CARRY ON RAMBLING

From Carry On Cabbie, 1963, written by Talbot Rothwell.  Pintpot, played by Charles Hawtrey is applying for a job as a Taxi driver with Speedee Cabs. The boss of the firm,  Hawkins (played by Sid James) has been telling him and a group of would-be drivers what hard work it is, with very long hours.

PINTPOT:  We will get one night off a week won’t we?

HAWKINS:  Course.  Are you married?

PINTPOT:  Oh no, only I belong to this rambling club you see, and so does a very nice girl too and, well, once a week we do like to go as far as we can.

Hawtrey was one of those actors whose performances were so gay you could almost believe he was straight, but he wasn’t, as many a sailor could testify.  He came to a nasty, if ultimately very dignified, end. Told by doctors that his legs would have to be amputated he refused the operation, saying he preferred to die with his boots on.

A WALK IN THE (DISPUTED) WAR ZONE

I come late to this, over forty years too late probably, long after the fact, and some time after it’s appeared in various places on the interwebs:

It’s a pamphlet about the horrors of life in New York, published in 1975, warning of the dangers of muggings, break-ins, fires in hotels, the risks of travelling by subway, and what not. There’s a dire warning not to go out after dark, and the passage on walking is especially hair-raising:

 In fact the pamphlet is not exactly what it appears to be.  It’s a scaremongering and alarmist, though not exactly ironic, text published by something called the Council for Public Safety, an umbrella group of 28 unions of police, prison guards and firefighters reacting to the city’s threats to lay off thousands of their members. You might say these conditions would be the consequences of reduced services, although word on the street had it that those conditions applied already.

Now it so happens 1975 was when I first set foot in New York, and although I never saw the pamphlet, its message had somehow soaked into the general consciousness.  New York was by many accounts a terrifying place where no sane person would dare to set foot.  A stroll in Central Park was to be considered a suicide mission.  We were led to believe the place looked like a war zone, and obviously parts of it did, like this:

Now, I’m as much of a coward as the next man, and as I set foot on the streets of Manhattan, leaving the apartment I was staying in on 101st Street and West End, I certainly did see plenty of hookers and pimps and drug dealers on many a street, though I can’t say they were very scary.

photo by Leland Bobbe

More than that, as I made my first forays into New York I couldn’t help noticing that there were lots of little old men and women, lots of young girls, lots of people who looked a great deal more feeble and vulnerable than me.  If they were brave enough to walk the mean streets of New York, then I surely had to be too.

And I was.  Yes there was the occasional hassle as I walked, but the experience was not at all as advertised.  It was only as scary as you allowed it to be.  Famous last words, I know.  However, I realize now that I didn’t take any photographs on that trip.  I’m not sure why.  I think I was probably afraid that it would have made me look too much like a tourist, like an easy mark.  And I don’t remember ever seeing a cop on the streets.  

Here are the other pages from "Welcome to Fear City."

WALKING WITH DUMPSTERS

I walk around and I look at stuff, mostly in what we might as well call the urban environment.  One of the things that my kind of walking does is make me see things I hadn’t seen before, to note various repetitions and common features I might previously have taken for granted.  I like to note similarities and differences.  It's not record science, or in fact any kind of science.  And so we come to the dumpster.

Sometimes they’re come singly:

Often in pairs:

Sometimes in groups:

I can’t speak for the whole of the Anglophone world but I think dumpster is an all-American word.  The British don’t have dumpsters.  They have skips and wheelie bins, and I believe the Australians use the British terminology.

The dumpster was introduced in 1936, part of a mechanical trash-collection system devised by one George Dempster of Knoxville, Tennessee, and for a while it was know as the Dempster Dumpster.

I see a lot of the modern versions when I’m walking around and I don't think most of them find their way onto the back of trucks.  This one, in Santa Monica, is the most pristine I’ve ever seen but then Santa Monica does strive to be pristine.

The ones for hire tend to be fairly neat and clean too – nobody wants to rent a dumpster that’s some scarred, graffiti-spattered thing.  But in the day-to-day world dumpsters hang out at the back of buildings and in alleys, and so they become targets for tagging and other forms of self-expression.  I guess people worry less about graffiti when they’re on a dumpster as opposed to on walls and fences. 

But sometimes people build a little house for their dumpster which presumably keeps it safer from roaming street artists.

Fact is, they're everywhere.  This one was spotted in LA’s Arts District:

This one in the heart of Hollywood.

This one in Little Tokyo:

And as. matter of fact, dumpsters are not only found in the urban environment - they’re sometimes found in the wide open spaces too:

And sometimes when they’re in the wide open spaces they may get used for shooting practice, though it seems you don’t need to be much of a sharp shooter to hit a dumpster, but then perhaps it was to practice grouping

In conclusion: I enjoy looking at dumpsters.  It’s not about looking for ugliness, and I don’t think it’s even about finding beauty in ugliness, and I certainly hope it’s not some wanky art project.  I hope it’s just about walking and looking and, of course, recording.

GROUNDED IN CALIFORNIA

Here is probably the best thing I’ve seen while walking in Hollywood in recent times:

It’s an outline of California, right?  On Selma Avenue.  And I can’t decide whether it’s deliberate, whether some waggish road crew deliberately put it there while filling in a hole of a completely different shape, or whether my pareidolia is just getting out of control. 

Of course it could be both