Deep Culture
Culture: the economic, demographic and technological conditions in a society, and the resulting ideologies and aesthetics that shape the lives and experiences of the people who live in it. We think of these forces as underlying– metaphorically beneath our everydays, hidden from our perceptions, silently informing what we do, what we believe and how we behave. This week’s CultureMorsel circles the globe, turns the metaphor inside out and goes – literally – underground: to the world’s great Metros, Subways and Tubes; to contemplate the culture to be found down below.
First to Kievskaya, Ploschad Revolyutsii and Mayakovskaya. Those wonders of Moscow’s Metro. Its trains charge with a violent raging roar, into ornate secular cathedrals. They empty and reload, and sweep off again, leaving first silence, then the sepulchral whisper of the next train approaching from the dark, rising to a scream, rising to another triumphant canon blast as it breaches the light. All every two minutes, exactly, from dawn till midnight. It’s the very power and structure of the Soviet state acted out like an endless military tattoo. That particular form of the state is now gone, and it’s no longer secular – God has been restored – but these spaces have lost none of their awesome grandeur; and now they reflect a new great power with many a resemblance to its predecessor.
Atlanta’s subway, MARTA comes inscribed with its own images of the city it serves. If you want to ride it out to the lush grass and country clubs of nearby Gwinnett County, you’ll be disappointed. Unlike their neighbours in Fulton and DeKalb County, Gwinnett residents vetoed the line coming their way when construction began in 1971, claiming it would introduce crime and – a sinister euphemism – ‘undesirable elements.’ Just last month, a Google search “What does MARTA stand for?” returned the answer “Moving Africans Rapidly through Atlanta.” It seems that old racist joke is still alive enough to keep it at the top of the search list. MARTA’s lines are racial lines.
With the completion of the Fukutoshin line in 2013, the Tokyo Metro company have finally stopped tunnelling. Quite possibly because there’s no untunnelled ground left to tunnel! The network is a convoluted maze of lines, several seeming to follow exactly the same route. But they’re all full and they’re all necessary to accommodate a still growing city with a magnetic attraction for the young. The countryside, meanwhile, gets ever emptier and older. Tokyo’s metro describes, in a way, the nation’s trajectory.
London’s Tube is a disorganised mess. Built in the 19th Century in a frenzy of development by competing speculators, the lines shot out like wisteria in springtime to undeveloped and uninhabited sites. When the Hammersmith and City line was completed in 1864, Hammersmith was known principally for the quality of the strawberries that grew in its fields. In contrast to the Tube’s anarchic development, most of the Paris Métropolitain, all art nouveau frill and belle époque vanguard, was designed all in one go. The Parisian grand design was to serve every corner of each of Hausmann’s 20 arrondissements. That’s why it’s the densest in the world, with most of its stations no more than 500m apart. Britain, perennially it would seem, likes to make things up as it goes along; France, by contrast, to have an ideology and a plan.
Every Metro, Subway, Tube and Subte has something to tell about this thing we call culture. That’s why, at The FameWorks, we make a point of foregoing taxis and Ubers; prefering to go underground, following the trails of underlying culture.