The Black Hole Terminus

A loosely-formed mendicant order of vagrants and junkies hovers and twitches as fidgety and deformed as pigeons, edging the verge of an inevitable event horizon with an unknowable fear flashed across darting eyes, red and drippy. Soaked in urine and caked in dirt, these people are the dark matter of the populace. There, but not there, you see. Sheltered under red-brick colonnades, porticos encrusted in stolid greeny-white shit, lying in the bus shelter, mired in the entropy of a week’s worth of sodden news. Trace the dark flow backwards to Victoria station, the black hole terminus. Swirling under a thick and soupy sky. It is the gravitational well, pulling all towards it, struggling to suck in Westminster cathedral, that Byzantine time-warp error, where our mendicants hold on for dear life. Its esplanade is a horrific orgy of ecstatic visions and demonic possession, speaking in tongues, hideous cackling, limping limbs or simply lopped-off, flea-bitten mongrels lying lewdly on sleeping bags, methadone, picking, scratching and shivering. Mock-religiosity, pious prostration. Jerusalem for the damned.

On the Tragedy and Farce of Painting Bicycles White

These are some things that I have to say about ghost bikes. The cyclists amongst you, as well as the amblers and the more generally observant will have noticed these spectral bikes during your rides, your ambles and your more general observations. They are scattered across the city at various cross-roads and traffic lights, where they stand tied fast to railings and lamp-posts. These ‘ghost bikes’ serve as memorials marking the locations where cyclists have been killed by motorists as well as, I like to think, memento mori for the general public. The idea of mourning cyclists’ deaths in this way began in San Francisco (also the birth place of Critical Mass, that other cycling-related cultural phenomenon that has become a part of London) and has since spread globally.

But the practice of painting bicycles white has roots in an altogether different context. Pedal back to Amsterdam, to the heady days of the 1960s when the Provos, a radical social movement with anarchist tendencies, took control of a council seat and went about attempting to implement a number of policies, or so-called White Plans. Conceived as part these White Plans (which included other such prophetic ideas as the smoking ban) the idea behind the white bicycles was to provide Amsterdammers with an alternative, healthy form of transport, whilst also being an experiment in common ownership and mutual aid. The white bicycle was said to symbolise ‘simplicity and healthy living, as opposed to the gaudiness and filth of the authoritarian automobile.’

Needless to say, the white bicycles of Amsterdam were a failure. The revolutionary optimism they were born of breathed the last breath in the rubble of May ’68. As one survivor of the sixties once told me, ‘it was all wonderful until some people started taking the bikes, painting them different colours and keeping them for themselves. That’s when the sixties began to end and the seventies started.’

Following the logic of private appropriation to its conclusion we see that the white bicycle concept, in Provo terms, has now become wholeheartedly apropriated; this time by those vying to cash in on the green buck. City councils are handing out contracts to manufacturers and ad agencies across Europe. The already extant Vélib’ in Paris is a case in point, as will be London’s less imaginatively named ‘Cycle Hire Scheme’ which is due to hit the streets in May 2010. These schemes are great for alleviating problems with public transport, encouraging alternative forms of mobility in a climate-conscious time and providing people with the chance to re-acquaint themselves with the topography and fabric of the city, ending the tedious and alienating mode of métro-boulot-dodo to which most of our urban experiences are unfortunately set. These are good things. Where the schemes differ from the original Provo vision is in their essentially profit-driven backers whose influence will doubtlessly grow and grow in intensity until yet another sphere of public life has become fully and irreversibly privatized.

People have started putting bikes out on the street again for common use, but they’ve started charging for them. People have started painting bicycles white again, but only to mourn and to warn. This is when the 20th century ended and the 21st century began. Tragedy and farce. The Provo’s white bicycle becomes just another ghost bike tied to the railings; rusty frame, flat tires and crusted, peeling white paint exposed to a harsh reality; a ‘tragedy of the commons.’