WALKING IN MANHATTAN WITH GARRY AND RON

 I’ve been doing some walking in Manhattan.  I didn’t go there specifically to do any walking but, as I’ve said many times before, New York is a place where people end up doing a lot of walking, whether they intend to or not.  And I think there’s something suitably Zen about this, that some of the best walks happen when you don’t intend to do a “walk.”

It was when I lived in New York that I first started carrying a camera with me full time, sometimes walking the streets pretending to be Garry Winogrand, or someone.  Of course, New York explodes with quirky, unexpected, eye-catching details, and characters. Even so I was slightly surprised to find this sign on a street in Hell’s Kitchen, on a day in mid-May when the temperature was pushing 80 degrees F.

It reminded me of my favourite bit of New York street art, this wonderful faux Ed Ruscha piece - not quite a mural, since it's not painted directly on the wall  - at the Gaseteria at the corner of Houston and Lafayette. 

Obviously it didn’t always have a pile of snow in front of it, but having taken the picture, that’s the way I always remember it. There’s still a gas station on the site, but it’s no longer the Gaseteria, just a BP station, thriving as far as I could tell, with many yellow cabs using it, and the faux Ruscha has gone - perhaps even to a loving home.  This is not surprising and it would have been absurd to "preserve" it in perpetuity, but still, I sort of miss it.

My wife and I were walking down Fifth Avenue and we were discussing the women and high heels in New York.   She said that she wasn’t seeing any New York women in high heels.  This surprised me.  When I lived there my impression was that the streets were full of them, and then as if to prove my point, up ahead I saw a very well-dressed woman wearing extremely high heels, a woman, it must be said, who looked amazingly short, which was perhaps why she needed the heels.

And then, a split second later, I realized this was a “famous person” – Nina Garcia – one of the judges of Project Runway (yes, yes, my wife sometimes makes me watch it) and also Creative Director of Marie Claire Magazine, whatever that might involve. Nina was struggling to find the right shiny black SUV that was there to take her wherever she was going next.  There were quite a few of them parked in the vicinity, and the streets and traffic of New York were unrelenting.  The first shiny black SUV she went to wouldn’t let her in.  She did some yelling, both at the driver and into her cell phone.  I reached for my camera. 

I got a shot, though alas I couldn't get the shoes.  I felt like Garry Winogrand, or maybe Ron Galella.

CAPERING WITH KEATS

And speaking of John Keats and things writ in, or on, water, I discovered an Italian “street artist” named Guildor who cuts letters out of foam and arranges them into words and phrases containing vaguely uplifting sentiments (in Italian), phrases like “Think thoughtless,” “Love, let the rest flow,” or “Happiness happens.”  At least that’s how they were translated by the New Yorker.  He then ties the letters together using nylon cord and floats them on the surface of Italian rivers; I’m not honestly sure which rivers to be honest.

This reminds me of a time I went walking by the canal in Sheffield a few years back.  Growing up in Sheffield I never even knew there was a canal, but now that the heavy industry has died in Sheffield, many of the remaining industrial relics have been cleaned up, turned into heritage, and made accessible as a walking route.

I was there by the Sheffield canal one Sunday afternoon with a companion, and we were walking on the towpath and suddenly we saw a big foam letter floating along the canal towards us.  It was the letter Y.

Now, my pal, a man of spiritual inclination and yearning, suggested that the universe was sending us a message, encouraging us to consider the big questions: Why? Why indeed?  Why anything?  I, being less that way inclined was reminded of the old Simpsons episode, you know the one with Ringo Starr, in which Marge becomes a painter, and there’s a show in an art gallery and one of the  paintings looks like this:

Still, it was a good walk by the Sheffield canal.  And there are many, far worse things to find floating in the water than a big foam letter.

KEATS IN HOLLYWOOD

This is a true story, not just based on one.  I was walking on Hollywood Boulevard, in the section with the Walk of Fame, looking at all the unhappy tourists walking along beside and around me.  I know that tourists can be unhappy anywhere, but they always seem especially unhappy on Hollywood Boulevard,

I was walking alongside a father and his young son, maybe ten years old, and the two of them were looking at the stars in the sidewalk.  They didn’t seem very impressed.  I wouldn’t claim to be able completely to analyze the pair’s social and class markers, but I think it meant quite a lot that in an effort to enthuse his boy the father suddenly spotted a star that drew his attention and he said excitedly,   “Hey look, it’s a star for John Deere!”  That would be John Deere the 19^th century blacksmith and inventor, best known in America today for being the name of a line of tractors.

Deere struck me as an unlikely candidate for having a star on the Walk of Fame, but for all I knew he might conceivably have had some odd but crucial part in the history of movie technology.   But as I looked down at the sidewalk, I heard the father groan and say sadly to his son, “Oh, it’s not John Deere, it’s John Derek.  Whoever that is.”

Ah me.  And I thought, though I didn’t say, “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.”  We get a lot of that in Hollywood.

HAPPY HIKING WITH HARRY

And here’s a thing.  A friend just sent me this inscrutable image, found floating around in the eternal spotless void of the internet:

 It comes with the caption: “Happy Harry Herman, the 77 year old hermit of Hollywood, takes his daily morning walk in Los Angeles.  Throughout the year, he wears nothing else than his loincloth and sandals.  California USA.  Photograph November 4, 1933."

Can this really be a photograph from 1933?   I’d never have guessed so, though I’m prepared to believe that it is – the street looks suitably empty, but a little research, online and off, doesn’t produce any further information.  If you have any, do please share.  Perhaps you can even identify where he is, I can only guess.

And the fact is, this does look like an image created for outsiders.  Anybody who lives in LA knows that although this is a very warm and pleasant city most of the time, it really isn’t so warm that you could go around half naked every day of the year.  You’d freeze on certain days.  Maybe people were made of sterner stuff in 1933, especially the hermits.