I’ve been thinking about Immanuel Kant, author of The Critique of Pure Reason, and Charlton Heston, star of
The Omega Man.
Immanuel Kant, 1724 – 1804, lived his whole life in Konigsberg, in
Prussia, what is now Kaliningrad, in Russia. He was man
of rigorous habits and walked every day as he thought and philosophized. So regular were these walks that people said
you could set your clock by the time Kant strolled past, even though there
seems to be no absolute agreement about exactly where he walked.
In the early 2000s an artist named
Joachim Koester created The Kant Walks,
doing his best to plot and then walk Kant’s route or routes. The proposition
was made trickier given that large parts of the city were destroyed by Allied
bombing at the end of World War Two, and the center was never rebuilt. Koester took some gorgeously bleak
photographs along the way.
Koester writes, “… Kant’s walk is
often invoked but rarely specified. A
walk is like a manual, a way to engage in space, a recipe to follow but also to
improvise with, allowing for drifting, losing oneself.”
And so, at the end of last week I found
myself in downtown Los Angeles drifting and improvising, trying to follow in
some of the footsteps of Charlton Heston, as taken in the The Omega Man, based on Richard Matheson’s novel I Am Legend. Charlton, playing Robert Neville, is nearly
but not quite the last man on earth, but most of the ones that remain are zombie-ish
vampire types. I admit I get slightly lost on the detail.
Tracking Charlton Heston is certainly easier
than tracking Kant, not least because one or two online movie obsessives have
already done some of the spade work. Everyone
says how much downtown LA has been revitalized but there are still some amazing
pockets of neglect and desolation. I
happened to walk along Skid Row, and amid the many homeless people there was an
old black man with dreadlocks who was carrying a hammer, and thought that the
tarmac of the road needed a lot of hammering, which he duly delivered.
Above is Charlton Heston walking along Santee
Street, and below is the street as it is is today.
Some buildings are gone, some spruced up, but the basic structure is perfectly
recognizable from the movie. This is the building at the end of the street that Heston's walking towards.
Then there’s the Olympic movie theater where
Heston goes repeatedly to watch Woodstock
(your guess is as good as mine).
Not sure if the resolution's good enough, but there's a fallout shelter sign to the
right of the theateris frontage. The place is now
a store selling elaborate decorative furnishings - complete with a sign that says everything must go – but the place where movie titles could de displayed
is still intact.
And here, not very far away, is a
remnant from a now closed down jewelry store, once so successful they could
even replace the sidewalk. I'd definitely have had that in the movie.
And then, completely untouched as far as I could tell, exactly as in the movie, although with new buildings in the distance, is the Water and Power building at First Street and Hope.
It’s hard to see the building from many of the surrounding streets because
it’s right behind Gehry’s Disney Hall, and of course in the normal run of
events, you’re not likely to go there unless you have some business concerning
water and power. However, and this is truly
a wonder, the building is surrounded by water – it’s MOATED – with a bridge,
though not a drawbridge as far as I could tell.
At the end of the afternoon I went into
the Last Book Store, a huge and I hope not doomed enterprise, and found a used copy
of The Image Of The City by Kevin
Lynch, a 1960s city planner, and a pioneer of one psychogeography according to some sources, a book which contains this terrific passages: “It must be granted that there is some value
in mystification, labyrinth or surprise in the environment ... This is so,
however, only under two conditions.
First, there must be no danger of losing basic form or orientation, of
never coming out … Furthermore, the labyrinth or mystery must in itself have
some form that can be explored and in time be apprehended. Complete chaos without a hint of connection
is never pleasurable.” Something I
suspect that we could all agree on, Imannuel Kant and Charlton Heston,
included.
