Tales of Two Cities

Postcard from London

 
When left to my own devices in London, I liked to ride the buses. Alone, I sometimes rode all afternoon, just thinking and looking out. I liked to write while on the bus. From Finsbury Park I happily traveled to the end of the line in any direction: Archway, Wood Green, Northumberland Park, Hackney Wick, Waterloo Bridge, Trafalgar Square, Battersea Park. A bus pass furnished an inexpensive way to tour the city and included the additional advantage of views of passing street scenes, especially if the bus had an upper deck and you could snag a seat at the front by the large windows. These windows fogged up nicely during rain showers and sometimes smashed into the branches of the older trees that line the roads, if the trees hadn’t been trimmed recently, or if the driver was more experienced and hugged the curb very closely as the bus approached its stops.
The overheards on buses were priceless.

“I’m scared of London,” one American boy said to his father on the Number 4 as it passed by St. Paul’s Cathedral. His baby sister was humming “London Bridge Is Falling Down.” Then she said, “Lots of people are going down to London because today’s a sunny day.”

Another time an older Cockney couple rode my bus through the city from St. Paul’s along Fleet Street, chatting away like they were visiting London as tourists after a long absence in Australia, or outer space. The couple on my bus delighted in calling out the names of things we passed, as if they were touching a mental rosary of remembered sites from the distant past, offering a guided tour of their memories.

“Millennium Bridge.”

“Fourteen years ago that bridge was swinging so badly you wouldn’t dare walk across.”

“Devil Tavern. Demolished seventeen some-odd.”

“Look at that shop! Two suits for one hundred fifty pound.”

“Nobody wears suits anymore.”

“Except for weddings.”

“And funerals.”

“Fancy sitting in front of a Monet at the Courtauld for an hour?”

I guessed that this couple had gotten hold of Freedom Passes, which provided public transport for pensioners at no cost. The unemployed also received a discount on travel. This little act of decency always struck me. It might not be your fault if you lost your job, and you might need to spend time on the bus looking for work.

George Orwell, in The Lion and the Unicorn, described Englishness in terms of “solid breakfasts and gloomy Sundays, . . . green fields and red pillar-boxes.” I would add the London buses. There was even a reality TV show about trainee drivers—The Big Red Bus—which featured a tearjerker episode with an Eastern European single mom passing the challenging road exam. Your average London bus driver was a combination of X-wing pilot, threading tricky turns and blasting through narrow lanes between buildings, and Zen master, overcoming the karmic obstacles of road rage, congestion, death-wish pedestrians, and the universal disorder of a city of nearly 9 million. Drivers trained in Jedi mind tricks and sometimes, I imagined, they closed their eyes and used the Force.

“They hunt in packs,” my wife said about London buses one time as we waited for ours to arrive.

Waiting for a bus near the South Bank, I once overheard a father singing to his son one of the old Cockney songs: “Where did you get that hat, where did you get that tile?”

The much-mourned classic Routemaster bus had formed another example of pure Englishness. Its system proved difficult for outsiders to understand, but it remained completely efficient inside the parameters of its own bizarre logic. You entered and exited the old Routemasters through the back and a conductor came to you to collect your fare and dispense change, like a beer guy at an American baseball game. You could simply hop off the bus from the back whenever you liked, even when the Routemaster was in motion, because it had a doorless entrance with a metal pole to help you balance. This strangely brilliant design involved the premise that the bus could move along before all of the tickets were paid for, which presumably helped speed up travel. It employed two people, the driver and the conductor, rather than one.

The new Routemaster buses, with their glass display-case look—which treats their passengers as specimens in an exhibit (Individuals Living in Areas Poorly Served by the London Underground System, c. 21st Century)—generally went despised. What happened to all of the Routemaster conductors, who had to jostle their way through the crowds upbraiding fare-dodgers?

The view from the bus window transformed into the world’s longest tracking shot.

The 236 floated like a bumblebee through a sticky day in July from Finsbury Park to Hackney Wick, shuttling folks through the maze of streets connecting Northeast and East London. I hoped to record a snapshot of yet another London by grabbing a seat on this single-decker bone-rattler and using the window as a kind of antitelevision set. I planned to walk out to the Olympic Park from the end of the bus line.

I always got a little excitable when the 236 left Islington and started zigzagging its way through the neighborhoods of Newington Green, Albion Road, and on into Hackney via Dalston. This bus was overcrowded and not air-conditioned. You paid the price for attempting to move east-west in a city that was designed for north-south travel. In some ways the 236 felt like a microcosm of London from the pre-Blair years, a little fishbowl containing those who had been left out of the picture. The route hit on the edges of some of the larger estates that had erupted during the 2011 riots, although of course the entire area was far from immune to the general lunacy of London’s massive gentrification project.

I loved every minute of the journey on the 236 because it induced a trancelike meditative state peculiar to London buses. You could not go anywhere fast—at times you couldn’t go anywhere at all. In Hackney you encountered the shock and delight of a seemingly endless city regressing into infinity. Inside Hackney, the urban fabric felt coextensive with the galaxy. A carefully ripped-up billboard had been repurposed by street artists as a décollage featuring Employment Opportunities—doing what, the sign no longer said. Under the rail bridge and farther east on Cambridge Heath Road, there stood a cheerful sign telling you what the council or a developer hoped would happen next: “Making an impact through deeper relationships.” (In Islington I once stumbled on a sign offering “real housing for real people.” Were there unreal people? Zombies, space aliens, vampires, foxes, cartoons, and fictional characters need not apply!)

The bus discharged old folks and sick people at Homerton Hospital, where they joined the walking wounded circumambulating the NHS facility. The genius of Homerton involved staying snug within a cloak of invisibility. Then came the mysteries of Kingsmead and the estates near the canal across from the grand development projects of the Olympic Park. Completing this bus journey, just beyond the Trowbridge Estate, you had the place to yourself. A man you’d never see again paused on crutches with a quizzical look on his face, as if he wasn’t certain where to go next. As Spinoza wrote, “By reality and perfection I understand the same thing.”

Excerpted from Vanishing Streets: Journeys in London by J. M. Tyree. Reprinted by permission of Redwood Press.

Postcard from Berlin

 
I am walking to a gritty industrial club, through the warehouses and parking lots of East Berlin’s rust belt. I reach the darkened façade of a former factory alongside the tracks of Ostkreuz (where the local party scene has moved since the tourists discovered that “super-club,” Berghain). I clip around the building, take the back way, behind a pile of bricks or a broken wall of graffiti, past the fluorescent still-life of a security guard through a cubicle’s window, past a vent that smells vaguely of poppers, until I hear voices as I turn the corner.

The line is long, and I chat with two British guys who drink Club Mate, a hipster stimulant, perhaps because they’ve also taken something that doesn’t mix with alcohol. But they smell like Döner or perhaps Gemüse Kebap, so their stomachs are insulated for a good time. It’s a summer night; the party’s in the garden, the crowd heaving before the DJ. The moon is out, behind clouds; it’s Caspar David Friedrich light. Or “Prussian” blue, that 18th-century color first invented in Berlin.

I see the British dudes again; they’re very friendly, one grabs me on the shoulder, buoyed by the pulsing electronica, the movement of lights, lifted by the warm air, the stars above, the diversity and happiness of the crowd, and he tells me: “Amazing! This is Berlin!”

When I leave, it is already day—one of those amazing Berlin June days that start the moment you walk out of the club in the early hours. I am saturated with cigarette smoke and sweat and kisses. The now faint blue above softens the steely train tracks. I go home, shower, sleep for a few hours, wake up for brunch with my friends. We compare our evening adventures—you never know what is going to happen to you when you walk out of that door. We talk politics, sex, and the news. The New York Times Styles section has been extolling again how much Brooklynites love Berlin, and the blogs have responded by saying that since Berlin’s been “discovered,” it’s now “over.” Time to write the city’s obituary because everyone’s a tourist at Berghain! As a logical consequence, Berlin’s “no longer the coolest city in the world.”

We start discussing:

“Who moves to a city just because it’s ‘cool’?”

“I know a few people here who did.”

“You’re relevant just because you live in Berlin, didn’t you know?”

“Better to say you’re an artist in Berlin than unemployed and living at home in Bari.”

“Judging a whole city based on the popularity of a nightclub doesn’t make any sense.”

“That’s all people see when they come here, the city for them is a big nightclub.”

“Berlin’s the best nightclub in the world!”

“Not any more, apparently.”

“They only see the Technostrich–”

“I don’t even like riding my bike by there on a Saturday night.”

“How many of them you think have been to the Philharmonic?”

“I think Berlin would be happy to discover it’s ‘over.’”

“Over? Tell that to the Greeks. They’d be happy if Germany’s star dimmed a little.”

“She means Berlin’s over for the Peter Pans from Dalston.”

“What they see of Berlin is not even my weekend, let alone my week.”

It is perplexing the way the international press—Rolling Stone, the Times, Vice—weighs the status of Berlin’s elusive “cool” based on the fortunes of a nightclub, on whether the nighttime itineraries of self-conscious club kids have been discovered by the masses. For those who actually live in the city, the dizzying array of concerts, clubs, festivals, and street parties is just an awesome backdrop to the everyday. But otherwise it is hardly of consequence. What matters is that Berlin’s still a place where people can pursue their creative work with fewer pressures from the market than in other European capitals, and have the opportunity to do so in an urbane international environment where they are allowed to live decently.

What would cause Berlin to be “over”? If the conditions for its noncorporate lifestyle were suddenly to evaporate, there would be cause for concern. With property speculation and gentrification, this is the looming threat. But perhaps we have, after all, reasons to be optimistic. Despite the onslaught of gentrification, civic initiatives, such as rent control, are in place to protect the city’s multi-income neighborhoods, and there are some indications things will sooner get better than worse. Let’s hope.

It would be wrong to say that optimism is a peculiarly Berlin perspective, as Berliners love to meckern, or complain. Perhaps for too long it was incomprehensible to believe that anything German could be “cool.” I sometimes think these Berliners don’t always appreciate what an outstanding city they have. Berlin will be tested in the years ahead as Europe confronts rising populism, nationalism, security concerns regarding terrorism, and the uncertainties of Trump’s foreign policy. But things here are, especially in the longer view of the metropolis’s history, better. The city remains in many ways a provincial place, one that has not yet reconciled itself entirely to diversity, or the recent influx of creative folk. And yet, against the backdrop of what is Europe’s foulest history, Berlin has left behind the worst—militarism, chauvinism, and murderous state racism—and emerged democratic and egalitarian, full of great institutions, for the most part welcoming refugees, taking the best of preceding eras—tolerance, historical mindfulness, and creative and intellectual dynamism. Berlin now needs to harness these achievements as we face an uncertain future.

Now, if we could only do something about those short, dark winter days. But then you bundle yourself against the wind, put on your headphones, and send sparks down the cold of the S-Bahn tracks with an electronic soundtrack, light candles in the windows, and count out the hours with strong dark coffee and good conversation—and in Berlin there is plenty. Meanwhile, in summer, you don’t need to do much more than buy a bottle of cold Pilsner, ride your bike down the blooming canal bank—past where the Turkish-German families are grilling, the Kreuzbergers are playing boules, locals are loitering at the tables in front of the Späti—to the Admiralbrücke. There, you can sit with your back to the water, watch the street hum with love, and observe how on this beautiful bright night, as the Berliners put it, “everything’s in butter”—na, allet in Butta.

Excerpted from Berlin by Joseph Pearson. Reprinted with permission from Reaktion Books.