Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: streetlife

  • your huddled masses

    New York I am going to climb right up in your lap and press my face to your grimy heart. Where five hundred million faces have been imprinted before. The photobomber in your every selfie sweet New York. Asking scarves of passersby do you know who invented ‘photobomber’. Who invented ‘selfie.’ Brilliant language. Melted together and down in such scaldrons as New York, hell’s diner’s kitchen with menus that could make you cry.

    Chickens reared in tenements and boiled in oil with feathers still in place here and there, wispy in their tender pimpled armpits. Chickens crumbed and larded like the pilgrim invaders who thought to teach those natives a god or two in a sky already crowded with gods. Chicken homefried and served with waffles, side of fries, with bacon, with maple syrup, bitter greens. Those greens are grey. Everything green is grey. Everything khaki is red, white, and blue.

    New York I will be the umpteenth mascot for the day, with fur between her ears. We’ll be two tourists without their guns. That’s if we make it all across the ocean of Atlantis city sunk for its sin in a droning tube with nothing holding us up, my hundredth flight, the one not piloted by a male-pattern-entitlement first officer whose girlfriend left him so he watches everybody board, three carrying babies, and decides again: I will do it. I will drag the whole world down.

    Spectators at a suicide aflame: the headline, neckline, wasteline, wantline. Today we will cross the oceans intact I pray, sift on that trash heap of lilies who reap and weave incessant labour nonstop and who sleep in the street if at all and have built a Museum to the idea of Sex. A green pond. New York. I’ll be in you and you’ll be you. I’ll be dancing: the song soon, soon, soon. (That’s Korean for now. Now. Now.)

  • the dogover nation

    To the person who decided that every cafe, restaurant, waiting room, bus station, bus, and public space had to have a television screen in it: I disagree with you.

     

  • a dog’s park life

    Crossing the park I passed the usual gatherings of African men standing about under trees, whiling away the hours until someone comes to buy some drugs off them. Sometimes they sidle up and say, “Alles klar?” and occasionally a whisper of “Grass?” comes up or, once, from a bolder guy, “Cocaine?” I’ve worked out at long last that not all of them are dealers, some are just hanging out because this is where they hang out; because they come from a culture where instead of everybody sitting in their own bedroom facing their own screen, you spend the day with everyone, you hang out. A shower of sparks fell across the park: four guys huddled round a low homemade brazier and fanning its coals with the lid of something. The smell of meat roasting. The sound of whickering trees. The way these recent settlers have brought the ineffable mystery of life back up under Germans’ noses. Two men were sitting on a bench in the shadows and a large, round, comfortably built black woman slowly passed. She was pushing a trolley. One called out to her, “Hey! Mama Africa!” “Yes,” she said, kindly but wearily, pausing, and I thought perhaps she was just someone whom everyone turned to for help, communities yield such persons, I explained to my companion this theory and he said, No, it’s even more beautiful. Mama Africa sells hot food to the dealers on cold nights, she goes around with her trolley and if they are hungry, they flag her down.

    A few hours earlier coming through the same park I came across three dog owners standing about warming their hands in their pockets, their four dogs channeling and chasing one another, noses to bottoms, noses to groins. Another dog raced in like a flash of black fur and then two more dogs arrived, a merry flurry, soon there were eight dogs weaving and circling and joining each other nose to tail like elephants or ants and the tallest dog owner, an old punk, said in his dark gravel or asphalt voice It’s a regular dogfest, “Es wird ein richtig Hunde-Party.”

     

     

  • three dog night

    three dog night

    A bar in Berlin. I am greeted by a dog. “Na hallöchen! (‘little hello’) Wer bist denn du?” He is wiry and rough-haired and nuzzles my bag, clearly scenting the traces of Another Dog on its old leather. Then said Other Dog bursts in. Writhes himself in an ecstasy into my lap. Now we are three. Dog owner joins us: four. A lanky dude with his lanky red-headed setter lopes into the bar just as the music changes. Red-headed setter slides under our table where all the dog action is at. Berlin, I love how you let dogs into your bars. How a person thirsty but inconclusive and confused can say, Was war denn das? Was du gerade gemacht hast? What was that you just made? And the barkeep will explain. “A very old-fashioned Old Fashioned.” It was so good I sucked all the sugar out of the orange peel. A wreath of contented dogs round my feet lying like drunks. A man who sells Motz (homelessness magazine) came in and made his pleading spiel. Along the bar a line of hipsters sweet and tilt-headed as birds.

  • someone else’s rage

    A girl with a most glorious voice started singing as the train took off, she was hidden by a mess of passengers who cleared, instinctively, to give her some room. Playing a tiny ukelele and letting the song free like a bird: her fond little scratchings on the instrument suited the sweet, round spiciness of her voice. She sang “Leaving on a Jet Plane” and somehow turned it into a kind of confident kvetch. “Don’t know when I’ll be back again ~” or if, babe, if you don’t shape up. Her hair sprang up out of her head like fireworks, fizzing in spiraling coils. She was relaxed, she was vivid. I searched all my pockets: not a single coin. But I could applaud, and the lady sitting opposite, huddled in the shoulder of her stolid-looking husband, sat up and clapped as well. I was about ready for some music, having had a close encounter this morning with somebody else’s pain and bewilderment, a massage therapist who had told me too much of her personal stuff and now retreated behind a wall of rage so sudden as to be rather terrifying. Why are you now so angry with me, I said, and she said, because we keep talking about my stuff. Now just lie down and let me treat you. I had said, when we found ourselves back on That Topic, you need to take action, and she snarled: I’m so sick of your opinions! How did we get ourselves into this? It was my fault, she told me, because on arriving I had asked “How are you.” So I was riding home sore from a non-massage and felt glad of the girl with her spunky round voice and her star-spangled stockings crossed over each other, comfortably loosely, as she leaned against the door. Glad of the blue sky when I came out of the train, its creamy little penguins of cloud. I stepped round nine Australians in the street who were saying to one another, patiently, “I want to do the museum and then the Wall,” “Well, I thought you wanted to do the club park”. I stepped into a bakery and said, “Haben Sie Brezel?” “Alle weg!” she told me, looking up from her scrubbing and then saying, ah, no, look – there’s one more left here. I took my pretzel into a corner store and bought it a beer. Because, fuck it. The girl at the counter was so divinely beautiful I had told her so before I realized I’d opened my mouth. “You! are beautiful as a picture!” Thanks, she said, laughing, perfectly familiar with her personal splendour. It was such a joy to look at her and laugh and to walk home along the slow, clogged, crowded street with bread in one hand and with beer in the other. If I could find the desert here and the beach, if I could find a way to make a living, I would live in Berlin for ever and ever and ever and never sleep.

     

  • the godfather underground

    Riding on the train underground I feel like a caterpillar carving through the belly of the city. The hungry metallic smell of the train’s breath is become familiar as I jog down the steps to Underworld. Sitting and writing and sitting and writing. I glanced up and caught the eye of an elder gentleman standing with his son against the glass doors, watching benignly. He said, across the carriage, “Schoene Schrift!” Lovely handwriting. Oh! I said. Thank you. And he nodded and nodded. I went back to my page. Filled it and turned to another and smoothed it down. Finished what it was I was saying and capped my pen and slipped the book into my bag. The doors opened onto the platform and this man and his son, my age, were standing beside me. He stepped back to let me past. “Alles schoen aufgeschrieben,” everything nicely written up, he said, with great satisfaction. Unintrusive and approving, like a kind of fairy godfather.

     

  • lord snowdon’s bicycle

    lord snowdon’s bicycle

    Rounding the corner on my bike just now I accidentally took part in a mass demonstration. I don’t know what it was about, maybe just a celebration of biking. People seemed easy and relaxed, it is a sweet sunny day with high white cloud, a blue sky, the pack of people travelling at jogging pace over the bridge, guarded by police on massive motorbikes, reminded me of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s description of her father’s experience of riding up out of the river bluffs with a big wolf pack travelling on all sides, they must have just killed and eaten, he told her, they showed no interest in me whatsoever. This was a quiet deed: shared, fruity, holy; some cyclists had dressed up, about a third were wearing helmets, but most of us travelled incognito, as our regular selves, quiet chat here and there like flowers in the grass or fishes occasionally leaping from the water. At my street corner I peeled off and passed the flower stall that has suddenly appeared since the weather turned autumnal, the strands of cut purple grasses stirring their flimmish pretty seedheads in the breeze like a prairie. America once was all prairie. A body of buffalo roamed it from end to end, turning each time they eventually reached the coast, nosing each other, “it’s not here! go back!” like the sparkling water in a snowdome slapping from end to end slowly. This may not be the exact scientific truth.

  • 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.

  • visiting Berlin Wall

    Passed a remaining section of the Berlin Wall and saw tourists of all languages leaning up against it for photographs, posing with big smiles and often two thumbs up; one Japanese girl had a coy, sexy grin. I wonder what it is they imagine they are visiting.

    photograph is of a building-site skip transformed into street art with the aid of a shopping trolley turret, carpet-roll gun & many layers of clingwrap plastic.

    H2O HoL gladwrap tank

  • 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