WALKING UNCAGED

There are many days when I wish that John Cage was still with us, for his compositions and his philosophy, and on a day like today, his mycological skills.

         Cage was a mushroom hunter, an activity that requires a fair bit of walking, and he wrote in a somewhat ironic piece published as “Music Lover’s Field Companion,” “I have spent many pleasant hours in the woods conducting performances of my silent piece, transcriptions, that is, for an audience of myself, since they were much longer than the popular length which I have had published.” 

He even taught a class in mushroom identification at the New School in New York which involved taking the class, on foraging expeditions, walking through the woods, but (the school decreed) only those woods accessible on public transport. 

Cage has been on my mind because recently as I’ve walked around LA (a city which has scarcely seen a trickle of rain for the last several months), I keep seeing mushrooms and fungi growing in very unexpected places.  Such as here on somebody’s lawn in Larchmont:

I suppose in this case the lawn has been watered perhaps overwatered through this long dry spell, and so perfect mushroom conditions have been created.

I suppose this must apply in the case below too, in Sawtelle, though this isn’t somebody’s garden but one of those little strips of grass between the road and the sidewalk. I didn’t notice a sprinkler system but I guess there must be one.  And in fact that mushroom was even bigger than it looks in the photo.

And today, on my way to the dentist, I saw this (there were a couple of other very small, less impressive specimens nearby):

Since they’re growing out of a tree I don’t suppose they rely on watering, and the patch of ground the tree did look very dry, though that’s not to say it doesn’t get watered from time to time.  I wish John Cage, or someone, had been there to identify the fungus.  My best guess, from doing a reverse image search, is that it might be a Rhizina undulata, but I wouldn't want to put money on it.

Did you know that in 1959 Cage won $10,000 on an Italian quiz show Lascia o Raddoppia (Double or Nothing) by giving the 24 names of the white-spored Agaricus as described in Atkinson’s Studies of American Fungi.”  Not just that, he listed them in alphabetical order,” which makes him a bit of a show- off, but when you’ve got the knowledge, why not flaunt it?  He used the prize money to buy a piano and a Volkswagen bus Merce Cunningham's dance company.  It wasn’t the sixties, but it was close.  In 1969 Cunningham produced a dance piece titled Walkaround Time.

          Want to see an ancient picture of the Hollywood Walker, somewhere in Scotland, posing with an Amanita muscaria (and his ex-wife)?  Of course you do.

WALKING WITH OBELISKS

I’ve been walking, and thinking about obelisks. If you walk a couple of miles, all of them up hill, from where I am now in East Hollywood, you’ll come to the Griffith Park Observatory, and outside it you’ll find this:

It’s sometimes known as the Griffith Observatory Obelisk, sometimes as the Astronomers' Monument, designed by Archibald Garner, completed in 1934 even before the opening of the observatory, about 40 feet tall, with figures of Hipparchus, Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, and Herschel at the base. (I admit that I’d never heard of Hipparchus.)

Those statues and the armillary sphere on top give it a rather more complex design than I think an obelisk should have, though I’m not knocking it.  But if you head down the road to the Hollywood Forever Cemetery you’ll find (what seem to me at a least) purer examples of the breed, such as this one marking the grave of Griffith J, Griffith, the very man that Griffith Park is named after.

Further south still, on the University of Southern California campus, you’ll find a line of comparatively short obelisks, each about nine feet tall, which mark the involvement of students and faculty in the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics.

So clearly Los Angeles has its shared of obelisks even if it’s not exactly famous for them. London on the other hand, has loads, as I found out recently. 

The "biggie" of course is Cleopatra’s Needle on the Embankment (above), a genuine Egyptian obelisk, and that’s a whole obsession in itself, especially how they got it to England: in an iron tube that was 90 feet long – the obelisk itself being about 70 – and they built an ocean-going vessel around it so it could towed all the way from Egypt.  Complications, some of them lethal, ensued.  

I didn’t know any of this story until very recently, and asking around my acquaintances, many of whom like to think they’re pretty knowledgeable, none of them did either.

Once you start keeping your eyes open for obelisks, London seems to be full of them, and again some look more perfect examples than others.  I saw obelisks in Chelsea:

West Hampstead:

Saville Row:

In an antique shop in Mayfair

In Bunhill Fields, an obelisk monument to Daniel Defoe, but Iain Sinclair has claimed Bunhill Fields so fervently I dare hardly set foot there.

And outside of London too, such as this rather wonderful one in Mistley, in Essex. Those are the Mistley Towers behind it, and there’s an inscription on the obelisk commemorating a local woman named Jane Death.  I kid you not.

I also realized that I’d photographed obelisks in the past, while out walking, without really thinking about it much.  This one in Bristol:

There is also this especially fine obelisk on a crazy golf course in Great Yarmouth.

And I know that years ago I was in Washington DC and definitely saw the Washington Monument.  This is the tallest obelisk in the world, 555 feet high, completed in 1844 – there is much discussion about whether or not slave labor was used.  In any case, I only saw it from a distance, and I was young and unimpressionable back then.  There is also an argument that it isn’t a true obelisk, which should be made from one piece of stone – impossible given the size, and also given that there is currently an elevator inside.

And if you’re a conspiracy theorist you’ll be thrilled to see this:

And finally (at least for now, I mean this obsession is only just starting, I haven’t even started on Athanasius Kircher) there is this by the great illustrator Tom Gauld.

It’s a myriorama “inspired by the works of Laurence Sterne, and I’m actually not sure If that walking figure is Sterne or Tristan Shandy, but that’s very definitely an obelisk.  Now, there is no mention of an obelisk in Tristram Shandythough there’s plenty of walking, nor is there an obelisk mentioned in A Sentimental Journey,so this may be an indication of Mr. Gould’s own obelisk obsession.  

         I have, however found a reference to an obelisk in Sterne’s writing.  It appears in Sermon XVIII titled “The Levite and his Concubine” and runs as follows:

“Certainly there is a difference between Bitterness and Saltness, that is, between the malignity and the festivity of wit, the one is a mere quickness of apprehension, void of humanity, and is a talent of the devil; the other comes  from the Father of spirits, so pure and abstracted from persons, that willingly it hurts no man : or if it touches upon an indecorum, 'tis with that dexterity of true genius, which  enables him rather to give a new colour to the absurdity, and   let it pass. He may smile at the shape of the obelisk raised to another's fame, but the malignant wit will level it at once with the ground, and build his own upon the ruins of it.”

         Wit, obelisks, ruins – my kind of sermon.

THE ONE WORLD MISALLIANCE

I’ve been back in LA, from England, for about a month now, and in truth I haven’t been doing very much walking. When the temperature reaches 90 every day (and yesterday it was 97 – that’s 36 degrees for lovers of Centigrade) it rather takes the spring out of your step.

But I haven’t been completely sedentary, and sometimes you just have to get out there,  sweat it out, and walk the hot streets. and while I’ve been doing it I’ve thought to myself, yep, I’m back, this is all very, very LA.

The classic Volkswagen beetles:

 The palm trees (and also, the giant euphorbia and the hard to fathom parking sign):

The cacti:

The stone lions

The bears:

The curious skies:

Yep, all very LA indeed, but hold on there you psychogeographers, I found examples of all these things in England. 

The classic Volkswagen beetles:

The palm trees (Is this the result of global warming? I don’t think there used to be so many palm trees in England):

The cacti:

The stone lions:

The bears:

The curious skies:

Globalizaton, innit?  Possibly.

POETS WALKING

Nobody seriously doubts that there’s a vital connection between walking and poetry.  Not even me, although I do sometimes struggle to grasp what most contemporary poetry is “for.”

There is, I'm told, a rather good book on the subject, edited by David Kennedy, titled Necessary Steps: Poetry, Elegy, Walking, Spirit. It contains an essay by Jeremy Noel-Tod , “Walking the Yellow Brick Road: A Pedestrian Account of J. H. Prynne's Poems.”

As some of you may know, JH Prynne, or Jeremy as I always called him, was my Director of Studies at university, and he taught me a great deal about poetry.  His own poetry is not a walk in the park by any means, but I do occasionally read his work as a kind of intellectual and linguistic cage-fighting. But here’s what I think are some pretty great lines by Prynne from the poem the “Holy City”

There’s no mystic moment involved just
           that we are
       is how, each
       severally, we’re
       carried into
the wind which makes no decision and is
a tide, not taken. I saw it
       and love is
when, how &
       because we
       do: you
could call it Ierusalem or feel it
as you walk, even quite jauntily, over the grass.

*

When I was prose editor at Ambit magazine, great swathes of poetry arrived as submissions on a daily basis, far more than the prose, and I was very glad indeed that I didn’t have to deal with all those poems.

Still, here’s one poem that Ambit published, and I remember it fondly, by James Laughlin, founder of New Directions Publishing, as well as a poet.

I’m pretty sure Jeremy Prynne would not approve of James Laughlin’s work, I think he'd find it lacking in rigor, although they were both admirers of Ezra Pound – back in the days which such a thing was much more permissible than it is now.  Here's a poem by Pound.

Ione, Dead the Long Year 

Empty are the ways,
Empty are the ways of this land
And the flowers
Bend over with heavy heads.
They bend in vain.
Empty are the ways of this land
Where Ione
Walked once, and now does not walk
But seems like a person just gone. 

*

And here's old Ezra walking.

WALKING STICK WISDOM

 I’ve been reading the obituaries of Christopher Gibbs (that's him above), once described by James Delingpole as “the great civilising influence of the high 1960s counterculture. He got the formerly loutish Rolling Stones into velvet suits, Islamic art and stately homes; he thought up the album title Beggars Banquet; he stood up for his friends Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull after the infamous Redlands drugs bust; he designed the film sets for Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell's Performance, inventing the elegantly dilapidated interior style later known as 'shabby chic'.”

Well, that’s a full life isn't it?  He also was an old Etonian (expelled – as was the style at the time) and, if you ask me, just one more of those figures who gives the lie to the notion that “the Sixties” in England, however defined, was a working class phenomenon.

In an interview with House and Garden he once said, “'I like people to collect and buy things which have a strong personal flavour of someone gone by. For example, walking sticks. You can walk into a frightfully ugly house and the most strongly personal and tangy corner of it is the walking-stick stand in the hall. Its sticks have been given by people to each other, they chronicle events.”

I’m not sure I’ve ever walked into a house that had a walking stick stand in the hall, (maybe my former parents in law?), but I know what he means and I like it a lot.  Walking adds patina to just about anything.

His obit in the London Times said, “His final destination was Tangier, where he established an elegant home and garden on one of the mountain slopes overlooking the Strait of Gibraltar. One visitor described him there as ‘wearing wonderful kaftans’, adding: ‘And he looked like Moses walking in the olive garden — very peaceful.’"  This is him below in that phase, though I never imagined Moses as a blond.

I do not have an olive garden, and I don’t wear kaftans, but I do have a single olive plant in the garden (it’s not quite a tree) and I walk by it every day and sometimes I think I should be doing something about more to/about/for it.  So I consulted the internet about the care and pruning of olive tress.  One of the best sites I found said, “Do nothing for the first fifty years.” Yes, I can handle that.

Yep, that’s me above and my olive plant, and yes I’m holding up an olive it produced.  Do I resemble Moses?  You decide.