WALKING IN CIRCLES WITH GEOFF NICHOLSON

 On Saturday October 22^nd at 6 pm I’m leading a walk in Sheffield as part of the Off The Shelf Literary Festival. In order to make life difficult for myself, and I hope to make the walk more interesting, I’ve decided to turn it into a “project” that invokes mapping, memory and “emotion recollected in tranquility” – all the great Romantic pedestrian virtues.

The project is an apparently simple one.  I go for a walk near my current home in Los Angeles.  Then some weeks later, accompanied by festival-goers, I go for a walk in Sheffield, the city where I was born and brought up, and where, in my time, I’ve done a great deal of walking, but which is now partly (and increasingly) unfamiliar to me.

The idea is that the two routes should, in one sense, be as similar to each other as possible: the same length, taking the same amount of time, walking the same “shape” on the map of each city. 

I decided that the two walks should be as “circular” as possible, i.e. beginning and ending in the same place, and attempting to carve a circle through the geography of each place.  You can make up your own mind about the deeper symbolism of this.

So I began with a map of Los Angeles, specifically of Hollywood, and I traced a circle on the map, using the very latest hi tech cartographical methods – I drew round the rim of an inverted martini glass.

Of course you can’t literally walk in a circle on the streets of Los Angeles because much of the city is built on a grid, but I designed a route that was as close to circular as possible.  In fact, as you see below, it wasn’t really very close, or very circular at all, but that’s the nature of the enterprise: the best laid walking plans are always confounded by the situation on the ground.  The map (as they say) is not the territory.  This map, like all the others, is clickable and will then enlarge.

The Hollywood walk is now done, things have been seen, notes have been made, photographs have been taken, some of which are visible below.

The walk was arbitrary to a degree and it isn’t exactly a tourist route, but I thought it best to include one or two places that people are likely to have heard of even if they’re unfamiliar with LA: Sunset Boulevard, Hollywood Boulevard, Vine Street, and it was a route that from time to time gave views of the Hollywood Sign.  

Having done the Hollywood walk, I traced the shape of that route on a sheet of transparent plastic.

I then placed that sheet over the map of Sheffield, and that will be the route I’ll try to walk there on Saturday the 22nd.

Of course the geography of Sheffield, the layout of the streets, doesn’t conform to the geography of Los Angeles, so the shape of the walk will have to be modified again according to local topography.  The circle becomes ever less circular.  So here’s the route I’m actually proposing for the Sheffield Walk.

The idea, always subject to change and decay, is that as I walk the route in Sheffield I’ll consult the map, the notes, the photographs of my Hollywood walk.  I’ll be able to say things like, “If you were at this point on the route in Hollywood you’d be looking at the Capitol Records building or a marijuana dispensary, or whatever.  And we’ll compare and contrast this experience with conditions on the ground in Sheffield.

I realize that in many ways this is walking made needlessly complicated, perhaps even made absurd, but in the end, on the day, in Sheffield, we’ll simply be going for a walk, seeing what happens, seeing what there is to see.

Below is another map of the Hollywood walk, this time with numbers that correspond to the specific points where I took photographs. 

OK, I admit it, not all the photographs were taken on the very day of the walk, and one of them was “borrowed” from an online source because I couldn’t get a good shot.

1 – Why a lot of people like it in Hollywood: sunshine, palm trees and the Hollywood sign looming in the distance and legal medical marijuana. 

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2 – An actual Hollywood walker – pushing (I imagine) a large proportion of his worldly goods in that rather stylish pram.

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3- The Capitol Records building – one of Hollywood’s most famous “programmatic” pieces of architecture.  It looks like a stack of 7 inch vinyl singles, if anyone knows what that is anymore.

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4 – A graffito painted on a wall under the Hollywood Freeway.  I walk past here all the time, graffiti appear regularly and within days city crews come and paint them over.

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5 – Right in Hollywood, right by the freeway, the Vedanta Church, sometimes called the Vedanta Temple, the home of the Vedanta religion in Southern California – Aldous Huxley was a big fan.

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6 – The coming together of concrete and greenery.  I always wonder how long it would take “nature” to reassert itself if mankind miraculously disappeared from the face of the earth.  Not long at all, I’m imagining.

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7 – Pla-Boy Liquor – I love the name, I love the signs, and this is supposedly where Ed Wood bought booze in the later years of his life.  People who’ve live nearby also assure me it’s one of the more scary, crime-ridden corners in Hollywood.

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8 – The question of when graffiti become murals, and when murals become street art is a vexed one, but I think most of us would call this one art, but on the other hand, we now know that every damn thing is art if somebody says it is.

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9 – Mannequins in one of the many stores on Hollywood Boulevard designed to satisfy all your stripper needs.

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10 – A movie theater in a geodesic dome, and an inflatable Spiderman on the roof.  Does it get more Hollywood than this?

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WALKING AND CRUISING

So I have been to New York, I have appeared at the Brooklyn Book Festival and I have done a fair amount of walking.  In fact I walked from the hotel on 39^th Street in Manhattan, across the Manhattan Bridge and the East River, into Brooklyn to Borough Hall where the event was taking place; a modest four and a half miles or so.

The best thing about the Manhattan Bridge is that it gives you a fairly close view of the Brooklyn Bridge and a fairly distant one, over the rooftops, of the Williamsburg Bridge.  The worst thing about it is that although there are allegedly separate paths across the bridge for walkers and bikers, bastards on bikes still belt along the walkway.  On a different occasion they would have felt the rough edge of my tongue, and possibly my elbow, but who wants to get into a fight on the way to a literary panel?

Teju Cole, Sergio Chefjec and I were “moderated” by Edmund White.  His introductory remarks went something like this:

EW: It seems there are a great many books that involve walking, in fact I once wrote one myself.  It was called ... oh, what was it now ...?

(Longish Pause)

GN: (Helpfully)  The Flaneur?

EW: Well yes, there is that one, but I wrote another one as well ...

It says much for Edmund White’s twinkly charm that this came across as warmly human rather than simply befuddled.  He did a fine job of moderating, though he did have a disarming tendency to say things like, “So Geoff, tell us about Iain Sinclair and Psychogeography.”  I did what I could.

He also encouraged me to tell the story about Erik Satie and the streetlamps, and I obliged.  Satie was a great walker as well as a great composer.  Every day he left his home in the suburb of Arcueil and walked to his studio in the center of Paris, then at night walked back again: six miles in each direction.  He did a lot of composing on his nocturnal homeward walks.  He would create music in his head, then stop from time to time under a convenient streetlamp and write it down in a notebook.  But then, during the First World War a lot of Parisian streetlamps were turned off, and his productivity was much reduced.  The gaps between sources of light were too great.  By the time he got to an illuminated streetlamp much of the music had evaporated from his head.

This allowed Edmund White to tell his own story about picking up a “boy” in a gay bar and as they walked home the boy would talk quite happily for a while but then regularly fall into complete silence.  White eventually worked out that the boy was deaf and he was lip-reading.  This was fine when they were near a streetlamp, but as they went into the dark areas between lights he fell silent because he couldn’t see what White was saying.

By then we’d discovered that the book he couldn’t remember the title of was City Boy subtitled “My life in New York during the 1960s and 70s.”  AIDs was unknown and he was an "apostle of promiscuity", living on steak, amphetamine, alcohol and cigarettes, while enjoying "industrial quantities of sex."  Partners were invariably picked up on the street. “We had to seek out most of our men on the hoof,” he writes.

Back in the mid 1970s I was living in London, doing my first real job, and I had a friend who was studying drama at the Webber Douglas Academy.  He had the the most active gay sex life (sex life of any sort) that I’d ever heard of.  Every day as he walked to and from classes at drama school, a walk of not more than fifteen minutes, he would unfailingly pick up a sex partner, sometimes more than one.  At the time this seemed both impressive and improbable.  And of course, as we now know, extremely risky.  My friend was most definitely not having safe sex. 

But that problem still lay in wait.  At the time I was just fascinated to know how he did it.  He was a fairly ordinary-looking man, and to a heterosexual eye didn’t even seem all that conspicuously gay.  What was the secret of his “success”?  He said it was all to do the eye contact, with the way he looked at other men.  For a long time I had to take his word for it.

And then there was an occasion when I needed to move a large oil painting I owned, maybe four feet square, from my old flat to a new one.  I was too poor, and too mean, to hire a van, so Martin offered to help me carry it through the streets.  We walked, one of us at either end of the painting, him in front, me bringing up the rear, so that I had a view of him as we walked.  And I saw that he kept giving the “look” to men we passed. 

It didn’t seem at all sexual to me.  It looked threatening and aggressive, as if spoiling for a fight, and I’d have thought quite likely to get you beaten up in that “Who do you think you’re looking at?” kind of way.  But apparently not.  When we got to journey’s end he assured me this was the look that worked so well for him, and if he hadn’t been with me and carrying a painting he could certainly have scored a couple of times in the course of the walk.  The men he’d looked at had looked back.

Oh how I wished these techniques were available to the heterosexual male.  In general, with very few exceptions, I really don’t think they are, but I do have friends of friends who knew Tyrese (later Tyrese Gibson) in the period when he was somewhat known as a successful male model but before he became an actor and starred in movies such as 2 Fast 2 Furious.  I have it on reasonable authority that he spent most of his spare time wandering the streets of New York picking up women or every kind.  He made out like a bandit, as they say.  I’m not sure what kind of “look” Tyrese used as he walked the streets. Maybe the one below.

THE REFOUND ART

Oh and here's a thing to celebrate, and demonstrate my "international" status. While I'm in  New  York, the small format mass market UK edition of The Lost Art of Walking will be published.  Amazon.co.uk seems to have got the info all up the spout and they say it's not published till  October 1st, but they're wrong.  My publisher assures me September 19th is the real publication date.  

It's a slender, handsome volume now, and fits easily in the pocket and can therefore accompany you on your walks over hill and dale, and especially through dark alleys.  In due course it will make a lovely Xmas present too.  The Economist reckons it's "bewitchingly informative."

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 IN HEELS

It’s been a strange week here in Los Angeles.  The temperature hit 100 degrees on Wednesday, and although I may be a mad dog and an Englishman even I know my limits.  In addition to that, I’ve been demolished by some hideous bug I must have picked up on the plane, and even getting out of the chair to walk to the bookcase has seemed like quite an expedition.

So, thus immobilized, I have been reading Joan Didion’s forthcoming memoir Blue Nights, and watching a rough cut of a forthcoming documentary titled Betty Page Reveals All.  You might think that Betty Page and Joan Didion were some way from being soul sisters, and yet, and yet …

It's hard to think of Didion without picturing those famous photographs showing her with her Corvette, and outside her house on Franklin Avenue in Hollywood.  She just doesn’t look like a woman who does a lot of walking. 

But she also lived in New York for long periods of her life, and most people in New York are forced to be walkers one way or another.  Her book The Year of Magical Thinking contains a few references to walking in the city in general and Central Park in particular, and she mentions at one point that she stops wearing sandals because they catch in the pavement and starts wearing Puma sneakers instead.  I had never tried to image what these Didion sandals actually looked like, but if I had done I’d have assumed they might be at best “sensible.”  

But now I read in Blue Nights, “I had lived my entire life to date without seriously believing that I would age.  I had no doubt that I would continue to wear the red suede sandals with four-inch heels that I had always preferred.”  If any pictures of these preferred sandals exist I, alas, have never seen them.

Did Joan Didion really walk the streets of Manhattan wearing red suede sandals with four-inch heels?  Or is that further evidence that she didn’t really do much walking at all?  Maybe she just posed around in them.  There are very few women who can walk happily in four inch heels, though Bettie Page was one of them.

In the documentary, someone points out, and footage proves the point, that Bettie Page could walk every bit as easily in high heels as out of them.  There was no wobbling or teetering for Bettie, though there was no shortage of strutting.  True, in the movies she didn’t walk very far, often confined to a very small stage or set, but you felt she could have covered huge distances should the need have arisen.

It may have had something to do with her hips.  They were extremely broad in relation to her waist and maybe that gave her added stability.  She also looks as though she had very strong legs. And she was initially discovered while walking on the beach at Coney Island, though whether in heels, I don’t know.

Joan Didion, to all appearances, does not have broad hips or strong legs, though she has always been light - eighty pounds for most of her life - a little less now, or so she reports in Blue Nights.  I’m told that being light makes walking in heels much easier too.

Bettie Page ended her modeling career abruptly in 1959.  There were good reasons: a Senate Committee was investigating the world of S&M and bondage photographs, she was getting older  - mid 30s - though it seems she’d always lied about her age anyway, and whether cause or effect, she also became a devout Christian.  She “disappeared” and had a hard life that included periods of madness and incarceration.   But she could never leave the pin-up world behind her, or rather it would not leave her, and in the end – with some help from Hugh Hefner – she decided to embrace her cult status, though (with a few late exceptions) she chose not to be photographed.

It was Joan Didion who wrote, in A Book Of Common Prayer, "You have to pick the places you don't walk away from."