WALKING, AND OTHER DISTRACTIONS

I only just got round to reading an article I tore out of the paper a couple of weeks back.  It was in the New York Times but it was about walking in Los Angeles, written by David Hochman, and titled “Hollywood’s New Stars: Pedestrians.”  His point was that walking has become cool in some (strictly limited) corners of the Hollywood universe, and of course some celebs are all over it like a cheap leotard. 

Hochman recommends, unironically I think, that meetings should be taken not in an office or over lunch but while walking.  He tells us that Janet Tamaro, who created Rizzoli and Isles “sometimes spends 10 straight hours walking through rewrites (many days her pedometer registers 50,000 steps).” I’m not sure if that’s actual steps pounding the street, or at one those treadmill desks, I suspect it’s the latter, but impressive either way.  Here is Janet Tamaro with Angie Harmon: a couple of very fit looking women.

Actually the most interesting “fact” in the article is that an Australian study has concluded that for each additional hour of TV a person sits and watches each day, the chance of dying rises by 11 percent.   This raises a lot of questions in my pedestrian brain.  I mean, additional to what?  Additional to none?  Surely not, because “chances of dying” are absolutely 100 per cent whether you walk or not.  Chance doesn’t really come into it.  But equally if you suddenly watched 9 and a bit hours of TV a day, would that increase your chances OVER 100% and result in sudden death? I have evidence that it wouldn’t.

There’s a friend of a friend of mine, now in a nursing home here in Los Angeles, who has been unable to walk for the last several years, and I would estimate that he watches TV from his bed for at least twelve hours a day.  He has not died, though he constantly says he wants to.

Anyway, this got me thinking about another article, this one in the LA Times, dated August 5, and headlined “Rise in pedestrian deaths may be due to texting while walking.”  I’ve shared this with a few fellow travellers and the response has been equally split between, “Duh, you think?” and “Hurrah, serves the bastards right.”

To be fair, the article is simply quoting an announcement from Secretary Anthony Foxx of the Department of Transportation who is worried about “distracted walking” in general, and he reckons that texting or listening to music, or even taking drugs, may perhaps all play their part.  That’s why he gets the big bucks.

Alcohol too, naturally, plays its part. I know I’ve banged on about this before, so I’ll bang on about it again, and the article repeats a new version of an old statistic, “Alcohol was involved in half of traffic crashes resulting in pedestrian fatalities, and 37% of pedestrians had a blood alcohol concentration above the legal limit, compared with 13% of drivers involved in crashes.”  This is for the whole of America I think, and is certainly not news to me.  Drunk driving is clearly very bad and wrong, and of course illegal.  Walking drunk on the other hand is not illegal, but is far more likely to kill somebody.  Usually the walker, of course.

RUINENWERTTHEORIE

I’ve written elsewhere on this blog about ruin, war photography and walking, and the way in which the walker so often becomes a compositional element in an image.  Well, it won’t be stopping any time soon. 

Last week, supporters of deposed President Mohamed Morsi attacked dozens of Christian churches in Egypt, justified on the basis that Christians have in general supported the military takeover.  Last Thursday the Evangelical Church of Mallawi (Mallawi being an Egyptian town, south of Cairo), was ransacked looted and burned.

These pictures by Roger Anis show the ruins and the people walking there, and they strike me as wonderful: informative, moving, infinitely depressing.  But even as we resist the aestheticization of ruin, we also know that if the photographs didn’t contain walkers, they wouldn’t be nearly so effective. 

This brings me, in a bathetic sort of way to the cover of the next Nicholson book, titled, perhaps unsurprisingly, Walking In Ruins.

There’ll be far more plugging nearer the time of publication: October.  I didn’t have a whole lot of input on the cover design but the one thing I was absolutely certain of, I didn’t want the image to show a picture of someone walking in ruins.  I didn’t even discuss it with the designer; he simply got it.  

CRUISING ON CROSBY

One of the movies that stays with me, when other bigger, more lavish and more serious movies have been forgotten, is The Trip starring Steve Coogan (ABOVE) and Rob Bryon.  It was shown as a TV series in England.  It’s as much an “eating movie” as it is a “walking movie” but the two lead characters do a fair amount of hiking as they go on the male-bond excursion.

Coogan, I think we can say, has had an interesting personal life, including an affair with Courtney Love: well you’d have to given the chance, wouldn’t you?

Now, one of the few things I know about Courtney Love is that she used to live in Crosby Street in Lower Manhattan, a street I used to know pretty well.  And if you were to ask me to name my favorite “unknown” New York street where I like to walk then I’d say crosby Crosby.  It used to look like this:

It’s where John Updike’s fictional hero Beck also had a loft.  “He lived on the west side of Crosby Street, that especially grim cobbled canyon of old iron-facaded industrial structures running south from Houston, one block east of lower Broadway.” Sound pretty cool: who wouldn’t want to walk there?  That passage is from Bech at Bay, published in 1998.

Like everywhere else in New York it’s been gentrified, but there’s only so much you can do with a “grim cobbled canyon of old iron-facaded industrial structures.” Alicia Leys and Lenny Kravitz had lofts there too: all in the same building as Courtney Love, I think, at number 30.   I don’t believe any of the celebs stayed there long, but then I suspect celebs don’t stay long anywhere.

Anyway Steve Coogan is now starring in the movie The Look of Love about Paul Raymond the “soft-porn baron” as he seems to be described in the movie’s press releases (and that is probably the nicest way anybody has ever described him).  

Coogan says, “You realize you can see too many naked women.  It is possible.   By the end of shooting I just wanted to go for a hike in the hills, alone.”

ON THE DIRTY BOULEVARD (AGAIN)

Just when you think it’s safe to go walking in Hollywood, I find this wonderful picture (by Bob Grueun) of Johnny Thunders striding down the Walk of Fame, sometime in the late seventies I'm guessing - no easy task in those platform boots.  And of course there were times when Johnny had trouble standing, let alone walking, though at some point it may have become all part of the act.

And I discover, improbable as it seems to someone like me who never really followed the Johnny Thunders career, that he did a version of These Boots are Made for Walkin'.  

Of course Lee Hazelwood, of blessed memory, wrote the song to be sung by a man - himself; which is a lousy idea: walking all over women, especially in boots, is obviously bad and wrong.   Nancy Sinatra (at least after the event) took credit for seeing that it could be a great song of female empowerment, and she swept the world with it.  

Johnny Thunders, not the most politically correct of boyfriends, by all accounts, sings it in his own (not entirely inimitable) way.  Here it is on youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wn-Mf0pLSJE