RUBICON BEACH

Yep, you're gonna need a Jeep Rubicon (or two) when 

drifting through the mean streets of Beverly Hills:

A SHORT LONG WALK

Regular readers will know that I’m a big fan of Richard Long - walker, artist, sometime walking artists, sometime land artist, sometime sculptor.

Some of his best work – and his best walks - involve “interventions” in the landscapes.  Sometimes these might involve stamping out an “intaglio” on the ground, or he might move rocks into patterns.  

Very early in his career he went up Kilimanjaro, and made a kind of sculpture there.  “I was very proud of the fact I had probably made the highest sculpture in the world, ” he said in a recent interview with the Guardian.

If I’m walking in the desert or some isolated place I often see that somebody has rearranged rocks, and I always say to myself “Maybe Richard Long was here,” but I never really think he was.  And occasionally I myself have been known to rearrange rocks – in which case it’s definitely not a Richard Long, but I suppose it might be “School of Long.”

Long’s work also sometimes involves transporting pieces of rock or slate from natural settings or quarries, and then arranging them in art galleries or in outdoor sculpture parks.  An exhibition of these kind of sculptures titled Land and Sky: Richard Long at Houghton just opened at Houghton Hall, near Fakenham, in Norfolk, England.

Part of the coverage included that article in the Guardian which quotes Long as saying that he’s walked every piece of Dartmoor, but avoids pilgrim routes and old ways. “I made a conscious decision that there’s so many ways to walk in new ways or original ways. I was quite proud of the fact that no one has walked across Dartmoor in a straight line before.”  He’s referring to works like these:

I have definitely walked on Dartmoor – a long time ago, not sure I’d even heard of Richard Long at the time.  I definitely didn’t walk in a straight line and if I walked on pilgrim routes I certainly didn’t know about it.

Long says, “Ideas can last forever …  I’m one of the artists who realized a journey – from a straight path in the grass to a 1,000-mile walk – could be a work of art.”

Of course It’s in the nature of art that it changes the way you see the world, so when you’ve got Richard Long in your head and you find yourself, as I did the other day, walking in Los Angeles along Wilshire Boulevard, past a building that houses a Wells Fargo Bank and a slightly distant outpost of Cedars Sinai hospital, I was amazed to find this sea of rough but carefully arranged slabs of red rock. 

I’m as sure as I can be that these are not “real” Richard Longs, but who’s to say that the landscape architect wasn’t familiar with his works?  Maybe he or she too belonged to the School of Long.

WALKING WITH WOMEN WALKERS

Eleanora Sears

Two books have recently come across the transom, one relatively new, one comparatively old.  The first is Lauren Elkins’ Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London (2016) and The Wonderful World of Walking by Bill Gale (1979).

I belatedly bought myself a copy of Elkin’s Flâneuse since it’s become obvious that nobody is going to send me a freebie – despite my appearance in the bibliography.  No room in there for Iain Sinclair though – ha! (You realize that’s an ironic “ha!” right?)

I’d been reading the reviews of Flâneuse - and it’s not that I trust reviewers whether they’re praising or condemning a book - but there was something a bit off about many of them.  They were incredibly “supportive.”  They indicated that the book was a “good thing” but very few of them really showed actual enthusiasm or affection for the book.  “Well researched and larded with examples,” said Philippa Stockley in the Evening Standard.  Diane Johnson’s review in the New York Times seemed especially dutiful,  “If Elkin’s capsule biographies can occasionally seem a bit potted, they are never uninteresting.”

For my own part I wanted the book to be good – I like walking, I like women, I like women who walk, and I want women to be able to walk wherever they want without being abused or threatened, and all the rest.  Hell, some of my best friends are flâneuses.  And yet I had my doubts.  These doubts were not entirely assuaged by reading the book.

For one thing, there’s a chunk about Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury.  I can see why there has to be, but the truth is that I don’t love Virginia Woolf, men don’t, they just don’t.   I think it’s mostly because her male characters always seem so feeble and awful.  Wouldn’t you throw yourself out of a window rather than be in the same room as Mr. Ramsey of To The Lighthouse fame.  And as for Augustus Carmichael, the visiting poet …

And I know people make claims for Mrs. Dalloway as a great psychogeographic novel, but am I right to be doubtful about this when John Sutherland has made a pretty convincing case that Mrs. Dalloway actually completes her London drift in a taxi? 

Flâneuse also contains a chunk about Sophie Calle who I think is a pretentious phoney, especially that nonsense in Suite Vénitienne of her “following” a man all the way to Venice, while being “followed” by a photographer: but I know other views are possible.  “These are not souvenir snapshots of a presence, but rather shots of an absence, the absence of the followed, that of the follower, and that of their reciprocal absence,” says Jean Baudrillard, not wishing to be outdone in the pretentious phoney stakes.

This can be blamed on Lauren Elkin of course, but we’re all on much safer ground with Martha Gellhorn, especially the articles she wrote for Colliers magazine about the civil war in Spain.  “No matter how often you do it, it is surprising just to walk to war from your own bedroom where you have been reading a detective story or a life of Byron, or listening to the phonograph, or chatting with friends.”

I also very much liked Elkin’s description of living in Tokyo, where she didn’t have the very best time.  “What bothered me most was the certainty I felt that there was a great city out there full of places I wanted to discover, but I didn’t know where to look for them.  I didn’t know what there was out there.  I didn’t know where to go, where to walk.”  It’s a feeling many of us have had, in places much less alien than Tokyo.

          I wish somebody had recommended to Elkin “Flesh and The Mirror” a short story by Angela Carter set in Tokyo, "I was crying bitterly as I walked under the artificial cherry blossoms with which they decorate the lamp standards from April to September. They do that so the pleasure quarters will have the look of a continuous carnival, no matter what ripples of agitation disturb the never-ceasing, endlessly circulating, quiet, gentle, melancholy crowds who throng the wet web of alleys under a false ceiling of umbrellas.”  I’m not saying this would have cheered Elkin up much, but it’s a good story.

I assume, on no absolute basis, that Angela Carter was quite the flaneuse when she was in Tokyo, and also in London, and indeed in Sheffield.

The Wonderful World of Walking is (let’s say) a text of its time.  A chapter titled “Walking and Today’s Woman” runs to all of two pages.  But the book does contain accounts of a few walking women, none of them exactly household names, and some completely new to me.

Minta Beach walked from New York to Chicago in 1912.  Minnie Hill Wood walked from Washington to San Francisco in 1916.  Eleanora Sears, an all round sportswoman, set a speed hiking record in 1925, walking the 74 miles between Newport, Rhode Island and Boston in 17 hours.  I imagine none of these women considered herself a flâneuse, and they surely didn’t consider themselves artists, although Minta Beach did publish a book about her walk. 

I did have vague memories of a later walker that Gale writes about: Dr. Barbara Moore.   I just about remember seeing her from time to time on TV when I was growing up in England.  She did a number of long walks, the one I remember best was from Land’s End to John O’Groats – 1200 miles in 23 days, I know now, so that’s over 50 miles per day.   I discover that was in 1960, so no wonder my memories are vague, and apparently that same year she walked from San Francisco to New York, 3,387-mile according to Gale, so a fairly indirect route, and in 86-days, so a fraction under 40 miles a day which seems barely imaginable.

Still there was much I didn’t know about her.  For one thing, although she was British by marriage, she was born in Russia in 1903, migrated to England in 1939, and had a career as an engineer.  So she’d have been in her mid to late 50s when she was doing the walks that made her famous.

I also didn’t know that she was a nutritional crank, a vegetarian, but sometimes also a breatharian, believing people could survive without food altogether.  According to Bill Gale, “A large glass of grass juice was her favorite six course meal in one.” In various interviews she said that people could live to be 150 or 200 years old, and claimed to have cured herself of leukemia, using a special diet.

         
What I absolutely didn't know, and which Gale doesn't mention, is that she spent the last years of her life fighting legal property battles over the lab she was planning to build next to her house in Frimley, in Surrey, and she was eventually jailed for contempt of court.  She died in a St Giles Hospital, London in 1977, somewhat earlier than she had anticipated.

A BRUTAL WALK IN THE SUN

Now that I’m back in Los Angeles, I’ve been walking around looking for signs of Brutalist architecture.  There are certainly plenty of ugly buildings in L.A., some of them brutal with a small b, but I’m not sure how many classify as genuinely Brutalist in the grander sense.

The website for the Royal Institute of British Architects has a section labeled,  “What to look for in a Brutalist building,” and goes on to list:

1. Rough unfinished surfaces
2. Unusual shapes
3. Heavy-looking materials
4. Massive forms
5. Small windows in relation to the other parts

No mention there of concrete, which surprised me: Brutalism supposedly got its name from Le Corbusier who spoke of “breton brut” – i.e. raw concrete, and L.A. certainly has concrete buildings.  Various local online pundits also offer lists of Brutalist buildings in L.A..  These vary considerably and include: The American Cement Building:

The La Brea Tar Pits Museum:

The Japanese American Cultural & Community Center:

 

Even Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House.

I’ve walked past, and around, and even inside, all of these at some time or another and I never thought they constituted Brutalism.  They all strike me as rather friendly buildings, but maybe Brutalism gets softened by the California sunshine, the blue skies, the palm trees.

However, I recently a walk I recently did from Hollywood to Larchmont Village (5 or 6 miles round trip) pitched up some examples that might get a person thinking about the real meaning of brutality in these matters.

This apartment block on Bronson Avenue certainly has heavy-looking materials
and strangely small windows in relation to the other parts; no unusual shapes though:

These buildings on Santa Monica Boulevard have no windows at all, but they do have mass, and certainly have heavy looking materials, although one of them is decorated with those elongated stars which would be unthinkable to Brutalist hardliners:

This carpet warehouse on Gower Street looks brutal as all getout, and I believe is made of concrete blocks:

 But I can see that you might argue these things are scarcely architecture at all, they’re just buildings, and not so much brutal but just crude.  However, just above Beverley Boulevard, on Larchmont Boulevard, is the Larchmont Medical Building, built by Welton Becket and Associates, “real” architects too be sure, completed in 1965.

Welton Becket was also responsible for the Capitol Building and the Theme Building at LAX – so not the most committed to Brutalism but I think this building fits the bill pretty well: big, concrete, blockish, the forms not so much unusual as uncompromising, but again rather friendlier than hardcore Brutalism.

I like it a lot. It’s also a place I’ve been to have root canal work, I seem to recall the main entrance lobby being tiled in blood red marble, but my memory made be failing me there.  I was expecting brutality in the dentist's chair, and it turned out to be considerably less brutal than you might imagine.