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I'm a stranger here myself: it's 1980 and East German writer Wolfgang Koeppen finds himself in New York.

New York in the nineteen eighties

Not all strangers, of course, come to stay for good. German writer Wolfgang Koeppen (1906-1996)  describes his arrival in New York harbour on the ship ‘Liberté’.

 

 The New World greeted me with a cold wind and grey skies. Anticipation had driven our ship’s passengers out of bed before daylight, but the closer we got to land, the less we yearned for the gradually approaching form. A herd of amateur photographers swarmed over the decks like frightened sheep. The Statue of Liberty reared up out of the sea in a ragged cloak of mist, a worthy sister to those beloved giantesses in Europe  ―  Bavaria, Germania, and Berolina — whose hollow heads you can climb into, peering through their blind eyes at the mute, outspread horizon:  a matron sullenly holding up a wet torch, but illuminating nothing.

            Now the famous skyline stepped out from behind the homely symbol of freedom, the skyscrapers huddling together on the tip of that very solid and expensive rock. I thought of economic statistics, of success plotted with curves on a graph, I saw stock prices climbing, rockets taking off: the very heavens should be quaking! But you couldn’t see paradise any better from here than anywhere else, and from the perspective of the visitor approaching the continent, the world’s richest city seemed like a village with megalomania: the view looked familiar, and this painting was more true-to-life than  outsized or overpowering.

            The ship glided slowly, pulled by tugboats, toward the new Rome, the Rome of the fabled western hemisphere. Its towers weren’t praising God, nor were they inquiring about an all-powerful Being, for they had arrived at their own omnipotence. I expected to feel a frisson as I confronted the enormity of human freedom and the acclaimed belief in human happiness through technical and material progress ― but that shiver never materialized. New York City, stretching up in the morning mist, was a stage set of steel, concrete, glass, and brick which made me think of houses of cards and storms which might be brewing far away. Beneath its highest rooftops, other roofs cowered, looking as humble as they were: mere sheds, apparently, much like ground-level barracks, which drew down the giants and attempted to reduce them to their own level. Everything seemed temporary and arbitrary while appearing at the same time to follow the kind of easily-grasped order which a playful but not very imaginative child might have devised.

            It pleased me, however, to see the chunky, old-fashioned ferryboats plying across the shallow harbour, and I was delighted to see their wheels turning, churning up foam, as they crossed the Hudson heavy with their human freight. This was the America I had anticipated: it made me think of Mark Twain and Walt Whitman, even if the Mississippi and the Camps of Green were far away and the era of those writers was past. The docks mentioned by Melville still encircled Manhattan like black honeycombs, and the Liberté was swallowed up in them as if by some huge maw.

            Disembarkation proceeded according to an ancient, strict ritual. First the privileged people in first class were allowed into the country, then the cabin section with all its black-clad priests, and the emigrants had their turn at the very end, herded into the sacred precincts of the demigods, invited to the thick carpets and brocade armchairs of the great ballroom. Immigration officials were sitting here at tables cleared of those lavish suppers which were the pride of the shipping line. I wasn’t asked whether I wanted to assassinate the President: that turned out to be a myth. The officials were friendly and informal, stamping documents left and right, and they left assassinations to the foreigners.

            This mighty America trusted me ― it trusted me right away. It expected me to recognize with my very own eyes that the U.S. was God’s country. I was instinctively afraid of failing to live up to this expectation, and I was ashamed. Was I travelling with a false passport? I received my entry visa, walked down the gangplank, my last tangible connection to Europe, and stepped over a bridge into the huge customs hall. 

 

The hall was America and yet it was like something out of Kafka, a space with such a vaulting roof, such far-flung boundlessness, that it seemed to disappear into thin air and become totally unreal. Pale sunlight fell through panes of frosted glass to form shimmering shafts of dust motes. The concrete floor was worn and scratched, and numerous crude wooden barriers and desks of the cheapest sort stood all around with small mountains of baggage lying scattered between them, like a harvest gathered on a field ― the flotsam of Europe, raised out of the belly of the Liberté and somehow ordered alphabetically according to the owners’ names. I looked for my own things, found them, and observed that they were shabby.

            This is the moment when an immigrant has the urge to tear the clothes off his back and burn all the possessions he has brought along, so that he can step into his new life naked and unencumbered, anticipating different, more glittering trappings. But since such behaviour wouldn’t be appropriate even in America, and might negate all my efforts to travel this far, I waited for the customs official, who approached unhurriedly. From the star on his chest I recognized him as the good-natured policeman of the film strips, but he took a stern, Prussian view of his duty. Every bag had to be opened and searched. What kind of contraband was he worried about in this land of abundance? I never found out.  My baggage received the clearance stamp which was given out at the last barrier of the hall.

            I went through the gate. I had arrived in America. I was standing in New York. I had often dreamed about this, and now it was like a dream. The dream of being here had fulfilled itself, and as in that dream there was no foreignness:  I too was at home here, and America lay at my feet like my own personal property. I sensed freedom. I felt freedom. The wind was freedom. Nobody asked me where I was going, what I was going to do, or what I wanted to undertake from the Atlantic to the Pacific coast, from the Gulf of Mexico to the icebergs of Alaska.

Wolfgang Koeppen, Amerikafahrt  (1959)

(In Gesammelte Werke in sechs Bänden Vol 4,1986)

translated from the German by Susan Thorne

 

Wolfgang Koeppen is included in city-pick New York, featuring over sixty writers on the city. Other city-pick titles include Berlin, Paris, Istanbul, Venice, Dublin, St Petersburg, London and Amsterdam.

From London to New York: The Ten Top Art Shows in Your Favourite Cities this Spring

From Velazguez and Rubens to Picasso and Kandinsky, this Spring sees the world's greatest painters (and sculptors too, though anonymous Ancient Greeks) with some mesmerising shows across Europe, Canada and the USA. Don't miss them.

 

1. Paris  Velazguez and the triumph of Spanish Painting, 25/3 - 13/7 2015, Grand Palais www.grandpalais.fr Perhaps the most acclaimed painter of all time, here in all his triumphant glory.

2. London Rubens and His Legacy: Van Dyck to Cezanne 24/1 - 10/4 2015, Main Galleries, The Royal Academy www.royalacademy.org.uk  A rare opportunity to see the extraordinary range of Peter Paul Rubens's achievements. 

3. New York Kandinsky Before Abstraction, 1901 - 1911  to Spring 2015, Solomon R Guggenheim Museum www.guggenheim.org The defining years as the artist became an art revolutionary.

4. Vienna  Velazquez, the Exhibition, to 15/2/2015 KunsthistorischesMuseum www.khm.at  Brings together 46 of his best-known canvases.

5. New York  El Greco in New York, to 1/2/2015  Metropolitan Museum of Art  www.metmuseum.org New York galleries and collections bring together all his work to be found in the city. 

6. Florence  Picasso and the Spanish Modernity, to 25/1/2015, Palazzo Strozzi www.palazzostrozzi.org  How Picasso influenced his Spanish conpadres including Joan Miro, Salvador Dali and Juan Gris.

7. London  Defining Beauty: the body in Ancient Greek art 26/3 - 5/7 2015, The British Museum www.britishmuseum.org  Experience some of the most beautiful and thought-provoking survivals from antiquity.

8. Toronto Islamic Art Aga Khan Museum of Islamic Art www.agakhanmuseum.org Discover the astonishing range and beauty of Islamic art from Spain to China.

9. Madrid Goya's Tapestry Cartoons, Museo del Prado, until 3/5/2015 www.museodelprado.es  Goya's extraordinary tapestry cartoons, hung alongside works by his contemporaries.

10. London Inventing Impressionism, The National Gallery, 4/3 - 31/5 www.nationalgallery.org.uk  85 Impressionist masterpieces that passed through the hands of Paris art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel.

Love reading about & visiting cities? Check out city-picks' favourite recent features, links & videos

Love reading about and visiting favourite world cities? This is the first in Oxygen Books city-picks' regular round-up of our favourite features, links and videos on a whole range of cities from Berlin and Istanbul to New York and Paris. The focus is on the best books and writing but we do like to stray as the flaneurish way takes us.  

 

First to wonderful 1920s New York, where Literary Traveller (a site well-worth checking out for all things about writers and travel) has unearthed a brilliant documentary from the early sixties about the legendary Algonquin set. Dorothy Parker, Groucho Marx, George F Kaufman et al and some very dry martinis ...

 

Next Paris in the company of crime writer Patrick Modiano winner of 2014's Nobel Prize for Literature. Nouvelle Observateur has created a Google Map showing all the Paris locations used in Modiano's novels. Most of the writer's novels are set in Paris and we hope to include some excerpts in the next edition of city-lit Paris. There's also a lovely piece by Israeli journalist Moshe Gilad in Haaretz.com doing a flaneur's walk across Paris visting Modiano's locations.

  Patrick Modiano's Paris

'Tis the season to be in Dublin it seems with a plethora of festivals, literary and lots of others, through to the Spring reports Kevin McKenna in the Observer. This includes One City, One Book run by the library service, in which the whole city will be encouraged to read one book. This year it's Roddy Doyle's The Barrytown Trilogy.

Dublin's Temple Bar

 

Come to the cabaret too in Berlin in the company of the very best writers on the city according to The Culture Trip. Agree? Disagree? Or a bit in the middle? Do let us know.

Christopher Isherwood and friend

What's biting Venice? This is the leading question one of our leading novelists on Venice Michelle Lovric asks in a recent blog entry and her answers are as fascinating as they are fearsome.

Venice: Byzantine stone circle

 

Writers and writing about Amsterdam is really amazing. But don't take our word for it - check outthis video featuring a stroll around literary Amsterdam in the company of writer and translator Victor Schiferli

 

  

Orhan Panuk is probably the best-known modern Turkish writer and, unsurprisingly, Istanbul features in many of his books, including his non-fiction Istanbul. You can read all about Orhan Pamuk's Istanbul from a recent feature in the New York Times.

                                                            Orhan Pamuk's Istanbul

St Petersburg's cultural wonders don't begin and end with the Hermitage writes Tim Stanley in Guardian Travel. St Petersburg's contemporary art scene more than offers a rival attraction for visitors.

  St Peterburg art gallery

Oxygen Books is the publisher of the city-pick series featuring some of the best writing on world cities. 'Superb ... it's like having your own phone loaded with different tomes, except with the best passages, bite-sized chunks, just perfect to dip into' The Times

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"This is New York. Get over it" The New York Nobody Knows: Walking 6000 Miles in the City

What is the real New York? The iconic sights and shopping? The brownstones of a Woody Allen film? The projects and  gangs? Or was Walt Whitman closer to it over a century ago when the real city forced him to contain 'multitudes'?

 

Native New Yorker and CityCollege sociology professor William B. Helmreich took on a Sisyphean task: to walk nearly every block of all five boroughs as the only way to contain today's 'multitudes'.

 

The New York Nobody Knows: Walking 6,000 miles in the City is the result - a fascinating and reflective guide to the heart, mind and soul of New York.

 

Accompanied by his dog (New Yorkers like strangers with animals) and his sociological perspectives, Helmreich spent four hours on each of his walks over a period of four years.

 

Joseph Mitchell may have given us finer, more descriptive writing but he was in many ways a miniaturist. Helmreich is one too - the book teems with wonderful New York characters and conversations - but he also makes connections and gives us the bigger picture.

 

Helmreich's book is no anodyne guide: New York, as he shows us, might today be one of the safest cities in the US but there is still gangland activity and surprising behaviour.

 

On Broadway, near Jefferson Street, between Bushwick and Bedford- Stuyvesant he sees a man walking four large put bulls on leashes.

 

'As I took a closer look at him (I was walking sort of alongside him), I saw that he had two large boa constrictors around his neck. A minute later he stopped and encouraged a man to let his daughter pet the snakes. The man obliged and allowed one of the boas to wrap itself around his daughter, who showed only the slightest bit of apprehension - more like curiosity, it seemed. Only in an area like this could one see such a sight.'

 

And in case you want to avoid it, 188th Street, between Audubon and Amsterdam Avenues is, according to the police, the street in Manhattan where you're most likely to be shot, although mainly if you happen to be a drug dealer.

 

While recent Mayors have arrested them and put the homeless in shelters away from the centre, many still refuse to be removed.

 

James, a black panhandler and unemployed litho printer on Cliff and Fulton Streets, wears a white straw hat, black shirt and a multicoloured tie and works his pitch seven days a week.

 

'The police they know me and they see I'm causin' no trouble'. What's the biggest amount he ever got? 'A hundred dollars from some older woman. I was just askin' for some change. I was shocked. I went and paid my rent.'

 

Most people in New York don't of course live in brownstones or expensive apartments but humbler homes where they can bring up their families. and live among people who are like themselves.

 

Helmreich discovers EdgewaterPark, off ThrogsNeckBridge, in the Bronx.

'Most of the homes are enlarged bungalows. There are no sidewalks, so the homes face narrow, mostly no-name streets with sections named with letters of the alphabet. Everybody knows everybody, and most of the people are either of Irish, Italian or German descent, overwhelmingly Catholic, and generally they work for the city as policemen, sanitation workers, or firemen. Some of the homes along the shoreline have beautiful views of Long Island, and many of the residents own boats.'

 

If a place is not quite suitable for your ethnic community you might prefer as Hasidim Jews have done to settle around a South Flushing project that's completely black and Hispanic. If you live on Staten Island you might either be like Dan and Louise who have lived there for thirty years and love its sense of community or else feel deep shame as a couple move into their mother-in-law's apartment there. 'A place so forsaken that not even Starbucks would set up a store there, nor even the most enterprising Thai restaurant owner.'

 

On the other hand, an older woman living on East Ninth Street in Manhattan's EastVillage admits that a village-like community can have its problems. 'Sometimes you just get tired of saying hallo to someone you passed by for the seventeenth time in a week.'

 

When it comes to New York's housing projects it's worth mentioning that these are among the best constructed and managed in the country and are rarely taken down; instead they're renovated. They currently have a seven-year waiting list.

 

Recent newcomers to the city make of it something rich and strange. As he's walking up East 167th Street around Grant Avenue in the South Bronx the writer comes across a Hasidic-looking man with skullcap, beard and tzitzis leaving a school building.  He asks him what a religious Jew like him is doing there, only to be told he's the highly popular school dean and most of his pupils are Muslim. 'I actually it in pretty well. I'm just another weird dresser. Up here anything goes. In fact, very often they don't even realize I'm Jewish.'

 

He asks a waiter in a Harlem restaurant about his national origins. 'I'm everything' he responds. 'My mother is Gabonese and French, and my father is Polish and Chinese. I guess I'm just an American.'

 

Of course New York is endlessly surprising. A Ukrainian waitress is  the only person in Edgar's Cafe on the Upper West Side who seems to know who Edgar Allan Poe is. Pete's Tavern on Eighteenth Street and Irving Place was where O. Henry wrote The Gift of the Magi and is the oldest tavern in the city. It seems like the idea place to take his literary wife until they arrive one evening to find it has been transformed into a raucous singles bar.

 

'What I do get out of the experience is a sharp reminder that one must try as much as possible to see New York City in the same locations at different times, because when is often as important as where. Day or night? Weekend or weekday? Winter or summer? It can be, and often is, very different.'

 

Of vintage New York conversations there are too many to quote. But how can we forget the deli owner who observes wryly that some customers walk through his door five or six times a day, acting as if it's their home. 'wearing pyjamas or stroking an iguana.' The attitude seems to be 'This is New York. Get over it. And of course, they're right. What would New York be without bad behaviour?'

 

Then there's the Harlem maintenance man criticizing Harlem's gentrified tenements. 'These apartments are worth $100,000. But if I gotta pay $100,000 to live somewhere, I wanna be where there's grass around me. These are just glorified tenements. You still gotta fix the leaks in the bathroom and the stove when it breaks. Any apartment where I can hear somebody burpin' next door is not an apartment that I want.'

 

Not forgetting the woman walking her dog next to the writer who confirmed actor Christopher North's resident status and pointed to the building where he lived. 'He was kind of snooty,' she said. 'I met him in the building - my son lived there too - and I said. 'Oh, you're from that cop show.' And I had the wrong one. And he said to me in a really cold tone, 'No, it's Law and Order.' And I said to myself, 'That's the last time ....'

 

One must, Helmreich reminds us, see old manufacturing New York while we still can in places like East Williamsburg. 'In general, these parts of the city come closest to what New York City used to be as a manufacturing centre. Here you'll still find granite factories, electrical parts centres, makers of heavy machinery, dried-foods producers, building materials suppliers, brick inventories, bus garages, shoe factories, pipe supplies, and the like. When manufacturing occupied more of a centre stage fifty years ago, artists didn't exist in the area. ' Street art and other artistic products are now common here as manufacturing has declined.

 

Which brings us, inevitably, to gentrification as the Big Apple has shifted from an industrial to a service economy. Gentrification comes in different forms, with something for everyone who can afford it. He sees North and Central Brooklyn as a case in point with a top tier including BrooklynHeights, Cobble Hill and Dumbo and the next tier featuring East Williamsburg, FortGreene, Clinton Hill and others.

 

As for these gentrifiers who express surprise when they become a crime statistic a Brooklyn cop Helmreich meets has little sympathy. 'Well, what do you expect if you gonna live across the street from a project? And they be lookin' at their laptops in their cars, handling their portable GPS. They gonna have problems because they don't know what they hell they're doing. They shouldn't be moving here. They complain, but we can't be everywhere at once. You're a New Yorker. You wouldn't do that.'

 

And how do you know when gentrification is travelling south of 181st Street and west of Broadway? 'When you see a young Chinese American woman with two kids walking her dogs, accompanied by a Hispanic-looking man who might be her husband or boyfriend. Then another white guy comes along with his dog and is joined by a black woman and her dog, and they all have a fifteen-minute conversation on 163rd Street and Riverside Drive.'

 

Helmreich sees the pros and cons of gentrification and understands the problems in the outer boroughs but, like his Harlem maintenance man, his glass is usually half-full:

 

'You got white people, yuppies moving in here. All the prejudiced people, they died out. The yuppies don't give a shit. They just wanna get to their jobs. So that's how the neighbourhood completely changed. This is now a very interestin' neighbourhood. And it's a lot safer than it was before. Actually, in the early seventies Bradhurst was a very nice area. Then came the crack epidemic and it all changed. Now it's back to where it was before.'

 

Despite gentrification Helmreich feels the city has stayed authentic. 'It has historical cachet. If you want nostalgia, you only have to look for it in the right places. There are large stretches of Gotham that still retain the flavour of old New York. Traverse Bensonhurst or Bay Ridge, and you'll find the Brooklyn of Saturday Night Fever. Go on foot through Northeast Bronx streets and you'll find one-hundred-year-old homes and apartment buildings the norm, relatively untouched by gentrification.'

 

At the end of his 6,000 mile walk what emerges with great clarity 'is that New York today is a city that is enjoying a tremendous renaissance.'  He sees this in the way New Yorkers are acutely aware that they live in one of the greatest cities in the world. 'It's a connection to an idea, embodied in a space and a state of mind that is far larger than themselves. It's there, they know it to be true, and so does everyone else who lives there.'

 

If Walt Whitman contained 'multitudes' within himself 'multitudes' this fine book contains multitudes more - the beating, dynamic  heart of New York is here.

 

The New York Nobody Knows: Walking 6000 Miles in the City, William B Helmreich, £19.95, Princeton University Press

 

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Miranda Road, Heather Reyes £8.99

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New York Book of the Week: Teju Cole on being stuck on the Carnegie Hall fire escape

Nigerian-born Teju Cole’s Open City contains a wonderful description of seeing Sir Simon Rattle conduct Mahler’s ninth symphony at Carnegie Hall. But it is what happens when he tries to beat the crowds and leave by an alternative exit that leads to an unforgettable New York moment and provides a cautionary tale for anyone not content to follow the usual route out.

 

Only when the door clicked behind me did I realise what I had done. I had used the emergency exit, which led directly from the fourth tier to the fire escape outside the building. The heavy metallic door that had just slammed shut had no external handle: I was locked out. There was to be no respite from the rain and the wind because I had also left my umbrella in the concert hall. And, added to all this was the fact that I was standing not on an exit staircase, as I had hoped, but on a flimsy fire escape, locked out on the unlit side of Carnegie Hall on a stormy evening. It was a situation of unimprovable comedy.

     The slick wirework was all that separated me from the street level of the city, some seventy feet down. The lights directly below were visible between my feet, and my head and coat were already wet. My fellow concertgoers went about their lives oblivious to my plight. It was farther than the distance of a shout, even in clement weather; at night, with rain lisping through the streets, it was futile. And a few minutes before this, I had been in God’s arms, and in the company of many hundreds of others, as the orchestra had sailed toward the coda, and brought us all to an impossible elation.

     Now, I faced solitude of a rare purity. In the darkness, above the sheer drop, I could see the lights of Forty-second Street flashing in the visible distance. The railings of the fire escape, which were probably precarious at the best of times, were slicked with water and inimical to the grip. I moved carefully, taking step after premeditated step. The wind pushed around the building noisily, and I took some grim comfort in the idea that, if I were to fall from that height, there was no question of being maimed: death would be instant. The thought calmed me, and I stepped and slid down the metal steps, a few modest inches at a time. My high-wire act continued for long minutes in the darkness. And then I saw that the fire escape went only halfway down the building, ending abruptly at another closed door. The rest of the way down to the ground, some two flights, was air alone. But luck was with me: this second door had a handle. I tried it and it opened, into a hallway.

     Before I entered the door, holding it open with relief and gratitude, it occurred to me to look straight up, and much to my surprise there were stars. Stars! I hadn’t thought I would be able to see them, not with the light pollution perpetually wreathing the city, and not on a night on which it had been raining. But the rain had stopped while I was climbing down, and had washed the air clean. The miasma of Manhattan’s electric lights did not go very far up into the sky, and in the moonless night, the sky was like a roof shot through with light and heaven itself shimmered. […]

     I gripped the rusted railing of the fire escape with one hand and tightened my hold on the open door with the other. The night air clipped my ears. I looked down, a steep drop, and the blurred yellow rectangle of a taxicab sped by, and then an ambulance, its wailing reaching me from seven floors below, and stretching out as it headed toward Times Square’s neon inferno.

Teju Cole, Open City (2011)

One of over 60 writers in city-pick New York, edited by Heather Reyes, £9.99, Oxygen Books

city-pick guides 'open the book at any page and there'll be a sentence to make you think, dream, wonder (& even wander)'

BOOK: CITY PICK NEW YORK

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- 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.

http://www.easyvoyage.co.uk/book/city-pick-new-york

 

'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

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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

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• • 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".