WALKING WITH WOJNAROWIZ (SORT OF)

         “Take a walk along any river in any country, and one can see that the machine is almost defunct. God is rusting away leaving a fragile shell. Factories are like the shell of an insect that has metamorphosed into an entirely different creature and flown away.”  From In The Shadow of the American Dream: The Diaries of David Wojnarowicz.

         I’m not one of those people who has any great nostalgia for the bad, bad old days of New York City.  The first couple of times I went there, in the middle and late 1970s, the place was terrifying; abrasive, threatening, teetering on the brink of a bankruptcy that didn’t seem merely financial.  Having prostitutes, drug dealers or muggers on every street corner was undoubtedly very gritty and bracing, but it made walking around a hazardous and daunting prospect; not that I didn’t do it.  I felt as though I’d accomplished something, simply by surviving those streets.  And god knows I didn’t walk through the worst of it,

         There was an occasion when I took a Greyhound bus up to Poughkeepsie where I had some friends of friends, and at this point I’m not sure exactly what route the bus took, but not long after we’d left the bus station we seemed to be travelling through a war zone: burned out cars, derelict buildings, kids playing in rubble, a few desperate, homeless refugees pushing shopping carts.

         I didn’t consider myself a sensitive flower but I was really shocked by all this.  It was a genuinely appalling spectacle even as it was an utterly compelling one.  It was impossible not to stare and wonder.  How could one of the world’s great cities have come to this?  And above all, I was very, very glad that I was on the bus, and not out there on foot trudging through this blasted cityscape.  I had compassion for the poor souls out there, but I was very, very glad not to be of them.  It didn’t look very sexy out there.

The picture above is by Olivier Rebbot, and is titled “116th Street and Seventh Avenue, Harlem, New York City, March 1977, USA,” and I suspect the bus didn’t pass through precisely this zone, but the view is much as I remember it, though the man on the tricycle doesn't look entirely miserable.

These days, however New York, and especially Manhattan, is so prosperous, so pleasant, so spruced up that, while still resisting any nostalgia de la boue, even I find myself wishing it had a bit more patina, a few more rough edges.  Even when you find a rusted sign for a bar or a store you can’t be sure it’s genuine: there’s always a possibility it’s been deliberately antiqued to appeal to the hipsters. 

I did find a couple of places of fascinating ruin when I was in New York earlier this year, though you might argue about how “authentic” they were.  The first was the Irish Hunger Memorial, a half acre site commemorating the Great Irish Famine, of 1845–52.  It’s right down at the bottom end of Manhattan, on Vesey Street, close to the Hudson River, part of Battery Park, which means that it’s right by the World Trade Center.  Incredibly, improbably, as it surely seems, work started on the Hunger Memorial in March 2001, and was completed in July 16, 2002, rising from the ruined landscape all around it, while itself being a kind of ruin.

The Irish Hunger Memorial is like a chunk of old Ireland, magically transported to the New World, though in fact it’s a man-made slab of hillside, with paths, stone walls, and Irish grasses and wild flowers, and there are 32 large stones scattered about the land, one from each Irish county.

There’s also a ruined a fieldstone cottage, brought over from Carradoogan in County Mayo.  It seems to have been in use until the 1960s, and was owned by the Slack family who donated it to the memorial in memory of their relatives who emigrated to America and thrived.  So it is, in some sense, a genuine ruin; ancient stone, a rustic fireplace, no windows, no roof, and the last of these features meant that when I was there it was possible to stand inside the ruined cottage, and look up and see the almost completed World Trade Center rising above it.  If the symbolism seemed all too obvious it was none the less moving for that.

         A few miles to the north, a longish walk but a good one, still on the west side of Manhattan, by Riverside Park, on the banks of the Hudson River, in some sense actually standing IN the Hudson River, are the remains of the 69th Street Transfer Bridge, a black, decaying, deeply impressive industrial ruin, that looks like a misplaced signal gantry, possibly a kind of crane, or an elaborate scaffolding structure, its actual function unguessable unless you happen to know that it was built in 1911 as part of the New York Central Railroad. It enabled railway rolling stock to be transferred from the rails and onto boats, then floated across the river to the freight marshaling yards in Weehawken, New Jersey.

         It fell into disuse in the 1970s, and nobody seems to have thought too much about it at the time, since the city had other, more pressing concerns, which meant that a form of benign neglect took over, and the bridge survived, decaying gently but remaining essentially intact until 2003, when conservationists took notice and it appeared on the National Register of Historic Places.  It’s right there on the list along with the Brooklyn Bridge and the Chrysler Building.

         I’ve found some contradictory information about the future of the bridge.  One source suggests there are plans to turn it into “a waterfront amenity for ferry/water taxi access,” which sounds unlikely to me.  A more intriguing source has it that the 69^th Street Transfer Bridge is going to be allowed to decay still further, to fall into absolute ruin, which I suppose means that it will eventually disappear completely.  I like the sound of that.  It seems like a very special kind of ruin, philosophical as well as physical, and it moves me even more than the Irish Hunger Memorial.

 That walk from the Hunger Memorial to the 69^th Street Transfer Bridge will most likely take you past the Chelsea piers, now more or less safe, family-friendly leisure facilities, but not very so long ago, in the 1970s, they were the site of all manner of (chiefly male, gay) sexual subversion.   I certainly didn’t go down to the piers on my visits to New York in those days, and I’m not sure I even knew they existed, but I didn’t doubt there was plenty of sexual subversion going on all over the city.  The picture below is by Alvin Baltrop.

And now, life being the way it is, I’ve just discovered an essay by Fiona Anderson titled ‘Soon all this will be picturesque ruins’: Cruising Manhattan’s derelict waterfront,  which was presented at The Courtauld Institute, in 2011, as part of a conference titled Intersections: Architecture and Poetry.  Anderson quotes David Wojnarowicz extensively, having examined his archive - those words in quotation marks are the subtitle of a Wojnarowicz essay – and she concludes that “For Wojnarowicz, the waterfront was a space that facilitated not only functional and geographical appropriation and overlap; in doing so, it permitted temporal palimpsestuality too.”  Well you’ve said a mouthful there Fiona: palimpsestuality indeed!

She also quotes the novelist Andrew Holleran, one of whose characters, in a work titled Nostalgia For The Mud,  asks  “Why do gays love ruins? … The Lower West Side, the docks. Why do we love slums so much? [...] Why do I feel a strange sense of freedom the moment I enter a decaying neighborhood?”  And I suppose obvious answer might be that slums and ruins are places where, historically, gay men have gone to have furtive and anonymous sex.  Wojnarowicz did too, but he liked to imagine the guys he picked up bore some relation to great literary figures such as Genet and Mayakovsky.  To be fair he also made art there too.

A website titled backinthegays.com reports that "Greenwich Village in New York City was a homosexual’s dream come true in the 1970′s and early 80′s.  You could literally walk down Christopher Street and have sex as much as you wanted, anytime that you wanted to. Men fucked on the pier, in the trucks, in alleys and doorways and in bookstores, and bars backrooms.”

I don’t claim to know much about male homosexual desire, though I think I have some insights into the heterosexual variety.  To be able to literally walk down the street (as opposed to metaphorically walking down the street, I suppose) and having as much sex as you want, sounds like the kind of thing most heterosexual men would be very enthusiastic about.  And it would of course be crass to imply that having all the sex you wanted might lead to a different kind of ruin.

I’m sure it’s just as easy to ruin yourself in New York today as it always has been, but now the architecture and infrastructure no longer quite support the conflation of ruined body with ruined environment.  The ruins are stabilized, tidied up, appreciated. Many sexual subversives now want to walk down the aisle rather than among the piers.  I have a certain amount of trouble knowing whether that’s a good or a bad thing.

DRIFTING WITH DIDION

Franklin Avenue is one of the less glamorous and less celebrated streets of Los Angeles.  It runs parallel to, and just a little north of, Sunset and Hollywood Boulevards but it lacks their fame and name recognition, and I’m sure a lot of people think of it simply as an access road to the freeway.  I can’t say I’m deeply upset about this lack of love, yet a drift along Franklin Avenue reveals various wonders for the Hollywood Walker. 

Franklin starts in the Los Feliz district and runs west for five miles or so, ending up in the lower Hollywood Hills, at Wattles Garden Park.  Near the eastern end you’ll see the Shakespeare Bridge, not a genuine architectural folly I suppose, since it’s a perfectly functional bridge, but its gothic styling is pure decoration. And you might consider it a distant cousin of the similarly folly-ish Sowdon House a few miles further along, a “Mayan-revival” house built by Lloyd Wright, son of Frank.

Franklin Avenue is also the location of the unimprovably named House of Pies, and of the 101 Coffee Shop which in a previous incarnation featured in Swingers, a movie that in general plays cinematic havoc with the geography of east Hollywood and Los Feliz (characters are seen standing outside one bar but when they go inside they’re in the interior of  a quite different one, that kind of thing).  However, Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau supposedly wrote the screenplay in the coffee shop, which may be why they depict it more or less faithfully.

Janis Joplin died of a heroin overdose in the Highland Gardens Hotel, at 7047 Franklin, which is next to the legendary Magic Castle, where magicians of varying degrees of finesse ply their trade.  Gary Cooper lived at 7511 Franklin, with his parents.

But for me, and for others of a literary frame of mind, Franklin Avenue may be most notable as the street where Joan Didion and her husband John Gregory Dunne, lived in the late 1960s.  Mentions of the "Franklin Avenue house" crop up in various places in Didion’s work, but most crucially in The White Album, published in 1979.  She tells us that there was a former Canadian embassy on one side, a center for Synanon (a dubious drug rehabilitation program) on the other.  By her own account, things were extremely freewheeling inside her house, though of course there was a lot of that around back then.

She writes, “In the big house on Franklin Avenue many people seemed to come and go without relation to what I did. I knew where the sheets and towels were kept but I did not always know who was sleeping in every bed. I had the keys but not the key. I remember taking a 25-mg. Compazine one Easter Sunday and making a large and elaborate lunch for a number of people, many of whom were still around on Monday. … I remember a babysitter telling me that she saw death in my aura. I remember chatting with her about reasons why this might be so, paying her, opening all the French windows and going to sleep in the living room."

Things changed however, with the Manson killings and she and her husband and daughter, Quintana Roo, moved away to safety.  Didion said in an interview, “There were a lot of rumors about stuff, a lot of stuff going on around town, which you would kind of hear about on the edges of your mind and not want to know any more about. After the fact, it was kind of amazing to see how many lives had intersected with the Manson Family's … Later, I was interviewing Linda Kasabian, who was the wheel person -- she wasn't the "wheel man," she was the "wheel person" -- for the LaBianca murder. I can't remember. Maybe also for Tate. But anyway, the night they did the LaBianca murder, they were driving along Franklin Avenue looking for a place to hit, and that's where we lived, and we had French windows open, lights blazing all along on the street.”

I walk along various stretches of Franklin Avenue all the time, and once in a while I’ve thought I might go looking for the Didion house, but it always seemed too difficult. The only real visual clues I had were in the famous Julian Wasser photographs of Joan and her yellow Corvette, but all you can see is a section of wall and a perfectly ordinary looking garage.  That didn’t seem nearly enough to go on.

         I had also seen a picture of Didion sitting on a balustrade, but I wasn’t sure it was at the Franklin Avenue house, and in any case it was apparently in a back garden, and most likely wouldn’t be visible from the street.

         Finding the house was not a major obsession, and I can’t say I actually craved to find the place, but then I was rereading The Year of Magical Thinking, and found this passage:

“One night that summer he (John Gregory Dunne) asked me to drive home after dinner at Anthea Sylbert's house on Camino Palmero in Hollywood. I remember thinking how remarkable this was. Anthea lived less than a block from the house on Franklin Avenue in which we had lived from 1967 until 1971, so it was not a question of reconnoitering a new neighborhood. It had occurred to me as I started the ignition that I could count on my fingers the number of times I had driven when John was in the car; the single other time I could remember that night was once spelling him on a drive from Las Vegas to Los Angeles. He had been dozing in the passenger seat of the Corvette we then had. He had opened his eyes. After a moment he had said, very carefully, ‘I might take it a little slower.’ I had no sense of unusual speed and glanced at the speedometer: I was doing 120.

I completely remembered the part about her doing 120 but I’d not taken in the reference to Camino Palmero, and now it seemed a revelation.  If they’d lived on Franklin Avenue, less than a block from Camino Palmero, then surely it couldn’t be too hard to find the place.  I started my drift.

As I walked along Franklin, and approached what I knew had to be the right area, there were a surprising number of huge houses that looked like they might have been embassies at some time.   Quite what a Synanon center looked like, I had no idea.  But I did notice quite a few big, new apartment buildings that had clearly been built since 1971, so it seemed possible that the Didion house might have been demolished in the intervening years.  I did so hope not.

         Naturally, some quests are more prolonged than others, but to cut a short story even shorter, after a couple of the most minor false starts, I spotted the garage.  There was no mistaking it.  The two sliding doors had been replaced by a single up and over, but the tiled roof, the molding below it, the size, and shape, were quite clearly the same.  This was where Ms. D had parked her yellow Corvette, where she’d stood and posed for Julian Wasser’s photographs.  Eureka.

        And what kind of house was attached to a garage like this?  Well, rather a grand one it turned out, perhaps not strictly in the embassy class, but big and swanky enough for most tastes, and no doubt much refurbished since the Didion years.  Zillow.com, I subsequently discovered, think it’s worth $3.3m.

         The front garden gate was locked, and I wouldn’t have gone in even if it had been open.  I take seriously the “armed response” threat that looms over so many houses in LA.  However, there was a short, open driveway at the side of the house with parking for a few cars: only one was there now.  By walking to the end of the driveway I’d be able to get a look at the back garden.  I knew from reading my Didion that her daughter had played a lot of tennis on a court in there.  Nobody was going to shoot me just for peering into the garden were they, surely?

And when I got to the end of the driveway, the garden gate was wide open and there was a sign that read “Welcome to Shumei Hollywood Garden.”  It didn’t exactly look “public,” but an open gate and a welcome sign says to me “come on inside.”  I’d never heard of Shumei: I figured it wasn’t some Mansonite, or even Synanon style, organization, though I guessed they were believers of some sort.  In I went.

The garden was big, at least an acre, maybe two, and full of vegetable beds, in quantity, and elaborately arranged, with irrigation systems and trellises: it didn’t look like it was just some hobbyist growing a few tomatoes and onions for his or her own use.   There was no sign whatsoever of a tennis court.  And there was no sign of any people either, nobody working on the garden, but I assumed there had to be somebody around somewhere because of the car on the drive.  And sure enough after five minutes or so a lean, delicate, serene young man came out of the house and offered greetings.

He gave me a very quick run down on Shumei tenets: natural agriculture, art and beauty, spiritual enlightenment.  Shumei, I’ve since learned, also involves Jyorei “a healing art that by focusing spiritual light gradually penetrates and dissolves the spiritual clouds that cause physical, emotional, and personal dilemmas.” The website has a first person account of a woman who was cured of cancer. But we didn’t really go into that: actually we had a discussion about gardening.  The “natural agriculture” they practice is just staggering rigorous, no fertilizers, not even the organic kind.  I said how amazing it was to find this piece of lush horticultural land right here, so close to Hollywood Boulevard.  Yes indeed, my young man agreed, and apparently it had once been very different, there’d even been a tennis court.  I was ready to swoon.

The young man said he’d only been with Shumei for two years, and I may have been jumping to conclusions, but I didn’t think he looked like a Didion reader, so I didn’t turn the conversation that way, but he did tell me that the Shumei folks had been in residence for 34 years, which would mean they got there in 1979, some years after the Didion-Dunnes left, but in fact the same year that The White Album was published.

         I didn’t linger too long, didn’t want to overstay my welcome, and to be honest I feared I might get roped in for some enforced spiritual enlightenment, but looking from the garden toward house I now saw a balustrade, unmistakably the same one that Joan is sitting on in the picture up above.  That pleased me so much.  More than that, finding the house, finding this curious spiritual oasis, walking around the garden with this disciple, well, what can I tell you, it all seemed very, very much like being inside a piece of writing by Joan Didion.

         I’ve been reading and loving Joan Didion’s work for rather a long time now, and as with so many youthful enthusiasms I sometimes think maybe I’ve outgrown it.  But before doing this walk I returned again to The White Album, and dipped into a few other books, and the thing that struck me, the thing that so few people say about Didion: she’s an hilarious, and absolutely deadpan, writer.  People make her out to be a kind of Sylvia Plath.  Sometimes I think Anita Loos would be a better comparison.

Here from The White Album, again referring to her years in the Franklin Avenue house, “It seems to me now that during those years I was always writing down the license numbers of panel trucks, panel trucks circling the block, panel trucks idling at the intersection. I put these license numbers in a dressing-table drawer where they could be found by the police when the time came.”

If you don’t find that pretty darn hysterical, you might as well move to Malibu.
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In the interests of absolutely full disclosure, I should say that Anthony Miller, the well known psychogeographer and author of encyclopedic fictions, accompanied me on the important part of this drift.