the city-lit cafe

'city-pick's method of including blogs, novels, letters and memoirs is endlessly inspiring' Scotland on Sunday

‘Reliving a St Petersburg winter with Vladimir Nabokov, crossing the bridge of Sighs with Casanova, arriving in Greenwich Village with Bob Dylan. City Pick’s method of including the blogs, novels, letters and memoirs of famous artists, filmmakers and writers is endlessly inspiring. The latest hotspots to be given the treatment include New York and St Petersburg, with Istanbul on its way next year and Edinburgh a possibility. They’re so much more interesting than the usual guides.’ Scotland on Sunday

From Techno & Bowie in Berlin to Dylan & David Byrne in New York & Alex Kapranos's Paris tagine: city-pick high notes

 

On Berlin Techno ..

A new Berlin is being invented here. This is neither the West Berlin of the 70s, the battleground of alternative culture that has left its signature on Ton Steine Scherben records and Seyfried comic, nor the dark Kreuzberg of he 80s, brought to global fame by the radical left, Mayday riots and the Einsturzende Neubaten; the incomparable village in the shade of the Wall that still showed the signs of the burden of history, which Sven Regner describes in his Berlin Blues. And it’s not the East Berlin of the 90s either, the adventure playground that graduated from gaudy dancers on walls to the backdrop of the Love Parade. It’s certainly not the Berlin of the Aggro rappers, the city of no mercy where everyone looks out for himself and crime lies in wait on every street corner. And it has nothing to do with the neo-Wilhelmian fantasies raising their heads from soap-boxes since reunification.

This new Berlin that attracts thousands of clubbing tourists every weekend is the party capital of the Western world. It’s a city where the rents are low and the authorities are extremely liberal. Where the reality principle of other cities is suspended in favour of a comprehensive lust principle. No one here really has to work – apart from on some kind of art or music projects – new clubs are opening up all the time, and you actually spend all your time at parties. That especially … Tobias Rapp, Lost and Sound: Berlin Techno and der Easyjet, translated by Katy Derbyshire, city-lit Berlin, edited by Heather Reyes.

On Bowie in Berlin …

When he wasn’t in the studio he rode around town. He soon bought himself a bicycle: a classic English Raleigh with three gears. Once Bowie had had his breakfast of coffee and Gitanes at Café Anderes Ufer, he cycled down the Hauptstrasse towards the Hansa Studios at Potsdamer Platz.

Back then, cycling was a rather relaxed affair; hardly anyone can remember traffic jams in the West Berlin of the 1970s. So Bowie cycled off and past Kleistpark underground station: from her on the four lanes are no longer called Hauptsrasse but Potsdamer Square. On the left followed the Allied Air Safety Centre, housed in the building where the 20 July conspirators were tried before the so-called People’s Court. Then Bowie passed the construction of the so-called ‘social palace’, a twelve-storey residential machine on top of the ruins of the Sportpalast, where Goebbels invoked ‘total war’ in 1943 and now 514 concrete flats were being built. A couple of blocks further and across the Landwehr Canal on Reichpietschufer, Bowie passed Mies van der Rohe’s New National Gallery on the left and the next building site on the right: Hans Scharoun’s State Library. It was completed in 1978. Bowie could virtually watch it being built as her recorded ‘Heroes’. Tobias Ruther, Helden, David Bowie und Berlin, translated by Katy Derbyshire, city-lit Berlin, edited by Heather Reyes.

 

On Dylan in Greenwich Village …

 Long ago, when New York was affordable, people who felt they didn’t fit into the mainstream could take a chance and head there from wherever they were. Bob Dylan came east from Minnesota in the winter of 1961 and made his way downtown to Greenwich Village. Like countless others before him, he came to shed the constricted definitions of his birthplace and the confinement of his past …  Suze Rotolo, A Freewheelin’ Time, city-pick New York, edited by Heather Reyes

 

On David Byrne in New York City …

I’m reminded that the other day I wanted to bike to Long Island City to catch an art show at PS1, but it was the day of the New York City Marathan and the Queensboro Bridge bike lane was closed (for handicapped runners they said, though it was completely empty). So I took the bike on the Roosevelt Island tram instead and rode down by the abandoned lunatic asylum on the south end of that island that sits in the middle of the East River. There was no one around. Spooky. From the tip of the island there’s a great view of the UN building and of a tiny rock island filled with cormorants – an odd thing to see in the middle of New York City … David Byrne, Bicycle Diaries, city-pick New York, edited by Heather Reyes

 

On Alex Kapranos in Paris …

 

On Rue Aristide Bruant, La Taroudant II is bright like my grandparents’ living room – homely and welcoming, but a bit more Moroccan. Everybody smokes. Between courses. During courses. It is run by a couple in their mid fifties. M Taroudant has clipped moustache and a silver teapot in his hand. He brings the spout to the lip of a cup and raises his arm, slicing an arc of mercury through the air. He is stoic with the confidence of a practised and understated showman. Mme Taroudant brings me a Tagine d’agneau. The clay is black with splashes hardened by the unforgiving fire, the ghosts of a thousand meals. Prunes fall from the stone. L’agneau falls from the Y-shaped bone. I can’t tell what kind of bone. I try to summon some knowledge of agneau anatomy, but give up. I don’t care. It is magnificent. Thank God for the Parisians who are unaware of a convention left over from Christian times … Alex Kapranos, Sound Bites, eating on tour with Franz Ferdinand, city-lit Paris, edited by Heather Reyes

 www.oxygenbooks.co.uk

50 years ago Bob Dylan arrived in the 'mysterious ..capital of the world' New York and made his debut album

Ed Vulliamy describes how, released on 19 March 1962, Bob Dylan's debut remains a landmark of popular culture

•  
  • Share  709
  • reddit this
• Comments (53)

• • Ed Vulliamy

The Observer, Sunday 18 March 2012

Article history

Bob Dylan in London in 1962. Photograph: Brian Shuel/Redferns

A rollicking rush on guitar is followed by the line, "I don't know why I love you like I do", sung with something between a hollow laugh and a stab of pain; and after one minute and 37 seconds it is over. Side one, track one, of the first album by Bob Dylan, the most elusive, talented and influential American performer and poet of the 20th century.

There follows a classic talkin' blues that sounds like the work of an old hand, but expresses the awe of a young man on arrival in New York – then the voice, more vehement, intensifies for a searing third track that strokes the listener's every exposed nerve that little too roughly – a spiritual called In My Time of Dyin', with the singer's girlfriend's lipstick tube used to try to imitate the slide guitar of blues wizard Robert Johnson.

The album – entitled Bob Dylan – was released half a century ago (19 March 1962) , by a 20-year-old from Minnesota who had arrived in Manhattan the previous year, aboard a freight train. It had taken him two months to get much further than Times Square, before trying his luck in places like "an unusual beer and wine place on 3rd Street… now called Cafe Bizarre", as Dylan would later recall. "The patrons were mostly workingmen who sat around laughing, cussing, eating red meat, talking pussy… Talent scouts," he wrote, "didn't come to those dens."

Dylan finally arrived in the creative ferment of Greenwich Village with burning ambition to match it – "impatient to be seen, to impress important people, to learn", as Robert Shelton, the music critic who became Dylan's biographer, puts it. In the city Dylan described as "mysterious" but "capital of the world", he pressed himself through the doors of the coffee houses and folk clubs: the Commons, the Wha', The Gaslight – and Gerde's Folk City.

"I was there to find the singers," Dylan would write, "the ones I'd heard on record – Dave Van Ronk, Peggy Seeger, Ed McCurdy, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee." Dylan's first album was released in the same year that the Beatles recorded Love Me Do; Jimi Hendrix was still serving in the 101st Airborne Division; Frank Sinatra cut an album with Count Basie; and Dmitri Shostakovich premiered his 13th Symphony, with two more to go and 13 years longer to live. "Although only 20 years old," read a review of Bob Dylan in the New York Times, "Dylan is one of the most distinctive stylists to play in a Manhattan cabaret in months."

Throughout the 50 years since then, Dylan has maintained his enigma, which is all the more remarkable for having written what is regarded as an intimate autobiography, Chronicles.

His girlfriend Suze Rotolo – photographed on Dylan's arm for the cover of his second album, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan – wrote a memoir recounting the depths of Dylan's determination to stay mysterious at that time: he span her a yarn about having been abandoned as a child in New Mexico. Rotolo had suspicions about his "Welsh name" and prised his real one, Zimmerman, out of him at the apartment they would eventually share on West 4th Street (though she liked calling him Boo Radley after the couple went to see To Kill a Mockingbird).

But 2004's Chronicles does at least allow us to quote Dylan on himself after all the decades of elliptical responses and riddles with which he baffled interviewers. Most important, we can read his own account of coming to know the man who inspired this first album more than anyone: the hobo father and political conscience of American folk, Woody Guthrie. Nothing on the album is written by Guthrie, but the traditionals are sung as he might have performed them.

Dylan recalls buying Guthrie Raleigh cigarettes to smoke in hospital and singing Tom Joad to its author during long afternoons by his deathbed. Only two songs on the first album are written by Dylan: Talkin' New York and Song to Woody – the former adapts a Guthrie talkin' blues and the latter is a homage. Dylan's reasoning for this is disarmingly frank: "I can't say when it occurred to me to write my own songs. I couldn't have come up with anything comparable or halfway close to the folk song lyrics I was singing to define the way I felt about the world… Folk songs played in my head, folk songs are the underground story."

Playing at Folk City, Dylan won admirers and jealous adversaries. Joan Baez would recall: "He looked like an urban hillbilly… bouncing from foot to foot, he seemed dwarfed by the guitar… He spat out the words to his own songs. They were original and refreshing, if blunt and jagged. He was absurd, new and grubby beyond words… but captivating."

However, Dylan failed to turn his success in the cellars into a recording deal – he was rejected by Elektra, Folkways and Vanguard. Then he met John Hammond, at a rehearsal in an apartment rented by Baez's sister, Mimi Fariña, and her husband Richard.

Hammond was the genius who produced Dylan's first album, adding the young singer to the list of those he had nurtured, which included Billie Holiday, Charlie Christian, Bessie Smith and Count Basie.

By November 1961, Hammond was ready to move his new talent into Columbia's Studio A on Seventh Avenue. "I signed him on the spot," he once recalled. "We made our first album almost immediately. His guitar playing, let us say charitably, was rudimentary, and his harmonica was barely passable, but he had a good sound and a point of view and an idea. He was very disenchanted with the social system. I encouraged him to put all his hostility on tape, because I figured this was the way, really, to get to the true Bob Dylan."

Some of the songs were recorded in two takes, such was Dylan's germinal feel for the music, the folk, the blues. The only problems arose from Dylan popping his Ps, too close to the mike.

The immediately astonishing impact of the album, by any measure, is the contrast between the image of the unsmiling but fresh-faced lad in his cap and the depth of feeling and range in the singing between love, rage, sorrow and a fixation with death. The core of the album is Fixin' To Die, sung as though he were pleading for the life he is about to lose, such is Dylan's understanding of the intentions of its author, the great Delta blues master Booker T Washington – aka "Bukka" – White.

And so it continued: the lighter guitar touch on Baby Let Me Follow You Down, heralding the mighty ballads to come, a definitive claim on House of the Rising Sun and Elizabeth Cotten's Freight Train Blues – a choice worth noting not just for the lore of the American railroad and whistle of iron snakes winding through perpetuity, but also Dylan's own reflection that "I'd seen and heard trains from my earliest childhood days and the sight and sound of them always made me feel secure".

As ever, there is humour, too. Baez, Dylan's lover in the period immediately after the album, wrote that "his humour was dry, private, and splendid".

The estimable British writer on Dylan, Michael Gray, argues interestingly that the real value of the album is not only that it showed "more than a hint of a highly distinctive vision", but also "served as a fine corrective for Greenwich Village: it was the opposite of effete," he says, "in the context of what was happening at the time – American folk culture all but obliterated, and a stagnating 'folk' cult established as if in its place."

In Chronicles, we have Dylan's recollection of the books he devoured off other people's shelves during the time he made this record, which illuminate those to follow: Shelley, Poe, Faulkner, Gogol, The White Goddess by Robert Graves, whom he would later meet in London; "Balzac is hilarious," writes Dylan – and there is his "morbid fascination" with Von Clausewitz's writing on warfare. Books that can be said to play their part among the myriad influences on what was to follow – indeed, once Dylan had embarked along the creative road he would take from Bob Dylan onwards, it was a while before he returned to the album in his core performing repertoire.

"Sometimes you just want to do things your way, want to see for yourself what lies behind the misty curtain," he wrote. "You have to know and understand something, and then go past the vernacular."

Half a century ago though, the vernacular had a narrative and poetry of its own. But in his review for the New York Times, Shelton observed that, despite moments of "off-target melodrama", Dylan's "highly personalised approach towards folk song is still evolving".

Now you can buy city-lit PARIS p&p free in the US and Canada at www.bookdepository.com

Great news for our US and Canadian customers - all city-pick titles are available on www.bookdepository.com But that's not all: there are also some nice discounts and everything is post and packing free. What's not to like!

city-pick New York one of March's best reads ('excellent') in Lonely Planet Magazine

Easyvoyage on city-pick New York: 'Superb ...unlike the regular guide book one that can make your trip your own.'

Book: City Pick New York

Our selection: Book of the week  

City Pick New York

There are a plethora of different city guide books out on the market, most of which are glorified lists of attractions, hotels, restaurants and shops. They are as impersonal as they are repetitive and those who follow their advice religiously often find another thousand tourists in any given place that have done exactly the same. They are fine for practical information but they are certianly not going to enrich your experience or offer you anything a quick trip to the tourist office couldn't provide.

Not so for the 'city-pick' series of books, which regroups the very best of literature written about the greatest cities on the planet from some of its finest authors. The New York edition is divided into 12 sections, including, 'On the Waterfront', 'Big Yellow Taxis etc' and 'Celebrity City', and offers insights into various aspects of The Big Apple as seen through those who have written about it. Snipets of work from the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Truman Capote and Washington Irving stir up images of the city from days gone by while Beatrice Colin, Teju Cole and Ian Frazier give a more modern day account of the city that never sleeps.

Unlike the regular guide book, the city-pick book is one that you can make your own, or rather one that will make your trip your very own and not the same as the next person who has bought Lonely Planet or Rough Guide. Open the book at whichever page you desire and there will be a sentence to make you think, to make you dream, to make you wonder (or even wander). It is the type of book that can be read before, during and after your visit but which will have three very different meanings. Equally, you could just choose to read it, or part of it, before you leave and visit those areas of the city which have left the deepest impression on you. Or why not open it up once you've arrived and see where the writing takes you. Or simply leave it at home, take some time to let it all sink in and then compare your thoughs, feelings and emotions to those who have put theirs down in black and white.

The city-pick collection is a superb way to learn about a destination that you do not know at all and an equally good way to challenge your perceptions or complement your knowledge about one that you (think you) do know. The type of book that can be opened up at any page, the city-pick guide also covers Paris, London, Berlin, Dublin, Amsterdam and Venice.

www.easyvoyage.co.uk

 

The Irish Times on city-pick New York: 'an intriguing prospect ... succeeds in painting it as a unique and thrilling place'

‘The hubbub of clamouring voices covers the history of the city, the difference between the five boroughs, the architecture, the famous inhabitants, the experience of living in NYC and more. It’s an intriguing prospect, and the multitude of subjects and viewpoints gives a good impression of the heterogeneity and bustle of the great metropolis, and succeeds in painting it as a unique and thrilling place’ The Irish Times

 

The Guardian on city-pick New York: 'excellent ... it succeeds in capturing the authentic flavour of the Big Apple'

Wanderlust says city-pick New York 'a welcome glimpse into another part of this eternally energising city's soul'

city-pick New York: 'prismatic, engrossing ... atmospheric' Financial Times Paperback of the Week