Hail The World's Taxi Drivers
The Age
Thursday January 25, 2001
TAXI drivers know it all. They are a library on wheels, the mobile equivalent of the Britannica, the Melway and the dodgier parts of the Internet combined. Not always as accurate, mind you, not always as easy to ignore, and not always willing to take you where you want to go by the most direct, non-Michael-Schumacher route.
In London, of course, the inordinate amount of information they collect has become well known, even to mere mortals, as The Knowledge. And, last year, scientists reported that the taxi drivers there have bigger brains because of it. The size of that part of their brain called the hippocampus, where we apparently keep our maps, was millimetres larger than among noncabbies.
Cabbies are rich in fact, as well as fiction. They're good for those of us who love storytellers. Essence of Frederick Forsyth!
Among them I've met a former Israeli fighter pilot in Los Angeles who, shot down over Lebanon, fell in love with his Arab captor. In Melbourne I've relived a Balkan terror trip to freedom with a mixedmarriage Yugoslav forced to leave his wife behind. And another cabbie drove me around New York just two months after migrating from Leningrad.
New York is the city actor Michael Krass selected to launch City Cabs (SBS, 7.30pm), the first of a 13part series that goes around the world with local taxi drivers.
This offbeat travel show gets the cabbies to talk about their cities, guide us around tourist spots and lesserknown attractions, and introduce Krass to some of the local eccentrics. Future episodes will take us to Buenos Aires, Amsterdam, Cairo, London, Capetown, Lisbon, Mexico City, Rome, Berlin, Barcelona, Hong Kong and New Orleans.
Krass' host in ``the city of dreams" is an affable, bearish New Yorker called Cliff Hammond. He looks a little like the father in The Wonder Years and, thanks to his passenger, gets about as many lines. The cabbie here is very much the second banana, used in the photo ops and only to provide a segue, or punchline.
But Krass was perhaps ready for the worst. ``It was helpful to have a taxi driver who spoke English, which is not as common as you might think in New York," he says. And where does his driver come from? Hammond, it seems, is a typical New Yorker: his background is Jewish and Protestant, Russian, German, English and Welsh.
So he takes us to Ellis Island, to Brighton Beach to meet Russian immigrant Isabelle Belarsky, to an artist in Chelsea who pays $12,000 a year on his studio of parrots and then to Central Park, Times Square and Broadway. We never get to see the meter but it's a colorful trip. All hail the cabbie!
It was far from such city streets that artist Rosalie Gascoigne found her driving force. As we see in the Arts Show documentary Gascoigne Country (ABC, 9pm), she came to art fairly late in life, her work emerging from the isolation surely felt after moving from New Zealand with her astronomer husband Ben to the Mount Stromlo observatory near Canberra. ``I was born needing the artistic life," she said. ``I needed the freedom."
Gascoigne, who died in 1999, is, like many of our female artists, only beginning to be recognised. This impressive tribute from producerdirector Jaya Balendra and writernarrator Justin Murphy is being screened on what would have been her 86th birthday.
From the grasses, pebbles, discarded roadside trophies, road signs and softdrinks crates, she built an extraordinary collection of work. In her hands and through her eyes, the abandoned or commonplace became her material. Scraps of genius.
Today's Pick
* The Australian Open
Seven, 7pm
What else? Where else? Who else? Tonight's dream show from Pat Rafter and Andre Agassi is surely the one we've all been waiting for. Might have been better had this been the final, but, really, who is complaining? All we need now is for Seven's commentators to realise when silence, as well as hitting aces, is golden.
Full program: T10
© 2001 The Age