| Maximo Park Diary Entries |
| These are diary entries by Maximo Park members from the Official Maximo Park Website. |
Hannover, by the river |
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| 11 Jun, 2007 |
An office block the colour of turned milk overlooks the river, which reflects the dark vermilion of the trees that stand on the banks.
A concrete, jigsaw city defines the other side of the river. The concrete is coated by wood that was one painted white. Little chewing-gum-smears of mould pepper the surface, randomly.
Someone has stencilled five lion heads onto some newer brick. Some are fainter than others and the features are made from simple ovals and semi-circles, like an adolescent version of potato printing.
A gap appears in the buildings where a demolition is in progress, forming a large, black room fenced off by flimsy, temporary railings.
Silence emanates from the darkness.
Maybe someone is sat down in one of the corners, but I could be mistaken and I don't want to squint for too long either way.
It gets dimmer, but there's a pinkness to the sky that occurs in industrial places at twilight.
On a wall, further along, someone has sprayed a brown outline of a rocket ship that looks like two kidney beans connected together.
It's like the Byker Wall in Newcastle around here, with its aggressive structures made soft by primary colours. Voices echo around; those of young men in white tracksuits; a man with a blank, anonymous carrier bag shouts down the phone at someone he knows. An older man carrying his work bag walks silently, covered by what looks like the kind of jacket a bus driver might wear.
Meanwhile, on the other riverbank, a car creeps slowly across the grass, its red tail-lights read as tiny warnings.
In an instant, the bulbous lights along the walkway come on. Some are triplets; others stand alone, gripped by giant tweezers. Mossy spider webs droop down from the beacons as busy swarms of night flies become entangled and trapped, engrossed by illumination. It looks like some childhood lab experiment as the silhouetted insects land on the curves and excitedly scurry about, unknowingly under scrutiny.
Airborne mites, lit by the glow, become firework cinders.
A bearded man with a long, forked, heavy-metal haircut roars at a passing pleasure cruise full of seated men and women. Applause meets the gesture.
A middle-aged man with sensible clothing and a backpack says something in German before pissing behind a pillar. He seems to walk unaffected, but a few metres down the pavement, he throws up in the shadows and curses before ambling onwards.
More characters enter the scene and leave, most alone and inauspicious, apart from two young girls with olive skin and an older woman with a headscarf who disturb the low hum of evening by opening a giant, metallic bottle bin that creaks loudly. They have shopping bags with wheels and they begin fishing amongst the glass and plastic for their cheap bounty.
A vague smell of alcohol drifts by as the older lady empties a half-full bottle's yellowed contents into the river.
The road zig zags along.
Children cry and moan and then stop, possibly quelled by the softly insistent tone of their mother.
I go back to the venue, before I'm identified as an outsider, past bicycle racks twisted into parallel, abstracted sniffer dogs.
Paul Smith
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