OF WALKING IN ICE PLANTS

So here’s another thing that happened.  I went to the see the newly refurbished Beverly Hills Cactus Garden (note for pedants, it’s more correctly a xerophile garden – there are plenty of plants in there that aren’t cacti).  

Also, as I remembered it, it wasn’t a place that was likely to benefit much from refurbishment – surely the whole point about cacti is that you just leave them alone and let them do whatever it is they want to do.  Still, it was a walk, even though I knew it wasn’t going to be much of one, since the place just isn’t very big.  

Before

The real joy of the Beverly Hills Cactus Garden, refurbished or not, is that it’s a chunk of desert that sits right there alongside Santa Monica Boulevard – the old Route 66 – you walk among the opuntia and the pachypodia as the traffic flies by.

After

You know me, I can look at cacti all day, every day, but once you’ve walked back and forth a few times you’ve pretty much “done it.” If you think, oh maybe I’ll sit on a bench and soak up the vibe for a while, well you’re out of luck.  There are no benches and although you can sit on a wall, you’re not going to be comfortable lingering for very long.  This is no doubt deliberate. I suppose they want to keep out the riff raff, the homeless, and in fact just about anybody with time on their hands.

And so being in need of a bit more of a walk I took a stroll around the neighborhood.  I always say that I'm surprised they even let me in to Beverly Hills.  And I saw a house with a fabulous patch of color in front of it, with a gardener standing in the middle of what turned out to be a sea of flowering ice plants.

I took a picture and the guy saw me, and he shouted to me, quite cleverly I thought, “Hey, am I doing something wrong?”

And I said, “No, looking at that garden I’d say you’re doing something absolutely right.”

This both amused and wrong-footed him.

“Because the other day,” he said, “I was working, and this guy from the power company came by and he took my picture with his phone.  And I said to him, ‘Hey, why did you take my picture?’ and he said he hadn’t taken my picture but I saw him take my picture.”

         He seemed more indignant about being lied to than about the picturing-taking itself.

So I said, “Well yes, I suppose I did take your picture but really it was the garden I was photographing.  It looks fantastic.”

And of course since he was the man who looked after the garden, he was obviously pleased and flattered by this, and of course I did actually mean it, and also from the way I was talking I was obviously not threatening.

So we had a conversation about gardens, and he said the ice plants didn’t usually flower at this time of year, but there’d been rain and then a very hot spell and this had confused the plants and they’d burst into flower.  Usually July and August were the times when those particular ice plants looked their best.

I said I’d like to come back then and take another picture and he said, “If I’m here and you take my picture I’m going to want paying.”  I said I thought that sounded very reasonable.

SOULS AND HEALS

I’ve been seeing articles much like the one below for pretty much all my adult life.  Yes, high heels are sexy, yes most men like to see women in high heels, yes quite a lot of women like wearing high heels, but we know that they’re bad and wrong, unhealthy, symbols of sexual oppression and whatnot.

A stroll along Hollywood Boulevard on a Friday or Saturday evening would suggest that not every woman in town has got the memo, but obviously this isn’t really a walking issue.   Nobody wants women to walk miles in their high heels, it’s enough just to strut across the floor and perch on a bar stool.  It’s enough just to slip on the Jimmy Choos and pose around in the boudoir.  I know that human sexuality is a savage garden but even so I find it hard to believe anybody ever asked a woman to pose around the boudoir wearing sneakers.

And now as fate would have it Gal Gadot has become the new face of Rebok.  According to her Twitter feed she’s "pumped."  Apparently $10 million dollars is changing hands.

On the other hand, when Gal Gadot is at an event celebrating “the power of women,” different imperatives apply.  It's a minefield, isn't it?

Oh, and I did come across this while digging in the archive for something completely different, a quotation from Alexandra Schulman of British Vogue, "If god wanted us to wear flat shoes, he wouldn't have invented Manolo Blahnik" although if you ask me I think Manolo may have lost his mojo in recent days:

WALKING UNDER PORCHES

When I first read The Big Sleep back in England, back in the day, I must certainly have read the passage below, but just as certainly I must have skimmed over the term "porte-cochere."  As follows:

     “There was dim light behind narrow leaded panes in the side door of the Sternwood mansion. I stopped the Packard under the porte-cochere and emptied my pockets out on the seat. The girl snored in the corner, her hat tilted rakishly over her nose, her hands hanging limp in the folds of the raincoat. I got out and rang the bell. Steps came slowly, as if from a long dreary distance. The door opened and the straight, silvery butler looked out at me.” 

(“Silvery butler” is just stupendous, isn’t it?)

When I moved to Los Angeles I reread the Chandler novels and I remember it was time to get serious, and so I looked up porte-cochere.    Merriam Webster offers two definitions:

     1: a passageway through a building or screen wall designed to let vehicles pass from the street to an interior courtyard 

    2: a roofed structure extending from the entrance of a building over an adjacent driveway and sheltering those getting in or out of vehicles.

      I guess it's an American thing, and I think the latter is more common - you’ll find version at thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of American motels.  However if, as many people think, the Sternwood Mansion is based on the Greystone Mansion (aka the Doheny estate), then it’s more likely to be the former, though of course the two things aren’t mutually exclusive.  Here’s the porte-cochere at Greystone, through which I have walked:

I’d have thought the term was fairly rare in British architecture although Wikipedia offers this image of the one at Nottingham station - though I'm not at all sure that anybody in England would refer to it by that name:

You know, off hand, I can’t tell you whether a porte-cochere appears in the Bogart movie of The Big Sleep, but anyway, here’s a picture of Martha Vickers – the snoring girl, here fully awake, with the silvery butler in the background.

     So, the reason I mention this now is because the other day I was walking in the edgelands of Beverly Hills where, compared to the rest of LA, there isn’t so very much building and redevelopment going on.  But there was one lot where a house had been demolished and a new one was being built.  And there was this sign on the fence describing the project as a “NEW 2 STORY SFR WITH PORTE COCHERE” (SFR stands for “single family residential” – keeps out the riff-raff).

I knew I was out of my comfort zone, and I'm also pretty sure you'd have to go a very, very long way in England before you saw a sign like that.

OLD CARY GRANT JUST FINE

I have, by degrees, and by default, become a cat person.  This surprises me a bit.  When I was a kid I desperately wanted a dog but my parents thought I wasn’t ready for the responsibility, and that I’d never walk it.  They were almost certainly right.

These days, however, I sometimes think it would be OK to have a dog because I could combine exercising it with my psychogeographic drifts, although in the end I think I’m still not ready for the responsibility.  And in any case, I have become a cat person.

The cat, not much of a walker.

A cat joined the household, some years ago now, and she has gradually seduced me – (and yes, there was some inappropriate touching along the way, on her part).  And once in a while I think maybe I could combine my own walking with cat walking,  with the feline striding along beside me on a leash, although I’m told this is only possible if you start when the cat is very young indeed. 

And so the other night I watched Harry and Tonto, a pretty good, if very much of its time (1974), movie about an old geezer (Art Carney who is actually playing a character much older than himself) who goes on a road trip with his cat Tonto, who indeed has a collar and a leash.  They end up on Hollywood Boulevard opposite Pickwick Books and yes, that is Larry Hagman:

Pickwick Books used to look like this on the inside:

Why can’t there be a bookshop like this in Hollywood anymore?  Well, we all know exactly why, but still …

Anyway it so happens I’ve had the above picture of Cary Grant sitting on my desktop for quite a while now. I read the street names, and realized that location is just round the corner from where I go to see my doctor.  In fact when I go to see him I always take a stroll around the neighborhood to calm myself before the appointment.  So last week when I went for another check up I decide to drift along to Swall and Charleville and try to find the corner where old Cary and his cat did their walking.  How hard could it be?

Finding the crossroads was no problem, but it was hard even to tell which corner Cary had been on.  There were some obvious changes - the streets signs and their poles had been replaced, and some had apparently gone completely, the mail box had gone, hedges had grown up everywhere, and I could see no sign of the house. 

I thought the chimney  and those arches in the Cary Grant picture would have been the give away, but I couldn’t see them either.  I was starting to think the house must have been demolished and replaced but then something clicked.

A wall had been built in front of the arches, the chimney was still there but it had been modified and was lost in the trees, but that front door, that window with the bars - not identical - but then 60 years have gone by - but I'm prepared to bet that’s the house old Cary and his (or somebody else’s) cat had walked in front of, possibly only for that one photograph. 

I can’t find any hard evidence that he lived there, or even in the neighborhood, so I guess he was probably there just for a photo op.

And then, much belatedly, it occurred to me that maybe the picture is an ironic take on his appearance in Bringing Up Baby,  but I don’t have any hard evidence for that either.