SUBURBAN STROLLS

The best photo I can find of Tracey Thorne walking.

Tracey Thorn is OK by me.  She said some nice things about my book The Lost Art of Walking, and now she’s written a second memoir Another Planet: A Teenager in Suburbia, the title of which says it all, about growing up in Brookmans Park, a place I’d certainly never heard of. Unsurprisingly, as a teenager, she has arguments with her parents

“I told them I wanted to marry a poet and live in London. I wanted to get out. I couldn’t understand why they had ever moved here in the first place. Why would anyone want to? Who would choose suburbia? It’s for squares, for drones, worst of all, for PARENTS, who love it for the quality of life it offers. Young people don’t care about such things as comfort and cleanliness – they want culture, and nightlife, and energy. There are no clubs or pavement cafes in suburbia. You can’t explore it at night, as – say – Dickens walked the streets of London. Who walks around suburbia at night? You can’t be a suburban flâneur.  Suburbia is for those who want a quiet life with no alarms or surprises. It goes to bed early, and after dark, when a teenager comes alive, the streets are silent.

No wonder we looked at suburbia and wanted to burn it down.

I will say only a coupla things, that you can have better arguments with your parents even if you don’t live in suburbia, and even if you don’t want to marry a poet.  I will also say that some of us do in fact enjoy being nocturnal, suburban flâneurs.  And it’s not just me, it’s Jack Kerouac too, apparently, as here in The Dharma Bums

“Everything was fine with the Zen Lunatics, the nut wagon was too far away to hear us. But there was a wisdom in it all, as you'll see if you take a walk some night on a suburban street and pass house after house on both sides of the street each with the lamplight of the living room, shining golden, and inside the little blue square of the television, each living family riveting its attention on probably one show; nobody talking; silence in the yards; dogs barking at you because you pass on human feet instead of on wheels. You'll see what I mean, when it begins to appear like everybody in the world is soon going to be thinking the same way and the Zen Lunatics have long joined dust, laughter on their dust lips.”

The best pictures I can find of Jack Kerouac walking.  And yes, I do realize it's not night, and he's not in a suburb.

Kerouac never married a poet but he did date and/or marry a lot of women who subsequently went on to write memoirs detailing what a shit he was.

AN AESTHETIC WALK

I went for a walk in Bedford Park, in West London.  As you may have guessed, I’m doing some suburban exploration.

Bedford Park has a good claim to be the first garden suburb.  Work began there in 1875, long before Letchworth Garden City or Hampstead Garden Suburb.  And whereas Letchworth Garden City was built by a visionary, and whereas Hampstead Garden Suburb was built by a social reformer, Bedford Park was built by a slightly dodgy property developer, Jonathan Carr.  

He bought 24 acres of land from his father in law, a ripe plot just north of Turnham Green tube station.  He commissioned EW Godwin and then Norman Shaw to design houses for the suburb, and in the end built 365 houses.  He also had the advantage of having a brother, J. Comyns Carr, who ran the Grosvenor Gallery and was connected with members of the Aesthetic Movement.  He recommended the place to influential and artistic friends, and Bedford Park became something of a Bohemian enclave.  WB Yeats lived there with his father and brother, and it was fashionable enough to have a satirical (and fairly lame) poem written about it, The Ballad of Bedford Park.  One verse runs:

Now he who loves aesthetic cheer
And does not mind the damp
May come and read Rosetti here
By a Japanese-y lamp.

On the map, Bedford Park is now small, triangular, a sort of Christmas tree shape, with The Avenue running up through it like a trunk, and roads off to the sides like branches, though it didn't start out like that.
  A current map shows you the boundaries of the place but these aren’t all that obvious on the ground.  The roads have “good old” English names, Blenheim, Marlborough, Vanbrugh, Fielding, Flanders.

         

Unlike Hampstead Garden Suburb this did feel like London. Some parts of it were very fancy, some not really that fancy at all, but clearly all of it pretty expensive. And unlike Hampstead Garden suburb it has a pub, The Tabard, a pub – designed by Norma Shaw with William de Morgan tiles in the interior.  There was also a Polish shop and a Buddhist Vihara on the Avenue.

I was walking without any great purpose and it was easy to get lost, but it was hard to staylost.  Just by wandering you can find yourself back where you started.  I occasionally I used some interesting old cars parked in the streets as markers, since the cars were rather more distinctive than many of the houses.

Having said that, I was fascinated by the odd combination in the architecture of diversity and similarity.  The original architects had done a certain amount to make the houses look individual and then the inhabitants had taken it further.  These two porches for instance which had surely started out looking identical.

And this succession of gables, no two of them quite the same; some quite plain, some looking like the insignia of a secret organization.

Bedford Park is now a conservation area which means there are strict rules about what you can do to your house, and about what you can do to your trees.  Under Section 211 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 “all trees in the conservation area are protected by law. It is an offence to deliberately damage or destroy a tree by cutting down, topping, lopping, uprooting or by any other means without permission from the local planning authority. … Six weeks’ notice must be given before any work is started.”

On the other hand I did see some dead trees, and some huge pieces of tree trunk, which were possibly located just outside the conservation area.

As for new buildings, well some of the houses are replicas in the Arts and Craft style, which replaced old ones that didn’t suit the tone of the place, but some of the most interesting buildings were a couple of zesty new houses that had been shoehorned in and looked different from the prevailing style and yet to my urban eye didn’t look at all out of place.

         

         

Yes there were gardens, and they were well looked after, nothing very eccentric, nothing kitsch that I could see, but there were some interesting plantings including this, which is one of the biggest olive trees I ever saw in captivity in England:

         Also this tasteful cat statue:

And at one point I became aware of a real cat walking very close to my feet.  It’s a measure of a certain kind of suburb that you see cats wandering freely, even if a few of them have missing ears or shortened tails. Now, I like cats well enough but I don’t like cute cats and there was nothing cute about this one.  He didn’t just look like the cat belonging to the evil genius – he looks like an evil genius in his own right.

 Suburbia is a great place for an evil genius to go into hiding.

SUBURBAN STRAINS

It being a Sunday afternoon, I combined my afternoon drift with a visit to Skylight Books to see Lynell George read from her book After/Image.  And to get a signed copy, of course. Lynell George is a flâneuse, a pedestrienne, and above all a woman who walks and looks and takes photographs and writes about it.  Also an Emmy winner.  Cool.  

As is the way of these things, I opened the book at random and found a reference to Dorothy Parker describing Los Angeles as “seventy-two suburbs in search of a city.”  This is apparently a well-known sneer but I’d never heard it before.  You’d think I would have.  And, as Lynell says in her book, some of us don’t think that’s such a terrible thing.  One of the 57 books I regularly think about writing but probably never will is titled In Defense of Suburbia.

I’ve been trying to find the source of that Dorothy Parker quotation, and as far as I can tell there isn’t one.  Adrienne Crew president of the LA Chapter of the Dorothy Parker Society and a tour guide says in a blog post, “I am asked on a regular basis if Dorothy Parker actually said that Los Angeles is ‘72  suburbs in search of a city.’  The answer is...probably not. 

“The quote has been attributed to Dorothy Parker but it's really a paraphrase of Aldous Huxley's bon mots found his 1925 book, Americana. He wrote that Los Angeles was "nineteen suburbs in search of a metropolis" and he was probably quoting someone else who initially said Los Angeles was seven or six suburbs in search of a city. The witticism expanded from there. At times it was attributed to H.L. Menken, Robert Benchley, Alexander Woollcott and Dorothy Parker.  Most likely it was Mencken who used the phrase in an essay published in the April 1927 issue of Photoplay magazine after visiting Los Angeles for three weeks in 1926.” 

         And yes, it does sound like the kind of thing you might say after three weeks.

        

I don’t know if Dorothy Parker got around much when she worked in LA but the only places she lived were Beverly Hills and West Hollywood, thereby leaving her some 70 suburbs short.  This is her, perfectly nice suburban bungalow on Norma Place.

But I did wonder about the basic premise:  just how many suburbs are there in LA?  Wikipedia has a “List of districts and neighborhoods of Los Angeles” which numbers just under 200, but by no means all of them are suburbs. “The Old Bank Distrct” for instance is just the area where the banks are in downtown, and therefore part of the “urb.”  And some of the places I’ve never heard of such as  the “Platinum Triangle.”

As a local, I could probably tell you the difference between Hollywood, East Hollywood, Hollywood Hills, Hollywood Hills West, and Hollywood Dell, though I’m sure you wouldn’t thank me for it, and suburban though they may all be, I’m pretty sure they don’t constiture four separate suburbs.  Still, with bit of casuistry, I think you probably could identify 72 distinct and separate suburbs in LA, if that’s your pleasure.

 

While I was in the bookstore I saw this intruiguing volume by Ed and Deanna Templeton titled  Contemporary Suburbium.   The suburb in question is Huntington Beach, and the book is one of those concertina jobs and I was tempted to but a copy, but I had already spent my book dollars for the day.  Next time.

 

Some of the suburban stuff I saw on my walk looked like this:

 

And this – Jesus and the Gnomes (which could easily be the name of a band from Huntington Beach):

 

And I couldn’t help thinking they were raising expectations a little too high at the Dresden:

 

 

 

 

 

 

A SORT OF SUBURBAN RAMBLE

I’ve been thinking about suburbs.  It’s one of those words, and indeed concepts, that tends to slip away and lose its meaning the more you think about it.   The word has its origins in ancient Rome – sub for lower, urbs for walled city, so the suburb was lower than the city, but that works because Rome was built on seven hills.  The same doesn’t apply everywhere.

Dictionaries are only partially helpful.  Merriam Webster tell us:  a) an outlying part of a city or town, b) a smaller community adjacent to or within commuting distance of a city.  Which only raises question of how we define outlying, adjacent and commuting distance.  London’s Hampstead Garden Suburb, for instance, is only about 5 and a half miles from Marble Arch, which counts as pretty darn central by any London standard I know.

Of course suburbs get a lot of bad press for being too tame, too pleasant, too conformist, which of course is why a lot of people move there.  I grew up in various suburbs in Sheffield, in England, and at the time I’m sure I thought they were evil and constricting, but in retrospect I think it may have been the life of a teenager, going to school, living at home with my parents, that was getting me down, rather than the suburb itself.

Equally, although I think of myself as an urban walker, a fair proportion of my walking has been done (depending on your definition) in suburbs.  I definitely don’t hate the suburbs or suburban walking but obviously when you walk the there you don’t see much of people’s lives.  Suburbanites tend to present a clean, orderly facade to the world, and what goes on behind it is anybody’s guess; though it can be fun guessing.  See the novels John Updike, more or less passim.

And now I live in Los Angeles which by some accounts (though not all) is one of the most suburban cities in the world.  Some people say that’s changing or at least that’s want they want to believe.  The main evidence seems to be that developers are building stonking great developments in the middle of borderline suburban areas, (Hollywood is the place I know most about, but it’s happening all over the city).  This extra density will allegedly make more people walk, and it may well do, in the sense that traffic around these developments may get so bad that using a car will become simply not viable.

Another possibility of course is that people will move out to more thoroughly suburban areas where they can again have their own house and plot of land, and actually use their cars.  As for whether people actually walk any less in the suburbs than in cities, well I’m not sure, I’d like to see some research.

Before I lived in LA I lived in Brooklyn – where I (and everybody else) did a fair amount of walking.  I certainly didn’t have a car.  There seems to be some argument about whether Brooklyn is a suburb or not.  Is it sub to the urb of Manhattan, or is it an urb in its own right?  I have no dog in that fight, although if space, plots of land, and single-family homes are defining features of suburbia, much of Brooklyn comes up short.

In 2001 I was living in Brooklyn’s Park Slope, in an apartment at the top of a fifth floor walk-up.  There was access to the flat roof, and although I went up there once in a while it was kind of scary – a low parapet and I wasn’t sure that the roof was actually very strong.  You got a clear view of the twin towers from up there, but you could see them almost as well from our living room window.

One man we do who know spent some time on his Brooklyn roof is the composer William Basinski.  He writes in the liner notes to his majestic Disintegration Loops.  “On September 11^th I was on my roof in Brooklyn, less than one nautical mile from the World Trade Center: our beacon, our compass … my nightlight.”  On the previous day he’d created his masterwork while archiving loops of decaying magnetic tape, and he played the piece as the ruins of the towers burned, and he set up a borrowed video camera to film the rising smoke.  The results can be seen on YouTube, though it’s a video that thoroughly shows the limitations of YouTube.

I never exactly thought of the twin tours as a beacon or compass.  I found them hard to love, and I think most New Yorkers felt the same way until they became a symbol in their absence, but I certainly looked at them out of my window and every morning – although in certain weather conditions you couldn’t see them at all.

It would be some time before I, and the world, discovered Basinski and Disintegration Loops,  before that work became the necessary, the required, in some ways the only musical response to that moment in New York history.  But I do remember, after 9/11, wanting to listen to music and having trouble finding the “right” thing.  I listened to Talking Heads’ “Life During Wartime” quite a lot.

The Concert for New York City at Madison Square Garden wasn’t much help.  David Bowie sang Paul Simon’s America and that seemed good and appropriate, but Bon Jovi sang “Livin on a Prayer” and “Wanted Dead or Alive”, McCartney sang “Yesterday” and “Let It Be”; which were no doubt well-meaning – and of course very moving, we were all emotionally naked at the time. but somehow they missed the point.  James Taylor, curiously enough, sang Goffin and King’s “Up On the Roof.” 

Even if the organizers had heard of William Basinksi and Disintegration Loops, it seems unlikely they’d have thought that a work of heart-breaking serial minimalism was quite the thing for the crowd at Madison Square Garden.

Will it surprise you that William Basinksi now lives in Los Angeles?  And if I have his address right (and I believe I do) it’s in the utterly suburban enclave of Mar Vista.

And so, like any good boulevardier, finding myself in Mar Vista, I went for a walk that took me past the great man’s house.  I found it easily enough: a small, neat, bungalow, offering a pleasant, unexceptional face to the world.  It didn’t have the kind of roof you could easily stand on.  Who would guess that a major American artist lived here?   

The sidewalk ran very close to the front of the house.  Even without trespassing I got the clear impression that somebody was in the house.  The front door was open, with a screen door in place.   I could see there was a light on in the kitchen – it was actually a lava lamp – on a table right by the window.  In fact the sidewalk was near enough to the house that I could hear voices inside, not “live” voices, but voices on a TV or radio, sounding a little distorted and repetitive.  Could this have been a sampled and looped piece of sound art in the making?  Nah, probably not.

I wasn’t intending to do much of anything.  If I’d happened to see Basinksi sitting in his front garden, or getting in his car, or setting off on a walk, I’d surely have said hello – but I didn’t intend to ring his front door bell, and yet, egged on slightly by my faithful companion, that’s exactly what I did.

It was perhaps inevitably, and perhaps for the best, a non-event.  The voices continued, nothing changed in the house, in fact nothing happened at all. And certainly nobody came to answer the door.  I am not a postman, I only rang once, and then I went on my way.

Since then I’ve struggled to find much hard evidence that Basinksi is much of a walker – but I did find this in an interview with Andrew Parks on the Self-Titled magazine website, about first arriving in New York with his boyfriend James Elaine:

“We saved our money and moved there in 1980. We got there on April Fool’s Day, the first day of the legendary two-week transit strike…  I remember the first day–we both had on new cowboy boots and skinny black jeans, just ready to take over the minute we got to Grand Central Station. God, we ended up walking all over town, and by the time we got home, we had such blisters. I think we went and bought some Converse tennis shoes the next day.” 

Mr B, looking as though he might well be in his cowboy boots and skinny jeans phase.

Oh, and here’s a belated coda to the Basinksi/suburbia rumination.  In an interview with the website 20jazzfunkgreats.co.uk he says,

“Some of my earliest memories are of living in a brand new 60’s era planned utopian subdivision near NASA, watching the black and white television broadcasts of the rockets going up.  The wonder of men going to the moon! We moved to Florida around 1966 and Dad was working on the Lunar Module for a NASA contractor there.  We watched the rockets go up from the beach, visited Cape Canaveral. Once the launched an unmanned rocket at night.  We watched it from our yard.  It began to go off course and had to be destroyed.  The entire sky lit up orange!  There were always sonic booms and once I saw the strangest anomaly in the sky…it was a bizarre cloud but looked like a colored oil slick one might see in a puddle on the street.”

I guess life in suburbia isn’t always boring.