One of the minor pleasures and curiosities of being in a “walking city”
is that once in a while you see celebs, just walking around. Although I've seen a few celebs in LA,
I’ve never seen any of them walking. Spotting Nick Nolte leaning against his Prius
in the parking lot of the Vons supermarket at the corner where Hollywood and
Sunset Boulevards meet, is as near as I’ve come. Though there's obviously evidence here that he can be seen walking sometimes.
When I lived in Park Slope in Brooklyn, I collected a whole set of
sightings – John Turturro, Paul Auster, Steve Buscemi et al.
In Paris I once got off the Eurostar train, walked out of the station
and there immediately was Jane Birkin, also walking, although in fact I think
she was looking for a taxi.
My London sightings included Bob Geldof (more than once), Joe Strummer,
Cliff Richards, Julian Cope, Peter Ackroyd; but given how long I lived in
London, the sighting were perhaps surprisingly few.
Just once in a while the celeb sees you looking and looks back. And of course you have to play it cool. Brief eye contact and an “I know who you are”
nod is as much as is required. I had one
of those moments once in Manhattan with Thurston Moore. He was walking along lower Broadway, having
just come out of Dean and DeLuca, and I was on my way in, and we went through
the old “look and nod routine.” It was a
small bright spot in my day, though probably not in his.
And now Thurston Moore is living in London, and he’s written a piece
for a pamphlet titled On Community, produced by New
Humanist magazine in association with the Stoke Newington Literary Festival.
He says of his earlier trips to London, when he stayed in Stoke
Newington, “I wanted to be in London and traipse the
streets of the Slits, Gang of Four, PiL, the Raincoats but, unlike the
minuscule parameters of NYC geography, London was a sprawl the size of a small
state. Determined to find action, I'd leave Stoke Newington for Camden Town or
Notting Hill by hoofing it to Church Street and waiting for the 73 to get me to
Kings Cross and into the city lights.”
Then adds, “In hindsight I wish I'd stayed
close to Stoke Newington, indeed all of Hackney, and investigated its world.”
I understand what he
means. I once almost lived in Stoke
Newington, but in the end decided it was too far away, too far from the center
of things. These days however, Stoke
Newington seems to be the center of the London cultural universe, and one way
or another I always seem to end up there when I’m in London. And Abney Park Cemetery seems like the very
center of the center.
Indeed, the picture above
shows Thurston Moore in the Abney Park Cemetery, and not so long ago, and not
for the first time, I found myself walking there with my fellow scribe and
drifter Travis Elborough. And we came
across this gravestone:
Literary know-it-alls
though we may sometimes appear, we’d never heard of Eric Walrond, though it was hard to resist a book titled Tropic Death.
I now know that Walrond was
a respected, if fringe, figure of the Harlem Renaissance. Tropic
Death is a collection of twelve short stories, first published in
1926. According to his publisher, “This
book of stories viscerally charts the days of men working stone quarries or
building the Panama Canal, of women tending gardens and rearing needy children.
Early on addressing issues of skin color and class, Walrond imbued his stories
with a remarkable compassion for lives controlled by the whims of nature.”
I confess I haven’t read
the book. I have however read an
article by Walrond published in the magazine The Messenger in 1924, about
walking in Harlem. “Along the avenue you
are strolling. It is dusk. Harlem at
dusk is exotic. Music. Song. Laughter.
The street is full of people – dark, brown, pomegranate. Crystal clear is the light that shines in
their eyes. It is different, is the
light that shines in these black people’s eyes.
It is a light mirroring the emancipation of a people and still you feel
that they are not quite emancipated. It is the light of an unregenerate.”
I wonder if Walrond felt any
more emancipated in London. He died
there in 1966, having collapsed from a heart attack while walking in the
street.
