by A. A. Gill
New New York
The skyline is more or less the same, but the mean streets are no longer mean. They’re just irritable. And a bit dull. But you’ve still gotta love the Big Apple.
Previously I wrote about the singular fascination of islands and the odd micro-cultures they cultivate. I made a list of the sea-surrounded specks that I particularly liked, but I had the nagging sense I’d missed somewhere, that one of my islands had gone missing. And then, as is the nature of these things, it crashed into me in the middle of the night. Of course. The most cussedly singular of all the self-defining islands is Manhattan. Barely an island at all, cut off by only a mere moat, spanned by great girder bridges, just semi-detached enough for an odd individuality, New York, New York. The only other city apart from Edinburgh and London that I’ve ever lived in.
For one amazingly happy and self-destructive year, it was my city and I was its citizen. Manhattan is the 19th-century model of how all cities were supposed to look. It was a robber baron’s vision of the future. But nothing dates as fast as predictions and futurology. They fix a look that is forever the moment they were conceived in. By the time I got to live there in the ’70s, New York had developed the famous look of a stalled archaic thudding grandeur. The emphatic gestures of the skyline were contradicted by the angry filth of the streets. New York was acned with graffiti and rubbish, the roads were potholed and riven with seeping oil and infernal steam. New York was murky. The mafia ran utilities, City Hall was partisan and biddable and the police were notoriously open-handed. It was the time of the great corruption, when Nixon was being dragged, inch by inch, down the long road to impeachment. The stink and guilt and loss of Vietnam hung in the air and, most devastating and depressing of all, disco was at its most noisomely idiotic. The city had gone from being a vision of the future to being a dire dystopian warning. Delegations from European cities gingerly came to see what lay ahead for them – and if they could avoid it.
New York was the urban jungle, a cautionary tale, and New Yorkers rather revelled in their Grimm retelling of it. They talked endlessly and viciously about murder, the more random and salacious the better. Old ladies pushed under subway trains for kicks, joggers gang-raped and brain-damaged in Central Park, junkies found rotting in the basements of Fifth Avenue apartments. New York invented mugging. The word became a constant refrain, the morning complaint like the weather in London or the traffic in Tokyo. Mugging was New York’s weather, New York’s traffic. So we all learned to carry nothing, no watch, no ostentatious coat or briefcase, no smart handbag, definitely no jewellery. Everyone walked in the same slumped, determined, aggressive, un-eyecatching way. We all looked the same, millionaires and muggers, students, panhandlers and plutocrats. The midtown socialite and her maid were indistinguishable. New York the über-capitalist city became New York the communist one.
It invented the apocryphal story. New York was a great omnibus of things that had happened to a friend of a cousin of a brother-in-law of a girl at work. The rumours were the morbid pleasure of decay. The favourite was the one about the city worker who bumps into a tough-looking Puerto Rican in the street. Immediately, as all New Yorkers do, he checks for his wallet. It’s gone. This one time he’s reached the end of his tether, so he turns and, throwing caution to the wind, confronts the thief. Give me the wallet, he shouts. The mugger, shocked at being finally confronted, hands it over. The businessman gets home, and there’s his wallet on the bedside table.
The defining film of the moment was Death Wish. At night I walked a dog in the park where Charles Bronson meted out summary justice to street thugs. In fact, the park was mostly populated by ancient middle-European men playing floodlit chess. I worked as a janitor’s assistant in a Harlem school. My boss was a big Jamaican who carried a revolver in his overalls. I was never frightened in Harlem or on the subway I took there, but I did like the sense of tension, the watchfulness, the worldliness of the naked streets where wits were what you needed. I was in my twenties. I looked like a young punk. I didn’t know any better.
Last week I read a short paragraph in the paper: the citizens of Harlem are signing a petition to stop Columbia University from expanding. In the ’70s, Columbia was an island of middle-class aspiration and white liberal hope in the black and Puerto Rican underprivileged sprawl of crime and violence. Harlem was the wicked wood where all the bad people waited before creeping through Central Park to rape and pillage Jews. Harlem was a worldwide byword for robbery, squalor and racial discrimination. Columbia, on the other hand, was secure. Well, apparently we were misinformed. Columbia is now the problem, and Harlem should be protected as a site of cultural and historical significance. The university is an interloper, a conglomerate whose expansion will spoil the atmosphere of the neighbourhood. And that is the final, irrefutable proof that New York, the New York I lived in, no longer exists.
The skyline is more or less the same, but the mean streets are no longer mean. They’re just irritable. New Yorkers got what they fervently prayed for: law, order and garbage collection. They got a property boom and a safe island. In terms of murder and robbery, Manhattan is now one of the safest places in the West to live. It’s also one of the dullest. More concerned with aspiration and appearances than life, the city that never slept now doesn’t go out much past 9.30pm as it has to get into the office by 6am. It runs on the spot to CNN, not dances in the dark to Madonna. It just shows you should be careful what you ask for.
I still love the city, though. I go back regularly, walk the old streets. And like all places you return to, it’s a mixture of here-and-now and then-and-there. There’s a particular bright sunlight you only get in New York, and the buildings look particularly fine and defined against it, as if they’re super-hyper-real. It always makes me happy, because it reminds me of being happy.
Manhattan is now a rich middle-class island with bankers’ concerns and shopkeepers’ worries. It has succeeded in buying off the murderers and muggers, and with them the artists and writers, the social parasites, the lounge lizards, the remittance men and the unforgiving women, the amusing failures and all those who came to the city from all over America and the world to claim social, artistic and sensual asylum from the broad bigotry of small towns and wide suburbs. They’ve all gone now, and they’ve taken the thing that the real-estate sellers, the arbitrage traders and the hedge-fund topiarists all wanted to find here in the first place. New York has once again become a prophecy of the future, a different cautionary tale about the consequences of fear: judicious tedium.
Plane miserable
It’s time to empty your pockets, remove your shoes and submit to the naked x-ray in a ritual that assuages the fear of flying.
Airports come high on the list of our most dreaded environments, somewhere after the paedophile wing, crematoriums and the Korean Football Association. We really don’t like airports. They manage to be both incomprehensibly technocratic and redneck tacky. They are relentlessly efficient and infuriatingly slow. Aeroplanes rarely crash when you consider the impossibility of flight; it’s just the sheer absurd act of contrived faith that we believe that if you drive a jumbo jet at 160 miles an hour it will suddenly become lighter than air, and have enough lift to hoick 400 fat atheists who have all lied about their cabin baggage across a continent. Airports are particularly annoying because they don’t do what it says on the box. On the box it says ‘Welcome to Mother Teresa’. Well, it does if you land in Tirana, Albania, which is, to my knowledge, the only airport named after someone who thought you’d be better off dead. At least in Italy you can be welcomed to Leonardo da Vinci, a man who at least thought flight was probable.
Airports imply freedom and effortless transportation. You go to sleep in Europe; you wake up in Latin America. But first you have to go through a quarter-mile of queues that are like taking part in the Middle Ages. The queues part and re-form and split and become free agents and then they reconstitute themselves again, constantly disintegrating, re-forming and moving. It helps if yo
u think of an airport as being a Petri dish incubating some world bacillus. (It helps, but I’m not sure what with.)
Airports are all bisected: they are problem and solution, frustration and freedom, departures and arrivals. They are the yin and yang of travel, the oldest, most ancient fear and relief. One of the things that differentiates Homo sapiens from our ape cousins is the ability to track ahead, to see a destination before you get there, to assume a route to it. The trepidation of leaving the cave and the fire, and then the relief of getting back, are implicit in airports. Our emotions in them are not entirely post-modern fury at the human speed of things or the pre-digital confusion. Airports are one of the very few areas of life that haven’t naturally evolved into being better, easier and more comfortable with time, technology and experience. We now look at the advertisements for flying in the ’40s – with their subtle mix of military can-do and ocean-liner obsequiousness – with envy. It was supposed to feel like a suave and sophisticated thing to do, this flying lark, with bone china and beds with real sheets. The airport was a comfortable, covetable waiting room.
Anyone who has travelled through a hub airport in America recently will know quite how miserable an experience they have managed to make it. There is now the added humiliation of the naked x-ray. American passengers are beginning to rebel, to refuse to be intimately examined in these infuriating, run-down cattle sheds. This is the most health-and-safety conscious nation in the world, where people will sue over hot coffee, where they print warnings and disclaimers on both chewing gum and assault rifles, and the combined demands of home security and health-and-safety have piled misery onto the dumb rote tedium of security lines. The one things that’s worse than being asked to remove your shoes, open your laptop, take off your belt, empty your pockets and remove your watch is to have to stand behind someone who has to do all these things and seems to have a magician’s number of pockets all of which contain small change, keys, phones and a half-full hip flask. Security trumps every other requirement or desire. Security is a ratchet that turns relentlessly to move every conceivable, statistical, minute chance of human interference and aerodynamics. The security consultants and the pat-down officers and the monitor-watchers and the conveyor-belt facilitators aren’t going anywhere, and they really don’t care if you are. The acquiescence to the innate goodness of airport security has become an absolute that no one in an airport is even allowed to question. The faintest mention of terror or box cutters will get you arrested and draconian charges dumped on your head. We all understand why this happens and, though irritated, we abide because we accept that safety is ultimate and we know why we go through this.
But actually, flying is safer than almost every other form of getting around. You are in far more danger on the streets of most cities from fundamentalists or international terrorists. It’s just that the consequence of a bomb or a fanatic on a plane is so catastrophic – but then no more so than a bomb on a train or a ship. Most 13-year-old boys could work out five or six scenarios for urban Armageddon that are worse than blowing up a plane. Hollywood spends a great deal of money thinking of them, and we live with that. We understand all the possibilities and we compare them to our ordinary coming and going and we reckon up the odds and we think they are so distant, have so many noughts, that we just forget about it. Wildebeest can’t insure against lions, but they understand that statistically it’s unlikely to be them. But this natural, rational discounting of possible danger against this necessity of continued living becomes a whole new equation in an airport. The odds are perceived to be far more perilous, the chances far steeper. It’s as if someone had blocked off half the holes on the roulette wheel.
I have a feeling that this is a realisation, a projection, of the innate and constant fear of flying itself. We perceive the danger to be added on to the already dangerous, nay impossible, activity of flying. It isn’t natural, it shouldn’t work. We may understand the dynamics of a wing passing through the resistance of the air, but still it’s a meagre trust to hand your life over to. We rationally understand that flying is safer than riding a bike or even a donkey, but emotionally we know it’s some unnatural alchemy. We accept the absurd level of insurance security because it is somehow a manifestation of a votive ritual that assuages our nervy fear. If you comply with the demands of security, if you put your moisturiser and toothpaste in a plastic bag, if you carry no sharp objects (not even a threatening necklace), if you turn off your mobile devices, then you will assuage the god of levitation who will gently deposit you in this thin and fragile cigar tube safely in Tenerife.
We call them airports and not airfields or dromes anymore after the very first one, which was in Southampton. And that really was an airport. It was where the flying boats landed, like the one in Sydney Harbour. Southampton Airport was also where the Spitfire was first tested. Its designer, R J Mitchell, was a driven man. He designed 24 aeroplanes between 1920 and 1936. He died in his forties of cancer. It was said he worked himself to death. He said, ‘If anybody tells you anything about an aeroplane which is so bloody complicated you can’t understand it, take it from me, it’s balls.’ And that could be the motto of all airports.
When the RAF took the design for his fast fighter he was informed they were going to call it the Spitfire and he replied that it was just the sort of bloody silly name they would choose. He personally called it the Shrew. On such insignificant footnotes do the destinies of nations turn. Imagine the Battle of Britain fought by Shrews. The few Shrews to whom so much was owed.
A-grade Belgrade
With more than its fair share of troubles in its past, Belgrade might be one of Europe’s gruffer cities, but it’s also a place of striking beauty.
A Frenchman, an Italian and a Serb all end up in hell. The Frenchman begs to make one last call home to see how his family is coping. The devil says fine, it’ll cost you an extra thousand years in the flames. The Frenchman agrees, and tearfully listens to his wife shagging his brother. The Italian begs to call home to see how his daughters are doing. That’ll be an extra thousand years in the flaming pit, says the devil. So be it, says the Italian, and weeps as he listens to his children selling the farm. Now I want to call home, says the Serb, and grabs the receiver. He hears his neighbours robbing his house. How much is that, he asks the devil, who replies that it costs nothing. How dare you, shouts the Serb, you took a thousand agonising years off the frog and the eye-tie, what’s wrong? My pain not good enough for you? No, no, says the devil, local calls are free.
I don’t really do jokes, and neither do the Serbs. This one, which I suspect is an international pizza-topping joke, was told to me by a Serb with not so much a straight face as a rigidly palsied one. He told it to me in a monotone without embellishment to prove that Serbs had a sense of humour, that they could be as ticklish and ribald, as warmly hilarious and avuncularly clubbable as any other damn nation in the world. And not only that, but it also proved that Serbs were secure and sophisticated enough to tell jokes at their own expense. Though, he added, the sentiment that Serbia was semidetached from hell was only to be used in a ribald setting and under no circumstances should be exercised as an assertion in a non-humorous context, as that would be likely to get your kidneys removed the secret way.
And that’s quite enough about Serbian jokes. Let’s just leave it at the inarguable fact that Serbs have a fine, sharp, well-honed, pointy sense of humour, but they choose not to use it unless provoked. And if they do, you’ll most likely be laughing on the other side of your face. So if I suggested you spend your next European holiday in Serbia you’d probably say that I was joking. Pull the other one, you’d say. Shall we go there after the health spas of Moldova and the restaurants of Kyrgyzstan or before the beaches of Cardiff and the bracing fresh air of Athens?
There’s no getting around the fact that Serbia has a bad reputation. It’s always had a bad reputation. Obviously it’s been brushing it up in recent years just in case we forgot why we were avoiding it in the first place.
I’ve just been, and admittedly I went because it was on the way to somewhere else. I was travelling up the Danube trying to get to Budapest and there was Serbia in the way. But, I have to tell you, it’s a pretty fabulous place. A surprisingly fabulous place. Mostly what I mean is Belgrade. It’s beautiful. Impressively grand. A 19th-century place built out of vanity and pride, which are two of the best emotions to build on. Modesty and self-deprecation may be admirable in people, but they’re an anticlimax in urban planning.
To begin with, it’s on a river, and as anyone who’s been to more than three cities will tell you, the propinquity of large bodies of water is a prerequisite for a really first-rate burg. Belgrade is on the confluence of two of them. It also has a castle. A very impressive castle from multiple centuries with many impressive walls, keeps, turrets, et cetera. A river and a castle are the makings of a flush in the city department. Belgrade is also a city that likes to do its living outside. There are cobbled streets packed with cafés whose tables join up into long, winding promenades of flirtation and vicious argument. With Serbs, it’s often difficult to tell the difference.
There’s one street of cool bars that’s known as Silicone Valley because of the quality of the breasts on display. When I say ‘cool’ it is in a particularly Slavic way. It is a particularly Slavic cool – that is to say cool in the way a Chinese Elvis look-alike contest is cool. Serbs don’t really do Western cool. What they do is posing in a manner that implies there might be some cool going around. This is the only place in the world where I’ve seen an adultish man wearing a T-shirt that says ‘Amateur Porn Star’, and if you think that’s a total absence of cool, then I have to tell you that he had his girlfriend with him. How chic do you think she felt?
