WALKING IN PATCHES

As I walk around Hollywood, I still see a few patches of open, undeveloped land. It’s been a wet spring and they’re still green now, in early May.  Of course, as the building bubble continues to stretch and inflate, I think, “Well, that won’t be there long much longer.”  And I'm generally right.

And as I look, and sometimes take a picture, I think to myself, there’s an art project here – "The last patch of green in Hollywood."  It isn’t a project for me but it definitely could be for somebody.

For instance, there used to be a patch of bare ground on Franklin Avenue that stayed empty all year and then each December some local entrepreneur rented it and sold Christmas trees from it.  This was recently paved over and it’s now the staff parking lot for Gelson’s supermarket. I don’t know what will happen come December.

And a couple of days back I was looking at a patch of land on Hollywood Boulevard, empty and still with a few remains (rather than ruins) of whatever had previously been there. 

As well as some greenery there were also, naturally, piles of rubbish, although you can see worse piles of rubbish in this city, in pretty much any city.  There was even this surprisingly stylish, abandoned bra (although maybe it's half a bikini):

And as I was taking these photographs I heard a woman shouting, “That’s right.  Take more pictures.  Take more pictures.”

         She sounded annoyed although not specifically with me, and she did, in some sense, mean what she was saying.

“Take more photographs and send them to the mayor,” she said, with passion rather than anger.  “I’ve written to him but it does no good.  Maybe he should see some pictures.”

         So we talked, and she said that this empty lot had become a hangout for homeless druggies, hence the garbage, though it was uninhabited at that moment.  She lived in the apartment block next door and she thought this lot was disgusting and dangerous, and you could definitely see her point.  Sympathy with the homeless doesn’t necessarily mean you want them as immediate neighbors.

And then she said, “Ah well they’ll be building there soon,” which was undoubtedly true.

Not very far away, in a corner of a newly built apartment block, I did find this patch of green.  It’s a (very, very small) dog park.  The “grass” is Astroturf.

WALKING CHIPLESS

Maybe you saw this recent walking story.  It was all over the news this weekend. It’s so remarkable, so improbable, so “good,” that it’s hard to believe it’s true, though nobody seems to doubt that it is.

Jacob Cartwright, aged 22, (that’s him above) set off in his tractor trailer on Tuesday, to deliver a truckload of potato chips from Portland to Nyssa, in Oregon, a 390 mile trip according to Google maps, through snow, intending to make the delivery by 7:30 a.m. Wednesday.  And he went missing.

         There was a land and air search, which failed to find him.  After 4 days Cartwright’s wife went home from a meeting with local officials about the search and found him sitting in their house.   He’d been walking.  He’d walked home. He told his wife he was “hurting real bad” and she took him to the hospital.

Almost certainly not Jacob Cartwright's truck, but it's from the company he works for.

The story Is that he punched the wrong address into his GPS and so it sent him up the wrong road. He became aware of that sooner or later, and he had the GPS recalculate, but then it sent him up a forest service road which started out paved but then became dirt and so the truck got stuck.  Cell phone service was patchy and in any case his battery had died, so he got out of the truck and started walking to his home in La Grande, which at that point was about 36 miles away.

He walked without any food or water from just after midnight Wednesday and kept going, wading through snow at some points, and by Saturday morning he was near enough to La Grande, to hitch a ride to his home.

         I’m well aware that people can go long periods without food, but surely he needed water.  He could have drunk the snow, I suppose, but apparently he didn’t.  According to his boss Roy A. Henry, owner of Little Trees Transportation, “He was so dehydrated that his kidneys stopped functioning.”  On the other hand, the nursing supervisor Danita Thamert at Grande Ronde Hospital said, “He looks to be pretty good. He’s a big boy. He kept moving and stayed warm enough. So it doesn’t look like he’s going to have too many injuries.”

And the punchline: despite having a truckload of potato chips he didn’t touch any of them. According to Henry again, when he asked Cartwright why he didn’t take some potato chips with him for the walk, Cartwright said, “That’s worth money. That’s the load I was hauling and I didn’t want to damage the property.”

         The man’s a walking hero, though I don’t think he’d be any less of a hero if he’d taken a few bags of potato chips with him for the walk.

THINGS WILL BE GREAT WHEN YOU'RE ...

Somebody’s been making art in my neighborhood and leaving it in the street, which I think is not quite the same as making street art.  So far, I’ve only seen it on Franklin Avenue but it’s perfectly possible it’s elsewhere too.

Some pieces look more skillful than others, some more crazy than others.  Some

of it seems kind of paranoid, and potentially offensive, and possibly racist, but at this point in art history who knows whether lack of skill, craziness, and offensiveness aren’t just artistic strategies.  Quite a few people were walking by as I was taking these pictures, but nobody paid any attention either to me or to the art.

Of course much of Hollywood, like the rest of the Los Angeles, perhaps like the rest of the world, continues to be demolished and rebuilt at a frenetic pace.  There are plenty of ruins and building sites, and some structures that look like both simultaneously.

And some new buildings require the digging of deep holes that will eventually become subterranean parking garages. Do note how “nature” is still coming up through the ground – though that won’t last long.

Some short sections towards the eastern end of Hollywood Boulevard remain much as they were when I first arrived in LA, over a decade and a half ago, even as things change all around them. There are at least three old school motels, which remain in business and you imagine may be kind of sketchy - the yelp reviews are mixed.

 The Harvard still offers in-room “adult movies” but you suspect that may be just a retro affectation.   The whole place looks a movie set and may well be used as one.  

 The Hollywood Dowtowner, a place I’ve photographed a few times in passing over the years, is certainly my favorite from the outside, and I was quite cheered to see these guys below working on the neon sign.

I guess they knew what they were doing – they certainly had a very big truck, but I did wonder if they really needed those high visibility yellow vests.  When you’re 30 feet in the air in a cheery picker, people are going to see you with or without a fluorescent jacket.

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SOME WALKING HUMOR

Devorah Baum (that's her below) recounts the following joke in her newish (2017) book Feeling Jewish (A Book for Just About Anyone) - got to love that subtitle.

"Two Jews, Moishe and Itzhik, are walking in the forest in the Ukraine some 150 years ago.  In the distance they see two local guys walking toward them.  Moishe turns to Itzhik, panics and says, 'Itzhik, what shall we do?  There’s two of them, and we’re all alone!' ”

I think I understand this joke, but I’m sure I don’t “get it” the way a Jewish Ukrainian would.

But I definitely don't get why it was 150 years ago.  That would be 1867 - and if Wikipedia is to be believed this was one of the few times when Jews in Ukraine were comparatively safe.  But maybe that's the whole point.  Minefield, innit?

BOYS OF VARIOUS CENTURIES

Half a lifetime ago I was, very briefly, a security guard/gallery attendant at the Royal Academy of Arts in London.   They’d taken on extra staff for a big Post-Impressionist exhibition. First thing in the morning, you had to be at your place ten minutes before the public were allowed in, so for that very brief period of time you found yourself alone pacing up and down in a gallery of, say, priceless Van Goghs.  And as you paced it was very possible to imagine that you were some kind of supervillain, and these Van Goghs were yours and yours alone.  And funnily enough something very slighty similar happened to me at the weekend in Los Angeles.

I went to the Parker Gallery to see an exhibition by Duncan Hannah, top quality painter, and author of a newish memoir titled Twentieth-Century Boy which is getting masses of attention, and according to its publisher is a “rollicking and vividly immediate account of his life amid the city's glamorous demimondes in their most vital era as an aspiring artist, roaring boy, dandy, cultural omnivore, and far-from-obscure object of desire.” And if you can’t trust Penguin Random House, who can you trust?

I checked a map – the gallery was walking distance from where I live, maybe a forty minute walk in each direction.  Easy.  On the other hand, the map showed the gallery apparently to be in the middle of a very posh suburban enclave, the kind of place that I’m pretty sure isn’t zoned for commercial enterprises.  Ah well, that would be interesting in itself.

I checked the weather and it promised to be warm though not punishingly so, but I set off walking and discovered the forecast was wrong.  It wasn’t just warm but scorching, and by the time I got to the gallery I felt like a mad, sweaty dog.      Incidentally, Duncan Hannah these days looks like such a cool customer I can’t imagine he ever sweats at all:

Doesn't look as though he perspired all the much in earlier years either:

PHOTO BY FERNANDO NATALICI

And yes the Parker Gallery is indeed in a suburban enclave, in fact it’s inside a mock Tudor mansion, and the casual gallery visitor would surely be deterred by the prospect of walking up that driveway and knocking on the door, which I suppose is the point. 

But I am made of sterner stuff.   I went up, rang the front door bell, and a very pleasant art gallery girl let me in, and I saw the Duncan Hannah exhibition which was terrific.  

I was all alone, there were no other visitors, and I was able to recreate my Van Gogh moment, walking through the rooms at the Parker pretending these Hannah paintings were mine, all mine.  It was rather a good feeling.

Hannah’s paintings are often both narrative and figurative (a tricky furrow to plow in this day and age), all calm surface but with a hint of inscrutable menace.  Something not quite right may have just happened, or may be about to happen but you don’t know what or why.  This is a particular favorite titled “Man Wrongfully Accused.”

A fellow traveler tells me that the setting is almost certainly Finchingfield, in Essex, and he's surely right, but I don't know what significance that has.

You'll note the absence of cars in the painting, but Hannah is really good with classic cars, such as this Karmann Ghia:

Want to see an old twentieth-century picture of your scribe with his Karmann Ghia? –  Course you do.  (NB I'm well aware that I was no Duncan Hannah looks-wise, but then, few are).

I had a vague plan that after seeing the exhibition I might walk on and have a look at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ennis-Brown house, which was not a million miles away, but it was too damn hot, and the route to the house was all up hill, so I went the other way, and I saw this, perhaps the most rigorously minimalist garden I've seen in a good long time.  Painterly.