WALKING ON ICY AIR

 

I’ve been thinking about Yoko, who turned 90 on February 18th. Towards the end of January, when she was just 89, she Tweeted 

I learned about this from the New York Post which isn’t the most universally reliable news source, but in this case the information seems accurate enough – the Tweet is right there on Yoko’s feed.

 

And I do happen to think Yoko’s walking cure for depression is a very good one, though by no means every walk in New York gives you a high.  And how far was she claiming to walk?  Well that’s tricky.  There are about 20 blocks to a mile running north-south, but east-west there are about 7 to a mile. You do the math; but Yoko couldn’t be doing less than 4 miles, which would be good for any 89 year old.  Here she was walking in New York in 2015.

The Post then pointed out, and again this seems accurate, that Yoko’s in poor health, and has mobility issues.  In 2017, her son Sean Lennon pushed her in a wheelchair to receive the National Music Publishers’ Association’s Centennial Song Award (whatever that is).  

In her acceptance speech she said, “I’ve learned so much from having this illness,” though she didn’t say what the illness was, and personally I’m rather opposed to the notion of illness as a ‘learning experience,’ but that’s just me.

Other sources say she has round-the-clock care and rarely leaves her apartment in the Dakota. So maybe she goes walking in her mind.

I was especially thinking about the song ‘Walking On Thin Ice,’ which  apparently she and Lennon were working on at the time of his murder.

The song contains the lyrics

I knew a girl
That tried to walk across the lake
'Course it was winter when all this was ice
That's a hell of a thing to do, you know
They say this lake is as big as the ocean
I wonder if she knew about it?

That’s is indeed a hell of a thing, a hell of lake, one helluva walk.

WALKING OUT OF MY HEAD

 

If you’ve been watching Adam Curtis’s multi-part documentary I Can’t Get You Out Of My 

(and if not, why not?) you may have been reminded, or minded for the first time, of 

Eduard (sometimes Edward) Limonov. 

 

He was a Russian poet, novelist, memoirist, newspaper editor, and a dissident, although his dissent was not of the standard anti-Soviet kind that went down so well in the United States, to which he moved in 1974.  He was also a politician, though his politics were all over the place.  He was (almost certainly unjustly) charged in Russia with terrorism and spent two years in jail.  He also seemed to be – and this may have been the final nail in his political coffin - a pal of war criminal Radovan Karadzic (not a good look).

 

Limonov’s appearance in the Curtis film shows him with Karadzic, apparently firing a machine gun towards the besieged city of Sarajevo (an even worse look), though Limonov claimed he was a victim of creative editing, and was in fact just shooting at a target.  

 

As a writer Limonov is probably best known for It’s Me, Eddie, a ‘fictional memoir’ about his life in New York in the mid to late 70s - hence the Ramones t-shirt below, I suppose (though I can't swear this is in New York) 

 

Also, sometimes he did a Saturday Night Fever thing, which again is not a good look. 

If the book’s to be believed he (and/or his fictional protagonist) did an awful lot of walking in New York, at a time when it wasn’t the safest city in the world, which is why he’s here in this blog.

 

He writes, “All I was doing was sitting, lying, smoking, drinking from a bottle in a paper bag, sleeping in the street. I would go two or three weeks bumming around New York on foot, sometimes walking two hundred and fifty blocks a day, bumming around in neighborhoods both dangerous and safe, without talking to anyone.”

                                          

There are about 20 blocks in a miles (depending on the block) so that’s about 12 and a half miles. Quite impressive. Then he upped his game.

 

“I once covered more than three hundred blocks in one day, on foot. Why? I was out for a walk. I generally go almost everywhere on foot. Out of my $278 a month I begrudge spending fifty cents to ride anywhere, especially since my sorties have no set destination, or the destination is indefinite. For example, a place to buy myself a notebook of a particular format. They don't have it at Woolworth's or at another Woolworth's or at Alexander's, and I march down to the sidewalk markets on Canal Street to scrounge up the right notebook. All other formats irritate me.

“I am very fond of tramping around. Really, without exaggeration, I probably walk more than anybody else in New York. Unless there's some tramp who walks more than I do, but I doubt it. So far as I can see, bums are all immobile, more apt to lie still or putter sluggishly about in their rags.”

 

There’s a lot of this in the book, also a certain amount of talk about ‘pederasty’ – he was in favour of it.

 

For some of his time in New York he lived in the Winslow Hotel on 55^thStreet and Madison Avenue.  In 1982 the building was turned into an office block, with shops on the ground floor.  One of the shops, at least before Covid, was The Walking Company, just a shoe shop, but for some of us a reminder of the walking contradiction that was Eduard Limonov.

LOST(ISH) IN NEW YORK

I’ve been in New York, the city and the state, doing some walking among other things.  On the first day there I went to my publisher’s office, a place I’d been before and it’s right there in the middle of town, on 18^th Street, and so I had no worries about finding it and getting there on time.  And so, I set off for a meeting, and in due course I got completely and utterly (and inevitably) lost.  I suddenly couldn’t tell whether I should be on east 18^th or west 18th, and in any case I had some kind of brain fade and couldn’t tell east from west anyway, and so I got there late and sweaty and panicky, and feeling like a complete rube, who couldn’t find his way around the big city.  This was not precisely the impression I was trying to convey to my publisher.

Of course, when I’m in my walker/urban explorer mode, I think that being lost in the city is a very good thing, but it’s not nearly so cool when you have to be at a certain place at a certain time.  The ­real problem, I told myself later, is that you never get quite as lost as when you’re certain you know exactly where you’re going.  If I’d had any doubts about where I was going, where the publisher’s office was, I’d have double checked the address, consulted a map, taken the map with me, but I had no such doubts, and in the event my unmerited confidence undid me.

I was staying in the apartment where photographer Dudley Reed and his wife Betty live, and the place was full of photographic books, including Susan Sontag’s On Photography, a book I’d read a very long time ago, and I thought I remembered it pretty well, but it seems not.  Or perhaps it’s that I now have a different set of priorities and obsessions, than I did back then when I first read it, and there seemed something very fresh about a couple of paragraphs from the book.

Sontag writes, “…the earliest surrealist photographs come from the 1850s when photographers went out prowling the streets of London, Paris, New York, looking for their unposed slice of life.”

         Then later, “In fact, photography first comes into its own as an extension of the eye of the middle class flaneur, whose sensibility was so accurately charted by

 Baudelaire.  The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising, the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes.”

Interesting and significant, I think, that she doesn’t categorize either the flaneur or the photographer as male, though historically (and with notable exceptions) the majority of both flaneurs and street photographers have been men.

As you wander the streets of New York these days it seems that everybody is taking pictures, women just as much as men.  One or two seem to be “real” photographers, brandishing bulky SLRs, but the majority are using their cell phones.  I don’t know how many of them are looking for the Surrealists’ “chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella,” but I’m sure they’d take a picture of it if they saw one.

And of course a lot of people are looking at their cell phones, texting rather than taking pictures with them, and of course they walk into others, and others no doubt walk into them, which seems a kind of rough justice. They can’t say they haven’t been warned.  The streets of Manhattan now display posters like the one below, which is actually on the side of a public phone booth.  Does anybody use public phone booths anymore?

As it happened, there were was a Banksy street art exhibition going on all over New York while I was there.  One of the pranks involved some guy on the street selling “real” Banksies for the price of fakes - $60 as opposed to the $15,000 or so they’d cost in a gallery.  Of course $60 does seem a bit steep for fake Banksy. 

But knowing that the man himself was in town and in action meant that as I walked the streets of New York I kept seeing Banksy-esque stenciled graffiti, and asking myself is that a real or a fake.  Only a fool would have claimed to know with any certainty.  But I did spot this on 24^th Street at 6^th Avenue.

Of course I couldn’t have sworn it was the real thing, but I thought it might be, and I definitely thought it was worth a picture; and having got home and done some research it seems that yes, as far as I can tell, I was looking at a REAL Banksy. I walked past it again a couple of days later, and it seemed it was being surrounded by other, much less artful-looking tags and graffiti, which you might think spoiled the effect, though for all I know Banksy might have been doing those too.

BACK IN THE HIGH LINE

While I was in New York I went to the High Line, a section of elevated railway that’s now been converted or I dare say “repurposed,” into a pedestrian precinct so that New Yorkers can stroll high above ground level and look down on the poor suckers beneath them.  New Yorkers seem justifiably proud of it, and a lot of people do in fact walk there, but it’s a very specific kind of walking, actually I think a form of promenading.  People walking up and down, savoring the pleasure of walking, looking around them, checking each other out.  Very old school.

Of course, very few of the people walking the High Line are actually going anywhere, using it as a way of getting from A to B.  That’s not surprising.   Citizens who actually need to get from the far western end of, say, 30th Street down to Gansevoort Street and the meat packing district are few and far between.  So the place functions a kind of pedestrian theme park, a piece of reclaimed industrial territory, now decked out with walkways and exuberant landscaping, while keeping some of the old rails still visible.

One great thing, obviously, is that you’re above the traffic, and therefore not confronted by manic drivers or deranged cyclists.  There’s even a section where people sit in a kind of amphitheater and gaze down at the traffic below; a surprisingly pleasurable activity. 

But even so, walking on the High Line isn’t entirely different from walking the sidewalks of New York.  The paths are extremely narrow in places and you can find yourself stuck behind a group of inconsiderate, slow-moving walkers just as you can on the street.

There are also some wooden loungers where people who are less committed to walking can sprawl back and display themselves to passing pedestrians.  Did somebody suggest there might be one or two exhibitionists in New York?  Well why not?  People watching is always fun, and watching people who have actually set themselves up to be watched is a particular form of that fun.

The High Line itself is suitably sylvan and park-like, but inevitably you look past the greenery and the pedestrian oasis, away towards the cityscape of the surrounding area.  There are apartment blocks, new slithers of zesty modern architecture, old industrial buildings and the Hudson River is visible from certain places.

There are inhabitants who were formerly living thoroughly quiet private lives who now find gaggles of people walking past their window and staring in.  No doubt some are royally pissed off about it.  On the other hand, some of the newer developments seem to be designed specifically with passing pedestrians in mind.  In certain places you can look right into some very expensive apartments and see just how much space the inhabitants have got, indeed how much space they’ve wasted – the true sign of Manhattan opulence.

On the two days I went to the High Line, a building was being demolished very close to the southern end of the walkway.  A guy in a demolition machine, one with caterpillar tracks and a single arm with what looked like a giant hole punch on the end, though I believe it’s actually known as a hydraulic hammer, was doing the job all by himself. 

Smashing walls and roof was easy enough but then he encountered metal girders which were much harder to break down, though he always got there in the end.  The whole process delivered quite an ear-bashing to the walkers on the High Line, and clouds of demolition dust rose up and billowed in our direction.  The noise and the dirt were the kind of thing that you might think would threatened to spoil a walk.  But it didn’t.  The walkers I saw absolutely LOVED it.  We all paused in our walking, moved to the side of the High Line, pressed against the railing and stared down in absolute fascination, to see how one man could destroy a whole building. 

It didn’t spoil the walk, it absolutely MADE the walk.  If I were designing a pedestrian theme park I’d make sure there was some industrial-scale destruction going on there; so much more fun than looking at the birds and the plants and the show offs on the wooden sun loungers.

THE MYSTERIES OF WALKING

If you Google “walking,” “New York” and “quotation,” one that regularly pops up is Janice Dickinson’s remark, "I was lusted after walking down the streets of New York."  I can’t tell whether she now thinks this was a good thing or a bad thing, but she seems to have enjoyed it at the time.

Life being like that, on Saturday I’ll be flying two and a half thousand miles to New York to do a bit of walking (and indeed talking).  To be precise I’m going there to be on a panel at the Brooklyn Book Festival.  And to be strictly accurate I’m not going all that way solely to be on the panel.  I was planning a trip to New York anyway and it made sense that it would coincide with the gig.  A report will follow.  The details as follow:

1:00 P.M. Walker in the City.  Nigerian author Teju Cole (Open City) British writer Geoff Nicholson (The Lost Art of Walking) and Argentine Sergio Chejfec (My Two Worlds) read from their books and discuss the distance characters cover—geographic and metaphysical—as they walk through and around cities. 
Moderated by Edmund White.