WALKING SOMEWHERE ELSE

    Here's a thing that popped up on Instagram a little while ago

 - a quotation (and pic) from Buckminster Fuller “How often I found where I should be going only by setting out for somewhere else.”  

To which I suppose you might ask, “Well yes, but how often exactly?”

 

Anyway, it did make me think, in a way that I’d never quite thought before, that one of the great and comparatively rare pleasures of walking, is to be strolling along, going nowhere in particular, and suddenly to come across a geodesic dome.

In Los Angeles you can do it just by walking along Sunset Boulevard and seeing the Arclight cinema.

 

And if you walk further you might see them in some unexpected places – not a million miles away from the Hollywood sign:

 

And in Glendale you might once have walked by this dry cleaner, which I’m pretty sure was abandoned despite the Open sign on the door.

Or you might walk down a suburban street and think, who on earth lives in a house like this?

The experience can be even better if you’re walking in the desert. You crest a hill and look down, and boom there it is:

 

Or here:

Or here in Arizona:

Inevitably the experience happens rather more often in the United States that it does in old England but it’s not completely unknown.  There were these belonging to restaurant in Gloucestershire named (I think) The Ragged Cot:

 

Photo by Caroline Gannon

And there are these bad boys in Victoria Park, 

the kind of backdrop that a lad might use for an author portrait:

 

Photo by Travis Elborough

As for the question of whether Buckminster Fuller was much of a walker, well, his 1981 book The Critical Path certainly makes some mention of walking, as when he writes, “We walk right foot, left foot, not right foot, wrong foot.”  Though I’d say we surely all put a foot wrong once in a while.

 

And here he writes later in the book, “As I have mentioned before and now repeat in a more comprehensive manner, in 1800 the average human being was walking an annually cumulative distance of 1,100 miles and riding ten additional annual miles. By 1900 the average human being was yet walking a total of yearly distance of 1,100miles but the average U.S.A. citizen's annual vehicle-ridden miles had increased to 400.  All humanity is as yet in 1980 walking an annual average of 1,100 miles but in the U.S.A., Europe, and parts of the Near East, Asia, Africa, and Australia, all men, women, and youngsters free to travel, are averaging over 20,000 annual miles of vehicular travel.”

I’ve no idea how accurate his numbers are, though the general principle seems reasonable.  I know a good many people who walk more than 1,100 miles a year; as for the 20,000 vehicular miles, I suppose much depends on whether you’re frequent flyer.

         

     But here’s a thing. During World War One, Fuller married Anne Hewlett, daughter of an architect, and when the war was over he started a company with his father-in-law, making bricks out of wood shavings. Things didn’t go well, and on the verge of bankruptcy, they sold the business 1927. At much the same time, Anne gave birth to a baby daughter. As a jobless new dad Fuller was deeply depressed. One day, he was walking by Lake Michigan, and by his own account, contemplating suicide.  But suddenly when he found himself floating a few feet above the ground, bathed in sparkling light; which I suppose is walking of a sort. He felt time standing still and he heard a voice say, “You do not have the right to eliminate yourself. You do not belong to you. You belong to Universe.”  Note the capitalization and absence of definite article.

 

 

 

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.