WALKING WITH PATINA

I happened to be walking early one morning this week in the streets around the Beverly Center, here in Los Angeles.  I wasn’t looking for the seamy underbelly, since it’s a fairly swank neighbourhood, and I’d have looked in vain, but I was looking for things with a bit of quirkiness or patina.

Quite a few people were leaving their houses and apartments, getting in their cars and going to work.  A young couple fell in step walking behind me, so I didn’t get the very best look at them, but I got a general impression of young, attractive, cleanish cut, and I could hear their conversation quite clearly.

HE: I can’t believe Bobby’s got a job already.  He’s only been in LA like a week.

SHE: He got four casting calls in his first three days!  He’d have got the J.C. Penney job if     he’d been able to ride a motorcycle. He looks like the kind of guy who could ride a  motorcycle.

HE: That’s the thing about Bobby.  He’s so straight, but casting directors always think he’s so gay.

As you may have read elsewhere in this blog I have an ongoing interest in what I call “feral furniture” – couches, chests of drawers, televisions, that have simply been dumped on the street.  Some, of course, look in better shape than others, but I have never seen such a stylish abandoned couch as the one I saw that morning in the environs of the Beverly Center.  It looked like this:

And I was thinking to myself, man, this must be a really classy neighborhood.  The people here throw away furniture that looks cooler and more elegant than any furniture I’ve ever owned.  And then half a block later I came across something else feral, an abandoned toilet tossed into the ivy at the curb, which suggested that some of the area’s inhabitants may be slightly less classy than others.

GHOST WALKS

It was late Saturday afternoon, and I was sitting on a bench in the cactus garden, outside our house on the lower slopes of the Hollywood Hills, and my wife was inside and the radio was tuned to National Public Radio and suddenly she stuck her head out the door and said “You’d better get in here, there’s going to be an English psychogeographer talking on the radio.”  I can’t swear how many other Hollywood homes that happened in, but I’ll bet not so very many.

Now, my wife is not easily impressed, and I long ago gave up trying to impress her, but when I replied, “Who? Iain Sinclair?” I did earn myself a gold star in her eyes, for intuition if nothing else.  Sinclair was talking about his book Ghost Milk, which has just been published in the United States, and in his beautifully soft, well-modulated voice he was spewing forth elegant bile about the evils of the London Olympic games.

Now interestingly, I see that the English edition of Ghost Milk was subtitled “Calling Time on the Grand Project,” but the US edition is subtitled “Recent Adventures Among the Future Ruins of London on the Eve of the Olympic games,” a problematic subtitle I’d say, given that we’re already well past the eve, but I'm no publisher.

Anyway he duly talked about the Olympic site as a “future ruin,” and I was reminded of something I’d read just a few days earlier in a piece on Brian Dillon’s website. The site is named Ruins of the Twentieth Century and the particular post I was thinking of was “Adventures in Architectural Hell” a review of two books A New Kind of Bleak: Journeys Through Urban Britain By Owen Hatherley, and A Guidebook for the Urban Age By PD Smith.

In his review Dillon writes about getting off the train at Stratford station in the middle of the Olympic park.  He says, “It feels as if you’ve detrained into a high-tech, functional ruin, a genuinely thrilling (though likely inadvertent) hint at the classically inspired sporting rigours ahead.”

Future ruin, functional ruin these are wonderfully evocative terms, and ones I intend to use.  Of course neither Sinclair nor Dillon, is entirely averse to a good bit of ruin.  Nor am I.


It seems to me there are certain problems with the idea of a future ruin, since ultimately surely all buildings, all cities, all landscapes are destined to be ruins one way or another, and some of us will take great pleasure in walking through them.  Anish Kapoor’s magnificent giant sculpture at the Olympic park looks like a ruin already.  The idea of a functional ruining is much more paradoxical and intriguing.

I remember when I first walked the streets of Manhattan in the 1970s; the place did indeed seem ruined, and large swathes of it undoubtedly were, and since the city was more or less bankrupt you could certainly argue that it wasn’t truly functional.  On the other hand, when I started going there regularly, and eventually living there in the late 1990s the place was less conspicuously ruined, and was certainly functional, and yet a walk through the Port Authority bus station or around the piers or parts of the east village, showed that plenty of ruin remained.  And of course many New Yorkers much preferred it that way: they didn’t want to live Disneyland.  They didn’t even want to live in a clean, safe, well-ordered American city.

Incidentally, Brian Dillon is one of the authors of a book titled Walking in My Mind,  that accompanied an exhibition at the Hayward Gallery.  Of course, the mind is a place where some of us do a lot of our walking anyway, and at least most of us who live, think, converse, get around, have minds that are more or less functional.  But most of us have no doubt that that one day in the future our minds will be absolute ruins, places we can do no walking whatsoever.

A LESS THAN PROUSTIAN WALK

Funny what you remember.  Above is a photograph featuring my regular, if increasingly occasional, walking companion Steve Kenny.  We’re in the middle of a walk in Dunwich, in Suffolk, sometime in the early 2000s I think.  Those are the ruins of Dunwich Abbey in the background.

Steve and I have walked a lot of many miles together over the years, in town and country, and invariably we talk as we walk. Needless to say I don’t remember any of our conversations verbatim, but I know the kind of things we’ve talked about, and like to think I remember some of them in detail.  And my recollection is that on that day in Dunwich Steve was telling me about an idea he’d had for a sitcom that involved superheroes and people who worked in local government.


He now tells me he has no memory whatsoever of this sitcom idea of his.  However, he does remember a horse and a small boy. The story, as he tells it, is that there was a horse in a field next to the Abbey ruins - we petted it and it seemed friendly enough.  This, in fact, I do now remember, though probably wouldn’t have without Steve’s prompting. And apparently I said that despite "making friends" with the horse, I felt I could still eat it.  Steve said that he couldn't (unless in great extremity, of course) as he felt there was now a bond between us - however slight and recently created.  I don’t actually remember this conversation, but it sounds very much like the kind of things each of us might have said.


And now the part I don’t remember at all.  According to Steve,  “A couple came along with a young boy – they let him give some grass to the horse.  He was too young (a toddler) and was doing it all wrong.  I had an urge to intervene but of course, I didn't – we'd already started to move on.  It was almost inevitable - the horse nipped the boy’s fingers - the couple were surprised but not as surprised and distraught as the boy, who was probably scarred for life (I was thinking mentally - but perhaps physically as well) - the horse had big teeth, he had little fingers. Did I blame myself or the stupid couple - perhaps both?  I couldn't escape the feeling that the horse had done it deliberately - perhaps you were right to want to eat him.”   To be fair to myself, I didn’t say I particularly wanted  to eat him, simply that I felt I could, if the circumstances presented themselves. 

As I go through life, and as I walk through the world I generally resist the urge to turn 

my experience into anecdote, but this is a pretty good anecdote.  The only problem is, it 

doesn’t feel like “my” anecdote.  I don’t doubt that it happened exactly as Steve described – I don’t for a moment think he’s inventing it - and that I was there and was at least a passive witness to events.  The problem is simply that this seems to be Steve’s walking anecdote rather than mine, which is why I give him full credit. I wonder if Marcel Proust would have had any such scruples. 

Proust did write, “But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.”

Of course, I don’t have any recollection of how the horse smelled, any more than of how he tasted.

THE DIRTY BOULEVARD

Being a pedestrian of international stature (he says self-mockingly, though in fact not quite so full-on ironically as you might imagine), once in a while I do get photographed by some really good photographers.  The latest is David Westphal who photographed me for the jwm magazine, that’s the in-house mag of the Marriott Hotel group, so my image will be an adornment to hotel rooms the world over for the next three months or so, which would appeal to anybody’s vanity.

But of course vanity means that you actually worry about looking good.  That being the case, I’m always a willing model if not a very natural or comfortable one.  In general it’s easier when I’m doing something, and since walking is one of the things I apparently to do best, it made sense to take some pics of me in mid-stride.

David asked if I knew a good location where I might walk and where he might do the shoot.  I suggested Griffith Park, up by the old batcave, with the possibility of a view of the Hollywood sign in the background.  Cheesy but effective.  And one of the great attractions from my point of view was that on a weekday afternoon I reckoned there wouldn’t be many people around, so the potential for embarrassment and self-consciousness would be much reduced.  David said that sounded great, but in truth, somehow I didn’t really think it would be that simple.

Come the day of the shoot David had had a better idea.  He thought it would be really great if we took some pictures slap bang in the middle of Hollywood Boulevard, sometimes with me walking, sometimes with me standing still as pedestrians swarmed around me.  Now I dare say Naomi Campbell would have stamped her little foot and refused, but I am no Naomi Campbell, as you may have realized, and in any case this sounded like a decent idea for a picture, so I went with it.  I’m not sure I really had a choice.

And rather a peculiar thing happened.  I’m not saying I look especially good or at ease in the pictures, but in the event I felt remarkably unembarrassed and unselfconscious during the shoot.  I guess it has something to do with the nature of Hollywood Boulevard.  First of all, whatever you’re doing there, however odd, there are always going to be plenty of people doing much odder things: a man dressed in a SpongeBob SquarePants costume, some guy forcing his CD into the hands of unwilling tourists “Well you gotta take it now ‘cause I’ve signed it for ya,” a male/female busking duo who seemed to be making up their songs as they went along, at one point launching into the lyrics, “Lick, lick that jellybean, lick it lick it till I scream.”  The chaos was oddly liberating.

Needless to say, again unlike Naomi Campbell, I didn’t have image approval, which is why they didn’t use the pic at the top of this post.  You might argue that this isn’t actually a picture of me walking, but it’s the one I liked best.  It has so much going for it: a tyrannosaurus, a bunch of overdressed hipsters, and the author, staring into distance, not exactly relaxed, and by no means above it all, but detached and aware and observant.  That sounds quite a lot like me.  They used this one instead, which again doesn't actually show me walking, but is still a great picture, even if it makes me look a little over-chunky -  vanity, indeed.

The piece is written by James Bradley, who runs a Brooklyn record store (yes really) named Soundfix and he also plays alto sax saxophone under the name Beauclerk. “Low-resonance, high-discomfort ambient drifter Beauclerk is a one-man drone menace, mixing glory and danger via saxophone and a Line 6 pedal,” says the Village Voice.   

The jwm piece features a playlist of music that a pedestrian might listen to when walking the streets of Los Angeles.  I’ve done these lists before and it’s very hard to stop yourself being “hipper than thou,” and I can’t swear that a list containing John Cage and Christian Fennesz entirely escapes that accusation. 

And of course my original list was longer.  I’m not complaining: I understand the realities of putting together a magazine, but as a little bonus, let me recommend one song that ended up on the cutting room floor:  

Johnny Tyler and His Riders of the Rio Grande, ”It Ain’t Far To the Bar (But It’s Such a Long Road Back).”  The story of all our lives.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRzWSJRnZpw 

James Bradley’s Soundfix website is here:

www.soundfixrecords.com 

Beauclerk is here:

http://www.soundfixrecords.com/products/beauclerk-s-t 

David Westphal’s website is here:

http://www.westphalphotography.com/ 

The jwm magazine is here, though my computer found some of the bells and whistles a little too fancy to deal with easily, yours is better no doubt:

http://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/mcmurry/jwm_2012summer/#/38 

WALKING IN THE FUTURE REDUX

And speaking of walking in the future, as I was a few posts back, a reader pointed me in the direction of the movie The Book of Eli.  It was a movie I’d never really fancied, partly because it sounded a bit “spiritual” (which in fact it is) and because Denzel Washington, as Eli, looked so gosh darned noble in all the stills, (although of course I do know that Denzel has a lot of trouble NOT looking noble, whatever part he’s playing).

 But now I’ve seen it and I’m glad I did.  The movie is set in a future so bright that everybody has to wear shades whenever they step outside, because “the war tore a hole in the sky”.  This of course makes everybody look very cool, or very cool and noble in Denzel’s case.

And yes indeed, as ever, there is plenty of futuristic, over-dressed walking.  Eli has been walking west across America for 30 years, and when somebody asks, "How do you know you're walking the right way?" he replies "Faith."

If you’re especially alert to spoilers, this may tell you pretty early on that Eli is in fact blind, so presumably he doesn’t actually need the shades, and the blindness certainly doesn’t inhibit his fighting skills, though it may explain why it’s taken him so long to walk across America.  If you ask me, having blindness as a movie’s major plot twist is a bit of cheat, but I know some people think it’s a brilliant device.

Anyway, the walking gets a good deal more decorative when Eli has Mila Kunis as a fellow traveler.  And the movie kicks up to a whole other level whenever Gary Oldman appears on screen, playing Carnegie, a scenery-chewing villain and (as it happens) crazed bibliophile.  I think we've all been there and done that.

Now frankly I’d be happy to watch Gary Oldman chew scenery from now till the Rapture, and although he doesn’t do much walking in the movie, he looks very cool indeed on the occasions when he does.  In fact Gary Oldman looks very cool indeed, pretty much all the time.  Just how many people could get away with walking down a fashion runway dressed like this? And it's not even in the future.