natural born rock star!” He was. He is. The bar filled with revellers. Some of them were 21 and some were 62. The bald guy making eyes from across the bar began to dance as Dave poured himself into “Love is the Drug,” an exquisite cover, absolutely defined again by his rolling bass.

    Probably my favourite song for the night was the Sunnyboys, “Alone With You.” Lord, was I dancing. That just never gets old. And then Dave struck up something of Elvis’s, can’t remember what it was, oh! “Hound Dog”! and the bald guy across the bar left off leaning and started slowly grooving. Like he was wearing a hole through the floor. I strode round to join up with him, sashaying good, and we both sang it out as people do who love music and are perhaps drinking, who knows, it’s the Valley. A whole pile of people poured in. There were two gigs upstairs and one in the back room. “It’s a labyrinth,” said my friend when he came offstage. I left my beer standing there and the man I’d been dancing with bowed with his hands, like Thai masseurs do, “Thank you, lady,” he said, “thank you, love.” Later on he turned up at my elbow saying, “Can you introduce me,” and then grinned into both our faces, saying, “You are suited, you look right together.” He told my boyfriend, “She’s a great girl. I mean! She’s super great!” But I let my beer stand and went out to explore the back. It was noisier. Death punk vibe. There was the girl with cherry bomb hair and long black leather jacket. There was – hey! Dusty Anastasiou waved cheerily, next on the bill, I promised I would go see them play but then my boyfriend threw an accidental beer over me, I forgot. Anyway we slunk home cold and reeking of alcohol. “I can’t believe you threw that over me, I am so cold, I’m so wet.” But we had climbed up the stairs and found the skinhead gig right up under the roof, the boys clustered at one end the girls coiled at the other, we looked out the clotted windows on the Valley, Friday night concupiscence, all the sleek taxi cabs stopping and starting at the curb, the people stumbling in and out of places, the girl who looked like Ashley Judd and the post-traumatic-stress-disordered Scottish Falklands veteran who told us all his archaic and sad, tired, unpleasant history and by his side the little punk boy whose girlfriend, fiery-dyed and fearlessly tattooed up like a Maori warrior queen, sang along every word with some Nirvana song I’d never heard of, such is music, the shared ecstasy and the narrow individual dream that takes up all the moors and can encompass every wonder, every effort, every thing. I came home stripping off my beer clothes and barely knowing anything, deep in the serenity, close friend to a rock star and light as lager foam in my soul, on my feet, all down the front of me, wherever you’d want to be: the music has always been there first and is what guides us, canary singing in the coal mine, “You’ll be safe here, you’ll be sweet.” Good night, canary dear. I love you.

  • on it, and in it too

    Oh, gosh. A friend of mine is visiting Berlin from Finland with her young family, they came here instead of to Budapest so that we could catch up for only the second time since we were both 11 and schoolmates in Indonesia. We saw each other on Friday and again just now, they are leaving in the morning. What’s happend is her little diaghter, about the same age we were when we were close, fell in love with me and I with her and her mother and I meanwhile have grown apart, though with plenty of mutual liking awash between us and respect, I think; the two of us, plus her fourteen year old brother, had such a good time once we broke the ice the other day, talking to each other in ridiculous accents and assigning magical powers to such landmarks as the scrappy scaffolding you have to pass under in order to reach the supermarket. I say assigning, but it feels more like you understand some genuine enchantment that is lying there, like the face of the moon in a puddle which from another angle reflects only parked bumper bars and tyres, waiting for us to know it and see it as we blindly pass. The parents went methodically through the supermarket, trying to work out which margarine was best for the breakfasts this weekend in their holiday unit. It’s easy for me to be revelrous and unresponsible, rebellious and responsive, I don’t have care of any kids. The girl took me by the hand and towed me to the softdrinks section, which til now I had never penetrated, it is right up the back of the giant side room supplying local Germans with their alcohol. Her brother had found a new variety of Coke and wanted to show it off. Ooh, we said, in our arch voices, eet ees like we are in a seeeeety of all Cokka-Collar, eet ees surrrrounding us on all sides, we cannot escape. Like me the little girl enjoys rolling her Rs.

    Today I caught up with them after their river cruise, my friend texted to say We are still climbing, can you come down, the kids want to show you their moves. I remember how passionately I fastened on any Lady produced by my mum’s social life who had qualities I could identify as those I wanted to embody when I was grown. How I longed to tuck my hair behind my ears with bobby pins, like our first-grade teacher. I went down to the climbing centre built round an old watch tower in the grubby club park. My friend’s daughter came and grabbed me. She was leaner and faster than her brother, both climbing astonishingly like insects climbing water, up and over the sloping walls which lean over forbiddingly, studded with holds. It was fantastic to watch. When her mother said it was time to go she put her regular shoes on and took me round to show all the climbs she had executed earlier, each one a higher grade colour of difficulty than the last. “I did those ones, too,” said her brother, “…. but not that other one.” I ruffled her silky hair. She has slanting Finnish eyes, a witching snow princess. “You’re like Tank Girl,” I said, passing on a compliment somebody paid me when I peeled off all the sweating layers of wool at the end of a not so long forest hike yesterday. “No,” she said, her eyes bold and secretive, her bow-legged aristocratic accent reappearing, “Iiiiii… am: a Niiiinja.”

    You are, I said. I see you are. We all walked up the street together, past the two tall punks begging for their Saturday night beer money at the video store, past the guy who sits cross-legged by the bus stop and does not beg at all. The little ninja spurled her spiels about each local artefact that caught her eye: mostly, people, and their behaviour, alongside reminders of the games we had invented walking two days ago and that had sunk into her imagination. The green signal man in the traffic light who is so busy, so so so busy, who appears to only have one arm and whom we had mimicked, hurrying so-busily over the crossing with our bodies bent forward. The red signal man with his arms spread wide who appears to be blessing the waters. They decided they would eat at a restaurant my friend had noticed. When it became clear I was not planning to join them, my little friend drooped, everything about her sagged. I felt tearful. “Why you not longer?” she said, with her hand on my arm. My eyes met her mother’s. The invitation had been there but wan. Or possibly I was just feeling over-sensitive: very often that’s the explanation. “Because,” I said, “I feel like… this is family time, it seems like you guys have had a big day, a big weekend, and everybody’s tired, maybe people are getting grumpy. Her mother, my friend, did not demur. “I’m not tired!” she said, “I’m not grumpy!” “Oh…” I cast about me, I don’t know why I had to escape. We had our arms around each other by this time and I was crouched so as to enfold her as completely as possible, my little familiar, little kindred spirit, I didn’t want to leave. I told her I would write to her and asked her to write back. Then I came home and phoned a friend and cried about it for a time. “You know how…. some children…. are just so…. special,” thinking how when I was a girl I would have given anything to get to know just one adult who seemed to still have humour without teasing and intrusion, who was like me, who liked me, who had the keys I had myself, given by god or whatever inanimate coincidences take the place of god, the power of noticing and knowing that you cannot know, the feeling that the trees also know you as you know them when you step amongst them on a night when the road seems to lead off right into the sky, the curious power of finding out coded language in the stones and in the curve of the street, I don’t know how to say it and have probably never described this before but I will go to my grave knowing this is what we are for, this is who we truly are, this is what we’re waiting for, the world of moon that is waiting for us despite flags and currency, despite gossip and news, despite additives, work choices, busyness, boredom, underneath and in spite of and above everything, and in it too.

  • reeky dog

    Such a pretty day. When I came out of the Underground station the sky had filled with these tiny white, flat-bottomed clouds, as though they were puffs of steam that had popped up from the chimney of some hidden machinery. It was a pleasure to reach the outdoors. Jumping onto the train I caught the eye of a raddled punk, crouched over his big brown dog. He was petting and soothing the animal, lovingly. I smiled and he smiled. The doors slid shut. But what was that… awful smell? Oh, god, it’s the hound. A guy in workout gear looked over and made an expression of disgust. I looked about me. People were wrinkling their noses. The smell filled the cabin and was unendurable.

    I got up and slid down the far end of the train carriage. Within seconds that end of the carriage was full, as though the track had tilted: the punk and his dog sat up on a vinyl bench by themselves, unsurrounded on all sides. The dog was emitting these edgy, whining noises. Everyone looked strenuously away, in a body, as though they could dissolve him by pretending he wasn’t there.

    The punk guy shrugged at me, the only person making eye contact. “Der reitet nicht gerne,” he said. He doesn’t like to ride. I said, “Tcha…” I was revolving in my mind the most inoffensive way to mention it to him, trying to translate: dude, your dog really reeks.

    The smell was unbearable, a creature rotting alive, I was breathing in little shallow gasps. We pulled in at the next station and the carriage emptied within seconds. Seven people ran pelting down the platform and leaped into the carriage behind. There they stood doused with disapproval, that righteous German indignation people can excite by basic inconformity. Even in a punk city, even in Berlin. I followed, laughing helplessly. Och, the poor old punk with his mangy, stinking, poor terrified animal. The long-term neglect, the isolation. You know that kind of released and loose laughter that feels like crying, feels almost like sex. It was kind of sad but wonderful and could only happen here. All the way home I was remembering him and the confederacy of perfumed people locking him out of their secret, hidden glances. I remembered and kept glancing out the window and smiling to myself. The poor smelly dog and his misery, the poor old drug-fucked oblivious punk who maybe thinks people reject him because he’s rejected society, thirty years ago, with his haircut and his piercings. Making up his stories to himself of why people can’t bear him and will not come near. An almost unbearable ecstasy of shame pierced me, that I had not spoken, that my German is laborious when it counts, that I couldn’t find the words. Berlin, decorous and louche at once. You big old mess of freaks.

  • picked it up & have kept it

    Walking along a quiet street feeling grumpy I heard a loud, juicy burst of fat laughter. Coming towards me was a man on his phone, shortish, gleaming, African, with laughter rolling through him, like a wisp of weed rolling in the sandy sea. Further down the street I saw a dog waiting in the laundromat, wistful with big eyes turned to the door, and passed a middle-aged punk whose hair had almost entirely balded away. But he had worked the few strands growing over his forehead into a messy quiff, stiffened with product but still with his own native old man’s/little boy’s curls escaping, as though he were saying to Death “You’ll never take me alive.” Coming back to the house I found a small square of white paper stuck to the cobblestones, entirely blank on both sides, and I picked it up and have kept it.

  • elephant in the womb

    elephant in the womb

    A punker girl crossed the street under the shady trees, shouting at some invisible or internal enemy. She was dressed in black from boot to root, her ears infested with silver and bone. Parts of her bristled and other parts erupted with pus. She scraped a chair out at the cafe where we were reading the paper. I can read German upside-down, almighty me. A little girl of eleven who escaped an arranged marriage showed her luscious unformed face and said, if you make me marry “ich werde mich umbringen.” Meantime the blackclad punk had sunk into some suicidal nirvana of her own. Maybe she was married too young, against her will. Heroin came and took her in his boat, she paid the ferryman, they rattled off knocking and whining on the water. Twenty minutes later two police officers appeared, wearing plastic gloves, and stood over her til she roused enough to stagger to her feet and fall to the ground. We felt sad in the belly and my companion pulled me away. Death in public, and the underworld that clings to the surface. Drugs and their many-splintered joys. Just say nowt.

    H2O HoL outback elephant eye

  • all police are souls

    all police are souls

    Entering the park at dusk we passed four very drunk men with maybe three full sets of teeth between them, squatting round a fire in a little glade of trees. Their enjoyment was loud and coarse and strong. We broke into the open and trudged up a slight hill, overtaken by a swoop of bicyclists. They were a family: mum, dad, teenage sister, and falling behind came the 9-year-old girl in her pink down jacket who wailed, Mamma, das geht nicht! (Mamma, this isn’t working). From the other side of the path came unexpected encouragement. A grizzled woman crouching over a joint called out in her throaty, smoky voice, “Du schafft es! Du kannst das!” You’ll make it! You can do it! The little girl put on a burst of speed, possibly out of terror or surprise, and the woman roared after her, “Yes! Yes! You’re doing it! You’re doing it! You’ve done it! YOU MADE IT!” It was such a beautiful, generous, Berliner thing to have witnessed. God love ‘er. With her scars and tattoos and her All Police Are Arseholes jacket.

    H2O HoL browsing piano player

  • pearl-sheaves

    pearl-sheaves

    Ran across the same little punk dog we’d met with last week, a scruffy little dude with green dye in his hair. His name is Schnitzel. I know this because he came scampering up the street and this long knotted rope of a woman, with five colours in her hair and a goodly stomp on her, came bawling after him, “Schnitzel! Schnit-ZEL!!” “Typical punker name,” my friend told me, casually. Really? Schnitzel?

    We went to a new place, new to me, for a breakfast roll. “Let’s go to the Greek place,” he said. It’s a spacious, cool, shadowy deli, like an old-fashioned larder keeping its cool via the stone walls and not through the agency of frigid, piped gas. The proprietor Yannis has large colour photos of himself all over the walls, photos he says his customers have taken. Yannis frowning, Yannis carving meat, Yannis folding his arms. He has a wall of certificates for his olive oils. He sells spicy sauces brewed in this neighbourhood, and handmade Greek products with beautiful packaging: a tea made from ginger, mint, saffron, and licorice root. Watching him tenderly sloshing fresh, grassy-green olive oil on our bread and shaving a flapping slice of ham from the hock in his glass cabinet I feel filled with optimism and a sense of slow, rising well-being. Surely we can support small adventurous businesses whose response to a troubled economy is: I will make teas. Surely we can eat fresher, walk on the grass until we find a shady spot to sit, live longer. A dozen dogs tumble and writhe in the unkempt park whose waving dandelions and delicate pearl-sheaves of grass seed remind my lounging friend of “a punk hairstyle. This is how you can see this city has no money.” “It’s even green,” I say, remembering the little scamp Schnitzel. The arse of my dungarees slowly dampens on the dark, damp soil. It rained yesterday. The sun comes and goes like bees. Possibly wind sifting through high trees is my most beloved sound on this half-paved green earth. Wind in the trees, sun in a twitching lace like glass-slippered waves, waving green grasses and the white clouds still passing.

    H2O HoL berliner spass

  • while it lasts

    One thing I love about Germany is that you can find local bakeries who’ll treat you like diners in a restaurant. You can choose a bread roll filled with lettuce and cheese, or raw mince and onion (“builders’ marmalade”), or some kind of iridescent preserved meat with cucumber, and order a cup of tea and have it all brought to your table outdoors with knives and forks and napkins and not pay until you leave. You can sit under the bower of greenery and watch a skinny mother with a pram and a cigarette flirt with the shaven-headed dude who just leveled a trigger finger at a passing flock of teenagers. One of the teenagers says to her friend, “Do we look like school students?” Yes, you do. Enjoy it while it lasts!

  • for beer and weed

    Two li’l punks on the footbridge to the Warschauerstrasse station, lounging with legs crossed and outstretched, dog lying between them, begging bowl out and a large sign propped on her legs which says in English: FOR BEER AND WEED. He obviously adores her. They have matching frothy haircuts, blonded and shaved up the sides.

    H2O HoL webbed alleyway