WALKING AND LOCOMOTION

As you see, from the above communication, I have been rejected by Nike.  I applied to be a shoe tester.  I filled in a form.  I answered the questions.  I told the truth where I thought that would be an advantage, and told lies when I thought that would.  But it has come to nothing. I have been weighed and found wanting. I shall have to continue to pay for my own shoes.

Why did I apply to become a shoe tester?  Because I just finished reading a novel by Wilhlem Genazino titled The Shoe Tester of Frankfurt.  It’s a good book in which our hero wanders the city having deep thoughts, many of them about women, and all the time wearing shoes that he’s testing for a company.  Eventually he gets screwed over by the company: they offer less money and worse terms, and he’s reduced to selling the shoes he’s tested at a street market.  In fact the lads currently in charge at Nike didn’t offer any payment whatsoever, and if I’d been accepted I’d have had to return the shoes once I’d tested them, at my own expense, so it wasn’t the very best deal in the world. I just wanted to be part of a literary tradition. 

As you see above, the jacket design for The Shoe Tester of Frankfurt, incorporates images by Eadweard Muybridge, this one titled “Plate 49 – Clothed Male Walking, Turning Around Rapidly, Satchel in One Hand, Cane in Other.” 

You might think that’s a rather unnecessarily full description and you might wonder why anybody would bother to specify that he was clothed.  Well, the fact is Muybridge made a total of 781 plates – quite a few of animals of course including horses, and five just of  hands – but most of them show people in motion, a few of them walking.  This is  plate one:

Now Muybridge obviously knew his market. However scientific and artistic his photographs, he realized that the human body is a lot more compelling when it’s naked than when it’s clothed.  Out of that total of 781, 133 are of nude men, 62 of women “in transparent drapery and semi-nude,” 180 of women completely nude and, it being a different era, 15 plates of nude children.  And the appeal of nudity certainly applies when it comes to descending a staircase.

It’s hard to imagine that Duchamp would have been quite as inspired by this image:

as he obviously was by this one:

In any case, a Muybridge image is a very fine thing to have on the jacket of your novel about walking.

      Incidentally, Wilhlem Genazino is also the author of a novel titled Die Obdachlosigkeit der Fische, which (I believe) translates as The Homelessness of Fish,  although as far as I can see there’s no edition in English.  I can’t absolutely swear what it’s about, and Wikipedia with Microsoft translator is only a partial help: “The Osprey, the stability through phone book and the sheep are described in sometimes unexpected twists - of the sheep in the field of view are for example ‘appalling taste kotete buttocks.’”

Yes, that is Bettie Page on the front cover, and as discussed elsewhere in this blog Bettie was a woman who knew how to walk, especially in high heels.  What she has to do with the homelessness of fish I don’t know.   In any case, a Bettie Page image is a very fine thing to have on the jacket of your novel, although it might raise expectations the author couldn’t possibly fulfill.

WALKING AND HIDING

Even before I lived in Los Angeles, I was still an occasional Hollywood Walker.  I used to come as a tourist and I usually stayed in a hotel on Franklin Avenue, and I’d get up in the morning and wander the streets, looking at the houses and the cars and the flora, and it all seemed a kind of fantasy land.  I didn’t take many photographs but on one of my walks I took this picture of a house.

At the time I didn't really consider my motives, but thinking about it now, I reckon I took it because the place struck me as both very typical and very special, thoroughly Californian, without being a cliché of Hollywood architecture, and completely unlike any house you might find in England.  It seemed cheerful and optimistic – I guess that was the color.  It wasn’t exactly modest but it wasn’t a mansion; you could just about imagine yourself living there.

Well, I took the picture and pretty much forget about it for the best part of 15 years, but then the other day I came across it again and I realized that the house really wasn’t so very far from the places I currently go on my neighborhood walks, and so I took my camera and set off with the intention of doing one of those “now and then” comparisons.   I tried to stand in the same spot, and what I saw this:

The house hadn’t disappeared but it had gone into hiding.  I wouldn’t have been sure I even had the right house if it hadn’t been for that curious spherical “streetlamp.” Not to labor the obvious, but there has been some exuberant growth, huge trees that weren’t there at all 15 years go.  Is that intention or just neglect?   And of course the chainlink fence has been changed to wooden slats, and the gate looks like this, indicating that it’s now two homes rather than one, but possibly it always was.

You have to go round the side before you can really see the house at all.  And I must say it looks less special and less optimistic.  There’s been a complete change of color on those shingles, but have they been replaced or have they just faded to their current shade? But then the owners have kept the paint color on the bricks.  Or maybe they've just done nothing,  Things change but sometimes they also endure.

There was a woman in the garden, and in certain circumstances I might have talked to her and told her what I’ve told you, but as it was I didn’t.  She might have thought I was weird.  But I did go home and check out the house on Google, because that's the kind of thing you can do these days, and in this picture, taken in a different season, it’s even more hidden:

WALKING IN THE PAST

Back in the day I used to fancy myself as a bit of a “street photographer” (not a lot of a street photographer, just a bit).  I used to walk around in my lunch hour with a camera, and inevitably I’d take pictures of people walking. 

And it’s a funny thing, isn’t it, how the Internet is both so of the moment but also so nostalgic and backward looking.  Beause of social media I constantly see photographs from people’s childhoods and college years, that I’d never have seen pre-Internet.

 And so here are some of the pictures I took back then.

I’m not absolutely sure of the dates – very early 1980s I think.  All the ones above were taken in London.  The ones below were taken in Sheffield: 

and Scarborough:

TWO STEPS BEHIND (DEF LEPPARD ALLUSION)

If you’re like me and you’re walking in West Hollywood and you see a monster truck like the one above your first thought may well be, “I bet the driver of that thing has some issues with small penis syndrome.”   

But wait.  It gets more complicated.  Go round the the back of the truck and you’ll see that this is a commercial vehicle belonging to a company called Vagina Guitars, who make custom instruments. 

Now, you can kind of see their problem, even if it’s a self-inflicted one.  With a name like that there’s a danger your product might be thought of as a bit girly.  You don’t want to drive around in some cute little pink thing, therefore you go for the monster truck, so I guess it is a form of compensation  after all.

          In fact the truck it was parked round the corner from the Guitar Center on Sunset Boulevard, which has the Hollywood RockWalk (that’s a registered trademark so be careful), featuring the handprints of a very mixed bag of musicians, mostly but not only guitarists.

Obviously it’s an echo of the handprints in the cement at Grauman's Chinese, on Hollywood Boulevard.  They have foot and shoe prints there too, as well as hand prints.   

But there’s only a single footprint at the Guitar Center. It belongs to Rick Allen of Def Leppard who only has one arm, having the lost the other in a car crash in Derbyshire.  Therefore he placed one hand and one foot into the cement.  

The small child’s handprint belongs to his daughter Lauren.

YOUR ONLY MAN

I’m in the middle of a mild Flann O’Brien obsession. He belongs to the great sodality of the walking drinking writer. The name was an invention, the pseudonym, of Brian O’Nolan, and I don’t think he was deliberately trying to invoke flaneurism, but now that name inevitably does.

Here, one of his narrators in At Swim-Two-Birds, is writing about walking:

“Purpose of walk: Discovery and embracing of virgins 

“We attained nothing on our walk that was relevant to the purpose thereof but we filled up the loneliness of our souls with the music of our two voices, dog-racing, betting and offences against chastity being the several subjects of our discourse.  We walked many miles together on other nights on similar missions - following matrons, accosting strangers, representing to married women that we were their friends, and gratuitously molesting members of the public.  One night we were followed in our turn by a member of the police force attired in civilian clothing.  On the advice of Kelly we hid ourselves in the interior of a church until he had gone.  I found that walking was beneficial to my health.”

Well, who could disagree? 

Can you be a flaneur on a bike?  Almost certainly, as O’Brien suggested in The Third Policeman, although the process was not without its dangers, largely that the rider might become part bicycle. Not that walking is a piece of cake, either.

                  “The continual cracking of your feet on the road makes a certain quantity of road come up into you. When a man dies they say he returns to clay but too much walking fills you up with clay far sooner (or buries bits of you along the road) and brings your death half-way to meet you. It is not easy to know what is the best way to move yourself from one place to another.” 

There is a remarkable bit of film of O’Nolan/O’Brien, in the company of Patrick Kavanagh, Anthony Cronin and others celebrating Bloomsday.  Drink appears to have been taken and is affecting the walking style.  

The footage seems utterly ancient, not least because it's silent, but also because of the horse and carriage they’ve hired for the occasion, and then suddenly a Volkswagen Beetle appears:

The celebration is taking place in 1954, a half century after the June 16th on which Ulysses takes place.  You can find the clip here on Youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0gNNWHmj9Q