Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: streetlife

democracy

Voted! Gosh it feels wonderful. For those few minutes with ballot paper in hand, we are utterly sovereign, entirely free.

It turned out something of an odyssey to get there: which feels also appropriate and fitting. So many people have died for our right. I got sidetracked, absorbed in some other work I was doing, suddenly looked up and it was late. I rang the Embassy. Yes, they said, just come on in, we’re open for another twenty-five minutes.

I was twenty minutes away by train. So I jumped on my bike. Me and bike climbed on the wrong train at the right station (U-Bahn, S-Bahn, Strassenbahn… who can tell the difference here?) and as we travelled uncomfortably it occurred to me maybe you’re not supposed to bring your bike onto the Underground. The cars are narrow. It was hard for other people to climb on and get off. But they were very friendly about the inconvenience. Four stations later realizing this line (now travelling through the treetops – it’s confusing) did not connect with the above-ground line I needed, me & my bike jumped off.

Locked up bike and flagged a cab. “Can you take me to the Australian Embassy?” We got there at three minutes to four. There was a little queue outside, of people clutching passports. “It’s not clear we’ll still get in,” a woman explained. “Ah,” I said. “So maybe the government will be decided by people who are just that little bit more organised. Maybe that’s a good thing!” The guard let us in. I was the last through the doors. We had to give up our bags for screening, the fellow next to me (a songwriter from Melbourne who later told me his life’s summary) seemed to have endless pockets full of coins. He literally made a pile on the security guard’s counter, two handsful. He had travelled from Hamburg.

The Embassy smelled of Australia, possibly because of the charcoal artworks in the beautiful foyer. It really was beautiful. The staff were casually dressed, like people who have not have time to iron. A woman in trodden-down loafers and white jeans came out with handsful of ballot papers, calling out names. “Rosie? Molly? Hugh?” We stood about like pub patrons at the tiny high tables, bent over our forms. People were chatting as they voted. Democracy, I love you. On the U-Bahn platform on my way back to collect the bike I watched a man in salmon-coloured jeans hitched very high on a black leather belt, so old his skin was reptilian, prance down the platform very slowly whilst carrying what looked at first like an old fashioned suitcase, black and with white corners. Turned out it was an immaculate but disposable carrier bag from a glossy store. He stood waiting and felt round the bottom of his (empty ~ I peeked) huge bag to pull out its contents: a small plastic comb. Nervously he smoothed his hair back one more time.

Beside us a young girl with glitter round her eyes forged through the pages of the novel she was carrying. She held it right up to her nose, almost literally immersed. If anyone is curious my voting method ran as follows: 1. Greens. Because our environment is a bigger issue than any other. 2. Start putting all of the cruelest people last. Above the belt, below the line. I had to carry my vote into a glass-fronted office where a man said, cheerfully, “All done?” and sealed up the envelope for me with sticky tape. “Such a friendly embassy,” I told him, “thank you.” I love you, Australia.

September 7, 2013
scripteddybareitall

Saturdays in the studenty district of Berlin where I am living have been infested with a gobbling string of raucous hens’ parties. You’ll see a dozen young or not so young women all wearing matching headpieces – bunny ears, airline-hostess hats, fascinators, halos on headbands – and maybe pink t-shirts with a slogan, or beauty queen sashes… today I saw nine girls towing a children’s wagon which had several bottles and all their handbags stashed in it, the head girl (the bride-to-be) had on a prison uniform and her satin sash read, “Lifer.” You’ll hear them before you see them, most probably. Last week I saw fourteen candy-pink bunnies coalesce in front of two long-legged fellows who had taken up life on the couch, someone else having left a corduroy couch in a garden bed by the cobbled street; they made some sort of suggestion to the boys who responded with some sort of willingness, bringing a ragged cheer, a whooping, from the hen party, that had an unmistakeably dutiful quality.

What I dislike about these dos is they seek to rope in passersby. It reminds me of why I don’t like street theatre – at least not the kind that leaps, rehearsed and scripted, onto a tram and then claims the other passengers, immersed in their own train of thought, their lives, their worries, their books, have no sense of humour/are ‘inhibited’ if they refuse to be bullied into taking part. This seems to me to give what might otherwise be actual fun an aggressive quality. There’s always one girl lagging behind, her arms folded, her handbag protecting her heart. Why must a woman be willing to consume penis-shaped chocolates to marry the one she loves? Why must she dress like a lap dancer in order to prove she’s a good sport? In a small northern town over Christmas we saw a man sweeping the town hall steps. His friends called us over and dispensed beers from the open hatchback of a small scarlet car. “He’s thirty,” they explained. “This is his birthday. He has to sweep the steps until nightfall, or until a virgin comes past and kisses him.” Eventually his girlfriend, her expression an unutterably painful combination of the wry and the humiliated, scampered up the steps and kissed his cheek. He put down the broom. A cheer went up. Somehow celebration seems to me – Christmas notwithstanding – far less convincing when it is so scripted.

September 7, 2013
tower of rage

Yesterday morning I woke in that state known so satisfyingly as A Towering Rage. Must’ve had infuriating dreams. The sun came in my window and all the injustices of life lined up around me and stared like palings. It’s not a very usual experience for me and I wasn’t well equipped to deal with it. I didn’t stop to reason with or resolve my mood, just strapped some shoes around my feet and spilled out into the street. People were out. The sky was blue and clotty. The riot of graffiti seemed selfish and pointless. I travelled fast, towering and glowering. Took a sharp detour through the ruined industrial park where newer tourists than I stood about in shambolically worshipful groups, staring up at things with cameras in their eyes. Everyone was annoying. Before long the fury had burned off like a dew but for twenty or thirty minutes it was quite a lot of fun, in a yah, boo sucks kind of way. People got out of my way. The best and strangest, most irritating part was as I strode along not bothering to alter my misanthropic expression, men marvelled and turned and stared. A fellow in a schnitzel cafe craned round his wife’s back to gaze and blink. A tall man with a redheaded child on his shoulders met my eye with that slightly goofy, astonished, almost grateful look by which strangers compliment each other wordlessly. I was too angry to be gratified but I kept noticing. Each time I thought, like an incoherent teenager, As! If! The young, bearded, beautiful man who lies supine with his begging bowl annoyed me more than usual. The day before I had noticed his sweatshirt said, I laugh at you all because you’re all the same. He rattled his tin at me wistfully and I said, spreading my hands, Are you going to give *me* something? Sure! he said, digging into his coins with a big smile. I laughed, which annoyed me the more. As ever the sky and the water were beautiful, the sneer in my mind, more than love, seemed to distill every atom of the day into a burning clarity.

August 31, 2013
doesn’t that seem unusual?

Berlin, Berlin, I cannot but love you. Unbelievable, unmistakeable. The contrast to Copenhagen is immediate. At the airport nothing works. Every toilet is barred with tape and the man in the kiosk is grumpy but funny. He raises his eyebrows and shrugs. We are laughing. The train smells faintly of old urine. When we get out to change trains at Ostkreuz, for a moment I’m wondering can we have stumbled into a party? A party on the train platform, doesn’t that seem unusual? But it’s just a bunch of Sunday night revellers, standing about talking loudly and all of them wearing various casual, scraped-together outfits, some in funky, messy costumes, a girl with her afro pared into a kind of wave and bleached orange is crouching earnestly over her bags, sorting methodically a magical melee of things from one gaping leather satchel to another. She has on a short pair of shorts and some kind of shearling vest cut high around the ears. The moon drifts high, high, high above the scene, it does look like a scene, grubby and fitted out like a film set built by many hands. The train fills with the noise of someone’s ghetto blaster and the smell of stale alcohol. People are drunk. By the smell of it, some have been drunk for several days: a smell not of spilled beer or Red Bull breath but of old booze leaking from people’s pores. Three ladies with their suitcases ask my friend directions, he answers confidently and then grows confused for a moment when pointing out the outermost stations on the map above the door. The boy opposite catches my eye over his girlfriend’s head and we both laugh, laugh for a while, one setting the other off with a glance when the other stops gasping. The three pretty girls with demure frocks and curly hair are smiling tolerantly. The newly-arrived ladies wave when we get off. “Have a great time in Berlin,” my friend says. The love. The moon. The insanity. The mess. The three drunken Polish guys who ask for money, shoving a filthy coffee cup under my nose and rattling it. “Für beer und weed?” The gasp that leaps out of me when we reach street level and a low tide of litter has buried, like old snow, the bottom of all the tyres on all the bicycles locked to the railway station railing.

August 21, 2013
decanticle

I’m alone in the house and my heart feels filled with love. It’s a feeling like glass-slippered waves coming in over your feet on the sparkling, rough sand, so shallow you barely get wet but the softness of the water is inexpressible. Like water from stars, I mean light, I mean starlight, the salt water travels a long way to get to us. Maybe all of the love in my heart is from long-extinct volcanoes burning in other skies. I love the sounds of other people’s lives around me, I love the roaring restaurants that spill out along the street. I loved the girl dourly smoking Gauloises as her lover nuzzled into her neck. The little Thai restaurant, the bar on the corner with a waiter whose beautiful shoulders and tiny pigtail sprouting from the crown of his shaven head were so irresistible to watch. I love the sandpit at the playground with its no smoking sign. I love the little purling hair growing out of this soft mole on my cheek, its familiarity, its curve. I love the way the sky sets off immediately where the ground ends and goes, as far as we know, forever and ever and never ceases to be. Asking nothing and accepting everything. I love the blackness and the blue. The flowers that close up at night, like awnings. The irregular army of bottle-collectors, and people with spray cans and brooms.

August 7, 2013
lost girl

Last night a lost soul brushed past me on the street and I could feel the black, sucking wind. She was very beautiful, extremely young, just-enormous eyes. Bare feet and ankles swollen like stumps. Bruises. Old bruises. She was leaving the curb as I reached it to cross the street, making a decision, counting out some kind of breath or strange fairytale with soft beats of her hand on the air. She crossed halfway and came back. Same again. Described a formal square on the asphalt with sober steps, watching her own feet, slightly smiling. In the middle she balanced herself on the white lines and turned to open her arms at the approaching traffic imploringly. I said, We have to help that girl. She cannot have heard me but her gaze focussed on me vaguely, like air. She came back over the road and put herself beside me, very close, her head yearning towards this source of passing kindness with a tilting raise of the chin. I stood beside her. I said, Kommst du mit uns? and invited her to cross the street. Now it was safe. The traffic gathered at a distance, thrumming bulls. She was so surrounded by the sense of imminent threat, or so it seemed to me, it was like she was towing a thunderstorm on a kite string.

She looked into my eyes like a dog. A slow blink. “Alles ok?” I said. “No,” she said, very quietly, in English, very distinctly. I said, “Do you need help?” She sort of spread her hands on the air, two floating castles. Helplessness, helplessness: mine, hers, ours. A young girl like a flower, a roaring jungle infected with needles, coins, tricks. We crossed the road without her, her attention dissolved from me as love dissolves. I looked back and two friends had surrounded her, they carried her back in their intent to the side of the road. She was reasoning with them. In the park one of the African dealers caught my eye and I smiled and he smiled. Then he looked self-conscious, shy. “Are you laughing at me?” “No!” I said. “I’m smiling at you, because you’re beautiful.” He walked on a couple of paces alongside. “That,” he said, thoughtfully, “is a really nice thing.” The girl in my mind made a feint at the traffic from the roadside again, describing circles and air squares all paved in asphalt, more than a dog but less than her altered self, a welter of physical injuries, little fiend no doubt who would steal and shame and was lost in helplessness, waiting for her accident, a ghost already.

August 6, 2013
cafe calm

It was breathlessly hot. Almost every inch of Berlin seems to be paved. I went out with a friend who has a dog. The cafe we found has three guardian trees, sentinels of sensibility on a long glaring featureless street. The dog flung himself onto the shaded pavement. The cafe owner brought him a basin of water. He brought us menus written on little lined notebooks, with pictures of writers pasted inside. They made perfect coffee and perfect eggs. The owner, a motherly, middle-aged gay man in a blue gingham shirt, came over and said, holding up two biscuits between his thumb and forefinger, “And is my little friend allowed to have something to eat?” He crouched by the dog and stroked his head, offering the crunchy treats coaxingly. The awning over our heads was caramel-coloured and had strings of golden lights looped underneath. The tables had little sprouting pots of flowers on them and those glass sugar dispensers with a tilted steel nipple like round fat ducklings. We gazed up and down the street, falling into silence, stunned by this unusual heat. I told my companion, cafes save my life every week. What would this street be without this oasis? A bleak, suburban hopelessness. Cafes give the feeling that human civilization has been for something. They collect up the beauties of what we have made. This lantern, this music, this length of printed cloth, this sturdy tumbler just right for the grasp. From a cafe vantage point one can sit and look out. One gazes on the world passing ceaselessly, in starts and spurts, and says, Aye. So it is. Such is life. This is us. Here we are. It’s a funny old world. And so it goes.

July 29, 2013
berserker

Yesterday walking down a very Turkish street I saw four groups of boys, one after the other, carrying large, menacing, (plastic) bazookas. One held his fake sub-machine gun to his friend’s head as the friend squirmed and several times tried to bat it away. An eight-year old carrying the Ramadan bread tucked it under his arm and pulling a pistol from his pocket shot his five-year-old brother in the face. Then they both walked on, their pistols bulging in the pockets, carrying the bread of God and guns like it was nothing.

July 26, 2013
the hurly-berlin

Berlin, Berlin. Familiar and overwhelming. On the train back from the airport a girl with an extraordinary voice hopped on and busked. At the end of the song, the guitarist accompanying her took a bow and people burst into applause. “Wow!” she said, opening up her hat. A cute couple jumped off and a guy with his afro razored up the sides leaned after them, silently proferring the phone and wallet the girl had left lying on the seat. Two muscular men slightly running to fat had their dog with them, a pug named Princess Sheba. We got talking. The one holding the dog on his lap obeyed signals from the other one who said, wiping his own eye, she has something near her eye, and so forth. Princess Sheba stood upright on her owner’s sturdy legs, balancing against the train’s movement like a surfer. These trains travel high above the street and at intervals feel like you’re lost in the woods. The cool breeze flooded in every time someone got on or got off. “Mind the gap,” the safety announcement said in English. Later in the evening a guy snarled at me for making eye contact and called my German companion a Nazi. He was walking along spoiling for it, followed us, taunting, through some misery of his own. “Like the black women in Brooklyn say,” he said, bitterly, chasing us, “stay away from white people.” Berliners smoke in cafes and the street is filled with old litter. If you eat out, people beg, and sell newspapers, and beseechingly play the harmonica. At the next table a middle-aged blond woman painted her lips against a little mirror while her boyfriend watched absorbedly. It took both of them to make her beautiful, it was their tradition. She made faces at herself as though she were having a very emotional, silent conversation. We saw two Romany boys whom I’d seen busking last summer, a year ago now, the little one is bigger and wirier and his chubby brother is chubbier. The younger plays the trumpet and has a loud ghetto blaster with which he drives away all the other musicians. But he’s getting better. Last year he was confident but terrible. I told him, your playing has improved! so much! you’re getting good! and for the first time in all the dozen times we have spoken he gave me his slow, curling, lopsided and personal smile.

July 26, 2013
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.

July 25, 2013