WALKING WITH WEIWEI

Ai Weiwei depicted in a mural in the L.A. Art District:

I've tried and failed to find who the artist is.  I guess that's how it is with street art.  

Somebody might tell me.

The Sunday Times just had an extract from Ai Weiwei’s memoir 1000 Years of Joys and 

Sorrows, about his 81-day incarceration in Beijing in 2011, having been deemed a ‘national 

security risk.’

 

It’s grim and disturbing stuff, and of course he was treated appallingly by the Chinese authorities, and yet I wonder why they didn’t treat him worse. They could certainly have given him a life sentence, for instance. The only obvious reason I can think of for this comparative leniency is international opinion and fear that they might turn him into a martyr.  Today he seems to be allowed to travel anywhere in the world.

 

Weiwei’s work S.A.C.R.E.D. features dioramas depicting his incarceration including this one:

 

The memoir describes what he calls a room rather than a cell, ' some 280 square feet and the floor was laid with brown ceramic tiles, each 2 ft by 2ft, six tiles across and 12 tiles down.  I could exercise only on the six square in the middle of the room: after walking seven steps I had to turn around and go back in the other direction.'

    Then later: ‘From 6.50 to 7.40 am was reserved for exercise, which consisted of walking back and forth on the six permitted tiles.  The guards accompanied me on either side, walking and turning just as I did, maintaining their position and adjusting their distance as necessary, to make sure I didn’t suffer some mishap – however unlikely that might be.  Together we made up the world’s smallest drill team, but in time we reached a high level of wordless co-ordination, sensitive to the slightest changes in rhythm.’

 

         I was left wondering whether it was always the same two guards. Presumably not.  Even in China prison guards must get a day off.  So were some guards better than others at walking with him? I don’t know.

 

Now Weiwei’s free to walk more or less where he likes, such as below, where he’s seen with Anish Kapoor, walking from the Royal Academy to Stratford. The blanket shows solidarity with refugees.  (photo by Mat Smith)  

QUEENLY WALKING

 Want to see the queen with a walking stick, photographed last week?

Want to see the queen with a walking stick 17 years ago after she had a knee operation?

WALKING WITH FELINES

 I was walking in the neighborhood and came across a man taking his cat for a walk.  

The man is named Steve.  The cat is named Boris the Bold.  I’d have thought that most cats would resist violently being put on a lead, but Steve explained, ‘He’s never known anything different.’

 

I was of course reminded of this picture of Cary Grant and his cat, or at least somebody’s cat, walking in L.A..

 

And of course there are these familiar leashed black cats, also in Los Angeles, attending an open casting call.

 

A little digging around also revealed this photo of Dr Ava Cadell, the founder of Loveology University.  Before she was a doctor she was an actress starring in such movies as Lunch Box, and Not of This Earth.  And yes, she is a genuine cat lover.

 

And finally there's this faked picture (not faked by me) of Barry Obama.  I think it’s supposed to make him look weak, like somebody who can be pulled around by felines, but in fact I think it makes him look very human, and also as though he's enjoying himself.

 

WALKING STILL

It's true that I've not been spending a lot of time worrying about this woman I saw walking in the street in Colchester a couple of years back.  She is after all just a bronze statue, an artwork by Sean Henry, and able to take care of herself.

And yet looking at her yesterday, she was surrounding by a sea of road works, or perhaps earthworks, and that did seem somehow troubling:

But maybe I was being oversensitive.  I mean, she was still upright, and still walking, though admittedly still not getting anywhere

WALKING AND DISAPPEARING

         Sometime over the weekend, in the morass of media silt I was absorbing, I came across an online article (actually from Woman & Home) about Mel Giedroyc with the picture you see below and the headline ‘My fantasy?  A walking holiday.’

 

I think this was supposed to be a surprise to somebody, as though Mel G was far too cool to go on a walking holiday, but I can’t say it surprised me, and I can’t believe it surprised anybody else. I like Mel G but she’s always struck me as exactly the kind of woman who goes on walking holidays.

 

And I do quite like the shoes she’s wearing in the above pic.  I assume she wouldn’t be doing much walking in them, but they’d be just fine for posing around the boudoir at the end of the day.

 

Later I was reading an extract from David Sedaris's book of diaries.   In this extract, dated July 17 2011, he'd been watching an episode of The Tyra Banks Show featuring a woman named Donna who weighed 600 pounds but would have liked to weigh 1000.  ‘I guess I'm a sort of reverse anorexia.'

People on the show tried to reason with Donna.  Tyra Banks said, 'But you can hardly walk.  If you keep this up, you won't be able to move.' And Donna replied coolly that she thought walking was overrated.  

I'm sure she's not alone in thinking that.

 

And then I was reading a back issue of the London Review of Books and there was a review by Colm Toibin of Richard Zenith’s Pessoa: An Experimental Life.  Part of it runs, ‘The French translatorand scholar Pierre Hourcade, who visited Lisbon in 1933 remembered leaving a café with Pessoa and walking with him for a few blocks.  Hourcade had, Richard Zenith writes, “this uncanny sensation: that the poet, as soon as he had disappeared around the corner of a downtown street, had really disappeared, and would be nowhere in sight were he to run after him.”’

         I think that’s a great way to end a walk, any walk.