PEDESTRIAN ANTHROPOLOGY

  

I was first aware of Harry Smith as an avant-garde filmmaker.

 

 

Only later did I discover he’d put together the 3 volumes of the Anthology of American Folk Music which is a thing of great beauty and wonder.

 

These days when people describe Harry Smith they have to add that he was also a painter, occultist, anthropologist, and collector of many things, not least paper planes.  Like this:

 

This is the cover of a book titled Paper Airplanes: The Collections of Harry Smith: Catalogue Raisonné, Volume I.  I just bought it.  It too is a thing of beauty and wonder.

 

I can’t swear that Harry Smith was much of a walker per se, though one way or another he certainly spent time on the streets of New York, where he picked up and collected paper airplanes: the perfect found object.

 

If the book’s introduction is to believed, and with Harry Smith very few things are to be believed completely, there was a time, say late 60s to early 80s, when you couldn’t walk the streets on Manhattan without seeing a paper plane on the ground, sometimes even in the air.

Smith would swoop down, pick it up, then annotate it with the time and place he found it, just like a ‘proper’ anthropologist.

 

Smith’s friend William Breeze is quoted in the introduction as saying,

‘He and I discussed it more than once as we usually met for dinner and had a trip to the Strand on Fridays …  and walked the neighborhood.  He found several planes and would immediately stop to fish out a pencil and make notes on it. As I recall he was interested in in the changes in their morphology over the years, with some plane designs disappearing and then mysteriously reappearing years later.’

 

In due course the planes went into storage. Some of them at one time were at the Smithsonian, now 251 of them, all the ones in the book, are at the Anthology Film Archives. Very possibly there are a lot more elsewhere.

 

Many things about this collection surprise me.  I think I’m a pretty good scavenger and observer of street detritus, but I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a paper plane lying in the street.  But times do change. I remember when I used to see quite a few playing cards lying around in the street and for a while I picked them up thinking I’m do something or other with them, but in the end I never got round to it.

 

Is it possible that people have got more conscientious about littering, and now they take their paper planes and their playing cards home with them or put them in a bin?  If this is the case, then on balance I suppose it’s a good thing, but it’s a real disadvantage for the street anthropologist.

FROM THE ASHES

I sometimes worry that my enjoyment of walking in gardens is just another sign of having one foot in the grave, and of course I want to seem preternaturally youthful. 

However I (temporarily) overcame my worries last week as I wandered into The Phoenix Garden, a green space and community garden, tucked in between the dwindling number of bookshops of Charing Cross Road, the similarly dwindling guitar shops of Denmark Street, and right by the Elms Lesters Painting rooms in Flitcroft Street (now no longer painting rooms).

 

The Phoenix Garden is great, not big, though it seems to have expanded since I was last there.  It’s a work in progress and at present parts of it are wonderfully chaotic, and although it’s not a place for a long walk, it’s a great place to wander around.

 

And what really appealed: the things that the gardeners grow there are pretty much the same things I try to grow in my own humble patch: acanthus, euphorbia, cardoon:

and above all echiums, though it must be said that The Phoenix Garden has rather more success with echiums than I do:

Photo: Caroline Gannon

Given the cold it wasn’t a place to stay for too long and I certainly didn’t want to hang around sitting on a bench, though somebody else apparently had done, and then left behind, abandoned or lost, a couple of books.

 

The one on the right was a rather fine notebook containing various not very legible pencil notes about art and film. In other circumstance I’d probably have taken it away with me as an acquisition for the Nicholsonian Institution but I was already quite laden and in any case the book was soaking wet.  I left it for a more or less discerning walker/collector/scavenger.

TOTTERING IN TOTTENHAM COURT ROAD

 I’ve been walking in London, nothing too fancy.  It was tiring but I was tired BY London, not tired OF London, a distinction Dr. Johnson would surely appreciate.

 

I used to live and work in the area and I always find myself there any time I'm in Central London. 

 

Of course large parts of Tottenham Court Road and Charing Cross Road are barely recognizable from even just a few years ago, though fortunately those twin Brutalist peaks of the St Giles Hotel and Centre Point are still in business.

 

There was this wonderful bit of idiocy on a building site just north of the St Giles.

 

You know I suspect those lads up on that gantry have never so much as skimmed Derrida’s Writing and Difference. This is the fun-loving man himself, walking:

 

 

Much as I like the Tottenham Court Road/Charing Cross Road nexus, I’m not sure I’d take anybody there to try to impress them with the wonders of London, but as I was standing on the corner waiting to cross Oxford Street I saw and overheard two young women, teenagers I suppose, maybe out oft owners  though they didn’t look like innocents, and one of them was saying to the other, ‘I’ve never been to this part of London.  It’s really NICE!’

 

This pleased me enormously.

I'm not in the business of giving advice to tourists but if I were I'd have suggested they pop up to Whifield Gardens, now supposedly improved as part of the 'greening' of Tottenham Court Road.  I'd have suggested they savour the fact that this used to be a graveyard associated with grave robbing, and very close to the spot where the last V2 fell on London.

It looks like this:

STAND UP WALKING

Steven Wright is a very funny man. I don't know how much of a walker he is.

I’m aware of him chiefly as a deadpan stand up comedian but he’s also an actor, writer, and film producer.  The humour is usually verbal, with a lot of puns, some philosophy, and a shedload of absurdity. To be honest I don’t know if he writes all his own stand up material but he’s all over the internet credited with the line  ‘Everywhere is walking distance if you have got the time.’

 

I think he’s wrong about this.  The Americas aren’t walking distance from, say, London because you’d have to walk over or under the Atlantic Ocean, although admittedly there is some suggestion that this is what Buster Keaton does in The Railrodder – jumping into the Thames and emerging on the coast of Canada.

Steven Wright does have another line about walking which I think is much better than that first one

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FRISKING IN FRINTON

New Year’s Day was spent walking in Frinton on Sea. Once upon a time people used to say Harwich for the Continent (because that’s where the ferries go from) and Frinton for the incontinent (because of the number of retirees). These days you have to be a pretty well-heeled retiree to live there.  I can’t speak for the level of incontinence, but you’re seldom far from a defibrillator.

 

These days I (and all the other hipsters) tend to go there to gawp at the very cool mid-century architecture of the Frinton Park Estate:

It’s great stuff, though it seems to me that a white building against a pale grey sky is a lot less attractive than a white buildings against a blue sky.  This may be why white buildings aren’t as popular in Britain compared with, say, Greece or California.

 

But if, like me, you’re fascinated by suburbia in all its manifestations, it’s a lot of fun to find an example of mid century modern right next to an archetypal suburban bungalow.  I wonder if the neighbouring inhabitants have much in common on.

 

But it’s not all modernity in Frinton. It’s also home to St Mary’s Old Church (aka St Mary the Virgin) which is a very old church indeed, parts of it (very small parts I think) dating back to 1199.

 

It is also apparently the smallest church in Essex. It looks as though the pews would accommodate maybe 50 people at a pinch.

 

There’s some good stained glass which the handy leaflet in the church says was designed by Edward Burne-Jones and installed by William Morris and Co., and no I’m not sure what ‘installed’ means in this context.  I mean, I assume old William didn’t pop round with a bucket of putty.

The church also has two, yes two, keyboards:

Very Keith Emerson:

 

Try as I might I can’t find any connection between Keith Emerson and Essex, much less Frinton, but should you be looking for famous connections and find yourself walking past McGrigor Hall, home to the Frinton Repertory Theatre, you’ll find a blue plaque commemorating the life of Lynda Bellingham, star of the Oxo ads, Confessions of a Driving Instructor, and much more besides.  Here she is walking for charity:

WALKING SCHTUM

          In December I did a bit of walking in the California desert; nothing too extreme, and some of it very tame indeed, but I did find it moving and uplifting and all the things the desert is supposed to be.  And once in a while I was struck by the profound silence of the desert.

Photo by Caroline Gannon

         In my experience this kind of desert silence is actually quite rare.  Often the sounds of wind, traffic and even low flying aircraft disturb the supposed tranquility.  

 

    At this point in history it’s hard to find untouched desert, or even to know what untouched desert looks like - you can be stuck in a traffic jam trying to get into Joshua Tree National Park - but in general I’m happy to be where the desert and the human intersect; the unusual structures, the desert art, the occasional gas station dinosaur.

Nevertheless, when I got back to England I found myself poking around for literary sources about silence and the desert.  There’s Edward Abbey, of course, but I also came across these words attributed toJean Baudrillard, ‘The desert is a natural extension of the inner silence of the body.’

 

         As usual I find myself in less than perfect agreement with old JB, and I’m not sure the body has an inner silence.  If it did, stethoscopes would be redundant wouldn’t they?  And of course I thought about John Cage’s, admittedly now contested, experience in the anechoic chamber, of hearing the sound of his ‘nervous system in operation’ and his ‘blood in circulation.’

 

I have, from time to time, wondered what (if any) music ‘goes with’ walking in the desert: maybe Steve Reich’s The Desert Music, perhaps Painted Desert by Robert Quine, Ikue Mori and Mark Ribot, for that matter Cage’s ‘In a Landscape.’  But in general I don’t need a soundtrack when I’m walking, although I’m well aware that others do.

And then, as it goes with these things, a copy of ‘Weird Walk’ Number 6 arrived. 

It's a zine that calls itself ‘a journal of wanderings and wonderings from the British Isles.’  So no deserts in there, but it does contain an article, by Archer Sanderson, ‘a regular feature (in which) we explore an artist or genre well-suited to soundtracking lone perambulations.’  The current article is titled ‘Doom Strolling: The Solo Rambler’s Doom Metal Primer’ and the text says, ‘Doom can be paired with a host of environments, though epic, widescreen scenery seems to be a potent choice.’

Sounds great for the desert, no?

 

Now the fact is, I think I prefer the idea of Doom Metal to actually listening to Doom Metal, and although the article references one or two bands whose music I do kind of know - Sunn 0))), Earth, Napalm Death - it concentrates on Cathedral, Bell Witch, Pallbearer and a duo called Divide and Dissolve, all of whom were closed books to me.

 

I've done some research and some online listening, and I've discovered that Divide and Dissolve make quite an interesting noise, while also according to interviews referencing ‘decolonisation, the destruction of white supremacy and (the) prison industrial complex and the survival of indigenous sovereignty.’ 

Nevertheless I haven’t been able to find any explicit reference in any of these bands’ music to the desert or indeed to walking, though I may have missed it.  But you don’t have to be too literal about these things, do you?  You can always listen to Cage’s 4’ 33”.

 

 

 

 

 

THE LAST WALK OF LAST YEAR

Sorry if this is going to sound a bit middle of the road; I mean I don’t suppose Baudelaire spent his Xmas holidays doing this kind of thing, but the old year ended with a walk around the gardens of Hyde Hall in Essex – one of the Royal Horticultural Society properties.  

I’m not sure that walking in sculpture gardens is becoming my ‘thing,’ much less a ‘project’ but I do enjoy it, and I seem to have done a surprising amount of it lately.

 

To be fair there wasn’t a vast amount of sculpture at Hyde Hall but there was this great kinetic piece inspired by sycamore seeds; and no alas I haven’t been able to find out the artist’s name. 

 

I can see why gardeners or garden designers might think it’s a good idea to have sculptures that use botanical imagery, but often it seems to me that there’s enough botanical imagery and indeed botany in a garden, without having to add any manmade extras.  In general I’d rather have, say, an Eduardo Paolozzi like this one at Kew.

But Hyde Hall does have some spectacular ‘willow sculptures,’ things I’d never seen before.  These were not sculptures OF willow, but sculpture made FROM willow that continues to grow, the branches being bound together to form exotic (and I suppose organic) shapes.

 

I was also taken by the variety of signs dotted around the garden, many of them related to walking, or at least telling you where you should and shouldn’t walk, some more conventional than others.

The implication seemed to be that walkers just go hog wild when presented with a stretch of grass or a flowerbed.  

 

And I don’t even want to think about what they might do to working bees.