City montage

Still from TWILIGHT CITY (1989)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cycling in London is to experience the city's moods in a direct and shifting manner. Moving through the backstreets and main arteries of the city day after day reveals its divergent prospects, its rhythms, the patchwork of class and culture that make up the metropolis. Recently in analysis, reflecting on the 2026 London experience of general anxiety and aggression, I stated something which brought this thesis home for me-"I know things are fucked up because of how people drive."

Cycling gives me autonomy and joy in a highly contrived city, an emancipatory practice as much as a dangerous and exposing one. To be on a bike is to increase the possibility of injury or death at the hands of drivers, to be exposed to the eyes of thousands of people and to abuse from both drivers and pedestrians. Cycling while trans is something that keeps me safe (I feel I can leave any given public scene quickly) even as the danger of London roads brings me into contact with morbidity daily. I joked with a friend recently, what a shame it was I was so invested in two activities (transexualism and cycling) that people seemed to really dislike. I hear snippets of many conversations as I pass people, my attention flitting between the scene around me and the position and sounds of other road users. Over the past years I have built up a mental picture of what is going on in my city through this absorption of affect and speech.

Black Audio Film Collective's Twilight City centers on long shots from a car driving around London at night. The visual is accompanied by someone reading a letter to her mother who has left the city for the Caribbean. The writer claims that the London her mother knew is dying, that the city is changing fast, there is an ideological battle playing out over what city London will become. This is a story of struggle for the heart of the city, for the ways of life the metropolis makes possible that I identify with today. City montage is a way of seeing what is falling away, and what is appearing in its place. Twilight City's subtitle reads Sacrifice a piece of the past for the whole of the future. A commitment to cycling, a commitment to living desire, a commitment to the city as home are commitments to a future where we are more able to breath, both literally and metaphorically.

Life can be a dream

​Sometimes I feel as if I am living in a waking dream of my own life. Social reality shifted around me as if it were a force field this past year, like I began again for a second or third time, that field shifting first in 2021 perhaps masked by the scale of upheaval around me.

Is this waking dream rather acute alienation? Or living inside a rubber mask of the devil's face?

Some meetings this week, trying to mend things.

A cobbler's terse hello and reluctant agreement, "I can do it, but don't shout at me" left me asking why would I shout at him? 

The tailor's claim "we don't have what you want here."

At the builders merchant, the cashier turning to the till screen at which point she says "I wish you were dead." 

 

A simple exchange and a smile at the pound shop "how are you doing today?"

Two things that cut through it all:

Proc Fiscal - Uhazsh music video (so of a present time but also deeply unalientated, a love story <3)

&

Aya - Hexed pitchfork review (thoughtful music journalism and some of the only writing on the UK trans backlash I've seen that gets to the core of what is at stake - the body and desire)

 

No matter the epoch, fear and disgust cling to those who manipulate reality in ways that aren't supposed to be possible. That's the dangerous thing about transition: It really happens. Plug a hormone into hormone receptors and the body changes itself according to genetic code it already contains. Dress a new way, change the way you move, modulate your voice, and social fabric shifts: People perceive you differently. Sufficiently advanced deviance might be indistinguishable from magic to some but it literally happens all the time. It makes some people very angry to suggest that reality might be more moldable than they've been raised to believe. It might just force them to consider the unendurable stagnancy of their own lives.

It is my birthday this weekend, the one I chose.

Returning to a form

I've been looking for a place to write, an outlet for posting energy. That energy has been frustrated since leaving instagram six years ago, mostly sublimated into incessant texting. H suggested I start a blog after I found niche fame on a London bike forum recently and someone recognised the bicycle I was riding and had been posting about on London Bridge. Sunday was quiet, a bus driver had just tried to run me off the road, a cabbie minutes earlier shouted something indecipherable at me while blocking my path at the lights. It was pleasurable to be recognized for something I had made, rather than as a problem, as someone who needed to be told what a problem she was being. I wonder if I can find a better way to work with writing here. Unstick the knots so present when I sit down to begin something I designate important.

Yesterday I cycled to the north circular where the road cuts through Epping Forest, it had such a particular smell.