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 11th 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.
