WALKING WITH WAITS

I would never say that Tom Waits is a fake: he quite obviously isn’t.  But he is a poser.  He's a man who knows how to adopt a pose and hold it for as long as required, which may be a very short time, say the fraction of a second it takes for a camera shutter to open of close, or for the length of a concert, or (as it is now) the length of a career that’s lasted more than four decades.

The fact is, it’s much easier to pose with a guitar in your hand, or at a piano, on a bar stool, or leaning against an old truck, than it is to pose while walking.  Oh sure some people affect a swagger while walking, or a strut, or a lope, but send ‘em on a good long hike, and ten miles down the road you can be pretty sure their stride will be revealing their true self.

There’s an interview Tom Waits did with the beloved Terry Gross on National Public Radio in 2002 in which she asked him whether, when he started listening to “older music” it affected the way he dressed or spoke or behaved.  Waits replied “Oh yeah, sure. You know I bought an old hat and drove an old car.  Yeah sure. I walked with a cane.  You know, I was going overboard perhaps but ...” And Gross interrupts to ask what kind of walking cane it was, did it have a silver top?  “No, no,” says Waits, “an old man’s cane from a Salvation Army.  Yeah.  And I carved my name on it and everything you know  ... It gave me a walk, I guess.  It gave me something distinctive.  ‘Oh who was that guy in here with a cane?  Did you see that?’ It just gave me something I liked identity wise.”

There was a time a few years back when I was suffering from all kinds of foot problems.  And the real problem was finding a doctor who knew what I was actually suffering from.  I got diagnosed as having tendonitis, bursitis, plantar fasciitis, all good names, all of which essentially mean that you’ve got a pain in your foot.  But none of the quacks I saw (and one of them was an absolute genuine quack) were able to do a damn thing about it.

Things got so bad that I could hardly walk outside the house, so I asked my wife to buy me a walking stick.  She found a place on Hollywood Boulevard that sold walking sticks with handles made of Lucite, with a spider set in them.  She bought me one of those.  It looked pretty sharp, and it was some help in getting around. 

And then after I’d had it about a week I realized the top screwed off, the cane was hollow metal, and there was a swordstick stick hidden inside.  That made it seem even sharper.  It seemed like the kind of cane Tom Waits ought to have used, and I could certainly see the attractions of walking along with a cane that contained a spider and a concealed weapon.  It was the kind of affectation a man might get used to.  But I gave it up once my foot got better (long story, I found the right doctor). I didn’t want to use the stick as part of a pose.  I reckoned that one day I might really need a cane full-time, and I didn’t want to bring it on by using one before I needed to.

There’s another interview with Tom Waits, by Robert Sabbag for the LA Times Magazine, in which he talks about Keith Richards.  Waits says, “He stands at ten after seven, if you can imagine that.”  (I can just about)  “Arms at five o’clock, legs at two o’clock” (and no I can’t imagine that at all) “with no apparatus, nothing suspended.  He’s all below the waist.  And if he doesn’t feel it, he’ll just walk away.”

Well yes, you can believe that.  Of course, some people find it hard to believe that Keith Richards is able to stand, let alone walk, but he still seems well able to put one foot in front of the other.  He doesn’t even need a cane, though he does have Patti Hansen for support.

OF WALKING AND PARKING

                                                                                                              Ed Ruscha

One of the small but significant pedestrian pleasures I sometimes have, is to walk through parking lots (for my American readers) or car parks (for my English ones).  Partly it’s because this is such a satisfyingly long way from being “good walking territory.”  Also because it sometimes feels like trespassing, and I suppose in some cases it actually is, though I can’t say I’ve ever been challenged while walking through a parking lot. 

When I’m driving and have to park in some giant open air lot, I always choose a  spot in a  far distant corner.  Partly because there’s usually more room and it’s easier to park there, and also because it ensures that I do a certain amount (OK an absolutely minute amount) of walking.  While others jockey for a place nearest to the mall or supermarket entrance, there I go striding across the lot, the flaneur of the tarmac.  Also, there’s always a chance of being run down by distracted drivers, which tends to put the walker on his mettle.

Recently I was in Ridgecrest, California, taking a pre-breakfast stroll around the town and came across the rather gorgeous expanse above.   To garble Raymond Chandler, few things look emptier than an empty parking lot.  Chandler said the same thing about swimming pools.  I couldn't resist walking across that wide open space.

When I lived in New York, I often went upstate at weekends, I became especially fond of a parking lot in Rosendale.  It belonged to one of the saddest supermarkets I’ve even seen, so sad that it featured in Martin Parr’s book Boring Postcards USA, where it looked like this:

As you may or may not be able to read, it then went by the name of the Rosendale Food Center.  When I was there it was Sunrise Farms, a pretty awful supermarket where there was always a good chance the meat was going to be off, still at least it was a local store.  And then it closed down.  It was a lot sadder then, and a lot more boring in one way, but at least you could walk across the parking lot without fear of getting run down.

And now I find, lurking on the internet, a picture of yours truly, in a car park in Brooklyn, in the rain, standing on one leg, thus:

Actually I suspect it’s been lurking there for years.  The image is to be found on the website of the Temporary Travel Office, “a quasi-fictional tourist agency” run by Ryan Griffis.  The picture is part of the documentation for an event called “Public Parking: a Tour of Parking Lots and Utopias: Brooklyn, NY.”  I actually mention this expedition in The Lost Art of Walking.  Ryan Griffis seems a thoroughly good man, and the Temporary Travel Office is obviously a Very Good Thing.  Is it just me, or is ironic tourism suddenly a big growth area? 

The Temporary Travel Office is here:

 http://temporarytraveloffice.net/ 

“Public Parking” is here:

http://temporarytraveloffice.net/hollywood/parking.html

DAVID BOWMAN RIP

The Sunday New York Times contained an obituary for the writer David Bowman.  It seems he died in February of a cerebral hemorrhage, but the public announcement is only being made now.  I didn’t know him, but I know several people who did.  I recall reading his novel Let The Dog Drive, and thinking it was pretty good, though in fact I remember almost nothing about it.

Oddly enough, I discover in the obituary that David Bowman once found himself in much the same position toward his book.  In the summer of 1989, having more or less finished writing the novel, he was on vacation in Montauk, on Long Island.  He went for a walk and was hit by a car.  He was in a coma for a month and when he came out of it he was suffering from all but total amnesia.  According to Bowman’s friend Dr. Eric Schneider, “When David first read his manuscript, he didn’t recognize a word of it.  It was as if someone else had written it.”

Well, one way or another, Bowman got his memory back and went on to have a writing career.  He  published only one other novel Bunny Modern, although he apparently finished a new one shortly before his death.  Bunny Modern is a futuristic satire containing nannies whose infant charges are so precious they need to be protected with Glocks and sawn off shotguns.  

This novel is hardly the place to look for a serious meditation on the risks of pedestrianism, but it does contain the lines: “I remember how fathers wandered the streets strapped to their Walkmans; how moms knelt at the household TV, channel-hopping through network product.  My own mother did the network kneel, but my dad never did the Walkman walk.”

I can’t help wondering if there was some connection between the car accident of 1989 and this year’s brain hemorrhage, and I can’t help wondering if Bowman was wearing a Walkman when he was hit by that car.

'WE'LL HAVE A BLOW'

It seems I still haven’t finished with HG Wells and his walking.  I just discovered a passage from Jerome K. Jerome’s My Life and Times:  actually I found it quoted in Michael Moorcock’s recently published anthology London Peculiar and Other Nonfiction.  Jerome had been under the weather and Wells had invited him down to Folkestone for some sea air and a rest.

Jerome writes, “To ‘rest’ in the neighbourhood of Wells is like curling yourself up and trying to go to sleep in the centre of a cyclone. When he wasn't explaining the Universe, he was teaching me new games—complicated things that he had invented himself, and under stress of which my brain would reel. There are steepish hills on the South Downs. We went up them at four miles an hour, talking all the time. On the Sunday evening a hurricane was raging with a driving sleet. Wells was sure a walk would do us good—wake us up. While Mrs. Wells was not watching, we tucked the two little boys into their mackintoshes and took them with us.

      ‘We'll all have a blow,’ said Wells.”

I don’t know that Michael Moorcock was ever all that much of a walker, and at this point in history it's hard to believe anyone could ever walk down the street dressed the way he is in the photograph above.  In any case he certainly isn’t much of a walker now, being a wheelchair user.  Iain Sinclair once told me the story of when he, Moorcock and Alan Moore did an event at the British Library in London.  This is an image from event, which I find enormously pleasing and moving for reasons I still can’t quite put my finger on.

The event was a great success, it was afterwards that the problems started.  Sinclair writes, “nice & tragic image: the meal that followed was quite an adventure, Mike in his chair, Alan blind in one eye and deaf in one ear, talking and rambling through traffic, down the madness of Euston Road - finding nowhere to eat. And, despite all this, the group were invisibles in the city, nobody rushing to salute those culture heroes.”

A damned shame, I'd say.

KARMA SUTRO

And speaking of walking and swimming pools, I was in San Francisco a couple of weekends back, and decided to go walking in a place I knew next to nothing about.  I headed off to Point Lobos, not so far from Golden Gate Park, the ruins of the Sutro Baths.  I was there on a bright, warm, sunny April morning and the ruins were surprisingly well-populated with walkers and amblers and the occasional scrambler.

The Sutro Baths, I know now though I didn’t know them, were a vast indoor bathing complex opened in 1896, by Adolph Sutro, a successful businessman and one time San Francisco mayor.  They were located between a cliff edge and the Pacific Ocean, a great turn of the century scheme, all glass and wrought iron, seven pools, six of them filled by the incoming tide, the seventh containing fresh water.  

Images from the time make it look like a cross between a football stadium, an opera house and the Crystal Palace, and evidently many visitors back in the day were there to watch rather than swim: there was seating for 8,000, and photographs show the seats absolutely packed. There was also a skating rink and a museum containing Mr. Sutro’s collection of curiosities.

Very little of this could be deduced on the ground from looking at the present day ruins, and after looking at photographs and even blueprints from the baths’ glory days, I’m still not exactly certain how the current fragments relate to that elaborate and optimistic nineteenth century structure. 

What we have now are chunks of strewn masonry, broken columns, pools of still water, a pedestrian tunnel, and an inscrutable block that looks like an above-ground bunker, but must have been in one of the lowest levels of the original building.  There are also a number of what appear to be concrete catwalks, actually the foundations of the baths’ walls, I suppose, raised not so very high above the surrounding water.  Some of them appear to be the retaining walls of the individual pools, but the longest one runs right alongside the ocean, from one end of the baths to the other. 

I wasn’t sure exactly how seriously to take that sign, “Cliff and Surf Area Extremely Dangerous: people have been swept from the rocks and drowned,” but I don’t think it was a completely superfluous warning.  Certainly the sea was rough even on that warm sunny day, and some sections of that oceanside walkway were wet: you could certainly have got drenched if not necessarily drowned.

Of course, the vast majority of the people visiting the ruins felt the urge, perhaps the compulsion, to walk along at least some of those catwalks.  In one sense there was nothing very challenging or risky about most of them.  At their narrowest they were still a couple of feet wide, and if they’d been at ground level and not edged by water they’d have presented no problem for anyone.  Even as it was, some people just strolled along them as easily as if they were walking down a garden path.  Others however walked as delicately and deliberately as if they were on a tightrope, or tiptoeing through a minefield. 

Personally I was somewhere between the two.  I walked the concrete strip alongside ocean, purposefully and carefully, making sure not to slip on the wet sections. I didn’t fear for my life, but I did fear the terrible humiliation that would have ensued if I’d lost my footing and got a soaking.  I did just fine.  It was a fun little walk, and invigorating enough, but I admit there was a certain relief when it was over.

Drenching and drowning are not the only risks around the Sutro Baths.  The cliffs are high, the drops steep and scary, and on one of them there was this wonderful sign. 

Of course it’s actually very ambiguous.  It obviously started out as a simple “no walking” sign, a pedestrian with a diagonal line struck through him.  Now he’s been turned into the grim reaper, but the line through him is still visible, as though it means “no death,” which is a nice idea, but there’s something about that cliff edge, with the view of rocks and ruins below, that made death seem a perfectly real possibility.


Here's a terrific website that tells a great deal more about the Sutro Baths:

http://www.cliffhouseproject.com/environs/sutrobaths/sutro_baths.htm