PSYCHIC PEDESTRIANISM

When I first moved to Los Angeles, I wasn’t sure what kind of life I was going to lead here.  It occurred to me that I might become a full-on motorhead.  I was encouraged, in the first couple of months, by meeting, separately, two very different artists and car enthusiasts: Robert Williams and Ed Ruscha.  This is Robert Williams:

In fact I mostly talked to them about each other.  Both had a taste for old cars, preferably 1930s Fords.  Ruscha kept his stock, Williams hot-rodded his.  And I seem to recall that Ruscha told he liked cars, but Williams really liked cars.  Williams knew the parts numbers for gaskets and so on, Ruscha didn’t.

Anyway, I still kind of like cars. but I’ve never turned into a motorhead.  I have decided (arguably in a sour grapes kind of way) that looking at exotic old car is way more fun that owning them.   So, since Robert Williams is currently having a one man exhibition at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, titled Slang Aesthetics, I decided walk over there, see the show, and walk home again. 

The Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery is in Barnsdall Park, right next to Frank Lloyd Wright’s endlessly decaying, endlessly being restored, Hollyhock House, and if you ask me the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery could use a snappier name.  The Hollyhock Gallery perhaps. The current name sounds kind of “worthy” and Robert Williams’s art is never, ever “worthy.”

It’s a big gallery and a big show, and I always enjoy watching people in art galleries, especially the way they walk, in that measured, respectful, dutiful way. So I was there looking at Williams’ paintings and drawings and occasional sculpture and keeping half an eye on the people in the gallery and suddenly I saw the man himself, with his wife Suzanne, walking across the expanse of the gallery floor. 

We said hello.  He said he’d been trying to get a show in this gallery for 40 years, and we talked very briefly about cars: the man has just acquired a Model T Ford, which he tells me is very tricky to drive, which comes as no surprise.  After we’d talked for a little while, he excused himself and went off to talk to a couple of attractive young women he’d spotted.  He introduced himself and took them on a walk around the gallery.  You can do that when it’s your show.

I was tempted to take a few pics of Mr. Williams in situ but I thought that would have been a bit fan-ish so I didn’t, but I found this one taken at the beginning of the show – he’s there doing a “walk through.”

Now a man who owns hotrods and a model T is probably not going to be a great walker, and Robert Williams’s paintings tend to feature cars, women, curious bits of architecture but I did find this picture (not in the exhibition) from 1970 titled, Psychic Pedestrians On a Spiral Horizon (Barycenter).

       However, the open-minded pedestrian, psychic or not, always finds something on his travels.  To complete the expedition, on the walk home, I did find this nice bit of street art, which delivers a message some of us know isn’t strictly true.

As I took the picture I was hoping that somebody might walk by to give it some human interest.  Nobody did, but I was aware of the woman on the right of the picture who looks as though she’s walking, though in fact I think she works in that shop and had stepped outside for a cigarette and a coffee break. 

But it was only when I got home and downloaded the picture that I noticed that waist of her, and the fact that she’s wearing a corset.  Now I wouldn’t say that nobody walks in LA wearing a corset, but really, very, very few.

SOME BRIDGES OF LOS ANGELES

 One of the features of walking in Los Angeles (and I know it’s not unique to LA but it seems both more pronounced and more appropriate here than anywhere else I’ve ever been) is that you’re seldom far from a freeway.  As a serious pedestrian you regularly have to walk over or under one.  Over is generally better, I think, because you can look down and watch the traffic flow, or more likely grind to a halt, “bummer to bummer,” as we like to say.

And as I observe my fellow bridge pedestrians (who admittedly are not huge a number most of the time) I find that they’re divided into two varieties: those who stop for at least a moment or two and look down, and those who stride swiftly across the bridge, keeping their eyes fixed straight ahead of them, as if pretending the freeway isn’t there.

Will it surprise you that I’m one of those who tends to linger, and yes it sometimes feels a bit contrarian to be up there staring down at traffic, but then I think that people are perfectly happy to stand on a bridge that crosses a river and watch the boats go by, so why aren’t they happy watching the cars and trucks?  One answer might be “pollution” and of course I have no rebuttal to that, but you know it’s not like I pull up a deck chair and sit there for hours, basking in the exhaust fumes, I just stop for a minute or two, enjoying the rush and the roar below me.

In fact there are quite a few places in LA where you can stand on a bridge and actually stare down at the river, although unfortunately the Los Angeles River tends to be a dry concrete channel for much of its length; great for car chases and such, but not exactly a roaring cataract.

Still. I do like looking at the river – and I especially like looking at the way the graffiti have been cleaned up – painted over with white oblongs, creating a bizarrely appealing minimalist art work.

And if you’re on a bridge in downtown Los Angeles, chances are you’ll also get a view of a railway line or two.  It’s like looking at God’s model railway.

Elsewhere you can look down and see all kinds of edgeland mess and complication, ruin, reclamation and repurposing, which of course I love.

I was doing this most recently because I wanted to take a look at the Sixth Street Bridge, which runs from downtown to Boyle Heights and is about to be demolished and replaced.  Nobody particularly wanted this to happen: the current bridge isn’t that old, built in 1932, but it’s suffering from “concrete cancer” and will be gradually taken down before it falls down, and a whizzy new bridge, described as a “ribbon of arches” will be put in its place. 

The new one will cost $440 million and according to Councilmember José Huizar, in whose district the project is happening, it won’t just be a way of getting from one place to another, but “a destination itself that people come to visit." 

To that end it will have ten-foot wide walkways and (wait for it) a viewing deck.  Just how many people will want to walk between Boyle Heights and downtown L.A. remains to be seen.  Completion is due in 2018.  How many will want to stand on the viewing platform and look down at the river and the railway line is even less knowable, but personally I think it’s very much to be encouraged.

WALKING SLIGHTLY

This thing popped up on my yahoo front page:

It was the headline “This Ford GT Has Fewer Than You Walk In A Day” that really caught my attention, obviously. And as you read the article you discover that the car has 2.7 miles on the clock, and is coming up for auction, expected to sell for about half a million dollars.

And I began wondering first of all who the “you” in that headline is referring to, and then I wondered just how many miles does the average person people walk in a day.  I accept that average is a fairly nebulous term here, but still …

My less than exhaustive research suggests that nobody really knows, although there have been plenty of studies that have come up with various contestable answers, many of them involving experiments that involve giving people pedometers. 

Now this strikes me as a, let’s say, flawed methodology.  If you give somebody a pedometer and tell them you’re going to measure how far they walk, you can be sure that people are obviously going to aim for the big numbers and walk a lot more than they usually do.  So … using the (I would say inflated) results, a 2010 study by David R Bassett of the University of Tennessee, concluded that the average American walks 5,117 steps a day.

Of course steps come in various sizes – if they averaged 3 feet each that would 5117 yards or 2.9 miles – thereby in fact proving that yahoo headline to be perfectly true.  However, I’m guessing that when you’re shuffling around the kitchen or the office these steps are considerably shorter.  Similar studies show that the Americans are way behind western Australia (9,695 steps), Switzerland (9,650 steps) and Japan (7,168 steps) per day.

And as for the British, well again, the information is patchy but a 2011 article in the Daily Mail contained such gems as “Britons typically walk an average of two miles a day,” “one in six say they need to put their feet up when they return back at their desk or get home,” “the average Briton becomes exhausted after only walking up the stairs.”

Again the notion of an average Briton is pretty meaningles, but I find all this extremely plausible.  For what it’s worth, my own observations, unscientific  though they are, do suggest that the British probably do walk more than their American counterparts, even given huge variations in and between both groups.

Now, a lot of people assume that because I like walking I must hate cars.  This is not actually true, and is possibly a secret shame.  Of course I don’t have half a million dollars burning a hole in my pocket, but if I did who’s to say I wouldn’t blow it on a ridiculous supercar?   However, I’m pretty sure that in no circumstances would I buy a nine-year-old car with just 2.7 miles on the clock.  In order to stay healthy, cars need exercising just like people.

FLANEUSE O'CONNOR

I came across this quotation from honest Abraham Lincoln.

In fact you’ll find it spread all across the Internet like chicken pellets.  Sometimes it's "backwards" rather than "backward," sometimes it appears as "I am a slow walker, but I never walk backwards."  Whichever way it is, I have yet to find the source where honest Abe said or wrote it, and in some cases he isn’t even attributed.

In any case it strikes me as a pretty dumb thing to say or write, and an even dumber thing to celebrate.  What the hell’s wrong with walking backwards?  I suspect people think it means “never retreat,” but that’s not much better - sometimes retreating is a very wise thing to do. 

And now wonderfully, amazingly, I have found that Mr. Lincoln didn’t always practice what he preached.  Here is a recollection of Lincoln at the 1856 Republican Convention, by William Pitt Kellogg, a lawyer from Illinois:

         “When he came forward to speak of course there was much excitement. … From time to time, as he reached some climax in his argument, he would advance to the front of the platform as he spoke, and with a peculiar gesture hurl the point, so to speak, at his audience, then as the audience rose to their feet to cheer, he would walk slowly backward, bowing …”

          It probably wasn’t a Michael Jackson style moon walk, but it was very definitely a bit of stage craft. He may be doing something similar here in Gettysburg.

In fact there are various sources that say walking backwards is terribly good for you – they’ve even got a name for it retro-walking, which sounds to me like you’d go out strolling in loon pants and tie dye tee shorts, but that’s just me.

According to Severine Koch, PhD, of the social and cultural psychology department at Radboud University, in Nijmegen in the Netherlands, writing in 2009 “backward locomotion appears to be a very powerful trigger to mobilize cognitive resource”.  And it’s easy enough to believe that walking backwards tones up a different set of muscles than walking forward and would probably be good for improving balance and coordination.  The problem is more where you could actually do this backwards walking – not in any place where there are a lot of people, obviously.  They’d think you were an idiot and they’d point and laugh at you, and then you’d walk into them.

Not that this has deterred Mani Manithan (above) who has been walking backwards since 1989 in order to end world violence.  He’s still at it 25 years later and has apparently now forgotten how to walk forwards. Of course he’s doing this in India, where they’re extremely tolerable of eccentric holy men. 

All of which brings us very, very indirectly to Flannery O’Connor.  When she was a child, in Savannah, Georgia, she trained a chicken to walk backwards.  It appeared on a Pathé news reel and now you can see it right there on Youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtnV-iD2QlI

Thank you Internet, maybe you’re not solely an instrument of the devil.

Flannery O’Connor is often, lazily, described, and occasionally patronized, as a writer of “Southern Gothic,” but it’s all too seldom mentioned just how damn hilarious she is.  In the book Conversations With Flannery O’Connor she says, "When I was six I had a chicken that walked backward and was in the Pathé News. I was in it too with the chicken. I was just there to assist the chicken but it was the high point in my life. Everything since has been an anticlimax.”

O’Connor was afflicted with lupus which eventually killed her, but she didn’t blame lupus for all her problems didn’t.  In 1954 she wrote to Elizabeth Hardwick, “… it galls me to have supported the lupus for four years and then to be crippled with rheumatism (a vulgar disease at best) of the hip.  I am not able enough to walk straight but not crippled enough to walk with a cane so that I give the appearance of merely being a little drunk all the time.”  

In due course she used a cane and then crutches.  She also kept peacocks, though I don’t believe she taught them to walk backwards.