HOLY WALKING

D.J. Waldie (that's him above) is a pedestrian and the author of Holy Land: a Suburban Memoir, an excellent book about growing up and living in the suburban hinterland of Los Angeles, in Lakewood.  In the interests of clarity it’s probably worth saying that he’s not an actual DJ.

Recently on his website he published a piece titled ‘Walking in LA: Los Angeles is the second-most dangerous city for pedestrians in the U.S.’

 

Waldie is a pedestrian by default, and a non-driver. As he says in the article, and as he’s often written about elsewhere, he suffers from various sight problems which prevent him from driving, though as he also says in the piece, ‘If I could, of course I would drive.’

 

In fact you do meet a certain number of non-drivers in Los Angeles. There are various reasons – from environmental showboating to having been banned from driving, to simply being poor, though it always seemed to me that many of the poorest people in LA still found a way to scrape together the wherewithal to buy a car.

More often than not. non-drivers in L.A. aren’t so much pedestrians as people who want to cadge a lift.

 

I was taken by that sub-headline in the Waldie piece saying that LA is the second most dangerous city for pedestrians in the U.S.  I’ve done some non-exhaustive research on this – looking at lists of ‘America’s most dangerous cities for pedestrians’ – not least because if LA is number 2, I wanted to know what was number one.

But it seems there’s no simple and agreed upon answer. I’ve found stastics where Los Angeles is number one, other statistics where it’s not even in the top 50.  

Still, the dangers are real enough for an LA walker. Waldie writes, ‘I’m a good pedestrian however, staying within the marked crosswalks and never jaywalking, even when the next crosswalk is a long walk away. Free-range pedestrianism is dangerous, Anti-war activist Jerry Rubin was struck and killed in 1994 while attempting to cut across Wilshire Boulevard in Westwood. The head of the Los Angeles teachers’ union, crossing the seven lanes of Olympic Boulevard, was killed.’

I do like that phrase, ‘Free-range pedestrianism.’

 

Then Waldie adds, and I thought this was the real kicker, ‘Fewer streets are marked by crosswalks today. The city has sandblasted away hundreds since the mid-1970s when traffic engineers showed, not surprisingly, that more pedestrians are killed in crosswalks than out of them. The engineers said the painted lines gave pedestrians a false sense of security, making them less attentive to danger. Risk managers had another reason to eliminate crosswalks. Their presence makes cities vulnerable if the city is sued by injured pedestrians or their survivors.’

 

Well that makes a lot of terrible and shocking yet all too predictable sense, doesn’t it?

 

Waldie’s website is here.

 

EVERYBODY WALKS IN L.A.

 For various reasons, some of them obscure even to me (perhaps especially to me), I’ve been in southern California, pretty much avoiding all my old friends and acquaintances there, trying to sort out my feelings about a place I loved for decades, lived in for over 15 years, and have ‘lost’ one way or another.  I mean, I haven’t really lost it.  It’s still there and I know how to find it, but even so ...

 

Naturally I did a fair bit of walking while I was there because that’s what I do wherever I am, and although I was seldom the only person on the street, sometimes I was:

 

The walking was great. I really do think that the LA authorities should promote the place with some slogan such as “Los Angeles – One Helluva Walking City.”

 

The place is built on a grid of course, which makes finding your way around comparatively easy, although admittedly the things you might want to see and places you might want to go are seldom walking distance from each other, and once in a while you do have to walk around or through a tent city, but what’s pedestrianism without a little local difficulty?

 

On my wanderings I briefly thought I’d found a Thomasson – in this case a set of stairs to nowhere - but in fact I think they’re part of the emergency exit from the building above, so unlike a true Thomasson the stairs do have a function.

 

There were ruins, just like ancient Rome:

 

There was even an obelisk:

 

There were cool vehicles of course. Here is the author with the vehicle of his dreams:

 

photo by Caroline Gannon.

And I saw a couple of VW Beetles still in action on the street, which is always reassuring. I even managed to get a picture of one of them.

 

There was walking in the gardens at the Huntington in San Marino, not least the desert garden.

It was fabulous.  And then the inamorata and I got in the rented car and drove inland to do some ‘proper’ desert walking …

 

MARKS OF WEAKNESS, MARKS OF WOE

There’s something about walking in London. Wherever you go in London you see strange, interesting and sometimes incomprehensible things. And some of us take photographs.

Of course, to be walking down a London street taking photographs may suggest that you’re a rube, or possibly a mark, but I like to think of myself as a photoflaneur, a term that I just made up, but I’m sure others have used it already.

Now, I know there are strange, interesting and incomprehensible things everywhere, but it seems to me that in London you see more oddities per mile, per street, per minute, than in any other place in England. And I’ve been wondering why this should be. Obviously it has something to do with population density. Pack people in tightly, and the weirdness will start to show. When a city acquires a certain size and mass, the population feels freer to be more eccentric, to express their peculiarities, and I’m not saying that’s always a good thing. I wouldn’t for example be thrilled to be living next to this house:

But in London my feelings would be of no consequence. The bigger the city, the less likely you are to know your neighbours, and for many of us that’s an attraction. You don’t know them, they don’t know you, and even if you did know them, you wouldn’t care what they thought about you. There’s a lot to be said for that. Or maybe it’s not so much about the city as about the walker’s perception, by which I mean that a big bad city sensitizes you. You need to keep your eyes peeled, your wits sharp, in case of real or imagined dangers, and that makes you aware of all kinds of things that are going on around you.

Ultimately I think this is only a partial explanation. Among the Instagammers I follow are Dinah Lenny, and Lynell George who wander around LA taking pictures like this in Dinah’s case:

And this in Lynell’s case:

In LA, I suppose, the real or imagined dangers would be drive-by. I also follow Carl Stone who wanders around Tokyo, which we’re regularly told is the safest big city in the world, taking pictures like this:

Incidentally, I did an online search for the world’s most dangerous cities. There seems to be some difference of opinion. Mexico seems over-represented, and Port Moresby and Caracas always very high on the list, though I’d have thought Kabul or Baghdad would be higher. I don’t doubt that these places quicken the senses, and I don’t doubt there are some walkers, observers and on the streets there, though I don’t suppose they think of themselves as flaneurs, photo or otherwise.

THE ONE WORLD MISALLIANCE

I’ve been back in LA, from England, for about a month now, and in truth I haven’t been doing very much walking. When the temperature reaches 90 every day (and yesterday it was 97 – that’s 36 degrees for lovers of Centigrade) it rather takes the spring out of your step.

But I haven’t been completely sedentary, and sometimes you just have to get out there,  sweat it out, and walk the hot streets. and while I’ve been doing it I’ve thought to myself, yep, I’m back, this is all very, very LA.

The classic Volkswagen beetles:

 The palm trees (and also, the giant euphorbia and the hard to fathom parking sign):

The cacti:

The stone lions

The bears:

The curious skies:

Yep, all very LA indeed, but hold on there you psychogeographers, I found examples of all these things in England. 

The classic Volkswagen beetles:

The palm trees (Is this the result of global warming? I don’t think there used to be so many palm trees in England):

The cacti:

The stone lions:

The bears:

The curious skies:

Globalizaton, innit?  Possibly.

THE XMAS WALKER

One of the things about walking in my neighbourhood immediately after Christmas is that you see more walkers than usual.  I suspect part of it may be that people have relatives staying with them and don’t know what else to do with them.  Some no doubt think it’s a good for the soul to take a walk at least once a year.  Maybe the odd one has got a new puppy for Christmas and is swiftly realizing what a terrible responsibility that is.

However, my unscientific observation is that this year there were far fewer walkers than usual.  And a man who had acquired a new camera lens for Christmas pretty much had the streets to himself, which was fine but just a little surprising.

Of course Christmas decorations persist for a while after Christmas  – not sure if that Santa is breaking into that upstairs window or breaking out:

And just because a Santa is small that doesn’t mean he isn’t security conscious:

 This presiding demon stays in place whatever the season:

But the spirit of good cheer is not universal.  This sign appears on the door of the last house before you get to one of the entrances to Griffith Park, and you can understand the guy’s sentiments whatever the time of year:

And you can never quite escape the John Cage influence, nor would I want to.  Whereas he had mycological expeditions that involved walking deep into the woods, I found these beauties by the side of the road, just a few hundred yards from my own front door. 

I took a couple home, tried to identify them, couldn’t altogether, though I suspected they might be the evocatively named Funeral Bells, and even if they weren’t, and even though I’m generally all in favor of Cagean chance operations, I really didn’t want to take a chance on these.  I left them where they were.  Next day walking the same route I saw they were half eaten, though not sure by what – possibly one of the new, though unseen, puppies.

But I think the best thing seen while walking over the holidays was this electronic keyboard left out for the garbage men.  And I wonder what the story was there.  Had Santa brought a brand new one, or had the owner made a resolution, 2016 will be a year without electronic keyboards?

BLACK FLAG WALKING

Here’s something from Henry Rollins’ column in this week’s LA Weekly:

“I don't do much walking in Los Angeles. I am sure there is a lot to enjoy as a pedestrian in our city, it just never occurs to me to do it. Years ago, when I lived in Silver Lake, I used to walk for miles all the time. As I would make these epic, biped journeys into Hollywood to see shows, I always had the same feeling that I wasn't really going anywhere except deeper into the seemingly endless sprawl of Sargassoid stucco.

“In Washington, D.C., I walk for hours, take a break for food or writing and then set out again. Most of my walks are referential, having to do with music. Places I saw bands, places where bands used to practice, houses I used to hang out in and listen to records. I go to these places over and over again, decade after decade. I know that sounds strange and it probably is, but to me, it's like a Kata or a meditation. The walk, the arrival at the spot. A moment to dwell on the significance and then to walk elsewhere, is to me what it means to be 'poetry in motion.'"

I think any even half-way serious walker would completely agree with what he says in the second paragraph; I think we’re talking psychogeography, or deep topography, or conceivably Proustian remembrance.  I’ll drink to that.

But I wonder if I get his point in the first para. “Endless sprawl of Sargassoid stucco” is a nice, if slightly opaque, phrase, and I assume it’s a reference to the Sargasso Sea: a two million square mile gyre (another nice phrase) – i.e. rotating currents - in the middle of the North Atlantic. It’s a seaweed-choked place of mystery, discovered by Columbus, where ships have historically been becalmed and where uncanny things have happened.  These days apparently it’s also a vortex of swirling plastic waste, much like the North Atlantic Garbage Patch.  So, not much walking to be done there.

Still, be that as it may, I think I’m enthralled by the idea of walking “deeper into the seemingly endless sprawl of Sargassoid stucco,” in fact I think it’s what much what I do it all the time.  Here’s a pictures of Henry Rollins, walking (sort of), not in seaweed, but on the red carpet: