FEELING HER FEET

My unfortunate but oddly cheerful sister-in-law has just had part of her right leg removed, a “below knee amputation” necessitated by complications from diabetes.  The amputation didn’t come as much of a surprise.  She’s never been healthy, and has long been enormously, dangerously overweight, hence the diabetes.  Inevitably she has never been much of a walker.

         

Along the way there have been a few moments of optimism, generally coinciding with periods of weight loss, times when she could, with difficulty, get around, but increasingly she’s had to use a wheelchair.  In recent days, even when she managed to get out of the chair, walking was scarcely possible since her feet were had no feeling in them, nerve damage being a prime symptom of diabetes.  It’s extremely hard to put one foot in front of another if you can’t feel where those feet are.

         

However, now that her foot and part of her leg have been amputated she’s got some feeling back. Yes, in the absence of parts of her actual limb, she has developed feelings in their phantom versions.  Just another of nature’s little black jokes.

WALK IN THE NEW

And so, on New Year’s Day - the first walk of the new year.  No need to get too intrepid about it – an hour and a half up and down the Hollywood Hills, including the wonderfully named Tuxedo Terrace, sun shining, the spirit of Christmas fading away slowly but surely.  The Santa Claus on top of the lamp post had already gone, but the Peanuts gang were still in situ, alongside a very stylish mail box.

Elsewhere the party was more definitely over, and I know it’s never easy to get rid of a big old Christmas tree, and these people have at least put a small amount of thought into what to do with theirs. Cutting off the branches is certainly a start, but not the complete solution, I’m thinking.

And to show that some kind of party, must have ended in some kind of chaos, here, carefully placed atop some kind of fire hydrant, was a woman’s single shoe, sort of elegant (red suede), sort of clunky (a cork platform).

 I always think there’s something infinitely melancholy about a single shoe lying in the street.  You can think of various reasons for losing a shoe – it dropped out of your bag, both shoes simply hurt too much, and you took them off and carried on walking barefoot, but it was night and you dropped one of them and  it slid down the hill and you couldn’t find it in the dark, or maybe something genuinely Dionysian took place, shoes, clothes, inhibitions, everything was tossed into the winds and the next day only a shoe remained. 

And maybe somebody is saying to themselves right now, “I wonder what happened to that red suede platform shoes of mine, I know I was wearing it at the party.”   Better get down there quick.  One way or another, I’m guessing it won’t stay on top of that hydrant for very long.

And finally (above) a couple of girls from the past who are walking into the future, via treadmill, wearing the correct number of shoes, which actually look like tap shoes to me.  You wouldn't want to lose one of them.

HOLLYWOOD CHRISTMAS PAST

I suppose there are a lot of people who “go for a walk” at Christmas who’d never dream of doing it the rest of the year.  It’s a thing you do on your holidays, it’s a thing you do with the family, or something you do to get away from certain parts of the family, a way to walk off the turkey, if not the devil’s bath.

Walking around Hollywood at Christmas has its appeal.  It’s sunny and mild of course - good walking weather - though the days are short.  And you might think that in Hollywood you’d see all kinds of excessive Christmas lights and decorations, but with a few exceptions it’s all curiously and surprisingly modest.

Yes the Capitol Records building on Vine Street (above) has a sort of tree made of lights up on its roof, but it’s not exactly Vegas, and it’s had pretty much the same look since it was first designed in 1958. True it uses 4,373 bulbs which is impressive in its way, and I like it a lot, but I like it because it suggests an old fashioned, dignified kind of celebration.  You can see more extravagant and baroque lighting rigs hanging off suburban bungalows all over America.

The fact is I always prefer to see the small-time, domestic, personal decorations, put up by people who’ve made just a little bit of effort but not too much.

I’m particularly fond of this one that’s been placed at the top of a lamppost.  Is it Santa, or is it a Cabbage Patch Doll? Or both?  You decide.

And the thing is, you walk past these decorations in the days before Christmas, and however low key they are, however downright pathetic in some cases, there’s always something optimistic and forward-looking about them, looking forward to a happy Christmas.  But after the day itself you see them with new eyes.  However happy the Christmas was, there’s something forlorn and melancholy about the decorations now.

And that applies especially to abandoned and discarded Christmas trees.  You see some of them dumped by the side of the road, all over Hollywood, sometimes just a couple of days after Christmas.  In certain ways I respect the sentiment - once the party’s over, it’s over – but really guys, there’s no need to be nihilistic about it – at least put the  tree in the recycling.

And so I’m very glad that whoever was walking in Hollywood, up by the corner of Highland and Franklin, and found this discarded tree below (still with some decorations on it for Pete’s sake) decided to plant it in the adjacent pile of rubble, so that it stood upright, so that the season of combined optimism and melancholy lasted just that little bit longer.  

On balance, and I hear your arguments against it, I think that’s probably a good thing.

FERAL WALKING

Quite a few people, including some who live here in Los Angeles, have said they don’t “get” the cover of the fall edition of the Los Angeles Review of Books.  That’s it above, and I love it.  The photograph is by Mike Slack.  One person whose opinion in other circumstances I more or less respect said it looked like a furniture catalogue, and now that I look at it more closely I’m not sure whether that chair has been dumped on the sidewalk or whether it’s for sale.  At first I assumed the former but then I saw there’s a little yellow sticker on the back which could be a price tag, so maybe it’s outside a  store waiting to be bought, in which case I got hold of the wrong end of the stick altogether.  Still, I think there are good reasons for my confusion, and indeed for my love of that cover: chiefly my ongoing obsession with feral furniture.

I was going to say that people who don’t “get” the cover should do a bit more walking in L.A.  As I’ve written elsewhere, every time I walk down the street anywhere in L.A., and it doesn’t seem to have much to do with whether it’s a rich or a poor neighborhood, there’s always some “feral furniture” lurking at the curb.  

I know that unwanted stuff gets dumped everywhere in the world but there does seem to be something quintessentially L.A. about throwing out more or less serviceable sofas and chairs and letting them sit out in the sun, providing a place where somebody might sit, in this city that has remarkably few public sitting places.  And if most of the abandoned chairs and couches don’t look quite as good as that one on the cover of the LARB, there have certainly been times in my life when I’ve lived with and sat on far worse things. 

Other stuff is less admittedly less appealing.  It’s hard to love somebody else’s used mattress, and certainly nobody has much use for an old TV.  I mean, I have a couple of dead TVs taking up space in my own garage, and I would like to be rid of them, but I’m not thinking of dumping them out on the street.  And this one - flat screen! - looks as good as the one I'm currently using:

So on Sunday afternoon I went for walk around Atwater Village, and yes feral furniture was on my mind, and indeed on the street.  There was this chair – which had obviously seen better days but didn’t seem completely unusable.

There was this TV, and yes it’s a TV that’s beyond redemption, but see how the wreckage is cheered up by the presence of a yucca plant sprouting up through the ground.

And then there were these really quite cool speaker cabinets, and yes sure, it would be better if they had speakers in them but still they’re very nicely positioned in front of that car, colored an orange seldom seen in nature.

And then I thought that taking pictures of household detritus in this suburban neighbourhood might have been construed by the locals as a weird thing to be doing, so I put my camera away and almost immediately spotted a feral cat grooming itself right in the middle of the street. 

By the time I’m got the camera out again the cat had stopped its grooming and was just sort of posing (above) and then finally it wandered away (below).  I guess L.A. isn’t the worst place to be feral.

Mick Slack incidentally is a top photographer, not obsessed with feral furniture per se, but clearly a man who does a good amount of walking and keeps his eyes open for intriguing, defining curiosities.  You can see more of his work at:

http://www.mike-slack.com

You could even buy one of his books.  I did.  

And then I just found this artist’s statement by him: 

“If I have a method, it’s basically to wander aimlessly, preferably on foot, using the camera as an excuse to stop and stare, to push into the visual arrangement of things, for no other purpose than to be doing just that: shutting off my verbal brain, letting the light hit my eyeballs. Over time, pictures (or, lately, image files) stack up and an editing impulse takes over—more of a game with its own purpose. But the first and most important step is always to wander.”

Hell yes, Mike.  Hell yes.  Seems he's been known to take the occasional cat picture too.