ROMAN ALL OVER THE PLACE

My pal Steve Kenny has just been in Rome, walking in, or at least among, the ruins, and also doing a fair amount of walking on cobbles, which he reminds me can be very hard work indeed.  And he sent me this picture (mild shades of Garry Winogrand) and an accompanying email:

“For the benefit of your readers, here's a pic of a girl showing how you shouldn't dress when exploring ruins and walking on cobbles and uneven ground.  It was in the Forum - she gave up after 50 yards and went back to the car.  She looked nice but everyone was laughing at her.”

I’m not sure that I’d have laughed at her. I think I might well have cheered.

Anyway, while trying to find some supplementary information about walking in Rome, I came across an item saying that a new law has been passed in Rome forbidding tourists (and I don’t suppose it only applied to tourists, but I think the idea is that the citizens of Rome have more class) from eating pizza, ice cream and whatnot as they walk the streets of the ‘centro storico’ of the Eternal City. 

An activist named Viviana Di Capua says, “This is a way to re-educate people, especially tourists visiting Rome in awe about how to behave in this city. We’ve let standards fall.  At the moment tourists can do anything they like in this city. We need to restore respect. It’s just a first step – a lot more needs to be done.”  Who could argue with a woman named Viviana?  And actually I suspect that if you looked like Audrey Hepburn you might still get away with it today.

WALKING WITH TALLING

For a while now I’ve been enjoying derelictlondon.com, a website run by Paul Talling featuring thousands of pictures of derelict, abandoned, or wrecked sites around London.  In fact it’s set me wondering whether somebody, possibly even  me, should write a taxonomy of the different forms and manifestations of ruin - the difference between dereliction and abandonment, between a wreck and a ruin and a hulk, and so on.

The website has the feel of a man walking the streets of London, freely though not quite aimlessly, camera in hand, and photographing every crumbling house, weed-choked railway line, graffiti stained wall, smashed window or roof, every closed down pub and shuttered factory he comes across.  The effect is obsessive and passionate, both unsystematic and all-embracing.  Talling is as fascinated by a burned out milk float as he is by a world war two pillbox. 

All these images are his, and yes, I did ask his permission.  He says on the website, “99% of these pictures were taken by myself during many miles of walkabouts around the great capital. After years of traveling via car or public transport I realised just how little I had seen of London ... Apart from a few tip offs most of the locations on this site are on here because I randomly stumbled upon them when walking down the street.”

It would obviously be pointless to complain about the randomness of his images, since that’s the nature of the beast, but I wasn’t sure how this would translate into book form.  But I just got a copy of the book, published by Random House, and I think it’s even better than the website.

A lot of pruning and concentration has gone on.  There’s more emphasis on the text, which contains some real gems of curious information.  That the Rail Freight Marshalling Yard in Feltham was built by German prisoners of war, that the phrase “going to see a man about a dog” comes from a play titled The Flying Scud, which also gave its name to a pub in Shoreditch, now derelict of course.  That there’s now only one public toilet for every 10,000 people in England: bad news for the urban pedestrian.

It all makes me determined that the next time I’m in London I’ll take a walking expedition to Winchester Palace, the Woodford Town football ground, or the Lambeth Hospital, though there’s no guarantee they'll still be around by the time I get there.

Paul Talling leads walking tours of London’s lost rivers - there’s a book as well.  As far as I know he doesn’t do tours of London dereliction, which strikes me as a shame.   The idea of little gaggles of tourists wandering around grim bits of London admiring collapsed cinemas and half-demolished houses, is extremely appealing.   I’d be there like a shot.

The derelictlondonwebsite is here:

http://www.derelictlondon.com/ 

ABIDING ON SUNSET

Unlike a lot of walkers I am not especially anti-car.  Oh sure, when they almost run me down then I feel outraged and antagonistic toward the drivers, but I feel just as outraged and antagonists towards pedestrians who try to shoulder me off the sidewalk.

When I first moved to Los Angeles certain people back in England asked me why, what was the attraction?  I always thought it was one of those “If you have to ask then you’re never going to know” type questions, and I replied (only a little flippantly), “Well, if you like quirky architecture, exotic flora and fauna, and cool cars, where else are you going to go?”  This, admittedly, did not convince anybody who wasn’t already prepared to be convinced.

Wherever I walk I always look at the environment around me, and since I do much of my walking in cities, and most of that in LA, I inevitably see a lot of cars.  Since they’re there I figure I might as well appreciate them. Shiny new cars don’t do much for me, but give me a car with a certain amount of patina and a hint of ruin, and I’m in aesthetic heaven.  Hell, I’m even likely to take a photograph.

There was one day after I’d spent a weekend looking at a lot of art by Richard Prince – the stuff with with cars and body panels – when suddenly there seemed to be Richard Prince works of art on every street corner.  This is surely one of the defining qualities of great art, that there are times the when whole world looks like it’s been created by the artist. 

Still, when I first arrived in LA, however committed I was to walking, it became obvious that I really couldn’t live here without a car.  I didn’t want a brand new car, and I didn’t want to deal with a used car salesman, so I developed a plan.  I would walk the streets of LA and the right car would present itself to me.   I’d be walking along and I’d see a car with a “for sale” sign in the window and that would be “my” car.  Which is why I ended up as the owner of a 1966 Dodge Dart that was parked in the street half a mile away from where I live.

In fact there was one car dealer’s lot that did vaguely attract me.  It was called B&M Auto, located right at the place where Sunset and Hollywood Boulevard’s converge.  It was a slightly scruffy, down at heel operation, but they always had some interesting cars for sale, say a Mustang resprayed an improbable yellow, a Jeep Wagoneer, or an E type Jag with a dent in every panel, that kind of thing. 

Of course I wouldn’t have felt completely confident buying an E Type Jag with a dent in every panel from a slightly scruffy, down at heel operation, and I suppose that’s why I didn’t.  But any time I walked around the area I always looked at what they had for sale and I’m not saying I thought it would B&M Auto always be there – there was always a provisional feel about the place - but even so it came as a blow to walk past the lot last weekend and find all the cars gone.  

The office was empty, there was a sign up in the window saying that B&M Auto was no more and that a new tenant had been found for the premises.  There was something deeply melancholy about the change, and the absence.

I don’t want to make too much of the “change and decay in all around I see” business, but I’ve now lived in LA long enough that quite a few things I liked have gone.  Many a soulful building or landmark has been demolished, this Bob’s Big  Boy and the very mid-century Cadillac dealership beyond on Wilshire, for instance.

Just a few weeks back they took away the giant hot dog that stood at the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Western Avenue.  Well frankly that one always seemed doomed.  The surprising thing here was that it lasted so long.  I wonder if somebody bought it to preserve it.  For that matter I wonder if somebody’s going to buy the B&M Auto sign.

So, in a world of civic and architectural uncertainty the statue of Rock and Bullwinkle that stands at 8218 Sunset Boulevard seems a touchstone of stability and continuity.  It’s outside what used to be the Jay Ward headquarters and gift shop, now a dog grooming parlor.  The statue first appeared in 1961 – Jayne Mansfield was there at the unveiling – so it’s been standing over 50 years.  In Hollywood terms that makes it as historic and permanent as the statuary of ancient of Rome.

And you can say this for the custodians of Bullwinkle, they’re not letting him turn into a ruin.  Every now and again bits of him fall off, including his hand at one point apparently, but fortunately LA has the kind of skilled artisans you can call up and ask to come over and repair your Bullwinkle statue.  You try doing that in the Eternal City.

DECLARATIONS OF MORTALITY

And speaking of Werner Herzog, as I all too often do, I was, of course aware of his “Minnesota Declaration” which contains the line “Tourism is sin, and travel on foot virtue.”  It’s a good line but it had never really occurred to me to wonder why Herzog was in Minnesota or what he was doing there.  Well, it appears he was at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, on April 30^th 1999, speaking about “Lessons Of Darkness,” which is one of the most compelling documentaries I’ve ever seen, showing the ruined, and often burning, oil fields of Kuwait, ignited in the wake of the first Gulf War.

In that Minnesota Declaration Herzog also says, “Filmmakers of Cinema Verité resemble tourists who take pictures amid ancient ruins of facts.”  I guess I don’t think taking pictures of ruins is exactly the worst thing in the world.  In Minneapolis I walked through Mill Ruins Park on the banks of the Mississippi.  The ruins belong to a flour mill that burned in 1991, having been abandoned some twenty odd years earlier: other buildings nearby are also abandoned but appear to be in fairly good shape.

Like a lot of people, I’m attracted to ruin, and I certainly enjoyed the sight of the ruined (and now carefully preserved) mill - they’ve turned it into a museum – but in fact I didn’t take any photographs of the burned out mill.  It seemed too obvious.  I photographed the abandoned but intact Gold Medal Flour elevators instead, but I don’t know if that would buy me anything in Mr. Herzog’s eyes.

I wonder if he would agree with W.S. Gilbert (as in “and Sullivan”) who wrote, “There’s a fascination frantic in a ruin that’s romantic”?  I’m guessing probably not.