All the Worthwhile Possibilities: Psychogeographic Lessons from Timothy Levitch

A curly-haired bespectacled man in an oversized blazer sings George and Ira Gershwin’s “But Not for Me” to a bus full of tourists with such a strong nasal quality that if one weren’t charmed by the randomness and the poetry of the moment, it could be jarring.
The voice belongs to Timothy “Speed” Levitch, the city tour guide or “cruiser” whose style of lyrical and philosophical ruminating brought him cult status when he became the subject of Bennett Miller’s first film The Cruise (1998). Were this film released any time after 2000, it is hard to believe Levitch wouldn’t be seen as a hipster, as a pretentious wannabe poet who can’t help but perform his entire life. However, there is a deep sincerity and cutting loneliness to Levitch’s figure which makes you quickly forget any particularly cringe-worthy moments. Instead, you get on board with his desire to “exhibit that [he] is thrilled to be alive.”
I had to question why I flitted in between finding Levitch profound and finding him to be too much, at one point wondering whether I had finally become jaded enough not to recognise enthusiasm as anything other than inauthentic performance. On the other hand, it very well could be an act. Levitch himself makes no bones about his penchant for drama. He calls himself an exhibitionist. At the time of the documentary, Levitch is a struggling playwright, using the tours as a meagre means of income. But when you see him in action you get the sense he would rather be on stage.
Though Levitch may be a self-professed grandstander, he isn’t one to hog the limelight. He knows the true star of the show is New York City, and he sees every tour an opportunity to invite the others to embrace The Big Apple in the same spiritual, all-encompassing manner he does. As tourists board the bus, Levitch tells Miller,
“You know I’m slowly learning in my cruising career that you should not expect people to transform in an afternoon. They are not going to rewrite their souls and re-do every day that they’ve lived thus far before they came onto the double decker bus. And yet I expect that. I expect the total transformation of their life, the entire rewrite of their souls. I am fighting minute to minute, every moment here on the bus, for every day they’ve lived thus far to seem as a [sic] abstract wreckage that might have happened but is probably a delusion, and that this is the first real day of their lives.”
These long meditations, often delivered at a rapid pace (hence the nickname “Speed”) are typical of Levitch and they convey just how invested he is in the cruise. Yet he says these things without the slightest hint of stress or pressure as though he knows that while he is the tour guide, the master of the cruise, it is New York City itself that will offer the transformative experience. They are like a double act, Levitch and the city. The film is entirely black and white so we rely on Levitch for colour. We must trust him when he says the light is bouncing off a terracotta building, when he gushes over how sexy a plant on West 67th Street is. And we do. And the city trusts him to tell us too.
Levitch divulges from a rooftop overlooking Manhattan that “New York is a living organism. […] So my relationship with New York City is as vitriolic as the relationships with myself and with any other human being, which means it changes every millisecond, that it’s in constant fluctuation.” This statement embodies the psychogeographic heart of the film. After singing “But Not For Me” Levitch tells the tourists that it was written by “a young, ambitious, desperate New Yorker named Gershwin.” Whatever the actual circumstances of that desperation, you can’t help but tie it to the city. The film is about the relationships people have with New York.
In another scene, Levitch stands on the top deck of the bus reeling off, like a spoken word piece, the names of New York inhabitants of literary significance. There’s Thomas Paine, who returns to die “in somewhat disgrace”, Mark Twain moves onto West 10th Street right after his wife dies, Edgar Allen Poe endures an opium addiction at 61 Carmine Street (though other sources claim it was 113½). He points out that 7th Avenue South is six blocks from where Henry Miller “decides he hates New York forever,” five blocks from where D H Lawrence “lives lasciviously.” He points out that Max Eastman lives two blocks from “where Arthur Miller, the playwright contemplates suicide,” that they are five blocks from where Dylan Thomas “loses consciousness in The White Horse Tavern on Hudson Street and never regains it,” and five blocks from where Dorothy Parker “wrestles with alcoholism and the defeats of a lifetime, and fails.” All in the present tense; everything is now for Levitch. The city bore and bears witness to all these things, and participated in them. There’s a violence to the city that Levitch himself has experienced. Back on the rooftop, he relates how the city and he were going through a turbulent divorce of which he was the loser: “I couldn’t believe how angry the city was with me.”
It was watching this moment that I began to feel an immense guilt and remorse. I live in another of the world’s great metropolises, London, and realised I too was going through a kind of divorce with the city. I was the angry one though, angry that my city had seemingly betrayed and abandoned me for wealthier, more “cultured” recent inhabitants.
The more London changed the angrier and more possessive I became. The rapid gentrification of the borough I live in left the landscape increasingly unrecognisable. I would return from a term at university to find a certain shop closed, a new luxury high-rise in the middle of construction, old landmarks razed to the ground, and it would set my teeth on edge. My sister and I would walk through the streets like they were crime scenes.
How arrogant I was. I didn’t even really know the city in the first place. I was the kind of person who never strayed south of the river unless for a specific purpose, who would probably be just as bad as any tourist at giving directions, yet I had the audacity to assume the city’s loyalty and the greater audacity to take what is just a condition of its existence, constant change, as a personal betrayal. Sitting in my flat doing nothing, I took the borough and the city for granted, believing that as a native it would always keep itself for me.
In contrast, Levitch’s personification of the city means there’s a desire to respect and revere, and to really be in a relationship of mutual benefit that would allow the city to open up itself to him. In one moment he kisses the stone of the Brooklyn Bridge, in another as Miller focuses on a stone carving of a flower, Levitch’s slender fingers enter the frame to caress it. In yet another, he appears to tentatively test the road, tapping his foot against it before crossing, as though he is asking permission.
However, he can also get angry, feel confused, feel betrayed and shut out, and even hate certain parts of it too, like he does the grid plan. The way New York is carved into blocks for Levitch signifies a “homogenising in a city where there is no homogeneity available.” He suggests blowing it up and rewriting it so that it reflects more of the struggles of the city’s inhabitants, gesturing to a homeless person wrapped up in a sleeping bag. The elements that prevent intimacy Levitch refers to as the “anti-cruise”.
The first anti-cruise encounter occurs when Levitch leading a tour on foot, comes face to face with some police tape cordoning off a section of the sidewalk. The anti-cruise is the bane of Levitch’s life, reaching its apogee when he was arrested and jailed for trying to access the roof of a skyscraper. At night, outside the Criminal Courts Building, two blocks away from Thomas Paine Park, Levitch rants against the anti-cruise, despairing at its seeming inevitability but revelling in the fact that the cruise always fights against it.
Even the jail, Levitch says, contains “a sparkle of cruising energy.” As if on cue a cockroach runs along the sidewalk unbothered by any elements of the anti-cruise that may be in the air. The cockroach is resilient enough to withstand nuclear explosion; the anti-cruise is no match for such a creature. “No prison for the cockroach!” exclaims Levitch with both admiration and envy, “Such respect for those bastards.” The next shot is Levitch’s mugshot.
And when we think resilience in the face of forces that would stop us in our tracks it is hard not to think about 9/11. The documentary was filmed three years before, but towards the end of the film, Levitch spins himself dizzy in between the towers before lying down to experience the illusion that they are falling down on him. It’s a scene that is incredibly sombre in its prescience.
The horror of the 7/7 bombings in London is embodied and etched forever in my mind by that image of the number 30 bus with its roof blown off. Those red buses, the London Underground hit by three bombs, symbols of the city. But in the aftermath, all around me Londoners continued to board the buses and the trains. The bus 30 to Hackney Wick would go past, completing the route that one bus did not, no less packed than any other day.
There’s a toughness and defiance to old cities like London and New York. I was so impressed by how indestructible New York looked despite everything. London too. And these are thoughts that occur more and more in light of recent events at Westminster Bridge, Borough Market, and Finsbury Park. Bold metropolitans going about their lives in defiance against the most horrific form of anti-cruise.
In Life from Shiva’s Dance Floor, a 2002 film where Levitch cruises around Lower Manhattan in close vicinity of Ground Zero, he seems so different to the ebullient 25-year-old of The Cruise. There’s still that characteristic lightness with which he expresses depth of thought but there is now a self-awareness that this is also seen as his “shtick”. There is even a cynical edge to some of his observations, which is understandable. He is — everyone is — less innocent.
But the film is still buoyed up by a message of optimism and opportunity. Levitch cannot help himself. Standing near Ground Zero, he describes it not as a hole in the ground but as “an opportunity for rebirth.” He sees the current moment as a chance for the cultivation of a joy and celebration that would not be frivolous or trivial but instrumental to humanity’s survival.
All that possessiveness seems intensely selfish and juvenile in this light. If London belonged only to me and existed according to my desires alone, it would have died a long time ago. Gentrification is itself a particularly stringent form of anti-cruise. However, my resentment seeing others enjoy and discover the city was a manifestation of anti-cruise that separated me from all that London has to offer. But Levitch’s unending voraciousness for New York, his rage against the anti-cruise, his recognition of the city as a forever-changing thing is inspiring.
In the last moments of the film, we follow Levitch up and up flights of stairs until he comes to a fire door. He inspects it carefully, cautiously, wondering if the fire alarm will go off. There’s a clunk of the lock and he seems to hold his breath before pushing the door, tentatively at first, realising there’s no alarm. A bright stream of light pours through, blinding, and Levitch disappears into it, to behold a sprawling view of the city from above. He knocked at the door and the city let him in.
