EINFUHLUNG FOR THE DEVIL

This is how it sometimes works when you’re a determined pedestrian in Los Angeles. I was heading for the first annual Independent Art Book Fair, taking place as a pop up in a building on Maple Avenue, on the edge of downtown. I vaguely knew there was a street called Maple Avenue, but I had never knowingly set foot there, and I also knew it was part of the Fashion District, just a hop, skip and a jump from Skid Row.

I could have driven all the way there but there’s no joy in that, and besides, I have to protect my reputation as a walker.  But equally I wasn’t going to walk the whole of the eight miles each way, so the idea was to combine some walking with some other forms of locomotion.

 

So I got in the car, drove down the hill and parked, then walked the three quarters of a mile to the Metro station, got on the subway, traveled six stops, got out, then walked a circuitous mile and a half to the book fair, knowing of course that I’d have to do most of it again in reverse on the way back.  That pretty much adds up to a day out walking in Los Angeles. 

 

You know, I don’t hear the term “gendered space” as much as I used to, but that may say more about me than it does about space and gender.  I was by no means the only man on Maple Avenue, but it was interesting how out of place a man can feel when he's in a street festooned with strange, gaudy fabric, all of it for sale.  

Did I feel marginalized?  Well, maybe a little.   Did I experience the inverse tyranny of patriarchy?  Not so much.   Did my presence feel transgressive?  Well no, but it did feel like a small adventure, that I was in a place where I had no business and no involvement.  Clearly needs were being met, transactions were taking place, but they all seemed completely inscrutable to me.  What would you actually make out of fabric that looked like this?

I'm sure that Walter Benjamin has a fair amount to say about this. It didn’t seem to me that I was watching “high capitalism” at work but obviously commodities were involved and were changing hands.  Benjamin writes in The Arcades Project, “Empathy (in German einfühlung) with the commodity is fundamentally empathy with the exchange value itself.  The flâneur is the virtuoso of this empathy.”

I don’t know that I felt a great deal of empathy with the commodity in this case, kind of hard to have empathy with fabric that looked like this:

But I did notice one thing, that although some of (by no means all) the things for sale had prices on them, I had absolutely no idea whether this was a reasonable exchange value.

THE STREET AND I

I just reviewed Geoff Dyer’s The Street Philosophy of Garry Winogrand – there’s a link below at the end of this post – so I’ve been thinking a lot about Winogrand and street photography.

Neither the book nor the review discusses walking per se, but as a street photographer, Winogrand obviously did a lot of walking, as I suppose all street photographers must.  We tend to think of his “beat” as being in Manhattan but he traveled widely and spent time in LA.  Here he is on Hollywood Boulevard; the photograph is by Ted Pushinsky.

And here’s his most famous Hollywood Boulevard picture:

Towards the end of his life (whether he knew that he was coming to the end of his life is a moot point) he moved to Los Angeles and since he was suffering from a slow to recover broken leg, he had people drive him around and he took photographs out of the car window.

In a sense this seems like no way for a street photographer to operate, and his “strike rate” for good pictures seems to have been pretty low at this stage, but it did result in pictures such as the one above.  And this one:

That link is here: 

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/unknown-unknowns-come-sweeping-in-on-geoff-dyers-the-street-philosophy-of-garry-winogrand

SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH GEOFF

Lately I’ve been going for a walk on Sunday afternoons – no big deal, just in the neighborhood, East Hollywood and sometimes drifting up into Griffith Park, more of a stroll than a psychogeographic expedition.

And since more and more places are open on Sundays, and since more and more people work on Sundays, you might think Sunday shouldn’t feel so very different from every other day of the week, and yet it does.  I’m not completely sure whether it’s me or the universe, but there is something curious and melancholy about the world on a Sunday when you’re walking.

My best guess (for the time being) is that the people who are on the streets on a Sunday have more time on their hands, they move at a different pace than in the week, they have some sense of being “at leisure,” they’re drifting just like I am, and this creates some specific “ambiance.”

And naturally I found myself thinking about Thomas De Quincey’s line, “It was a Sunday afternoon, wet and cheerless: and a duller spectacle this earth of ours has not to show than a rainy Sunday in London.”  And yes I do think that a rainy afternoon in London is much worse than a sunny afternoon on Hollywood Boulevard, but the latter is not without its melancholy.

I can’t swear that the fellow below on the sidewalk (he's the same as the one up above) is an opium eater, but I’d guess he’s probably taken an opiate if not an opioid.  He looks quite comfortable.  And you know, having taken the picture I'm feeling guilty.  Should I have checked his pulse?  Should I have called an ambulance?  Well yes, possibly I should, although if you called an ambulance every time you saw somebody passed out on the sidewalk in Hollywood you wouldn't have time for much else.

And I can’t tell you what, if anything, this fellow below has taken (maybe beard-enhancer) but it didn’t seem to have cheered him up much:

And as for this person, well I don’t know if anything had been taken at all, which is to say I don’t know if this is a man or a woman, transvestite or transsexual, or someone who’s just gender fluid  – hey, in Hollywood in the park on a Sunday afternoon we don’t always check IDs.

AND THERE'S THIS

https://nicholsonland.blogspot.com

WALKING CURATORIALLY

I am, or at least used to be, a bit of a scavenger when I walk.  I’m well aware of the eco tourist mantra “Leave only footprints, take only photographs” which the interwebs attribute to Chief Seattle of the Suquamish tribe.  However, since his dates are 1786 – 1866 it seems unlikely he’d have given all that much thought to photography.  There is one, and only one, known photograph of him, from 1865.

I have no argument with the chief, or anyone else about this.  Obviously I’m not in favor of driving a truck into the Mojave desert and loading it up with native flora and fauna, but if you’re walking in some scrubby bit of territory, outside any kind of designated park or preserve, and you find a horse bone or a bit of inscrutable machinery lying in your path, well I don’t think it’s the crime of the century to pick it up and put in your backpack and take it home with you.

And when you’re walking in the city I think it’s perfectly ok to pick up just about any old thing that’s lying in the street – books, toys, a loud speaker.  You could claim you were picking up litter, beautifying the environment.

But then the question arises of what you actually do with all this disjecta when you get it home.  For years I’ve been accumulating stuff and putting it on shelves in a little room off the garage.

And I suppose there was always some idea in the back of my mind that I might become a junk sculptor like Noah Purifoy, or one of those curator-artists like Mark Dion, both of whom I admire greatly.

But the years go by and the sculpture doesn’t get made, and yes I suppose any accumulation involves a kind of curating but I don’t see the good folks from the Pitt Rivers museum knocking at my door, asking me to install a display of the Nicholson collection, and so recently I’ve been thinning the archive, perhaps better described as throwing away junk, which is, in general, a remarkably pleasurable experience. 

At the same time (and I’m not sure if this is part of the same impulse or its opposite) I’ve been photographing the stuff before I throw it away.   As you see.

But then just a few days back I was out walking and I saw a machete on the ground at the side of the street.  Obviously it had been left there by a worker who’d forgotten it when he was packing up, and yes it’s obviously wrong to steal a man’s tools, but equally the man couldn’t have valued the machete all much or he wouldn’t have left it behind.  And so despite my resolution not to pick up more stuff I really did want that machete.  And the only reason I didn’t take it was because I’d have had to walk down the street with it in my hand, and I thought that by the time I got home somebody would have seen me and called the cops to report a dangerous armed lunatic in the neighbourhood.  So I left it where it was and I had to make do with a photograph. 

But I kept thinking about it and the next day I went for a walk down the same street and the machete had gone.  I hope it went to somebody who needed it more than I did, not hard since I didn’t really need it at all.