TOO MUCH TIME, WITH AND WITHOUT THE CAPTAIN

Suffering from insomnia, and not wanting to become entirely Ambien-dependent, I found myself between 3 and 5 am the other morning reading Mike Barnes’s biography Captain Beefheart.  It did not put me to sleep.

Now, as we know, tales of Don Van Vliet as a desert rat are often exaggerated, but in the book I found references to a promotional interview Beefheart did with one Meatball Fulton in which Beefheart takes about being a ‘trangent’ (his own invented word as far as I can tell), about bunking off school and going out walking in the desert with the trangents outside Lancaster in the Mojave desert.  He explains, ‘Well, what’s a “trangent,” do you know what I mean?  Someone who likes to go for a walk farther than somebody who is a resident.’

Well, I’m certainly no resident of the Mojave desert but I do go there once in a while, and the week before last I was walking there, not really all that far, in the scrubby parts outside Yucca Valley, and not in the company of anyone else, trangent or not, but I definitely walked farther than some, in the sense that I didn’t see anybody else while I was walking.

In some ways, you don’t have to go all that far to find a “Clear Spot” in the desert but I suppose it all depends on your definition of clear, and in any case that wonderful Beefheart song with its mentions of “Sleepin' in a bayou on a old rotten cot” obviously isn’t referring to the desert at all.  Still, for some of us, when we walk in the desert, the Captain is always with us in spirit.

The notion of the pristine or virgin or clear desert is always problematic.  Much of the American desert is under the protection of the Bureau of Land Management or part of a National Park, which is a fine thing, but there’s nothing strictly natural about that.  Otherwise much of the desert belongs to private individuals who may not do anything with it, but that doesn’t keep it looking pristine or even good, let alone clear.

Obviously houses get built in the desert, more and more of them, and sometimes houses get burned to the ground.

And there’s a whole category of people who think of the desert as a non-place (and we don’t need to get all French and philosophical about this, though we certainly could), or perhaps they think of it as a place that doesn’t matter, as a place where you can shoot your guns and dump your furniture.  Like this:

Clarity comes in many different forms. Here are some people who, one way or another, have found their own clear spots.

DESIRE CAUGHT BY THE TRAIL

You know me and I know you.  And we all like trails and we all like desire. Which is why we like desire trails. OK, sometimes they’re called desire lines, but that’s far less sexy, and let’s face it, these things are trails not lines.  And sometimes they get called desire paths.

There was an article in the Guardian last year titled ‘Desire paths: the illicit trails that defy the urban planners.'  To which one can only say “Illicit? Oh, please.”

The article contained a link to an academic paper from the University of Wollongong (you may make up your own joke here) which contained this fabulous bit of prose: ‘The theme of grounded practice returns in a very different way in Nathalie Casemajor Loustau and Heather Davis’ discussion of their project – “Ouvert/Open: Common Utopias”. Expanding out from a particular and local phenomenon of urban life in Montreal where desire lines record collective disobedience.'  To which one might say, ‘Oh, double please.’  

Anyway, above and below are some desire trails/paths/lines I walked recently.  Me, I’m just SO illicit and disobedient.  And OK, I'm not sure that the one below really counts, but it's a top quality trail in any case:

TOOPOGRAPHICA

I’ve been reading David Toop’s memoir Flutter Echo: Living Within Sound.

It turns out he’s a bit of a walker.  In fact that title comes from walking.  He writes, “My first memory of a listening experience comes from a walk, a regular journey during my early childhood.” He used to visit his grandparents, “we would take the bus from Waltham Cross to Enfield, then walk from the centre of the town to their house in Bush Hill Park …” 

"Shortly before the railway bridge that took us over the tracks into my grandparents’ road the path was bordered on both sides by a concrete wall.  The narrowness of this path meant that the walls reflected echoes from our footsteps very rapidly, an effect described as flutter echo by acousticians. Like the fluttering of a moth’s wings, sound bounces back and forth between the two parallel walls to create a ‘zing’.”

Later he lived with the artist Marie Yates, and together they did “Field Workings,” described by Toop as “walking and working from within the self and under the sky, deeply private even though conducted on open land and documented.” She made environmental sculptures, he made recordings, one of which consisted of “hanging my microphone on a wire fence, then walking away as I played sounds that were snatched from me by the wind …”. This an image from one of Yates's pieces.

Also, from his days as a (for want of two better words) music journalist there’s an article on the Artangel website about walking and art and sound related to Francis Alÿs, Seven Walks (2005), though he references quite a few other walking artists too.

He quotes Alÿs as saying, “I think it’s a natural state for somebody who’s interested in cities or architecture in general to walk. Walking offers a very convenient space for things to happen, and it allows a certain awareness in between an ongoing chain of thoughts and a series of incidental informations around, glimpses of scenes, sounds, smells, etc…” 

         This is an annotated map for one of Alÿs’s walks, titled, Guards.

Toop says, in his own write, “Urban space is divided up according to ideas of visual drama, social connectivity, and the pragmatics of movement, yet sound is taken for granted, forgotten, or ignored despite its vital role as an element in urban design. Sound is not reducible to a text, so not susceptible to ‘reading’.” 

I like that.

SOME WALKERS WALKING

CHARING CROSS ROAD

TOWER BRIDGE

KINGS ROAD

SURBITON

EAST HAM

CHELSEA MOURNING

Well, my billeting in Chelsea is about to come to an end.

It’s been a good time, and of course I make friends wherever I go, but I never got over the feeling that I wasn’t quite Chelsea material.  Few are.

When I arrived there was a place nearby in Kings Road called the Diva Café – it has now become Bye Bye London. 

I haven’t been in there since the change of name. As you may guess from the sign, it’s an Arabic restaurant, specifically Kuwaiti, and I don’t quite understand what the man on the sign looks so cross about. 

Meanwhile a little way up Kings Road there’s shop called London Bonjour, selling 'eyewear' (kids, that's what we used to call glasses!) and I’ve never been in there either but the name does seem a little more welcoming.

And here are one or two other sights I've seen while wandering around Chelsea.