THE WALKING CITY WALK

If you type “walking” and “city” into a search engine you’ll most likely come up with lists of the world’s supposedly great walking cities – San Francisco, Boston, London, Paris, etc.  I suppose this is what most people are looking for.

But shortly after those “walking cities” you get references to “The Walking City,” something conceived by Ron Herron, in 1964 when he was part of Archigram, a group of avant-garde, speculative “futurist” architects based around the Architectural Association in London.  It was the name of their magazine too.

Herron’s idea, simultaneously quite absurd and utterly appealing, was of a city made up of separate structures, pods rather than what we think of as buildings, and these pods would have legs, and they could stroll around the world, or at least around whatever landmass they happened to be on, moving from one environment to another as conditions demanded, joining up with and separating from other similarly pods as they went, constantly forming and reforming themselves into fresh groupings and communities.  This would probably have played havoc with the kids’ schooling, but after all it was only speculative.

Anab Jain, who is founder and director of something called Superflux, and for some reason is quoted all over the net,  writes, “The citizen is therefore a serviced nomad not totally dissimilar from today's executive cars.”  (Might want to run that through the grammar check, but we get the idea.)  To which I would respond, well, yes and no.  If you ask me it’s actually more similar to a man in a car towing a caravan, or a man sleeping in the back of his Volkswagen Beetle, which doesn’t seen inherently futurist; but more of that later.

As all this indicates, Herron’s idea wasn’t actually of a whole city that walked, but rather of individual components that walked in order to create cities.  For a genuine walking city we might look to Zodanga, as it appears in the movie John Carter,  he “of Mars” fame, based on the Edgar Rice Burroughs novels.

This is not an area where I claim any great expertise, but as I understand it this version of a walking city was invented by the movie makers.  In Burroughs’ novels Zodanga was a conventional, land-rooted city with 75 feet high walls, though in different books it did pop up in different and contradictory locations.  This seems to have been the result of careless writing rather anything else.  Putting the city on legs and making it mobile was an explanatory in-joke for John Carter fans, which box office receipts suggest is a fairly limited constituency.  Did the writers and designers of the movie know about Ron Herron’s Walking City?  Well, I’ll just bet they did.

Ditto the writers of the Simpsons.  In the end, my favourite moving, if not actually walking, city is the Simpsons’ Springfield.  In the episode Trash of the Titans, the environment has become so polluted, thanks to Homer, that the whole city has to be moved some miles down the road to a new location so its citizens can start polluting anew.  I can't find an image of Springfield in motion, but here's one of the dump.

Springfield is transported on trucks rather than on its own legs, and of course a city on wheels has certain disadvantages compared with a city on legs, essentially that it  needs a road, or at least a smoothish track, to move on.  And of course this is a problem with all wheeled vehicles.  Fortunately, to remedy this various “futurists” or customizers have imagined a Volkswagen Beetle with legs, and have gone so far as to actually build a few of them.  Here's one in Nevada (if my memory serves), with your blogger underneath.

OK, such Beetles aren’t actually functional, and they don’t actually walk anywhere, they’re essentially works of the imagination, but you know so is Zodanga, so is Ron Herron’s Walking City.  Some of us can live with that.


The Archigram archive can be found here:


http://archigram.westminster.ac.uk/index.php 

OLD MISTER COURAGE

Now, I am not for a moment suggesting that Berholt Brecht was some kind of hypocritical leftwing blowhard, but I have been reading his Journals, and he certainly is damn annoying.

He moved to LA in 1941, and you’d have thought he might at the very least be somewhat happy to be there, and out of Europe, but hell no – he makes all the usual jejune complaints about LA – it’s artificial, it doesn’t have seasons, people are materialistic. Ho hum.

There are in fact one or two things that he finds “rather amusing” – California oak tress, lemon thickets, the occasional gas station, but complains “all this lies behind plate glass.”  By which he means that he sees it all through the window of a car "going to Beverley Hills": he actually lived in Santa Monica, in this house, so you can see how he suffered.  

The blindingly obvious response is, well if you object so strongly to seeing things through plate glass, why not get out of the damn car and walk?

But just when you think yes, possibly he is some hypocritcial leftwing blowhard you might turn to “A Worker Looks at History” written in 1936, which contains the lines:

     I hear Mexicans are taking your jobs away.

     Do they sneak into town at night,

     and as you’re walking home with a whore,

     do they mug you, a knife at your throat,

     saying, I want your job?

This is a sentiment that ought to find plenty of traction in Los Angeles today.

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.”