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.
Tag: writing life
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core grimey
Today I am going down to my favourite Berlin cafe to write. Last time I was there was four months back and I did not plan to be away so long. It was winter then and a homeless man came along the rows of customers to beg. He stood for some time reading over my shoulder, and when I looked round, he was nodding and smiling with glorious approval. He put his hand around me to scroll down so that he could keep reading. He put his index finger, seamed with grime in its peeling fingerless glove, up to my glowing little screen and almost touched it. He kept pushing his finger under the lines he liked, making little grunts to let me know he thought my writing was grand. I was so chuffed by him. The screaming espresso machine and the scraping of the stools and people chatting in German as they unwrap their croissants and unfold the thoughtful, liberal, kindly and independent German newspapers stacked in the corner are all sounds I have missed.
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for the ages
I went to see Paul Kelly play Berlin. I was going with my girlfriend and the evening of, she rang to say: I don’t feel well. I feel so tired and I just need to stay at home and curl on my couch. Can you go on your own?
I went. Since I left my boyfriend I have been going to a lot of events on my own. I sat with a German couple and the man said to me, “Do you know him?” “Oh,” I said, awkwardly. “I once sat in the same cafe with him in Richmond, in Melbourne. Australia’s not quite that small.”
This was in the Richmond Hill Cellar and Larder and Paul Kelly was sitting quietly with his friends and I was nutting out the playlist for my album, listening over and over through what we had made with cat-callers and buskers and students of jazz in New York and I looked round the room with my own music in my ears and saw the love: how everyone tried so hard to be courteous and pretend we had not noticed him there.
“But you know his songs,” this man elucidated now. “I am the same year as him: 1955.”
He patted himself on the chest, approvingly.
The audience was filled with Australians. You can tell by the facial expression. A certain kind of friendly lazy openness that lends itself to generalisation. I looked around. You looking at me? asked an older, Australian man behind me when I glanced round. Oh no, I said, I was just… gazing in your direction. He had hopped up. Held his beer up in his hand. Can I come sit with you? Ok, I said, and so he bought me some beers and talked in my ear between the songs. But I hardly heard. I was transported. Someone brought on a bottle of water and stood it next to the central mic. The musicians came onstage and among them were Vika and Linda, the glorious Islander Bulls, it had not occurred to me they’d travel with him. I know they sing backing vocals on his albums. They were radiant and they owned the stage, from its wing. Paul Kelly introduced the new album he had written and they launched it like a ball of flame. These people, and their music.
Linda sang one song and Vika sang another. In their salty, knowing womanhood they swayed side by side like palms. The beautiful affinity between them bespeaks sisterhood. The rest of the stage was occupied by men. They know each other. They can communicate with a bare glance. I was almost crying. There came a moment when the crowd threw back their heads and yawped, bawling along with the lyrics in our Australian accents: he took it pretty badly: she took both the kids.
Then they sang How To Make Gravy and I was crying. Surrounded by beautiful, healthy, young Australian men in their t shirts I flung my arms open and one of them snatched me up and hugged me harder than I have ever been held. I emerged from his embrace and his face was wet with my tears. Every time I smiled he smiled back at me. The music finished and they all walked offstage and we weren’t having it, we hammered our feet on the ground and yelled and hollered. Paul Kelly broke the glittering curtains open by himself. The closing song had been a quiet one, “Darling, you’re one for the ages,” and he had spoken the lyrics, shyly, in bad German: mein Liebling, du bist zeitlos. It seemed like he had half the crew of Rockwiz on stage with him and half of those were my Facebook friends. Australia really is that small. Now he took up his guitar in silence and the crowd began to sing to him, irresistible, a capella, “Darling – you’re one for the ages. Darling… you’re one for the ages.”
A grin tugged at Paul Kelly’s face. He is not a good actor, he is too authentic and sincere, as I had ascertained this evening by watching the film clip for Love is the Law, in which he looks uncomfortable and the film maker’s directions are almost visible on the screen. “Well this is probably my second favourite moment of tonight,” he said. “My favourite was when someone yelled out, ‘En-fucking-core!’” We laughed, proud of ourselves. He started to encore. We all stood still and listened. To awaken stillness in a big crowd is a consecrated kind of gift. Sweat was rolling down my spine and darling, I was one for the angels. When I got home I would hand wash every one of my garments in a trance of caretaking meditation and the beautiful young man had given me his number and so had the older Sydney guy, who sells Blundstones. But for now the rest of the band came back on and played like emperors. Much later, as I stood collecting my warm wrappings for the long bike ride home, a roadie opened the curtain and out the back I could see their white tour bus, Vika Bull standing beside it waiting for the gear to be boxed up and wheeled out, she was smoking a cigarette and our eyes met, and I felt a bolt of womanhood arc out of me and into the vast cold sweet dark Berlin sky which chuckled with the autumn wind, all the way home.
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graffiti confetti butt
I was cycling along the river where the water meets the trees, there is a little grove there which is sacred to me and it seems to be a forest in a parallel universe. It is a dreamy Spring day, grey like the winter but unlike Winter, studded with flowers; and I had just finished all the painful difficulties for the day, spending time in the bank explaining for the fourth time, you don’t understand, my card was lost, I had already reported it and blocked the card before this handsome spending spree happened; and then on the phone crouched on a bench at the local junkie corner explaining to one debt collection agency after another: see, you don’t understand.
Somehow or other they understood. Now all I needed do was scan and email, or photocopy and mail, the stack of documents the nice pregnant police officer had provided to me; and this two month saga during which I had spent entire half days in her company would be finally vorbei.
So I took some time to just cycle slowly along in my billowing favourite skirt, under the trees, listening to the voices of people who were quietly chatting on the benches and one man, very beautiful and with an outstandingly strong, slender ankle cocked, cross-legged reading his book and turning a page as I passed. I saw the glimpse of his natty sock and the gleam of his wonderful shoe. I saw the girl feeding compliments to her baby in its pram, in a sultry coo, and I followed down the path a little sister and much bigger brother, cycling end to end like a tiny chain of donkeys.
Her little legs in their candy pink zebra stripes were pumping earnestly; she barely managed to keep up on her little silver bicycle, and as I watched, the big brother, who was barely pedalling, looked back to check up on her and as he did so, he flung up his hand and opened its fist. Out flew a perfect confetti of torn up bits of leaf and as he’d intended, from her delighted squeal, the fragments fell over her and all around her and it made her happy and it made me happy.
A few weeks back late at night I was cycling home in the dark and my mind was drawn by the voices to the cluster of English-speaking Berliners, or touris, as real Berliners – old school, German Berliners, often themselves migrants who have fled Bavaria or Cologne – sometimes contemptuously call them. Maybe they tend to be loud and expressive; maybe they have money and push the prices up; maybe sometimes ’true’ Berliners can be seen in t shirts which say Berlin ♥ You but with the ♥ struck out; or merely ‘du bist kein Berliner.’ You… are no Berliner.
From behind me a lighted arc flew up and over and it landed in amongst this group who were talking and clinking their beers. It is a delight to young people from Barcelona, from Zurich and Copenhagen, and from Seoul, to learn they can buy beer for about a dollar and can drink it here anywhere they please, just about; when you’re done you just leave the bottles standing for some less privileged person to pick up for recycling; maybe the place feels like one great big nightclub; maybe it feels like a music festival that goes on unending and to which you need have bought no ticket and where there is no ID check. Who knows.
So it took me some time to work out that this lighted missile flying so gently through the air like a badminton shuttlecock was in fact a lighted cigarette butt, and it had landed — I could see it — in the black hoodie crumpled at the back of one girl’s neck, they had started slowly to go, Whut? Hey… and she had turned her head, just slightly, and I could see the dense cloud of her hair and that in another second she’d have swept her curls across the lit butt and she would go up in flames.
I was shouting, in English through sheer discombobulation: Hey! Look out! Hey! Cigarette! There, uh — there on your back, it’s just —
Slowly the group of them gathered what had happened and she stiffened and her friend brushed his hand round the back of the neck and shook the lit thing off and then I realised that the slowly strolling trio who had now caught up with me had sent this flying in on purpose, it was a tiny form of terrorism.
They were Turkish Berliner kids, from the accent, and they snarled at me lazy and unhurried when in English I shouted, Hey, you — next time, don’t throw your fucking cigarettes at people. “Ja, ja, mach mal weiter,” said the girl who was already lighting another, yeah just keep walking, get lost, she was not interested in being told by one touri how she must treat another touri on her own god-given turf.
I was pedalling again as my bike started to wobble and I felt a fear of this girl, with her massive sense of entitlement, and switching to German, hurried, unkempt German, I tried, “That was idiotic. It’s dangerous. Don’t fucking throw your fucking butts at people’s heads.”
And I rode home, past the hipster cafe where I wrote every day all through the winter and which some local person with a very distinctive handwriting had labelled in great big black spider letters out the front where people sit in the sun, “If you want — to speak English — go to New York. Berlin hates you.” I had marched into the art supplies shop and bought my first ever spray can, in a decent hot pink, in order to amend this so it read, “Berlin hates hate.” I put a ♥. Because I so strongly felt that in this city with its devastated history of what can happen once you let hatred of Those Kinds take hold, we ought to be more conscious, and we ought to take more care.
It did no good. My amendment stood for a month or two and then the disgruntled local struck again, writing boldly, harshly over my edited text and reinstating their insistence on hate. It is still a world though where older brothers collect bridal confetti for their playful little sisters; and graffiti and confetti and hurled butts of half-smoked cigarettes conflated in my mind and at the far end of the same street I passed the second instance of this same graffitied complaint which I had also amended, in full view of the people standing outside a restaurant across the street, where eventually the Hausverwaltung sent painters to clean it up by whitewashing the whole conversation away, but not without leaving the love. The painters chose to blot out everything that had happened on that stretch of wall except for the neon pink heart I had left there and there it stands, for all the world like it was put there on purpose, for all the world to see, for all the world — from me to youse.
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The Great Fire
Only Shirley Hazzard could end a novel by writing explicitly of a virgin woman’s clitoris – which she describes with a kind of cheerful poetic simplicity as ‘the final fleshly inch where he could wake her and touch her, and say her name’ – using it to literally embody survival, and art, and all of life; turn her back on the War, which is, as we see, unending – ‘the inextinguishable conflagration’ – and write, at last, ‘Many had died. But not she, not he; not yet.’
Even to her, he would not say outright that he was thinking of death; of the many who had died in their youth, under his eyes; of those he had killed, of whom he’d known nothing. On the red battlefield, where I’ll never go again; in the inextinguishable conflagration.
These hours would be lived to the full. Years of hours would follow, but not this. He had felt their chance passing; she too, in fear. For this he had travelled to the airy, empty harbour where, like a legend, she lay in a mildewed swing-seat, waiting. As surely as if she had leapt from a planked deck into the ocean and swum ashore, she had jumped ship for him. Ten thousand miles had been retraced, down to the final fleshly inch where he could wake her and touch her, and say her name.
Many had died. But not she, not he; not yet.
~ Shirley Hazzard.
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music unfolds in the Funkhaus, live and barely planned
Today we will be making a new song, the first towards Cathoel & the New Government’s eventual second album. First album prompted 50s jazz impresario Bob ‘King’ Crawford to say, “In my opinion you will be one of the greatest artists this country has produced.”
He was talking about Australia but I have gathered fellow travellers from New York, Czech Republic, and Berlin. There’s eight of us today and only two have ever met. This is the persistent idea of ‘the new government’ – it is elastic and can consist of anybody who wishes to step up and take care of something they feel moved by. Something musical, something ecological; something furred or feathered, something human. It’s how plenty of people live in the world already. We’ll be recording in the famous Berlin Funkhaus and hope to produce a tiny doco about our day’s work, which will be improvised from scratch around a vocal line of mine. The lyrics were written on a drum kit in an Airbnb apartment in Spain:
you came a-courting me
in your skirt
and no shirt
and no shoesand I swallowed down all that you taught me
in my bed
in your arms
in my youthImagine a bunch of people with jazz sensibilities set out to make an electronica dance track, but using all real instruments and playing the whole melee live, not looped or sampled. Imagine it might build into the kind of trance intensity that explodes. This is my plan, insofar as you can call it a plan. I have only met one of these musicians before now, when he walked into a Berlin bar three years ago carrying a beautiful upright bass and proceeded to set up an irresistible stomp. I’m recruiting interested musicians online through musos’ groups. Song has no title as yet but we will see what evolves.
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mansplendour
I was working in a cafe, head down, muttering the words aloud under my breath as I forged down the page writing for hours. The man next to me started to take an interest. I was unwilling to give over my concentration to him but gradually angled my screen away to avert his possessive interest, shaded the words with my hand, made it clear I was busy and it was none of his business.
Some men cannot bear to be shown they have no influence in some woman’s life.
As soon as his companion got up to go to the bathroom this man spoke to me. Loud and assured, in German. “Something something astonishing you are able to concentrate in here” – a pure ruse to get my attention, as by speaking of this concentration he hoped to dispel it. When I still didn’t look up but went on chasing the verge of the idea which 20 seconds later broke over me like a wave and transformed my expectations for the writing I was working on, he was visibly, audibly miffed.
It reminded me of a man in Melbourne I had met only because he came to stand alongside me as I sat at the bar in an overfull restaurant, filling rapid pages with my thoughts. He stood there for a while, as I realised later, and when I didn’t react he actually passed a hand between my face and my page. This felt like someone had reached their big hand inside my head and stirred it round. I reared back. “What?” Where’s the fire?
This man was smiling, jovial, his hands back in his pockets. He rocked on his heels a little. “I was just wondering. Writing in here – don’t you find it difficult to concentrate?”
All the responses I could have made buzzed on my tongue like flies. But he was blind to his blindness and deaf to his own noise. This entitlement is also of course where mansplaining, manspreading, street harassment and rape come from.
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refugee dinner
This is the lunch I had today, in a Saturday cafe set up by a refugees welcome committee (one of the many) in Berlin. When I ordered, a smiling Syrian woman plump and beautiful in her brown scarf came out to me carrying this bowl: a dish I had never eaten before, and when I was done she came back for the plate and hovered anxiously, asking in English, “Did you like it?” I told her I liked it, and we smiled at each other. The food was noodles cooked with brown lentils, tamarind, lemon peel and pomegranate. It cost five euros, around eight Australian or American dollars.
I was thinking of my lunch as I read a stranger’s post lambasting Muslims as universal terrorists and lauding Trump’s ban. Or as someone the other day brilliantly dubbed him: Crybaby-in-chief. Today I decided I would start calling him POUTUS, for his glorious petulance. I thought at first he was more of a misogynist, but now I feel sure pouting is his real superpower.
This cafe was crowded and buzzy and I had come to concentrate and write. Much of the conversation was in German, which allowed me to tune it out and focus on my page. They played lazy, sunny, splashy sitar music. I stayed for three hours. Run on Saturdays to raise money to help house new arrivals, this is just one form of the pragmatic welcome given Muslims from Syria who have turned up here at Angela Merkel’s noble instigation, now comprising about one German in one hundred, and welcomed with Refugees Welcome stickers and t-shirts all over Berlin. I wish I could organise a roadshow of new arrivals who were not too traumatised to perform and travel, taking them through the so-called flyover states in the US where Trump has been hailed a saviour. I feel sure if people could just sit down with a Syrian person, or a Moroccan person like the many interesting and cultured individuals we got to know over Christmas this year, staying in Fez, the hatred that masks fear would begin to dissolve in curiosity, conversation, and ken.
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a Berlin evening, so cold, so sweet
After an exceptionally difficult night and a day of doing difficult work, I said: I need to go out. Let’s go someplace we can have a glass of red and a plate of food. I had in mind Italian but the restaurant was closed for some sawing and hammering, we ended up at a Swiss place run by a Swiss man who aired his Swiss accent to amuse us.
The wine was nice, the food was ok and the atmosphere thriving and red-checked. People came in from the cold in little gouts. We had a basket of bread and the waitress brought a little marble slab like something chipped out of a wall with a scrape of herbed butter splayed onto it. In the flickering candlelight we talked about his work and mine. I kept picking up the white enamelled wooden pepper mill and holding it in my hand, for the consolation.
Is it true the Swiss eat apple tart with lavender-scented soft cream? These Swiss do. I remembered the word I had made up to describe the natty fellows in late middle age circling the lake in Zurich in their roll-top cars, who had pink and lemon coloured cashmere jumpers knotted round their shoulders and some of whom were wearing mint green pants: immaculate contraception. We whined a little, pleasurably, about the music, which was one of those wan girls who spoons the stuffing out of twelve or fourteen formerly robust intricacies (The Cure, baby, the Rolling Stones) so that you feel faintly perturbed by the recollection: hey, didn’t I once used to know this song? More than the Queen, she was the opposite of punk. Feeling warmed inside and far more unwound we paid our bill and walked home across the hardening snow, and it had grown so terribly cold during the evening I started to tremble inside my duvet jacket and we both became nauseous with chill.
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it has sun
In the cafe he showed me the pictures he had taken on his walk here, of a dog skateboarding in the park. “You should animate those into a thumb-book!” I said. Amy Winehouse was singing. “Or maybe a – gif.”
We watched a couple walking past in their somehow sweet and somehow matching outfits. He had on a blend of waterfront worker and Clash renegade, a scarlet beanie; she was doused in a long, woollen coat with skirts, like she had stepped out of the moors to take the city air. I was struggling to put all of this into words and he said, “Their cute sort of karate look.”
I pressed his hand. “Karate-karaoke-paparazzi.”
We walked back past the housefront biliously painted with darker green highlights which says at arm height worst green ever. He had a conversation with the guy whose dog is wrapped in a torn army blanket, on the metal access ramp to the ATM foyer at the bank. This man is American and clearly made his life here years ago, but his German is poor. As is he. His devilish rock and roll grin greets bank customers and he swoops the door open, when they leave and when they enter, so courteously and with an infectious warmth.
In the park, drug dealers and old ice: the frozen water kind. A girl cycles past, singing. The sun has been brief. “You should gig there,” he says, pointing over to a bar sunk underground with golden windows. “They host acoustic stuff.”
“I’d love to,” I say, looking in at the knee-height windows shyly, as we pass. “If I ever start gigging again.”