Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: streetlife

  • some order

    I find Berlin the most extraordinary city. Nothing is regular, not that in my life anything ever is. I guess in an individuality-seeking cult/ure this sounds boastful or false-meek, but I have spent a lifetime hunting the things I have (bountiful, it turns out) in common with other people. Went through the drug-dealer park this afternoon on our dog walk/bike ride to the river. Saw two pale-eyed people sharing a picnic of vodka, a scarfed family of women leaning wearily but free against the fence that divides (we hope) the water from the land, African men lissom in dreadlocks playing music & ball, metalheads holding a metal convention under a large chestnut tree all in black and with slogans and dark music dimly blaring; many couples making out that plenitude is privacy; dogs upon dogs upon dogs upon hounds; and a Turkish family playing cards and smoking spiralling blue cigarettes between thorny bramble bushes, just as though their country were not burning or perhaps as though they were all too aware, and were taking some time off from chaos, placing some orders.

     

  • beats like butter, baby

    beats like butter, baby

    Cavernous cafe in Berlin during the changeover period from Friday afternoon caff to Friday night bar. The music is gradually speeding up and the staff become flirtier, including with each other. People still working on their laptops are hunched with concentration, trying to get it all down. Two extremely buff men who came in with an old-fashioned upright pram have their son on their laps, spoon-feeding him. The boy is fat as butter and looks calmly round the shadowy room. In German I read in a gossip magazine how dearly Brad Pitt loves Angelina Jolie and how he was tirelessly by her side during her recent ordeal. Outside, the sun is glary-bright and like snowflakes the fluffy little seeds of some flowering tree pursue their airy way through the day. Things seem slow and sunstruck but with the glimmering promise of sex with a stranger, the inimical glamour and disillusion of city evenings. A thin guy rolls in behind his stack of pallets of soft drinks on a sack truck. A muscular guy whose muscle is running to fat pulls over blaringly in his topless black vehicle, parks at an angle and leaves the engine running with an intolerably loud and banal dance track pumping. I am thinking about running out to turn the volume down, just to piss him off. I’m drinking a milkshake with cucumber and mint. Its clear fresh milky taste pleases my body. Berliners are smokers, people walk by with their head in the clouds. The fat muscleman leaps into his car and pulls out, jerking his hand to let the taxi driver who’s had to screech to a halt know, I am going first. The taxi driver is Turkish: he stretches his mouth whimsically. His hand falls on its back like a cat. He’s relaxed. “If you want to, man. If you have to, dude.”

     

  • feeding the swains

    feeding the swains

    Yesterday I saw two people having a very cute picnic in a park. They were sitting side by side on one of the benches facing in to the path and had a card table set up with checkered blue and white tablecloth, two glasses, an open bottle, bowls of nibblies, real napkins… the whole nine yards. Which is about how many Brisbane backyards would have fit in this skimpy narrow green strip that provided space for a few lovely trees to grow between the six-storey apartment houses. The picnickers were in their fifties and looked to have dressed for the occasion, she had on make up and sparkly earrings and he had on his good jeans. They looked so happy. They saluted me with raised glasses when I smiled at them. Ten minutes earlier I’d passed a man feeding a swan, by the river, he sat cross-legged on a large tree stump with his own glass of wine, paper parcel of food, and the swan bent its elegant neck to fetch things from his hand. First sunny day in a while and the greensward was littered with revellers – revellers and their bicycles – room enough to sit but not to lie down. Plenty of swans foraging the riverbank in hopes of crumbs and morsels. My German-speaking friend calls them ‘swains.’

    H2O HoL swan on nest

  • everywhere at work

    everywhere at work

    Berlin by night. Candles in the windows of quiet roadside bars. Soundless cyclists ignoring the lights. Puddles from the rain glinting under the trees, on the path alongside the canal. Pizza restaurant which has set out a yard full of benches and long trestle tables since I was here last, which was the end of a bitter, long winter. In the front corner of the yard are two spindly chairs, their feet looped about by overnight chains, standing perkily either side of a carved concrete round-topped table. A big quiet tree separates this lovers’ corner from the rest of the empty restaurant. We sit on the two chairs and watch quietly as the night evolves imperceptibly round us. This couple are walking their dog. A car is passing in a haze of invisible rain drops. This large tree on which I rest my hand is growing, sap rising, leaves unfurling and sprouting from the trunk in several places. Life is everywhere at work and leaves its carcases and traces.

    H2O HoL dark red jazz jam

  • Tom Waits for no man

    Tom Waits for no man

    I somehow forgot Berlin’s imaginative beggars. This guy held open the door to the autotellers in the foyer of the bank, with a grand flourish, saying, “Welcome!” He was as confident as though he owned it. And he did! He was wearing a greasy navy-blue pinstripe suit like a boxer and had his hair slicked back. On the way out I gave him some coins and he snipped them up in the hand that was free from cigarette-rolling, clasped them to his breast, “Danke!”, kept rolling, grinning at me salty and devilish as Tom Waits. The joy of life is a great thing to share, if you’re a beggar or busker, if somehow you can manage it. Irresistible!

    H2O HoL grafitti hedge

  • punk snot green

    Punker dog in Berlin, his hair matted and scrufflish, his gait insouciant. He has a green streak in his fur, top of the head between the ears, that matches the green quiff on his master. The thought of this dude dyeing his own hair like an old lady in a salon and then tenderly saying, Ok now we do yours, has undone me.

    H2O HoL grey graffiti muse

  • jousting

    Guy sauntering through the pretty part of town with a flashing, winking keychain, silver and the size of a beer coaster, jouncing at his groin. Its flashing and winking caught my eye, and then he caught my eye, with a smug, knowing look which spurred the mean hope that he may never get close to any woman again.

    Girl wheeling her bike alongside the lake, its rear wheel throwing up pinkish white blossom in tissuey arcs. I walked behind her like a bridesmaid, the bottoms of the green Spring trees stroking soft as mothers across the crown of my head.

    H2O HoL bought myself a present

  • coffee breathe

    coffee breathe

    I was in a strange city recently, got lost, felt overwhelmed momentarily, & needed comfort. Ducked inside a Guitar Shop to touch all the guitars. You pluck one string and wait for it slowly to come into stillness. At the back a man in a fisherman’s cap was playing a song of his own, I think, for the politely-smiling Guitar Shop man… they sat on matching, facing stools and one leaned in and one leaned back. Leaving the shop I felt just that bit more tuned in to sounds and to music, the traffic seemed rhythmic and spare, I kept hearing in the street the repeated curve-notes of a wolf whistle from somewhere high, or far away. Five times, six times, seven times, eight: was it a nerdy, somewhat serious guy who having gotten up the courage to catcall was now determined the object of his passing affection would not walk by without learning how beautiful he found her? Actually it was two college girls, leaning out of a fifth-storey window wolf-whistling their friend who was unlocking her bike oblivious in a stand of bikes downstairs, her hair wrapping itself around her in the wind. Wit-wheel! Wit-wheel! is how my ex used to spell it (and say it): Wit-wheel!

    I went into a crowded little food boutique that had a whole wall of small-brew beers. They had beautiful, grotesque, weird, colourful labels. They were honey-coloured, molasses-coloured, golden, greenish, dark. I bought a chocolate wrapped in sardine-printed foil for a friend who is overcoming a phobia of fish. I went to the back of the store and picked up the brown-paper packages of whole coffee beans and held them to my face and breathed in.

    H2O HoL an ambitious door

  • hipsterest, like Everest

    hipsterest, like Everest

    Call off the search! I think I may have found the world’s heppest hipster. All those people complaining that they’re not one can relax: this guy blows you out of the water. He is tiny and slight – built like Prince – and perched on his front steps in a crowded cafe street, wearing skinny black jeans, elfin boots, and a cunningly off-the-shoulder stripey sailor’s jumper. He caught my eye because his elbow was pointed above his head at a most uncomfortable angle – like an alerted bunny’s ear – as he gave himself a beard trim, slowly, searchingly, luxuriously, into a bevelled mirror on his lap, using a large pair of silver antique dressmaker’s shears.

    H2O HoL backlit kreuzberg

  • you are fire

    you are fire

    Walking home past an outdoor restaurant in town that provides rugs for its hardier patrons. Everyone else was huddled indoors, it’s barely ten degrees and the wind is icy. A woman wearing a piled confection of blonded whipped hair drew on her cigarette as I passed and said, drawlingly, “…but it’s ok. I paid him in shag rate.” She saw me listening and fixed me with her eye and blew out a long, expressionless stream of blue smoke. Dragon lady! You are fire. I adore you.

    H2O HoL we found here a blanket