HOLY WALKING

D.J. Waldie (that's him above) is a pedestrian and the author of Holy Land: a Suburban Memoir, an excellent book about growing up and living in the suburban hinterland of Los Angeles, in Lakewood.  In the interests of clarity it’s probably worth saying that he’s not an actual DJ.

Recently on his website he published a piece titled ‘Walking in LA: Los Angeles is the second-most dangerous city for pedestrians in the U.S.’

 

Waldie is a pedestrian by default, and a non-driver. As he says in the article, and as he’s often written about elsewhere, he suffers from various sight problems which prevent him from driving, though as he also says in the piece, ‘If I could, of course I would drive.’

 

In fact you do meet a certain number of non-drivers in Los Angeles. There are various reasons – from environmental showboating to having been banned from driving, to simply being poor, though it always seemed to me that many of the poorest people in LA still found a way to scrape together the wherewithal to buy a car.

More often than not. non-drivers in L.A. aren’t so much pedestrians as people who want to cadge a lift.

 

I was taken by that sub-headline in the Waldie piece saying that LA is the second most dangerous city for pedestrians in the U.S.  I’ve done some non-exhaustive research on this – looking at lists of ‘America’s most dangerous cities for pedestrians’ – not least because if LA is number 2, I wanted to know what was number one.

But it seems there’s no simple and agreed upon answer. I’ve found stastics where Los Angeles is number one, other statistics where it’s not even in the top 50.  

Still, the dangers are real enough for an LA walker. Waldie writes, ‘I’m a good pedestrian however, staying within the marked crosswalks and never jaywalking, even when the next crosswalk is a long walk away. Free-range pedestrianism is dangerous, Anti-war activist Jerry Rubin was struck and killed in 1994 while attempting to cut across Wilshire Boulevard in Westwood. The head of the Los Angeles teachers’ union, crossing the seven lanes of Olympic Boulevard, was killed.’

I do like that phrase, ‘Free-range pedestrianism.’

 

Then Waldie adds, and I thought this was the real kicker, ‘Fewer streets are marked by crosswalks today. The city has sandblasted away hundreds since the mid-1970s when traffic engineers showed, not surprisingly, that more pedestrians are killed in crosswalks than out of them. The engineers said the painted lines gave pedestrians a false sense of security, making them less attentive to danger. Risk managers had another reason to eliminate crosswalks. Their presence makes cities vulnerable if the city is sued by injured pedestrians or their survivors.’

 

Well that makes a lot of terrible and shocking yet all too predictable sense, doesn’t it?

 

Waldie’s website is here.

 

WALKING WITH BACON

 I was reading about Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1662), philosopher, writer, begetter of the Baconian method of scientific investigation, and latterly a disgraced politician in the days when politicians were capable of grace.

 

He also had a lot to say about gardens, and from the late 1590s he was responsible for the grounds of Gray’s Inn,  known as The Walks.  In 1702 it looked like this:

 

Like this in 1804:

currently like this:

 

Bacon’s Walks were a place to go for a walk, and a fashionable one at that, as recorded by Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn.  I suppose they're less fashionable now; a private garden but open to the polloi sometimes.

 

Polymath though he was, Bacon seems not to have been much of a walker.  John Aubrey’s Brief Lives contains this passage, ‘I remember Sir John Danvers told me that his lordship (Bacon) much delighted in his curious garden at Chelsea and as he was walking there one time he fell down in a dead swoon.  My Lady Danvers rubbed his face, temples etc and gave him cordial water: as soon as he came to himself, said he ‘Madam, I am no footman.’” I can’t help feeling I might be missing something in that reply.

 

And here’s an illustration by Joseph Ratcliffe Skelton titled, ‘Accompanied by a friend to jot down his thoughts, Sir Francis Bacon takes a walk in his garden.’

 

I made a note to go for a wander around The Walks just as soon as the weather warms up, and while I had this in mind a couple of days ago as walking in London, around the back of the Royal Academy, what was the old Museum of Mankind, and blow me down, there was a statue of Sir Francis Bacon, which of course I'd seen before but never took any notice of:

Sir Francis Bacon was a quotable man – “knowledge is power” that’s one of his - but of course he is not the only Francis Bacon in the world.  This is how he’s remembered on goodreads.com:

 

That, of course, is the wrong Francis Bacon, the one seen below, ‘Francis Bacon Walking on Primrose Hill’ by Bill Brandt.

WALKING AND FINDING

 Sometimes I like to think that walking is an abstract, immaterial activity without any end product.  You go out, you come back, and although you may be changed or uplifted or enlightened, you haven’t made or acquired anything.

         Unless, of course, your walk involves scavenging or shopping, and if you’re an assemblage artist.

 

         Having thought about Harry Smith picking up paper planes from the streets on his walks around Manhattan, I started to think about Joseph Cornell.  It seems possible that they met, though I can’t find any hard evidence for it. 

 

I reread parts of Deborah Solomon’s biography of Cornell, Utopia Parkway and she does have Cornell as something of a walker. Apparently he would often go walking in Central Park after visiting the galleries on 57^thStreet, including Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century.  The Cornell exhibition at London’s Royal Academy was titled Wanderlust.

 

But this was the passage in Solomon’s book that really stirred me up, ‘In the 1920s, as Cornell was combing through jumbles of objects in New York City, across the world, in the streets of Paris, Andre Breton was scouting flea markets for intriguing trouvailles … and in his autobiographical Amour fou (1936) he described his practice of “wandering in search of everything.”’  I suppose the thing about searching for everything is that wherever you go, you find what you’re looking for.

 

Breton is widely quoted as saying ‘The simplest act of Surrealism is to walk out into the street, gun in hand, and shoot at random.’  But I’ve never seen why walking had to be involved.  Wouldn’t it be just as surreal to fire your gun out of the window? Or into your own ceiling?

 

In 1942 Breton and a few other Surrealists were in New York, and were not much impressed by the city. Solomon again, ‘Left with nothing to do, the once-scandalous Surrealists visited galleries, sat through movie matinees and strolled down Third Avenue as Breton pointed out surreal-like objects in the windows of the secondhand stores.’

I can’t find a convincing picture of Breton walking – hard enough to find a picture of him outdoors - but here he is collecting butterflies with Benjamin Peret; some walking must surely have been involved.

 

Cornell and Breton did meet – Cornell organized a showing of some ‘nickelodeon classics.’ And as Solomon says, the Surrealists realized ‘Cornell himself was as exotic as any Surrealist creation, a passive autodidact who wandered the city with a brown shopping bag full of trouvailles.’

 

And then, from the dusty dossiers of my memory, I remembered, a long time ago, I was wandering around Manhattan and went into a fairly modest antiques emporium where various dealers were doing business, and the guys were still all aflutter cause the previous day Michael Jackson had been in and bought a couple of items.

 

         I’m sure this was true, though the idea of Michael Jackson wandering around New York looking for unconsidered trifles seemed as unlikely then as it does now. But a little research reveals the pictures above and below of Michael antiquing, and according to online sources he was a major collector of, among other things, comic books, clowns, unusual jewelry, and materials relating to Charlie Chaplin and the Three Stooges, much of it, it must be said, acquired at auction rather than by wandering the streets looking in antique shops.

 

And then the thought of auctions reminded me of a curious moment in my life when I was staying in the Daily Telegraph flat in Paris.  Did you know the Daily Telegraph had a flat in Paris?  I didn’t.  And there on a bookshelf was the 8 volume auction catalogue of the Andre Breton sale.  

 

I thought very seriously about stealing it, but I didn’t a) because of my own moral compass, though that was probably the least of the reasons, b) because I thought somebody might notice it had gone, and I didn’t want to be pursed by the Daily Telegraph and/or the French police, and perhaps most important of all c) because the volumes were immensely heavy and I would have had to carry them on my long walk to the station to get a train back to England.  

I see that catalogue currently sells for a few hundred quid and I don’t know if that makes me feel better or worse.

WRONG AGAIN

 In the interests of half-arsed research I typed ‘walking wrong’ into Google and wasn’t very surprised by what I found – this kind of thing:

 

Now of course I’m not actually going to read these articles, though I was almost sucked by this one:

 

Mistakes while walking may not be the same as walking mistakes but I didn’t trouble to find out – nice font variety through.

 

Of course many of the mistakes are apparently about posture.  Yes, sometimes the internet is just like a punishing and over critical parent – stand up straight, don’t slouch, look where you’re going. And in these cases the mistake was often revealed in the image.

But there were some surprises. Overstriding.  I’d never heard of that. 

 

Insufficient weight change – how much is sufficient?

 

And how about this one?

 

It’s the whole universe telling me that I’m walking wrong, and in the wrong direction, such as when I find myself walking into space on a concrete parabola that looks a bit like Lubetkin’s penguin pool:

And of course if you Google ‘walking right’ you still get a lot of hits telling you how you’re walking wrong. However, I this one found moderately consoling.  

Invoking scientists always raises the stakes – and scientists are rarely invoked in order to say everything’s just fine, carry on as you are. But in this case, I was encouraged by that line, ‘And there is nothing we can do about it.’ Which is fine, because nothing is exactly what I was planning to do about it anyway. 

WALKING WRONG

PHOTO BY CAROLINE GANNON

Sometimes it seems to me that people only buy weekend newspapers so they can be told that they’re doing things wrong.  They’re eating wrong, drinking wrong, sleeping wrong, dating wrong, bringing up their children wrong, and so on.   For me this  reached new heights of annoyance in Saturday’s Times, in an article by Lucy Cavendish, in which told us that most people are walking wrong too.

This is Lucy Cavendish

She was trying to improve her memory by one method or another (and walking was just one of them).  Of course I’m well used to being told that I walk too slowly.  Briskness is the new healthy walking orthodoxy, but you know, I’m inclined to walk at whatever damn speed I want. 

 

 Cavendish talked to one Susan Saunders who’s a Health Coach (yep that’s a job) who suggested that Cavendish could ‘maximise the benefits’ of her walking by combining it with mindfulness.  More than that, apparently researchers at UCL have ‘found a link between preserving cognition and undertaking self-reflection.’  The article then explained what self-reflection is for the benefit of slack-jawed readers who might be new to the idea of introspection.

 

I found the whole thing so annoying that I went for a dawdle while thinking unintrospectively about Helena Bonham Carter and Harry Styles.  I suspect they both walk wrong.