WALKING WITH SNAKES

Last week I went for a walk in Runyon Canyon Park – what used to be the Huntington Hartford Estate, a name that means less to most people than I think it should. George Huntington Hartford (he never used that first name), was one of those great, tragic American heirs who lost a fortune and himself.  

His family owned the A and P grocery chain.  He was nine when his father died, at which point his trust fund was worth $1.5 million a year, and when his uncle died, admittedly a few decades later, he became worth half a billion dollars or so, which he proceeded to lose.  Mostly it went on bad business deals, but he undoubtedly had an extravagant amount of fun along the way, as a writer, publisher, art collector, producer of movies and stage plays, including a theater production of Jane Eyre starring Errol Flynn, at a time when Flynn was some years past his peak.

The 130 acres of canyon that became the Huntington Hartford Estate, were and indeed still are, just a couple of blocks north of Hollywood Boulevard.  Huntington Hartford bought them from John McCormick, the Irish tenor, who had built a mansion, guest houses and a terraced garden on the property.  It’s not clear whether Hartford ever really intended to live there.   He had Frank Lloyd Wright design him a Play Resort and Sports Club which would have looked as though three flying saucers had colonized the Hollywood Hills (an appealing enough idea), but a tidal wave of local opposition put an end to the plans, and although he kept the property (Errol Flynn stayed in one of the guest houses) by the end of the fifties he was ready to give the estate to the city, which promptly declined the offer. 

Furious, Hartford sold the estate at a cut price to one Jules Berman, a man who made his fortune by importing Kahlua, and who promptly demolished most of the buildings on the estate to make way for a more orthodox housing development.  No properties standing on the land meant no property taxes to pay, although some sources say that at least one of the guests house was still there at the end of the 1980s.  Berman couldn’t get his plans approved either, and in the end he too offered the land to the city, which this time accepted the gift.

I’d been in certain bits of the park before, had certainly appreciated the “beware of rattlesnake” signs, but I never thought that Runyon Canyon was my kind of walking territory.  Sure, it offers some interesting challenges, rugged, steep, bleakly hot at times summer, and in return it does give you some great views over Los Angeles, but most of the people don’t seem to go there for the walking.  They go there to jog, to run, to exercise, and all too many of them go there to display themselves, to preen, to show off their perfected bods, the men rather more exhibitionistically than the women.  I really don’t need that when I walk.

But this time I was walking there for a very good reason.  I’d had lunch with the wonderful photographer Loretta Ayeroff, who is a fan both of walking and ruins.  One of her series of photographs is titled Off Wilshire referring to the area of LA she lived at the time, when her daughter was newly born.  Every day she’d go for a walk around the neighborhood, baby strapped to her back, camera in hand, photographing quirky, undramatic, but very telling and sometimes mysterious details. 

She also did another great series in the 70s and early 80s titled California Ruins, extraordinary photographs of ruined places that included Alcatraz, some sinister military bunkers in Marin county, the Los Angeles’ Pan Pacific Auditorium before it burned down.  There were shots of gold mines, restaurants, the dinosaurs in Cabazon, and this particular image that I find incredibly and inscrutably moving.

         The title is "Huntingdon Hartford Estate," and since we'd had lunch on Sunset Boulevard it wasn’t going to be much of a stretch to walk up the hill, into Runyon Canyon, to try to find those steps again.  We went in the gate at the south east corner, not expecting much, not sure that we'd find them at all, and immediately, there they were, bang in front of us, the steps, the ones in the photograph.  They were so conspicuous, and so easy to find, that at first neither of us could quite believe it was the right place, and in a way we didn’t want to.  We had wanted it to be harder, more of a search, more of a quest. 

In one sense the steps hadn’t changed at all (I suppose the more low-lying and ground-hugging a structure is, the less likely it is to be ravaged by destructive forces whether natural or human), but everything around them was transformed.  Where there had been leafless, wintry trees there was now lush foliage, century plants, and huge gnarled cacti rising well above head height.  Here’s Loretta, in situ.

        

         We pressed on, not very far, until we saw something in the bushes, nothing very identifiable, perhaps the end of a wall, a chunk of fallen masonry, but definitely something.  We went through bushes and branches, and found a long low, raised concrete slab, a foundation, with a substantial fireplace and a chimney made of rough stone.  We assumed it must be the remains of one of the guest houses.  Had Errol Flynn slept here?

     The painting on the chimney seems strangely sophisticated in some ways, like a hastily conceived totem pole, less sophisticated in others.  Somebody had written “Beer” on the side in thin formless capitals, and beer had clearly been on the mind of many previous visitors.  There were cans strewn around, and fast food wrappers, and a couple of sleeping bags, though these didn’t look like they’d been used recently.   There were condoms too – unused, still in their faded yellow wrappers – the LifeStyles brand.  Beer, sleeping bags, condoms; the Hollywood lifestyle indeed.

         We pressed on up the hill, on our way to the ruined tennis court, and then to Inspiration Point, and we noticed that a group of half a dozen people had gathered and were looking at something very fascinating on the ground.  We joined them.  There, slithering across the dry dusty path, was a five-foot long snake.  Someone said “It’s a rattlesnake” but it quite obviously wasn’t – there was no rattle.  And eventually a consensus was reached that it was a fine rat snake, not the tamest or least snappy of creatures, but nothing that would kill you.  

What is a garden, or indeed a canyon, without a serpent?  What is an estate, or indeed a walk, without a ruin?

More details about Loretta Ayeroff and her work can be found here:

http://loretta-ayeroff.photoshelter.com/ 

SWEET F.A.

 Just in case you doubted that Fiona Apple is a self-dramatizing, self-aggrandizing twerp (and I know you didn’t really doubt it for a minute) there she was in yesterday’s New York Times, with journalist Jon Pareles as her enabler, describing how she dealt with the profound angst she experienced when the record company delayed the release of her album.

Pareles writes, “She started to walking up and down a hill near her home in Venice, California ... for eight hours a day, day after day, until she could barely walk, until she was limping, and then until she could not walk at all.  Her knees required months of therapy.”  Then Pereles quotes the women herself, “Something about that was a rite of passage.  I think it’s really healthy to lose things or give things up for a while, to deprive yourself of certain things.  It’s always a good learning experience because I felt it really was like, ‘I must learn to walk again.’”

And yes, they actually let this woman out on her own.

Compare and contrast with the walking wounded of Afghanistan.  The story is that at a time when NATO troops are about to withdraw from that country, the Afghan army and police have started to get their act together and have even found a local hero in this man:

The above photograph by David Gill has apparently stirred great feelings of patriotism and heroism.  It shows an Afghan commando – his name seems to be Hamidullah – after he’s been involved in an eighteen-hour gun battle on the streets of Kabul.  He’s wounded in the leg but he’s on his feet, he’s walking, having stood up to the insurgents.  Well, we know that pictures never tell the whole story, and that social media tell even less, but apparently on Twitter and Facebook there is enormous support for the local forces and many wishes that they will defeat the “enemies of Islam,” whoever they might be right now.

I wonder what that wounded soldier will have to give up, how many months of therapy he’ll need or get. I wonder whether he’ll find the whole thing “a good learning experience.”

OF WALKING AND EATING

Walking and eating are only two of my many obsessions, though they’re probably the most harmless.  Thanks to street food and the occasional bit of foraging, they can sometimes be combined.

On the Frieze blog last week Erik Morse was interviewing Danish chef René Redzepi whose Copenhagen restaurant noma regularly tops those “best restaurant in the world” listings.  I know Erik a little and he’s a good man, and we’ve had some stimulating conversations, but I’m glad he’s never formally interviewed me, because he has a tendency to ask an opening question of such devastating complexity and high-mindedness (I mean that as a compliment) that I’m sure my mind would go completely blank.  His first question to Redzepi is below.

Erik Morse: Let us begin with one of the most essential, though largely ignored, prerequisites for the experience of food – namely, walking, both as the cartographic source for and biological reason for eating. I am reminded of the Danish philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard, who was known to walk extensively through Copenhagen on a daily basis while sampling the city’s pastries. The history of philosophy and the history of cooking once shared an intimate connection with the activity of walking. That said, why is the idea of walking and foraging such an important component for noma?

René Redzepi: Foraging is important to us for many reasons, although I must say that it doesn’t sum up what noma is …

If you’re walking in the city and suddenly find yourself in need of food it isn’t usually much of a problem – if you can’t find a pastry you, at least you can buy a chocolate bar or a piece of fruit, and chances are you’ll be able to find somewhere to sit down and eat if that’s what you want. I always enjoy Iain Sinclair’s descriptions of the greasy spoon breakfasts he has before setting off on his heroic psychogeographic expeditions.  In fact I’m sure I enjoy the descriptions more than I’d ever enjoy the breakfasts.

Out of town you make sure you’ve got something to eat in your backpack, maybe some landjäge – aka “German walking sausage” - but even so it’s always great to come across something growing that you can eat.  Finding a blackberry bush when out walking always takes me back to walking with my dad when I was a kid.  There used to be a vast field of nettles in the meadow behind the house where I lived in Suffolk, and I always imagined I’d go out there and collect some and make nettle soup, but by the time I’d walked into the meadow I was so thoroughly nettled my mind was rather poisoned against the idea of eating the damn things.  My adventures in Essex at the end of last year, finding oysters while walking on the beach, is about as good as foraging ever gets for me, though I’m sure that by René Redzepi’s standards this would be puny stuff.   By Richard Mabey’s standards too.

Mabey’s book Food for Free, was first published in 1972, and it was still selling when I was a bookseller more than a decade later, (so this foraging notion is some way from being a new-fangled idea).  A new edition is scheduled for this year.  I suspect that over the years far more people have bought the book than have ever gone out foraging, but the notion obviously has broad appeal.  In 1973 Mabey published The Unofficial Countryside, a book that’s become a crucial text for a certain kind of British edgeland enthusiast.  Iain Sinclair writes, “Mabey, like a covert infiltrator, makes an engaged pass at the ugly bits, the dirty folds in the map.”  I find myself wondering if there’s any such thing as a non-covert infiltrator, but let’s not carp.

The walking-eating connection has been much on my mind lately because I’ve been reading a new book, A Man In A Hurry: the extraordinary life and times of Edward Payson Weston, the world’s greatest walker,  which was sent to me by Helen Harris, one of its authors, along with Nick Harris and Paul Marshall.

I came across Weston while researching The Lost Art of Walking, and he did seem an amazing character, one of those late 19^th early 20^th century professional, competitive walkers, who walked the length and breadth of America, and occasionally England, entering races that could be hundreds of miles long, often cheered by vast crowds that Lady Gaga would envy.  Between 1865 and 1879 he walked 53,000 miles, and he kept on walking one way or another until his death in 1929.  I only knew what I’d pieced together from various sources: this, as far as I know, is the first-book length study.

It tells us that when Weston was undertaking a seriously long race, he’d use the first 24 hours to “break the neck” of the walk, hoping to cover 112 miles in that time.  But to accomplish this he’d eat nothing solid, getting by on beef tea, prune tea, coffee, egg yolks, gruel and blancmange.  Once the hard work was done he’d eat a more conventional diet, though one that modern athletes (and walkers) would find pretty heavy - cold beef, mutton chops, potatoes, oranges, lemons, grapes bread and butter and Peek Frean milk biscuits.

Biscuits aside, it seems that Weston also got plenty of energy from chewing coca leaves, which was perfectly legal at the time, and the effects of cocaine were little understood.  But “stimulants” were a mixed blessing for the walker.  In 1885 he competed against Daniel O’Leary – “2,500 miles a day (but not Sunday) in numerous locations until the distance was done.”  By the 44^th day they’d both walked more than 2000 miles, but O’Leary was in bad shape, yelling at Weston and pushing him off the track.  Next they were headed for Chicago, but O’Leary didn’t show up and Weston was declared the winner, though he did carry on to complete the full mileage.

Weston said to a reporter, “You see, about a week before we finished the contest, Dan commenced to take stimulants pretty freely.  I don’t mean that he went on a spree.  But the fact is that he was so exhausted that whisky was the only thing which could keep hi up.  Food had no effect on him … It will be a long time before he will be able to do much walking.”

WALKING WITH TALLING

For a while now I’ve been enjoying derelictlondon.com, a website run by Paul Talling featuring thousands of pictures of derelict, abandoned, or wrecked sites around London.  In fact it’s set me wondering whether somebody, possibly even  me, should write a taxonomy of the different forms and manifestations of ruin - the difference between dereliction and abandonment, between a wreck and a ruin and a hulk, and so on.

The website has the feel of a man walking the streets of London, freely though not quite aimlessly, camera in hand, and photographing every crumbling house, weed-choked railway line, graffiti stained wall, smashed window or roof, every closed down pub and shuttered factory he comes across.  The effect is obsessive and passionate, both unsystematic and all-embracing.  Talling is as fascinated by a burned out milk float as he is by a world war two pillbox. 

All these images are his, and yes, I did ask his permission.  He says on the website, “99% of these pictures were taken by myself during many miles of walkabouts around the great capital. After years of traveling via car or public transport I realised just how little I had seen of London ... Apart from a few tip offs most of the locations on this site are on here because I randomly stumbled upon them when walking down the street.”

It would obviously be pointless to complain about the randomness of his images, since that’s the nature of the beast, but I wasn’t sure how this would translate into book form.  But I just got a copy of the book, published by Random House, and I think it’s even better than the website.

A lot of pruning and concentration has gone on.  There’s more emphasis on the text, which contains some real gems of curious information.  That the Rail Freight Marshalling Yard in Feltham was built by German prisoners of war, that the phrase “going to see a man about a dog” comes from a play titled The Flying Scud, which also gave its name to a pub in Shoreditch, now derelict of course.  That there’s now only one public toilet for every 10,000 people in England: bad news for the urban pedestrian.

It all makes me determined that the next time I’m in London I’ll take a walking expedition to Winchester Palace, the Woodford Town football ground, or the Lambeth Hospital, though there’s no guarantee they'll still be around by the time I get there.

Paul Talling leads walking tours of London’s lost rivers - there’s a book as well.  As far as I know he doesn’t do tours of London dereliction, which strikes me as a shame.   The idea of little gaggles of tourists wandering around grim bits of London admiring collapsed cinemas and half-demolished houses, is extremely appealing.   I’d be there like a shot.

The derelictlondonwebsite is here:

http://www.derelictlondon.com/ 

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.