Herbie Hancock came to play Brisbane, it was bona fide. He and the band really loved it each other. When he came onstage, spontaneously people in the audience stood up, one by one, until pretty soon we were all standing. We wanted to acknowledge his effort and grace, the effortless grace and hard work. He mentioned a ‘Wayneism’ by his friend Wayne Shorter, who recently died: “Jazz means, ‘I dare you.’”
He told us, Kamala Harris has to win, and a shout went up. The room felt so joyous. Afterwards there was a long queue for the merch counter, at which we could buy not one of his 53 albums but they had assorted t shirts, and hoodies, and tote bags and a baseball cap. At the end, he wouldn’t leave the stage, the band were all gone and seven hundred people standing applauding. Herbie went all along the front row, shaking hands or a fistbump with one after another, and one guy asked him a question and he dropped down to his knees and started talking, and the two of them were talking and we were all just standing there, happy and rejoicing and wanting to be present. And I had this fantasy that the audience would disperse and go home, and the great hall with its vast pipe organ would be empty, and the two of them sitting there, going Yeah, man. The fusion, the half diminished, the monster drummer. The music.
Tag: Travel
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sharing the Herb
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shriveled bulb of god
My stomach feels like a shrivelled bulb after two martinis, no dinner. Whoever invented alcohol is my god: right now, my god. The last time I had one of those (a martini, a god) was in New York, it was summer then, I came out of the studio where we had been working on the album I’d wanted to make since 1999 and whose songs had been written over fifteen years and it was all so exhausting, so wonderful, on the street a man came past me pedalling his cab, a pedal-cab, like the becaks that used to carry us to the markets when I was a child, in old Batavia. “Take me to a rooftop bar,” I said, and the next twenty minutes were alive with light: those huge buildings shooting up into the sky like terraces, palaces, penthouses’ skeletons, every one stippled with windows alight and the warm evening breeze exciting my cheeks. I was crying with joy. New York! New York! Like Berlin she is one of those cities where on the subway, on the bridge, under the trees you would cry out “New York!” and feel like she hears you. So I found a banquette in the scarlet-lit rooftop bar that was rapidly filling with Manhattenites after work and I told the Spanish bar girl, I like olives, so she made me a martini festooned with skewers, each one so laden with green olives it was as though the glass had greenly exploded. I sat and sipped, turned my pages and sipped. After a while the volume level rose and I drew out the headphones I had bought that day, a remote birthday present from my Australian family, began listening back to the work we had made. Tonight was very different but same, same, same. This Russian bar in my leafy street that I’ve passed several dozen times suddenly beckoned, as if it were a painting of a bar that had come to life. I went in. “Can you make me a dirty martini on Bombay Sapphire?” And she did. The bar was tenderly tended by this woman, in 1950s sailor costume, her hair spooled back with nests of pins behind her ears, the luscious soft sound of the ice cubes as she rattled my drink u and down over her shoulder then poured away all the vermouth down the drain. Apart from the dark-haired girl in a beanie studying at the bar I was then her only customer. The dark-haired girl looked up and said to the bartender, This is so hard. I took my drink by its frost stem and the two of us drifted outside, wicker chairs where in a little while the bartender would come round with her basket, lifting aside the daytime posies of flowers and putting in their place red glass candleholders. I watched the street, where nothing passed. In an hour only two cars, ten pedestrians, five bicycles. The sky has changed, it is settled in a grey now and when I mentioned yesterday “you know at this time of year this means it’s grey for another five months,” the woman clearing my coffee cup said, “Ist das nicht furchtbar!” Isn’t that terrible! Well, yes, it really is. In the balcony opposite, on the first floor, three girl-silhouettes were enjoying their cigarettes. I wished I smoked. Occasionally a yellow leaf sauntered down through the still-warm air and landed on the cobblestones, in the garden bed, on the roof of a vehicle. I have never experiences a Fall before: it is what it is: life falls colourful to the ground. The dark cold skeletons reassert their empire. Winter is arriving, time to get out of here.
~ from Berlin via New York City, 2013
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long-legged rock god
At rehearsal with a Ghanaian band for whom it is imperative to have two different drummers side by side. There are three brass horn players and I have counted four different patterns of stenciled colour on the walls. The room is filled with people speaking Ga and Twi and pidgin and the carpet is striped. The hand drummer is unable to play as he keeps having to get up from his seat to dance. The kit drummer gives out commanding shrieks of joy. Brass section is tight. I didn’t want to sing Redemption Song but the bass player said, Tell our story. On the way home, I rewrote it on the back of the bike, saying Oh pirates, yes we rob you. Sell you to the merchant ships.
But your hand was made strong/by the hand of the almighty. We had ridden two hours on a motorbike in catastrophic traffic to get here, scattering streetlight vendors selling popcorn and plantain chips and iced water in plump bags and millet milk from zinc pails on top of their heads, finally spinning onto a long rutted red dirt road consumed with dust. Gig is Friday night and it is going to be wonderful.
~ 1st December 2021, a different world -
revellers have taken over the world
In a little Hungarian cafe I found a tourist map of Budapest. It very much resembles the summertime map of Berlin. All-night “party with a capital P” hotspots, hostels with wifi, a Sunday farmer’s market “to soothe your hangover soul.” When I got home, a trail of smashed-up pieces of coloured foil lay glittering among the autumn leaves through the house door. Revellers have taken over the world.
The back of the fold-up map has a kind of jokey phrase book that made me feel I had never been young. Spelt out in comic-font phonetics are the translations for “Yeah, whateva,” “Good penis,” “Please may I fondle your buttocks” and “Harder, faster, now.” “How much for him/her?” gave me chills. By the end of the page the insouciant mood has soured into something more like desperation:
I’m having a heart attack
Don’t harrass me
I’m thirsty
My bum hurts
I’m drunk
Never again
Help me
Fuck OFF
Don’t stop
Goodbye
Once more
I’m lost
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Berlin 2013. Found among some old stories. -
Portugold
I am in Faro and the moon has been full for days. Everywhere we walk he carries my bag. It is heavy with notebooks and sketchpads and he carries it without complaint. The old town is shaped like an egg. Or a zero. What was the most important thing the Arabs brought to us? asks the jingoistic guide, who has been jousting with my companion about who has the better football players. ‘That’s right! The zero!’
Well and that’s important, I say, deadpan: for the football results. He smiles into the stony ground. Our feet ache from days of walking. It is wonderful at night. We have found our way past the startlingly chic frameless glass cafes to smaller, darker, local places filled with families, trying bread porridge stuffed with shellfish and a raw egg stirred in at the table, fig and almond flatcake, pears in wine. ‘It is two pears,’ the friendly girl explains, with difficulty. ‘On his plate with sauce.’ I watch her ladling out the ruby syrup and she starts towards our papered table and then stops. She goes back to the big glass bowl in the cabinet with lavender octopi and anguished looking mackerels and carefully spoons out a third half of the fruit. Proudly she sets it before us. ‘Beers in wine!’
We love the shabby side-street bar broadcasting either football or fado where the hosts spend the afternoon getting drunk and then the entire evening singing. We explore for days before it is time for the tour, a looping walk tour conducted by a tiny local man. He guides us round the blue hour as the steep treasure roofs grow first golden then dark, under the bougainvillea, under the arch. Christopher Columbus is also called Christopher Colon. Christopher Scent-of-Spices, Christopher Arse. Standing squarely on the cobbles he declares, we are the first, we were the greatest, we are the best. ‘Portugal gave them Brazil and in exchange Spain gave us Cape Verde,’ or was it Indonesia and Madeira, Sri Lanka and Japan. Bravely my companion speaks up. As an African man it doesn’t feel good to hear this. You should find a more sensitive way to talk about it. ‘Oh, I’m not proud of it,’ says the proud guide who has described as an innovation Portugal’s decision ‘not to work the slaves, only to sell them.’ ‘You are proud,’ I say. ‘And you should be ashamed. Shame is the only way we can tell this story honestly.’
When a black man tries to speak, white people eagerly talk over him. I point this out. ‘You didn’t let him finish one sentence.’ ‘Ernesto is telling this story in his second language,’ the Canadian guest says, excusing the bristling little guide, and I say, indicating my companion, ‘It’s his sixth.’
Africans often have more courtesy. Racism relies on that gap between our entitlement and their courtesy. But later he tells me in private, I could have punched him. After the tour I say to the guide very quietly, Ernesto we like you. Your tour was great. I have a little suggestion. Next time you describe how Columbus ‘discovered’ the Americas, you can put air quotes. There were plenty of people already living there with rich and complex civilizations. ‘But it’s just history.’ cries Ernesto, ‘it’s fact! We didn’t have America in our maps! We didn’t know!’ We didn’t know, I say — but they did. Put it in air quotes and that way you get to keep the same text, but it’s more accurate. My companion has picked up a feather from the ground and he tucks it in my hair. Above our heads two storks in their stork nest are making more storks, she will lay an egg shaped like a zero, like the old town. The nun at the Franciscan chapel shows us a donation box marked Pao, bread, for every Tuesday they make a soup and serve it to ‘the drug people.’ A restaurant tout promises a garden ‘in the backside’ and then thanks me over and over after I explain why he could consider saying merely, ‘in the back.’ We are laughing with joy. He’s not an arse. Our guide Ernesto has pointed out how the church and the government built their roofs next to each other and it seems to me if churches had been better governed in the first place, if governments had been more pious, there would not exist so many Drug People and so many displaced and struggling people who work three jobs and can’t afford health care, who always need feeding.
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mud road
We are walking down the road in the middle of the night. The road is made of mud. Our new home is in a village and it has no address. An urban village, lapped on all sides with villages that make up to capitol, one storey high and crowded with tiny chickens and little soon to be eaten goats as far as I can see.
Should I look nicer, I said, tonight on our way out, rumpled in my unironed skirt. Oh no, he said, Cathoel you are a white lady – you always look dressed up automatically.
Every time he remarks, casually at the door when I have loaded him with parcels, “My loads are plenty,” or, when after a cross cross-cultural fight we start really finally hearing each other, or when he pronounces ‘automatically’ with its six distinct syllables as indeed it deserves, or when I say ‘hippopotamus’ and reduce him to peels of crying laughter — each time I fall a little bit deeper into love as though it were a big bowl of soup.
Here is a church. Already they are moaning and they’re wringing their hands. One lady paces foot to foot, waiting for transportation to start and eulogy to have set in. The whole road will have to listen to their dismal rejoicing. Further along, a few shops are still open. One is called Reggae Spot, selling tins of condensed milk and mosquito coils, though Ghanaians laugh at malaria.
On the weekend we rode nearly ten hours north on bad roads festooned with craters in a tiny bus leaking dust from its frayed with rust underside. Under my mother in law’s mango tree I asked her when she offered tea, do you have any condensed milk? No, she said, I only have normal milk – producing a tiny costly can of condensed Carnation milk, as normal as canned be.
In our village house the water is piped in from a truck to a large polytank on a concrete stand. A chicken is roosting on her nine eggs in one of the pots I have planted and I greet her every morning, “Good morning, Lady Chicken, still working hard I see.” I am reading Elizabeth Gilbert, another white lady dressed up in her handknit white life who took an entire year away from work and spent it in Italy (eating), in India (praying), and on Bali (falling in love). Her book Eat, Pray, Love became such a sensation and attracted so many privileged rich seekers to the island that Balinese took to wearing t shirts which said Eat, Pray, Leave.
In her ashram Gilbert riffs through two pages of the startling innocence that characterises unearnt privilege. Americans don’t know how the rest of the world sees them; men don’t know that women understand them all too well. When she writes of her friendship with her fellow floor scrubber Tulsi, she describes the girl as ‘cute.’ Tulsi is far cuter now that her glasses have smashed, and due to poverty she cannot afford to replace them. “Tulsi is just about the cutest little bookworm of an Indian girl you ever saw,” Gilbert writes, calling up one of a wardrobe of Indian tropes she has prepared earlier, “even cuter since one lens of her ‘specs’ (as she calls her eyeglasses) broke last week in a cartoonish spiderweb design, which hasn’t stopped her from wearing them.”
It doesn’t seem to occur to the author who is scrubbing floors voluntarily as part of her search into herself that looking out from inside that webbed lens might not be pleasant. That being unable to do without the glasses now smashed and damaged is not the same as a cute, manga-kid stubbornness refusing to give up a favourite garment which has torn.
Tulsi describes her prospects: she will turn eighteen soon and will be married off to some boy she dislikes, or is indifferent to. A “teenager, a tomboy, an Indian girl, a rebel in her family,” she loves hiphop and lists for her oblivious interlocuter, oh, so interlocutely, the flaws which can prevent a girl from marrying. Her skin is too dark. She is old, 28 for example. Her horoscope is wrong. Not one of these flaws is anything a girl can do anything about, except that she must not be too educated, or have had an affair with someone.
We’re left wondering if in the conversation itself Gilbert found the time to commiserate with her feisty, spirited, trapped companion or whether she just floated directly from this listing of someone else’s sufferings – so many someones – into fresh contemplation of her own inner self. “I quickly ran through the list, trying to see how marriageable I would appear in Indian society… At least my skin is fair,” she concludes, innocently. “I have only this in my favour.”
Meanwhile in this village house, which we intend to rent out as a kind of guesthouse so that other privileged oblivious whites can come here with their cameras and render all our neighbours objects in the background of their own selfies, I am scouring and cleaning too. When I bought this broom the woman who had made it asked, “But do you know how to use it, though?” By turning it upside down and stabbing the dirt I made her laugh. “Like this, right?” I am too shy some days to leave the house. I feel like an intruder. Daughter and grand daughter of intruders. We have stolen so much. Africa produces 75% of the cocoa that fuels the world’s $75 billion chocolate industry, and earns 2% of the profits. Like an American in her ashram I am doing what I can, so lazily, so slowly, to clear away the cobwebs and look out on this bold world more plainly. I am trying to become aware of the crazy-making stain of sharp edges that my Ghanaian boyfriend has to see past every time he tries to achieve anything at all. I am perceived as being well dressed without putting in any effort. I am addicted to my own comfort. And as I weigh my prospects I try to imagine how that effort spared in grooming and combing can best be spent.
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waking up in Africa
It is my birthday tomorrow and I’ve woken up in Africa! Beautiful Ghana of the glorious peoples. At the spanking new immaculate airport a man was bobbing at his keyboard and singing, in the arrivals hall, “And you’ve all arrived safely on this Wednesday night, hope you’ve had a great flight, welcome, welcome.” My flight was grumpy cos we got stuck on the runway for an hour (in, you know, air-conditioned comfort with personalised movies to watch) and I reminded the guy rolling his eyes next to me and complaining, you are in Africa. You arrived here on a million-dollar machine. A fast-disappearing luxury neither our planet nor most people working late at this airport can afford. We were fed and offered tiny bottles of wine and scented towels to wipe our hands and no one fell out of the sky on long wings of flame *just enjoy it!* Singing and bobbing in the passport queue, overjoyed to see my sweetest honey the kindest most gorgeous man in the world, whom I adore, who waited patiently outside in the crowd an hour for me and carried all my cases. I travel heavy, mostly books.
He had brought me a malaria tablet and fed it to me in a swallow of boiled drinking water in the car park. Then we got as close to each other as we can on the back seat and drove away into Ghana. What a blessing and privilege to be here, to be with him, even to know him when we have spent our lives on separate continents, to be running a tiny business with big eyes that wants to construct a way for Europeans to offer ‘personal, partial’ reparations to Africa.
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Ghanagain
The grandiose way of telling this would be to say, I am flying back to Ghana for the premiere of a film in which I played a small role. The truth is, I fell in love. This happened before I ever went there, and on the first night of my first visit, in January, we met. He picked me up at the airport and I thought, how terrible if I couldn’t find him among all the brown faces whose country was new to me. We had talked so much by email and had spoken of our whole lives. He said he loved me. I said, you can’t say that until we meet.
He sent me flowers and chocolates and wine, which arrived at my door in Berlin while I was in Morocco, and died. The florist lady was so touched by our story she allowed me to visit and pick out a fresh bouquet, choosing out all the blossoms I liked best. By video I showed him. “I love orchids and I love roses.” I showed him the field flowers I had chosen from her big vases: valueless to some people, but beautiful.
We lay down together. We’d still not kissed. I looked at him and he looked at me. Three nights later when he texted to say, I’ve come home, I ran barefoot down the alleyway to unlock the big security gate and flung myself against its bars. And he grabbed me and dragged me to him and we kissed passionately between the curls of steel, and I felt as though I had come home.
My first morning in Africa, because Morocco is different, he said I don’t want you to go out on your own. Wait for me. No fear, I said, no way: I’ve been travelling independently since I was fifteen. This was further back for me than for him. I went walking and at the end of the day and after furious adventures I came home, finding my way and proud to find it. Outside a two-storey building which stood out, a woman said, “Are you American?”
I crossed the road to shake her hand. “No, I’m Australian, this is my first day, it’s so beautiful!”
“Do you think you could fake an American accent?”
“I dunno,” I said, “quite likely not well.”
“Would you like to screen test for a film we’re making? We’ve hunted all round Accra for the right white lady.”
I went in and she took me through a room full of people in headphones. I can’t act, so I just tried to imagine how this character might feel. The director came down, who had written the film, and spoke to me about what he wanted. “It’s an American woman, a bit older, and she’s flirting with a Ghanaian man online. And she knows that he’s scamming her but she doesn’t care, she’s bored or… maybe a bit lonely.”
I stuck out my foot. “My sandal and your microphone – they look like they’re cousins.”
My hairy goatskin sandals from Morocco and the furry windsock on a big boom mic made them laugh. “So what brings you to Ghana?”
I said, “You’re not going to believe this…”
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winter blast
Try to work out whether I can afford to get back over to Ghana to see my sweetheart, I asked a friend: how long will this pretty autumn weather last? We know all too soon it’s going to get misty and grey and damp and bitterly cold – but when?
Oh well, he said: November is the greyest month. You could go in November and miss the Nieselregen.
Nieselregen is a kind of drizzly slushy snowrain that gets inside your spirit and rusts it out.
Or, he said, December is ok because everybody’s looking forward to Christmas – and at least if it rains, it might snow. But you could go in January. January is the coldest month.
January seems to me such a long way away, I said, in a very small voice. We were sitting under the trees in a quiet marketplace and had large beers in front of us.
Go in February, he decided. Because by February, even Berliners are sick of it and everybody just wants to stay in bed for the rest of their life. At least in March, the weather is still horrible but you can feel the change approaching. Like, ‘Just sixteen more weeks til I’ll be wearing my t shirt.’
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morning inglorious
Standing on the street in my Dad’s old pyjamas taping a sign “GORSS” next to the labelled doorbell. The man who works next door is waiting with his hands in his pockets, wearing a paint stained smock. He is very good looking. We are laughing. “Always misspelt,” I explain, in German, jabbing at the tape with my finger. I am barely awake and people are walking past with their kids in little kid wagons, pushing their bicycles, walking their dogs. I’ve been away from Berlin a long time and clearly am eager to make a good impression.