ZONING OUT

Guy Debord looking for a zone of distinct psychic atmosphere:

DRIFTING WITH MR. CUNNINGHAM

I’ve been trying to find something not too mawkish to say about the photographer Bill Cunningham (op cit in this blog) who died on June 24, aged 87.

I loved his artfully artless photographs.  He worked for The New York Times for about 40 years, and was a cross between a street photographer and a fashion photographer, snapping the fashionable people out in public in Manhattan.  He did some other stuff as well, at parties and balls, but it’s the street stuff that matters.

Cunningham wasn’t one of the great New York walkers (he actually got around by bike mostly) but he was certainly on foot when he took his pictures.   He was certainly a kind of urban explorer, and probably an anthropologist, and maybe even a psychogeographer.

He may not have been looking for, in Debord’s terms, “zones of distinct psychic atmosphere” but he certainly knew where to go to find people who were looking good and wearing fabulous clothes.  And of course he often photographed them while they were walking.

I never saw him when I lived in New York, but I know others who did, some of whom wished he’d take their photograph, but he never did – and I know some snappy dressers.   

He seemed to have had the trick, and maybe we should say gift, of appearing benign and good-natured when he photographed his subjects.  If he wanted to take your picture then you didn’t feel threatened or maligned, you knew you looked good.  Compare and contrast with that other great New York street photographer Bruce Gilden, who creates this effect:.

Even so I’m not sure there are many men who could get away with the kind of thing that’s going on in the picture below:

If most of us tried to photography the feet and shoes of a bunch of women standing on the street in Manhattan, I’m pretty sure the cops would be called.  I think you could probably talk your way out of it, though I wouldn’t advise you to say you were a flaneur, much less a psychogeographer.

SKYWALKING

So enough about staring at the ground while walking; maybe it’s time to look at the sky.  I’ve always liked skies.  I remember being at college and a group of us had been to a lecture on landscape poetry and at least two of us said, “Nah, I don’t really get landscape, but I get clouds.”  And I’ve always taken a picture or two of interesting clouds while I’m out walking – I suppose many people do.  Like this one:

And so I’ve been reading The Cloudspotter’s Guide by Gavin Pretor-Pinney, begetter of The Cloud Appreciation Society.

It’s one of those books that’s such a brilliant idea you wonder why somebody else (as in me) didn’t think of it before.  I’m thinking I’ll write about it at greater length at some point, but for now suffice to say that if nothing else it makes you look at the sky in a new way.

Now, I have been known to complain about the skies of Los Angeles, that they’re too tame and featureless and samey.  Although of course the more you look the more you see, and lately it seems to me that they’ve been a lot less samey, which of course says more about me than it does about them.

So I was out walking in the Nicholson acres a few days ago and I saw a strange circle in the sky.  I knew it wasn’t a cloud, but I didn’t know what it was: a chem trail, an alien signal?

Well no, I soon realized it was a vapor trail.  And the plane filled in the circle so that it what looked like a smiley face, or at least an O with eyes and a mouth, though of course it was upside down from where I was standing.

But the plane hadn’t finished. Next came a letter B, which I thought might be some reference some reference to President Obama.

But then a D appeared.  OBD – there aren’t many words start that way.   Obdurate was the only one that sprang to mind, though that seemed an odd thing to write in the sky.

Anywa,y to cut a long story short, after that there was an A, and then a Y.  But it still took a moment or two to realize what OBDAY meant.  But I eventually worked out that yes, the O was indeed a smiley face, or more precisely a happy face, and B was for birth. So it was saying Happy Birthday.  I suppose you’d have to be impressed if somebody employed a skywriter to celebrate your birthday, but OBDAY still seems a slightly banal thing to write in the sky, or anywhere else.

So I started thinking, what would be a less banal?  Well you see I think words are not the way to go.  One word or even two or three are never going to be very profound.  Love, Peace, Walk Tall, Kilroy was here – it’s just not quite good enough.  So I think I’d go for a symbol, an actual glyph, maybe something from the alchemy – perhaps this symbol for Transformation.

That’d be a nice challenge for a sky writer, and would certainly be an amazing thing to see in the sky while you were out walking.

And as a coda, there was quite a bit of wind high up in the sky on the day the pilot wrote OBDAY.  The letters started to drift and smudge as soon as they’d been done, and after the message was written, and after the wind had done it’s work you were left with a configuration that I think would have perplexed even the keenest cloudspotter.

WALKING WITH OTHERS

If you go to the Goodreads quotation site, you’ll find this: “Words inscribe a text in the same way that a walk inscribes space. Writing is one way of making the world our own, and . . . walking is another.” – Geoff Nicholson

 

I’ll gladly stand by this, though I’m actually more or less paraphrasing Michel de Certeau in The Practice of Everyday Life.  It's hard to find a good picture of de Certeau walking, but here he is apparently standing about in field, and I suppose he must have done at least some walking to get there.  But are you really sure about that scarf, Mike?

Meanwhile a correspondent, Jane Freeman – she’s an artist, you could check her out - draws my attention to a quotation form Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, in which he’s actually talking about essay-writing, but I think it has a wider application: “The reader should be carried forward, not merely, or chiefly, by the mechanical impulse of curiosity, or by a restless desire to arrive at the final solution; but by the pleasurable activity of mind, excited by the attractions of the journey itself. Like the motion of a serpent, which the Egyptians made the emblem of intellectual power; or like the path of sound through the air; at every step he pauses, and half recedes, and, from the retrogressive movement, collects the force which again carries him onward.”

No walking there, obviously, although we know Coleridge was quite the pedestrian – check out “The Devil’s Walk” – written with Robert Southey.  

And did you know that Kate Moss now lives in Coleridge’s old house in Highgate?  No, neither did I.

The Coleridge quotation corresponds somehow with a couple of paragraphs I recently found in John Berger’s Another Way of Telling.  He writes, “The dog came out of the forest is a simple statement.  When that story is followed by The man left the door open, the possibility of a narrative has begun.  If the tense of the second sentence is changed into The man had left the door open, the possibility becomes almost a promise.  Every narrative proposes an agreement about the unstated but assumed connections existing between events …

“No story is like a wheeled vehicle whose contact with the road is continuous.  Stories walk, like animals and men. And their steps are not only between narrated events but between each sentence, sometimes each word. Every step is a stride over something not said.”

      This is Berger walking with Tilda Swinton in Quincy, the town where he lives, in France.

Photo: Sandro Kopp/Berlinale

HOLY MOLY

You know, I’ve never really got on with Henry David Thoreau’s writing.  I mean he’s a walker and I’m a walker, but as anybody can tell you there are as many different kinds of walker as there are walkers.  And really he’s always been the kind of walker who gets on my wick, with this kind of thing:

“To come down to my own experience, my companion and I, for I sometimes have a companion, take pleasure in fancying ourselves knights of a new, or rather an old, order—not Equestrians or Chevaliers, not Ritters or Riders, but Walkers, a still more ancient and honorable class, I trust. The Chivalric and heroic spirit which once belonged to the Rider seems now to reside in, or perchance to have subsided into, the Walker—not the Knight, but Walker, Errant.”  Couldn’t you just tone it down a bit Henry?

On the other hand Thoreau did have a fair bit to say about cats, including, “The most domestic cat, which has lain on a rug all her days, appears quite at home in the woods, and, by her sly and stealthy behavior, proves herself more native there than the regular inhabitants.”  Is this actually true, cat lovers?  It doesn’t sound true.

And of course most famously he also said. “It is not worth the while to go round the world to count the cats in Zanzibar.”  Which is obviously a metaphor, I suppose, that heaven is on your own doorstep, kind of thing.  I gather there really are really a lot of cats in Zanzibar and I suppose Thoreau knew that, and although personally I wouldn’t go to Zanzibar to count them,  I’d be happy enough to go and look at them and have a walk around them.  They look like this apparently:

But in fact the whole of that Thoreau quotation runs as follows: “It is not worth the while to go round the world to count the cats in Zanzibar. Yet do this even till you can do better, and you may perhaps find some ‘Symmes' Hole’ by which to get at the inside at last. England and France, Spain and Portugal, Gold Coast and Slave Coast, all front on this private sea; but no bark from them has ventured out of sight of land, though it is without doubt the direct way to India.”

The Symmes here is John Cleves Symmes, who believed the earth was hollow and that there were various, undiscovered entrances – i.e. Symmes Holes, which a person could walk through and be in the hollow, brightly lit interior of the earth.

I’ve been thinking a lot about holes lately.  The other day I found a man spraying what you might call terraglyphs, or in any case strange symbols, on the road surface outside the front gate, tracking the route of the gas lines, he explained.  The symbols looked like this:

Yes, they’re about to start digging up the street and replacing the ancient, endlessly cracking water and sewer pipes.  This is obviously a good thing in the long run, but in the short run it’s going to make walking in the neighborhood a lot harder.  After the gasman had done his work, another guy arrived and he painted some parallel white lines along the length of the street, and it looked as though he was marking out a path or walking route.  Although of course that wasn’t the purpose:

Next day some different guys arrived and they had a big machine, kind of like a massive vacuum cleaner, the kind of thing that might appear in robot wars, and it had blades, which they used to cut along the white lines, and there was some kind of slush or I suppose coolant, or perhaps lubricant, that got sprayed across the street as it went, with an end result that looked like this:

The next step I guess is for a different crew to come and start digging up the whole street.   In fact they’ve done some of this piecemeal over the years, and they go pretty deep – at least a man’s height – the earth may not be hollow but there are obviously some little-explored cavities down there.

 Anyway, since walking in the neighbourhood has become a bit tricky with all these holes and trucks and machines, I went for a walk in downtown.

It was by no means hole-free, they’re digging things up all over the place there too and it wasn’t absolutely cat-free either.  I found this piece of terra-art – Felix painted, or I suppose stenciled, on the ground.  It was the only cat I found.  The only one I needed to count.