I woke this morning with a pair of dilemmas brewing: how to spend the better part of day in the sunshine and on what film to write my inaugural musing? Last week I saw Julian Schnabel’s ‘The Diving Bell and the Butterfly’ at the Roxy Bar and Screen (a nice little venue near London Bridge), and at the time I thought I’d found the subject of my first review. Visually it was a very nice film indeed, but I didn’t realise it was directed by Schnabel until afterwards, and what at first appeared an intriguing French film became a superficial reasoning of what a French film should look like – some PoMo pastiche anyone? – and frankly one can only write so much about various eye twitchings and recurring prenatal images of a man in a diving bell floating in a thick sea of semiotic sludge.
Instead, I decided to spend the morning walking from Shepherd’s Bush to Mile End, assuming the sunshine and a twelve-mile walk would offer some inspiration. Armed with my iPod and J.G. Ballard’s ‘Kingdom Come’ (for periods of rest), I left the house and headed east, past the Shepherd’s Bush Market (a place if one stands in the middle of which one can easily imagine having been transported to a Turkish bazaar), over the top of Shepherd’s Bush Green (a kind of Tompkins Square Park sans the alphabet and teeming with gaggles of perpetually under-dressed Antipodeans), and under the vaguely unsettling unshadow of the gleaming new Westfield mall (welcome to the sub-urbanisation of London). Shepherd’s Bush is sharply quarantined from the affluence of more desirable western postcodes by the Holland Park Roundabout; emerging on the other side of it, I was suddenly in a different city: the decaying Edwardian charm of the Bush gave way to imposing neo-classical facades and giant trees drooping over the chugging traffic of Holland Park Road.
By this time, I had walked my way through Stravinsky’s ‘Rite of Spring’, a few cheesy trance numbers, and a considerable amount of Pet Shop Boys top 40 hits. Over the next six hours I would work my way through a generous catalogue of music ranging from classical to pop, each flavour and genre becoming a kind of soundtrack for that leg of my journey. Gershwin’s ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ saw me nostalgically through the American invasion in Notting Hill; Ben Watt’s ‘Buzzin’ Fly’ urged me across Hyde Park and then contrasted oddly with the oil-rich abayat spilling out of Harrods; the sophisticated tragedy of Billie Holiday made the unfathomable wealth of Belgravia seem a tad bit excessive. Onwards I marched toward the East End, passing from neighbourhood to neighbourhood, from village to village, like chapters of a screenplay, each containing scenes comprising an epic narrative, this journey from the West.
During the time I lived in New York City I must have walked a distance the length of Manhattan hundreds of times, and I’ve walked the width of London dozens. When alone, I almost always have my private soundtrack playing, and today I realised how cinematic these walks have been, all of them a collection of experiences bound together seamlessly by music. In New York I passed from one neighbourhood to the next in the way that makes New York the ultimate metropolitan experience: through the streamlined Modernist grid, the barriers to commerce having been straightened and cleared, the neo-flâneur able to choose his or her adventure unobstructed. But as much as New York feels like the most cinematic of all cities – the backdrop of a million movies – London is even more so when taken in over the course of a long walk. Out of private estates, farms, and settlements its collection of villages has grown organically and uncomfortably into a patchwork of loosely related plots and cosmopolitan dialogues. Based principally on privacy, exclusion, and inaccessibility, London’s neighbourhoods enforce the narrative journey instead of allowing the journey to be forced upon them. One can easily get lost in London (and one does, even with an ‘A to Z’), but this is part of the fun, isn’t it, in the same way one enjoys losing oneself for two hours in front of the big screen.
| Map of my route |