A LONG CRUISE ON A SHORT STREET

 Nobody would pretend that Selma Avenue in Hollywood is one of the great walking streets, nor one of the great places for urban exploration - it runs for about a mile and a half, east/west, between and parallel to Hollywood Boulevard and Sunset Boulevard.  But it’s not without interest, because nowhere is.

Back in the day Selma used to a be a place where young men, inspired perhaps by Midnight Cowboy, hung out and plied their trade. There’s still a YMCA in the street, but you can’t stay there these days however much fun it might be.  This is John Rechy below on the steps of the First Baptist Church of Hollywood, which has stood on Selma in its present form since 1935.

Currently Selma is the site of all kinds of development and redevelopment, and I dare say a truckload of “gentrification.”  Restaurants close and are replaced by new ones that don’t necessarily look any better than the old ones, but presumably they have a better business plan.  There’s a stylish barber’s shop, a store that sells only vinyl, and there used to be a tent city of homeless people, but they were recently moved on by the cops.

There’s some curious stuff on the sidewalk:

 Some curious window treatments:

And there’s this, which may be the best reason for walking along Selma – an amazing example of scarcely improvable, ramshackle, improvised urban infrastructure.  It may possibly be a Thomasson (op cit) although possibly not because this thing, however ramshackle and improvised, is actually functional.

As I hope you can see in the above pictures (one mine, one from Google), and I know it's not easy, it’s essentially, two telegraph poles stuck together.  There’s one big, tall, fully-formed pole, supporting wires that run high across the street, and then there’s a shorter pole attached to it, accommodating wires that run in a somewhat different direction at a lower level. 

Two big, tall, fully-formed poles might have seemed the way to go but apparently the powers that be couldn’t find an extra pole of the required length.  They ended up with one that was shorter than the other, that wouldn’t even reach from ground level to the required height of the wires running crosswise.

So what would you do?  Well, what they evidently did was attach the short pole to the big pole but they had to hold it three or four feet off the ground.  In order to do that they used brackets and then a length of lumber for support.  But even the length of lumber proved too short and so they put a lump of wood underneath that as a shim.

It’s wonderful.  It works, I guess.  And frankly this is the way I personally do “handyman” projects – ham-fisted but functional.  You might imagine the powers that be in Hollywood would operate with more style and skill.  The fact that they don’t is somehow charming but also unsettling.  Is the whole of Hollywood held together with wire and string?  I think we all know the answer to that one.

RAMBLING WITH ROBERT

I’m not sure why it’s taken me till now to find this line from Robert Mitchum about walking, “People think I have an interesting walk. Hell, I'm just trying to hold my gut in.”  It’s a great line, and the story of many of our lives as we get older.

Mitchum was talking to Earl Wilson, for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner in 1971, when he would have been aged 54.  The previous year he'd made the movie Ryan’s Daughter,(that's a still from it below), and he’s certainly not the slim young man of his youth but really he doesn’t look bad at all compared to the average 54 year old.

Even so, it had all started rather differently, as it usually does:

And he was evidently a man who liked to get his shirt off, whether he was walking or not, and I'd say that gut is being rather fiercely held in in this picture, from Going Home, actually from 1971.

Equally, Mitchum spent much of his career in a well-cut suit and/or a trenchcoat, which would hide many of the gut problems.

 Of course there are times when even a suit can’t completely get the job done, though (inevitably) he's still looking pretty good here, and certainly a lot better than Michael Winner:

And sometimes of course a man stops walking, sits back and doesn’t even try to hold it in, although that the belt is doing its very best.

And as seen here, there are some walkers who actually prefer to let it all hang out.  They ain't no Robert Mitchums.  Who the heck is?:

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BURNING STILL

Meanwhile in Hollywood, walking under the freeway, we still feel the bern, even as we feel a bit ripped.

WALKING AMONG THOMASSONS

If the Internet has taught us anything it’s that we’re seldom alone in our passions and obsessions.  However apparently singular and obscure your interests, somebody somewhere almost certainly shares them.  Chances are too that somebody has already set up Facebook and Instagram groups and is organizing seminars and conferences on the subject, maybe walking tours as well.

This is reassuring in some respects, but occasionally disappointing in others, in a “Oh, I’m not nearly as special as I thought I was,” kind of way.  And so we come to the Thomasson, a term I’d never heard until a few weeks ago.

The tern was devised in the 1970s by the Japanese artist Genpei Akasegawa (above; he seems a cheerful fellow) who taught a course in “Modernology” to students in Tokyo.  He and they noticed that in modern cities there are various architectural features, remnants, that no longer serve the purpose for which they were built.  In fact they often serve no useful purpose whatsoever, and yet they remain a part of the environment, sometimes ignored, sometimes vaguely repurposed, but often surprisingly well looked-after as a kind of art object.

We’re talking about staircases that don’t lead anywhere, doors that open into fresh air up on the second or third stories of buildings, bricked in gateways, the remains of cut down telephone poles, bridges to nowhere, inaccessible balconies, and there’s the Atomic Thomasson – the silhouette left by a building that’s no longer there, as if it had been obliterated by a nuclear blast.

In some ways the Thomasson is a kind of folly, although in other ways it seems to be the opposite of a folly, since a folly is designed specifically to be useless or at least decorative, but the Thomason was originally designed to be useful but has somehow lost its way and become an aesthetic artifact.

It also has something, though not everything, in common with a ruin.  Genpei Akasegawa is especially taken with freestanding chimneys, which remain even after the buildings they served have been demolished.  But these are not precisely ruins since they’re intact and potentially usable, it's just that nobody has any use for them.

Genpei Akasegawa formalized and discussed these matters at length in a book titled, in English, Hyperart: Thomasson, a collection of essays that had first appeared in the Japanese magazine Photography Times.  It’s a rum old book that sometimes seems to take itself too seriously, sometimes not nearly seriously enough, but the description of Thomassons as “schisms in man-made-space, appearing along a fault line of a city’s architecture” seems fair enough.

The name comes from the American baseball player Gary Thomasson, who in 1980 was signed to the Yomiuri Giants in Japan for a huge amount of money.  He was supposed to be a slugger, a big home run hitter, but he proved to be quite useless.  To be honest I do think this is a bit hard on poor old Gary Thomasson.  I mean, it’s not like he was trying to be useless, he wanted to hit the ball out of the park, he just happened to keep missing it.

I realize now that I’ve been noticing and appreciating Thomassons for most of my life, and sometimes I’ve photographed them, despite never knowing there was a name for them.  I’ve been sent back to my photography files to look for appropriate pictures but also, perhaps more importantly, when I walk, and not only in the city, I now find myself looking for flaws, looking for Thomassons, with a brand new intensity.

You’ll see examples from my own collection of Thomasson pictures scattered around this article (they’re the ones in color, the black and white come via Genpei Akasegawa himself). 

I’m especially fond of steps to nowhere, but I can’t imagine I’ll ever find anything quite as wonderful as the Thomasson on the cover of Genpei Akasegawa’s book, it appears inside too, a door handle stranded in the middle of wall. 

It’s easy enough to imagine that somebody might want to closed off a doorway, in which case you might brick it up and plastered over it, (this one is behind concrete, apparently) but why on earth would you leave a door handle sticking out?  And if the in the caption is to be believed, the handle actually turns.

 Genpei Akasegawa gives a detailed explanation of how, when and where this Thomasson was found (not by him, and it’s the wall of a drycleaner’s) and I want to believe him, but I think there’s at least a possibility that this is an installation, a work of art created by him or somebody else.   You know what artists are like.

THE DANGERS OF TODDLING

I think this may be a highpoint of the cartographer's art (it shows part of Victorville, California):