WALKING AND WANDERING

There’s a great piece in the current New Yorker by Joseph Mitchell titled “Street Life: Becoming Part of the City.”  It’s from a previously unpublished memoir: Mitchell died in 1996.  He’s one of those writers that people have either never heard of, or are absolutely besotted by.  There seems to be no middle ground.  He was a great walker and explorer of the whole of New York, and he writes in this piece: “What I really like to do is walk aimlessly in the city.  I like to walk the streets by day and by night.  It is more than a liking, a simple liking – it is an aberration.”

Mitchell was employed by the New Yorker from 1938 until his death, but in 1965, after the publication of the book Joe Gould’s Secret, he essentially stopped writing, though he continued to go into the office, going out for an hour and a half lunch, during which he presumably did a some walking.  He wouldn’t even let his old work be reprinted until 1992 when he allowed Pantheon to published an anthology in called Up In The Old Hotel.

Here’s another extract, from a piece also titled “Up in the Old Hotel.”

“Every now and then, seeking to rid my thoughts of death and doom, I get up early and go down to Fulton Fish Market. I usually arrive around five-thirty, and take a walk through the two huge open-fronted market sheds, the Old Market and the New Market, whose fronts rest on South Street and whose backs rest on piles in the East River. At that time, a little while before the trading begins, the stands to the sheds are heaped high and spilling over with forty to sixty kinds of finfish and shellfish from the East Coast, the West Coast, the Gulf Coast and half a dozen foreign countries. The smoky riverbank dawn, the racket the fishmongers make, the seaweedy smell, and the sight of this plentifulness always give me a feeling of well-being, and sometimes they elate me. I wander among the stands for an hour or so. Then I go into a cheerful market restaurant named Sloppy Louie’s and eat a big, inexpensive, invigorating breakfast ...”

That’s pretty great.  It’s a benign piece, and yet that opening mention of death and doom hangs obligingly over it all.

I was reminded obliquely of Pico Iyer’s introduction to A Wanderer in the Perfect City, a collection of writing by Lawrence Weschler; I always misremember that title and think it’s a walker in the perfect city.  And then sometimes I think it ought to be the perfect walker in the imperfect city. Anyway ...  Iyer writes, “Curiosity is the engine that drives a traveler out into the world, and the true traveler is the one who see (sic) that the world points in two directions. He is fired by his eagerness, his interest in the world, but what it gives back to him in turn is often a strangeness, a confoundingness that is the other half of what we mean by curiosity.”  That’s pretty great too.

Above is the cover of Weschler’s book, that truly amazing photograph is by Helen Levitt.

SONIC HENGE

 If you’re a Facebook friend of Sonic Youth (and let’s face it, they’re an easy bunch to befriend), you get to see all sorts of stuff, including images of the band when they were more youthful, if not necessarily more sonic.  The above picture of them walking, or at least standing, at Stonehenge must have been taken pre-1985, before Steve Shelley was the drummer, before Kim Gordon was even a blonde.

I walked around Stonehenge for the first time last year.  I’d driven past it in a car a few times but for some reason had never got out and investigated.   These days the casual visitor can’t get very close to the stones at all, and is kept at a distance and has to walk around a pedestrian loop, though I think special “walk among the stones” tours are also available at certain times.  Once it was evidently much easier.

The fact is, just like Sonic Youth, everybody I saw there wants to be photographed posing with the henge in the background, including this Buddhist monk who I thought might have been there with a higher purpose.

Very few of the visitors seemed to be experiencing any deep mystical vibe, but thinking of Britain’s ancient stones led me to Julian Cope, and eventually via the eternal present of the internet, to an interview he did with Sirona Knight and Michael Starwyn at the time his album 20 Mothers was released, in 1995.  The link to the full interview is here:

http://www.dcsi.net/~bluesky/bs8.htm

I haven’t followed Cope’s career all that closely but I know he wrote a book, and did a TV series titled The Modern Antiquarian, which everybody seems to think is a pretty good guide to the ancient sites of Britain.  There’s now a website with the same name.   What I didn’t know, but should probably have guessed, is that he’s apparently a great walker.

In the interview he says he visited over 500 ancient sites, and walked along ancient trackways. "I walk on the sacred landscape with a dictaphone and I sing my songs straight out as the Spirit moves me. That's an artist's duty--to recognize what flame moves within him and I recognized a totally different flame."

“I write on the land. I just walk. Normally it all comes at once. I've walked over 1500 miles in the last 8 months, always on the neolithic trackways. The whole Avebury system is this huge grid of neolithic trackways, ceremonial trackways. Whenever I am reenacting these walks, I am reenacting the walks of people who repeated these ritual walks for 1500 years. I am now able to descend into the mist, into the other dimension.”

         Well, there was certainly none of that going on at Stonehenge when I was there, which is a shame.  Cope also wrote a song titled Gotta Walk.  Lyrics here:

Greedhead policestate

Admit your mistake

Paranoid

Paranoia

Here to go, baby

Here to beat Daddy

Here to catch a falling star

Save yourself some money

Run behind a taxi

Walk behind a funeral car.

Doomy doomy doomy

Yet I'm feelin' gloomy

Still I hate to screw my Ma...

I gotta walk - walk walk walk - gotta walk - I'm hip... I'll walk

Video here if that's the kind of thing that you're into:

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

THE QUESTION EVERYBODY’S ASKING

 The question is this: “But is it safe to wear high heels when exercising?”  Don’t ask me, I haven’t a clue, but Elise Sole (a made up name surely) has some answers on shine.com. in an article headlined "Would You Exercise in High Heels?"  You can look it up, I'm sure.  She certainly doesn't seem to regard walking as exercise.

She tells us about a class taught by certified (in some sense anyway) fitness instructor Kamilah Barrett, 35, called “Heel Hop”  “a no-impact hour of strength-training that helps women develop cardio vascular strength and the confidence and skill to rock high-heeled shoes.”  Yes, it’s the lack of confidence that’s really the root of the problem, I expect.

Then there are Stiletto Fitness Classes in Kansas City, M.O. "core and lower body high-impact strength and training fitness class." That’s high impact as opposed to no impact.  “Created by former dancer Coryelle Abney in July 2012, her class helps women look graceful wearing heels while offering a serious calorie burn.”  No downside to that.

But then of course a doctor gets dragged in, Dr. Elisa M. Kavanagh, DPM, who treats the New York City Rockettes. She says, "I wouldn't advise women to bring their Jimmy Choos to a class like this.  If you're curious, wear character shoes (they look like a classic Mary Jane with a chunky heel) that are flexible and designed for stomping, kicking, and twirling.”  I see: character shoes with a chunky heel.  You haven't quite grasped this concept, have you doc?

And above, for no very good reason, is Lindsay Lohan – I’ll bet she does a lot of things in high heels that aren’t entirely safe, walking being one of them.

THE LAST PSYCHOGEOGRAPHER ON EARTH

I’ve been thinking about Immanuel Kant, author of The Critique of Pure Reason, and Charlton Heston, star of The Omega Man.

 Immanuel Kant, 1724 – 1804, lived his whole life in Konigsberg, in Prussia, what is now Kaliningrad, in Russia. He was man of rigorous habits and walked every day as he thought and philosophized.  So regular were these walks that people said you could set your clock by the time Kant strolled past, even though there seems to be no absolute agreement about exactly where he walked.

In the early 2000s an artist named Joachim Koester created The Kant Walks, doing his best to plot and then walk Kant’s route or routes. The proposition was made trickier given that large parts of the city were destroyed by Allied bombing at the end of World War Two, and the center was never rebuilt.  Koester took some gorgeously bleak photographs along the way.

Koester writes, “… Kant’s walk is often invoked but rarely specified.  A walk is like a manual, a way to engage in space, a recipe to follow but also to improvise with, allowing for drifting, losing oneself.”

And so, at the end of last week I found myself in downtown Los Angeles drifting and improvising, trying to follow in some of the footsteps of Charlton Heston, as taken in the The Omega Man, based on Richard Matheson’s novel I Am Legend.  Charlton, playing Robert Neville, is nearly but not quite the last man on earth, but most of the ones that remain are zombie-ish vampire types.  I admit I get slightly lost on the detail.

Tracking Charlton Heston is certainly easier than tracking Kant, not least because one or two online movie obsessives have already done some of the spade work.  Everyone says how much downtown LA has been revitalized but there are still some amazing pockets of neglect and desolation.  I happened to walk along Skid Row, and amid the many homeless people there was an old black man with dreadlocks who was carrying a hammer, and thought that the tarmac of the road needed a lot of hammering, which he duly delivered.

Above is Charlton Heston walking along Santee Street, and below is the street as it is is today.  Some buildings are gone, some spruced up, but the basic structure is perfectly recognizable from the movie. This is the building at the end of the street that Heston's walking towards.

 Then there’s the Olympic movie theater where Heston goes repeatedly to watch Woodstock (your guess is as good as mine). 

Not sure if the resolution's good enough, but there's a fallout shelter sign to the right of the theateris frontage.  The place is now a store selling elaborate decorative furnishings - complete with a sign that says everything must go – but the place where movie titles could de displayed is still intact.

And here, not very far away, is a remnant from a now closed down jewelry store, once so successful they could even replace the sidewalk.  I'd definitely have had that in the movie.

 And then, completely untouched as far as I could tell, exactly as in the movie, although with new buildings in the distance, is the Water and Power building at First Street and Hope.

It’s hard to see the building from many of the surrounding streets because it’s right behind Gehry’s Disney Hall, and of course in the normal run of events, you’re not likely to go there unless you have some business concerning water and power.  However, and this is truly a wonder, the building is surrounded by water – it’s MOATED – with a bridge, though not a drawbridge as far as I could tell.

At the end of the afternoon I went into the Last Book Store, a huge and I hope not doomed enterprise, and found a used copy of The Image Of The City by Kevin Lynch, a 1960s city planner, and a pioneer of one psychogeography according to some sources, a book which contains this terrific passages:  “It must be granted that there is some value in mystification, labyrinth or surprise in the environment ... This is so, however, only under two conditions.  First, there must be no danger of losing basic form or orientation, of never coming out … Furthermore, the labyrinth or mystery must in itself have some form that can be explored and in time be apprehended.  Complete chaos without a hint of connection is never pleasurable.”  Something I suspect that we could all agree on, Imannuel Kant and Charlton Heston, included.