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| Photo by Victor Cabelero, via Twitter |
Having been a talking head last weekend, I was an “expert” panelist
this weekend, at LitFest Pasadena. The title
of the panel was simply “LA On Foot” something I do feel reasonably able to
talk about, although in many ways sitting on a panel feels like the opposite of walking. Since I live 15 miles from Pasadena some
driving was required, and of course I thought about walking there and back, but
it seemed a bit much for a Saturday afternoon.
Chairing the panel was Stephen Reich who is, among other things, one of the producers of a show titled City
Walk “the only television series that
journeys by foot across the country for a ground's eye view of urban America.
Experience the vibrant streets and sidewalks of Los Angeles, New York, Boston,
Atlanta, San Francisco, Portland, Las Vegas, Denver, and Washington D.C. while
discovering stunning architecture, magnificent monuments, serene parks, and
communities transformed by a new breed of pedestrians who march to the beat of
a different drummer.” Well yes.
On the panel were James T. Rojas, an urban planner, who made the fascinating
point that Latino immigrants are accustomed to having large public squares to
walk in back home, and so when they arrive in LA many of them turn their front
gardens into a miniature version of the public square complete with benches and
a fountain, though I suppose the opportunities for walking are considerably
reduced.
Also on the panel was Lynell George, a fine journalist who among many other
things runs a photoblog titled wanderingfoot (which I must admit I first read
as wandering fool) with some pretty fab pictures, such as these:
In a piece for “Which Way
LA” she wrote “So first with just a notebook, later with a camera, I began to
walk Los Angeles—its grittier neighborhoods, cul-de-sacs and alleyways—in the
early less-cluttered hours to see what I might find. Often, hiding in plain
sight, I’ve found souvenirs of the last century—backyard incinerators, rusting
hulks of past industry, hand-painted ghost signs hawking nickel movies or the
promise of ‘Nice Rooms.’”
Sounds like
psychogeography, right? Though that
deadly word wasn’t mentioned in the course of the session in Pasadena. I have learned this is a word that makes 99
percent of people in the world glaze over with mystification (at best).
It being a literary panel, Steve asked us whether we
had a favorite literary piece about walking, and I mentioned Jim Harrison’s “Westward
Ho” – a novella about a man who walks across LA, from Cucamonga to
Westwood. Harrison writes that this is a
47 mile walk.
A few people in the crowd thought this sounded like an impossible walk, and also that the distance was more that 47 miles. I was in no position to argue, but when I got home it checked it on MapQuest, and they (or at least their algorithm) reckon it’s a doable walk, if a few miles longer than described by Jim Harrison.
A few people in the crowd thought this sounded like an impossible walk, and also that the distance was more that 47 miles. I was in no position to argue, but when I got home it checked it on MapQuest, and they (or at least their algorithm) reckon it’s a doable walk, if a few miles longer than described by Jim Harrison.
I know that Harrison is at least something of
a walker – that’s him below with Gary Snyder.
Of course when you're on these panels you usually come away
wishing you’d said something other than what you did say, but I had a strangely different
experience this time. At one point I found myself saying, “We all
want to be safe when we walk and the more people walk the safer we’re all likely to
be.” It sounded true, and a perfectly
reasonable thing to have said, but you know, it just didn’t sound like the kind of thing I’d usually say.
Some links right here:
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