RANK AND GROSS - A GREAT DOUBLE ACT

 Fie on't! ah fie! 'tis an unweeded garden,

That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature

Possess it merely.

 

Oh come on Hamlet, you say that like it’s a bad thing.

 

One of the things I do as I walk through the world is peer into people’s front gardens.  This seems reasonsable and unintrusive.  Somebody (and I wish I could remember who) said back gardens are for yourself, front gardens are for others.  So I feel justified in my prying.

 

It’s evident that some people are happy to show an eccentric face to the world via their front garden.  As above and below: 

 

I like this stuff, obviously.  But I’m equally intrigued by the gardens where people appearto have done nothing and just ‘let nature take its course’ (whatever that might mean).

 

Once upon a time you’d have thought these people were wastrels of slackers, or people who were just giving an ‘up yours’ to their neighbours, but now we’re all in favour of wildness (or even rewilding), aren’t we? So it’s even possible to convince yourself that your overgrown garden has become a nature reserve.  Mine used to look like this: 

 

But there are always limits. Walking through Mark Street Gardens in Shoreditch t’other day I came across this sign:

 

Yes, we may love nature but we always like some kinds of nature better than others.

WELL RAPPED

 I know I was once in the same room as Christo and Jeanne-Claude.

 

And I know where it was – at a signing at the Strand Bookstore in New York, but I can’t remember when it was.  It seems like only yesterday, but Jeanne-Claude died in 2009 so it was at least before then.  Christo died in 2020.  This means that the wrapping of the Arc de Triomphe, currently to be seen in Paris is a posthumous work.

 

But, you might say, who needs artists at all, when you can currently walk down Kingsway in London, as I did at the weekend, and see this:

 

It’s a building (or two buildings depending on how you look at it – the tower and the office block next to it came as a set) that has gone by various names.  It was originally Space House, then Civil Aviation Authority House, with the tower known as I, Kemble Street.  And, it may be changing its name again – I understand the Civil Aviation Authorityhas moved on - to Gatwick.

 

It’s a building I ‘discovered’ for myself while walking around, a bit of not too brutal sixties Brutalism, and a lot of Londoners seem never to have heard of it, which strikes me as surprising since it was designed by George Marsh of the Seifert’s architectural practice for the property developer Harry Hyams.  This is the same lot that  – the same team that built Centre Point, which I did (secretly) like even when it was a symbol of capitalist evil.

 

Pevsner said Centre Point was ‘coarse in the extreme.’ He called Space House (as it was then) ‘an intruder.’ Will it surprise anybody if I say that both buildings are now grade 2 listed.

Here's a picture of Christo walking.

WING WALKING; YES, THAT KIND

You may remember t’other day I put up a picture, actually a gif, of Peter Falk walking in a scene from Wings of Desire.  Below is Bruno Ganz in the same movie, playing an angel. Can angels walk?  Yes, I suppose they can, though I don’t suppose they have to.

 

I was led to other pictures of Peter Falk walking, some of them in Beverley Hills, in 2008, on an occasion when he was in great distress caused perhaps by the presence of paparazzi, and certainly by the dementia that he experienced towards the end of his life. Some of these pictures are shocking and terrible, and I think it would be wrong to show them again, but here he is after he’s been calmed down by a cop.  Still not looking his best.

 

I headlined that original post ‘Wing Walking: No, Not That Kind,’ so as to distinguish it from this kind of wing walking:

 

I does look terrifying but then I thought maybe it wasn’t so bad, as long as you were firmly lashed to the plane, what could go wrong?

 

And then I heard that at the weekend, at the Bournemouth Airshow, a plane piloted by David Barrell and carrying a wing walker named Kirsten Pobjoy, plunged into Poole Harbour.  

 

Pilot and walker survived without injuries, though presumably with a certain amount of 

trauma.  But it seems there’s a lot more of this kind of thing going on than you might 

imagine – you can look it up.  It's grim stuff.   But obviously a wing walker has a much 

better chance of surviving if the plane crashes into water as opposed to solid ground.  

Nobody walks away from those.

 

But to return to Peter Falk. I never knew anything about his private life but according to a website titled The Life and Times of Hollywood he was quite the womanizer.  For instance he spotted Shera Danese walking through the streets of Philadelphia and chased her begging for a date.  He was, of course, married to somebody else at the time.

 ‘She wasn’t interested,’ Falk said. ‘I kept at it. She conceded to a hello over a cocktail.'

Reader, he married her, though by all accounts he continued to womanize.  She appeared in six episodes of Columbo, though not as Mrs Columbo (obviously).

 

  

WING WALKING; NO, NOT THAT KIND

You looking for a walking gif?

This will do nicely

• 

Peter Falk in Wenders' 'Wings of Desire'

Of course I know it isn't, but that background looks an awful lot like Sheffield to me.

YEAH, MORE OF THAT KIND OF THING

I was recently directed to a curious piece by Alejandro Chacoff on the New Yorker website. It’s a kind of review of Antonio Muñoz Molina’s book To Walk Alone in the Crowd. I admit I’d never heard of either of these authors.

The piece was titled ‘Is the Digital Age Costing Us Our Ability to Wander?’ – which suggests that nobody at the website is aware of Betteridge’s Law of Headlines: ‘Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.’ To be fair, in the print magazine it was titled ‘Doom Strolling.’ As for the piece itself, it’s extraordinary just how many of the usual suspects Chacoff manages to cram into the first 900 words of the piece before mentioning Molina’s book. These include Virginia Woolf, Sebald, de Certeau, Baudelaire, Benjamin et al. 

 The reason for Chacoff’s delay in getting round to talking about the book is because he obviously doesn’t rate it. He writes that the book’s ‘excursions into literary history lend the proceedings a certain gravitas, but they also highlight the relative monotony of the narrator’s own wanderings.’ Ouch. Glad the monotony is only relative.’ It is apparently a book of fragments, which sounds reasonable enough to me, but Chacoff says, ‘The use of fragments is not uncommon among flâneurs, but Muñoz Molina’s set pieces read as mere compilations of visual and sonic data, with no thread looping through them, no enigma being circled.’ Do walkers need to circle enigmas? I didn’t know that. This is Molina (he looks like a walker):

Chacoff also says, ‘In the age of Google Maps, it is difficult to follow Benjamin’s exhortation to get lost,’ a sentiment I hear all the time, and it strikes me as absolute nonsense. I have never been so lost as when trusting and following directions on a phone. Chacoff again, ‘Throughout the book, it is difficult to tell which city the wandering narrator is in unless he explicitly names it. There may be a tacit critique in this approach: have big cities across the globe become products, too, soulless and interchangeable?’ (To which again any sane person would answer no). This leads Chacoff to conclude, ‘Still, there is something self-defeating in an homage to flânerie that offers little sense of place.’ And there I think he does have a point. 

 I haven’t read Molina’s book as yet but I'm sure I will. In the meantime I ‘looked inside’ on Amazon and was rather taken by this passage; ‘I read every word that meets the eyes as I walk by. Fire Department Only. Premises Under Video Surveillance. We Pay Cash for Your Car … Do not leave plastic containers outside the trash bin. No Pedestrian traffic. Enjoy our cocktails.’ That’s exactly what I do. I thought it was what everybody did.