WALKING AWAY

The Hollywood Walker is away, walking (among other things).

THE LIMOUSINE WALK

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So, this happened. I was invited to a pre-Oscar party given by German Films and the German Consulate General at the Villa Aurore (yep, I’m THAT well connected.  That's it above).  The Villa is a splendid place, right on the edge of the Topanga State Park.  We were told to park in Los Liones Drive, which is the road where the State Park hikers leave their cars, and then board a shuttle bus to get to the Villa.

There were a few hundred guests, and who knows how many hikers: not a single bit of parking was to be had nearby.  I ended up parking a good 20 minute walk away. 

 I’m a walker, right, so I told myself that this was a good thing, but once I’d parked. I had to schlep up a substantial hill to the place where you signed in and got your wristband and then waited for the shuttle.

I’d spruced myself up a little for the event – jacket, proper trousers - and it was a hot day and, walker or not, halfway up the hill I was feeling it.

Now I’m not one usually one of those writers who listens to conversations and writes them down in his notebook – but here I happened to overhear a fellow in shorts doing some mansplaining to the girl he was with, thus “Bowie was Bowie because he WAS the Starman.  And he was so unique.”  That almost made the walk up the hill worth it. 

And at the party there were quite a lot of women in “limousine shoes” – I have no idea how they got there.  I’m pretty sure they didn’t walk up that hill.

WALKING WITH LEE AND ECO

It’s a bad week when we lose both Umberto Eco and Harper Lee.  Maybe it’s because I’m English that I don’t have the affection To Kill a Mocking Bird  that I feel I’m supposed to have. 

A few honest Americans I’ve talked to aren’t sure whether they really like the book or not.  It was drummed into them at an early age that this was such a good book, and such an important book, and they had to like it because.  For many it seems to have been the first "serious" book they ever read. 

Of course most of us in the English speaking world had never heard of Umberto Eco until The Name of the Rose, which first appeared in English in 1983.  It was obviously a very good thing, but also really hard to read.  The movie made everything easier. 

I’m actually much fonder of the essays in Eco’s How to Travel With a Salmon – and elsewhere he did an analysis (and a take down) of James Bond plots that even as a fan of Ian Fleming I find just wonderful.

I can’t swear that either Lee or Eco was a great walker but Lee did write this:

“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view... Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.”  That’s a little bit Hannibal Lector isn’t it?  If we have only understand people by climbing into their skin and walking around, we’re never going to understand many people at all. Which is of course a completely reasonable point of view.  Here's Harper Lee on the movie set.

Eco wrote a book titled Six Walks in the Fiction Wood which contains this passage: "There are two ways of walking through a wood. The first is to try one of several routes (so as to get out of the wood as fast as possible, say, or to reach the house of grandmother, Tom Thumb, or Hansel and Gretel); the second is to walk so as to discover what the wood is like and find out why some paths are accessible and others are not. Similarly, there are two ways of going through a narrative text."

That strikes me as just dumb – surely there an infinite number of ways to walk through a wood, and an infinite number of ways to go through a text.  But this is Fine.  This is the joy of literature, right?  We can love and admire writers, and in some metaphorical way walk with them, but we don’t have to agree with them about everything, or in fact anything.

THE DANGERS OF PEDESTRIANISM

Typical bloody Birmingham.

WALKING INTO THE SUNSET

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Life, being as it is, I open the latest issue of  the London Review of Books, and there’s Jonathan Meades in full flight, reviewing Hitler At Home and Speer: Hitler’s Architect.  It’s illustrated with this painting by Luc Tuysmans, titled The Walk in English, originally De wanderling in Dutch – Tuysmans is Belgian.

Meades writes, “Luc Tuymans’s painting The Walk shows Hitler and Speer silhouetted in early evening light on the Obersalzberg. The photograph that the painting is based on is mute. Tuymans’s manipulation of it is anything but. His Hitler, the Führer, the guide, is indeed guiding, just. He is stumbling awkwardly towards the last of the light while the upright Speer holds back, following certainly, but cautiously, tentatively, allowing his idol and besotted patron first dibs on divining the future – which may prove to be less golden than the sun’s shafts seem to promise. What if the guide has lost his touch, can no longer read the entrails?”

Well, this is good stuff, of course, and only a fool would get into an argument with Jonathan Meades, but I think I’ve found the original photograph, or a very close variant (on the website reichinruins.com), and I don’t find it mute at all.

  Let’s face it, Ayrian dreams aside, most walkers look good pretty good and picturesque when walking into the sunset.  For that matter most people look pretty good when walking among snow covered peaks.  And I do find it interesting however, that in the painting Speer has grown to be a head taller than Hitler.  Does that make the painting pro-Speer? Meades is virulently anti-Speer, as he's absolutely entitled to be.

Speer, as we know, was quite a walker, and he didn’t let incarceration in Spandau slow him down.  In his native Heidelberg there remains the Thingstätte, an amphitheater which he designed for the Nazi party, built in 1935.  It’s a great place for walking these days apparently.  ”Carry a map and watch for the labeled rocks” is the headline on Tripadvisor.