MORE DRIFTING THAN WALKING

No, no, the title isn’t a reference either to Guy Debord or Scott Walker, though I suppose by saying that, I’ve sort of turned it into one.  Rather it’s a reference to David Goodis.  That’s him above.

This being the season of good will and good cheer, any man with blood in his veins is likely need a bit of hairy-chested, noir fiction, to remind himself of other possibilities.  And so, over the weekend, I read Goodis’s “Black Pudding” in Manhunt magazine, December 1953.  That’s it below.

The magazine describes it as a “novelette” though I think most of us would say it was a short story of fairly average length.  The metaphor lodged in that title is slightly lost on me: one of the characters says, “It’s a choice you have to make.  Either you’ll drink bitter poison or you’ll taste that sweet black pudding.”  That would be the sweet black pudding of revenge, but you know, still ....  Apparently there’s a TV adaptation starring Kelly Lynch as Hilda.

Goodis was a massively prolific writer which no doubt explains why his output is so mixed, but I think there’s a pretty top notch noir paragraph right before the climax of “Black Pudding.” The hero, Kenneth Rockland, watches his ex-wife, Hilda, from outside the house she’s holed up in.

“She moved with a slow weaving of her shoulders and a flow of her hips that was more drifting than walking.  He thought.  She still has it, that certain way of moving around, using her body like a long-stemmed lily in a quiet breeze.  That’s what got you the first time you laid eyes on her.  The way she moves.  And one time you said to her, ‘To set me on fire, all you have to do is walk across a room.’”

OK, I could probably do without the long-stemmed lily, but otherwise, I like that.  I like that a lot.  There is actually a far more overwrought reference to walking in Goodis’s The Burglar.  In which the hero and his woman are strolling on the boardwalk in Atlantic City, watching the other strollers.  He says, "Look at them walking. When they take a walk, they take a walk, and that's all. But you and I, when we take a walk it's like crawling through a pitch black tunnel."

BACK IN THE LOW LIFE AGAIN

I realize that despite the title of this blog, I’ve not been doing very much walking in Hollywood lately.  The reasons are explicable enough.  I’ve been finishing a novel, I’ve been away, and the weather has been punishingly hot.  On the first day of October the temperature around these parts hit the high nineties.  Come on.  That’s not right.

So it was good to get out last week, walk from the lower slopes of the Hollywood Hills and head down for lunch at a little place on Melrose Boulevard - Melrose being the southern boundary of Hollywood in most people’s estimation – and then I walked back again.  It was about a 3 and a half mile walk in each direction, and it did punch a bit of a hole in the day, but that was the idea. Of course I saw the “typical” Hollywood stuff, which in some ways was a bit predictable: the big cacti, the stylish architecture, the cool old cars, the interesting people.  But a walk in Hollywood is never wholly predictable.

As I walked along Hollywood Boulevard, for instance, there was a parade, or I suppose motorcade, of vintage police cars.  My first thought was OK, well maybe this is just the kind of thing that happens in Hollywood on a weekday afternoon, but I discovered later that it was an event “to increase awareness of public safety officers,” and the cars were driving from the Los Angeles Fire Museum to Broderick Crawford’s Walk of Fame star – not a huge distance.  And it’s true - nothing heightens your awareness of cops like hearing sirens, seeing a bunch them packed into old cars and glaring out the windows at pedestrians.

Broderick Crawford - good looking cop.

Of course there was feral furniture: mattresses, couches, a gigantic mirror  There even seemed to be some feral art – though it could just have been a piece of old board with paint on it, but who am I to judge?

Everyone says that LA is the most suburban major city in the world and that’s probably true – but it did strike me on my walk just how industrial parts of Hollywood are.  The industry in question happens to be the movies, but a warehouse or storage facility for movie equipment or props looks much like a warehouse or storage facility for anything else. 

And then right there on La Brea Avenue there’s the Cemex cement works, churning out lord knows how many tons of ready mix, right across the street from the Target and the Best Buy.  How many major western cities have one of those in the middle of a shopping area?

And of course I saw some fellow walkers – not so very many but enough, a combination of the cool and quirky, those who were working too hard at being cool and quirky, and those who were just downright quirky.

There were graffiti-slash-street art, naturally – some Bansky-esque stenciling – which is getting a bit old, surely, although it hasn’t got to look actually retro just yet.  And I saw this extraordinary graffito on Melrose itself:

When did anyone last feel the need to write Bill Cosby’s name large on the side of anything?  And did it have some connection with the vaguely lewd ad for pants on the bench next to it? Or with the pita store behind it?  I don’t know. Every city has its mysteries, and some just have to remain that way.

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.

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.

WALKING WITH (AND WITHOUT) WARHOL

I first set foot in New York in the late 1970s.  I was smart enough in certain limited areas, very naïve in others.  I thought the obvious thing to do while in New York was drop in on good old Andy Warhol.  He’d obviously be delighted to make the acquaintance of some complete stranger from England.

A quick look in the Yellow Pages (remember them?) gave me the address of Andy Warhol Enterprises – 860 Broadway I believe, though I found this by Googling rather than because it’s indelibly etched in my memory - and I walked down there, stood outside the building, seriously intending to go in, but ultimately I just couldn’t do it.  I was a wimp, and I chickened out.

In retrospect I’m sure it was for the best.  People who know about these things assure me I’d never have got past reception.  This was well after Warhol had been shot by Valerie Solanas, and strangers were not embraced the way they had been back in the early 60s.  In any case I doubt that I’d ever have been clasped to the Factory bosom.  I had youth on my side, but I’m pretty sure I didn’t have what the Warhol crew was looking for.  I walked away from the building, trying not to feel too much like an idiot.

New York at that time was a bracingly scary place to go walking - muggings, prostitutes in hot pants, dangerous-looking men offering drugs that they might or might not actually have.  A stroll in Central Park was reputed to be a suicide mission.  This, I suppose, was Warhol’s New York, but back then I couldn’t have told you where Warhol lived or ate or hung out.  I certainly had no idea which church he attended, or that he went to church at all. 

Now, all this and more is revealed in Thomas Kiedrowski’s new book “Andy Warhol’s New York City: Four Walks Uptown to Downtown.”  I have found myself wishing I had a time machine so I could take this walking guide and go back the necessary number of decades.  I might still not be welcomed by the Factory crew but at least I’d know where to walk in order to engineer a “chance” encounter with Andy, Edie, Viva, et al.

As modern tourism becomes ever more pervasive and (for want of a better word) inventive, there is a small industry providing walking tours that enable you to see places through the eyes (or at least personal habits) of certain literary and artistic figures.  The overheads must be attractively low.  In Manhattan you can walk with Salinger, in Brooklyn with Walt Whitman. Graffiti walking tours currently seem to be popular.  In London it’s Dickens, William Blake, Sherlock Holmes, and a slew of others. In Paris you can follow the footsteps of Sartre or Toulouse Lautrec, and of any number of American artistic expats. You can certainly walk with Guy Debord, aka Monsieur Psychogeographie: there are details online, though it seems he really didn’t get around all that much.

New York, London, Paris, these cities are big enough that multiple views and versions are possible. New York does not only belong to Salinger, London is not solely Dickensian.  But what about those places with a single, or at least an overwhelming, presence?   Joyce in Dublin, Kafka in Prague, Mark Twain in Hannibal, Dali in Port Lligat.  You wouldn’t want to be the other painter in Giverny, the other literary presence in Faulkner’s Oxford, Mississippi.  If you’re a playwright you surely couldn’t live in Shakespeare’s Stratford.

I admit that I’m a sucker for this stuff.  I’m a man who absolutely had to go to Barstow in the Mojave desert, for no other reason than it’s mentioned in the opening line of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.  A long trip was required to Coxwold, in North Yorkshire because that’s where Lawrence Sterne lived, worked and walked. 

I’ve enjoyed myself well enough on my excursions to these places but I do realize that in the end there’s something unsatisfying, and even potentially absurd, about this kind of pilgrimage.  You can’t walk in Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles or on the banks of Thomas Cole’s Hudson River, because these places are inventions, artistic creations.  They exist sure enough, but they exist on the page or on canvas and, of course, in the mind and imagination of the reader or viewer.  Ultimately they’re no more “real” than Calvino’s invisible cities, or the hundreds of locations listed in Alberto Manguel and Gianni Guadalupi’s Dictionary of Imaginary Places.

The great places belong to everybody and nobody.  This is their appeal. You don’t have to write a book or create a painting to make a place yours.  Simply walking through it may be enough.

A small name-dropping footnote to Warholesque pedestrianism.  Here in Los Angeles I did briefly befriend Mary Woronov, star of Warhol’s Chelsea Girls among others.  It was no big deal - we didn’t do more than have a few cups of coffee together, and afterwards on one occasion I walked her to her car.  Unprompted by me she said, “Oh, that’s a good walk you have there.  That’s a very nice stride.”  I smiled fit to bust.  I’m not sure I necessarily want that emblazoned on my tombstone, but I’m very glad to have it in my blog.

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