WALKING CHIPLESS

Maybe you saw this recent walking story.  It was all over the news this weekend. It’s so remarkable, so improbable, so “good,” that it’s hard to believe it’s true, though nobody seems to doubt that it is.

Jacob Cartwright, aged 22, (that’s him above) set off in his tractor trailer on Tuesday, to deliver a truckload of potato chips from Portland to Nyssa, in Oregon, a 390 mile trip according to Google maps, through snow, intending to make the delivery by 7:30 a.m. Wednesday.  And he went missing.

         There was a land and air search, which failed to find him.  After 4 days Cartwright’s wife went home from a meeting with local officials about the search and found him sitting in their house.   He’d been walking.  He’d walked home. He told his wife he was “hurting real bad” and she took him to the hospital.

Almost certainly not Jacob Cartwright's truck, but it's from the company he works for.

The story Is that he punched the wrong address into his GPS and so it sent him up the wrong road. He became aware of that sooner or later, and he had the GPS recalculate, but then it sent him up a forest service road which started out paved but then became dirt and so the truck got stuck.  Cell phone service was patchy and in any case his battery had died, so he got out of the truck and started walking to his home in La Grande, which at that point was about 36 miles away.

He walked without any food or water from just after midnight Wednesday and kept going, wading through snow at some points, and by Saturday morning he was near enough to La Grande, to hitch a ride to his home.

         I’m well aware that people can go long periods without food, but surely he needed water.  He could have drunk the snow, I suppose, but apparently he didn’t.  According to his boss Roy A. Henry, owner of Little Trees Transportation, “He was so dehydrated that his kidneys stopped functioning.”  On the other hand, the nursing supervisor Danita Thamert at Grande Ronde Hospital said, “He looks to be pretty good. He’s a big boy. He kept moving and stayed warm enough. So it doesn’t look like he’s going to have too many injuries.”

And the punchline: despite having a truckload of potato chips he didn’t touch any of them. According to Henry again, when he asked Cartwright why he didn’t take some potato chips with him for the walk, Cartwright said, “That’s worth money. That’s the load I was hauling and I didn’t want to damage the property.”

         The man’s a walking hero, though I don’t think he’d be any less of a hero if he’d taken a few bags of potato chips with him for the walk.

THINGS WILL BE GREAT WHEN YOU'RE ...

Somebody’s been making art in my neighborhood and leaving it in the street, which I think is not quite the same as making street art.  So far, I’ve only seen it on Franklin Avenue but it’s perfectly possible it’s elsewhere too.

Some pieces look more skillful than others, some more crazy than others.  Some

of it seems kind of paranoid, and potentially offensive, and possibly racist, but at this point in art history who knows whether lack of skill, craziness, and offensiveness aren’t just artistic strategies.  Quite a few people were walking by as I was taking these pictures, but nobody paid any attention either to me or to the art.

Of course much of Hollywood, like the rest of the Los Angeles, perhaps like the rest of the world, continues to be demolished and rebuilt at a frenetic pace.  There are plenty of ruins and building sites, and some structures that look like both simultaneously.

And some new buildings require the digging of deep holes that will eventually become subterranean parking garages. Do note how “nature” is still coming up through the ground – though that won’t last long.

Some short sections towards the eastern end of Hollywood Boulevard remain much as they were when I first arrived in LA, over a decade and a half ago, even as things change all around them. There are at least three old school motels, which remain in business and you imagine may be kind of sketchy - the yelp reviews are mixed.

 The Harvard still offers in-room “adult movies” but you suspect that may be just a retro affectation.   The whole place looks a movie set and may well be used as one.  

 The Hollywood Dowtowner, a place I’ve photographed a few times in passing over the years, is certainly my favorite from the outside, and I was quite cheered to see these guys below working on the neon sign.

I guess they knew what they were doing – they certainly had a very big truck, but I did wonder if they really needed those high visibility yellow vests.  When you’re 30 feet in the air in a cheery picker, people are going to see you with or without a fluorescent jacket.

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SOME WALKING HUMOR

Devorah Baum (that's her below) recounts the following joke in her newish (2017) book Feeling Jewish (A Book for Just About Anyone) - got to love that subtitle.

"Two Jews, Moishe and Itzhik, are walking in the forest in the Ukraine some 150 years ago.  In the distance they see two local guys walking toward them.  Moishe turns to Itzhik, panics and says, 'Itzhik, what shall we do?  There’s two of them, and we’re all alone!' ”

I think I understand this joke, but I’m sure I don’t “get it” the way a Jewish Ukrainian would.

But I definitely don't get why it was 150 years ago.  That would be 1867 - and if Wikipedia is to be believed this was one of the few times when Jews in Ukraine were comparatively safe.  But maybe that's the whole point.  Minefield, innit?

BOYS OF VARIOUS CENTURIES

Half a lifetime ago I was, very briefly, a security guard/gallery attendant at the Royal Academy of Arts in London.   They’d taken on extra staff for a big Post-Impressionist exhibition. First thing in the morning, you had to be at your place ten minutes before the public were allowed in, so for that very brief period of time you found yourself alone pacing up and down in a gallery of, say, priceless Van Goghs.  And as you paced it was very possible to imagine that you were some kind of supervillain, and these Van Goghs were yours and yours alone.  And funnily enough something very slighty similar happened to me at the weekend in Los Angeles.

I went to the Parker Gallery to see an exhibition by Duncan Hannah, top quality painter, and author of a newish memoir titled Twentieth-Century Boy which is getting masses of attention, and according to its publisher is a “rollicking and vividly immediate account of his life amid the city's glamorous demimondes in their most vital era as an aspiring artist, roaring boy, dandy, cultural omnivore, and far-from-obscure object of desire.” And if you can’t trust Penguin Random House, who can you trust?

I checked a map – the gallery was walking distance from where I live, maybe a forty minute walk in each direction.  Easy.  On the other hand, the map showed the gallery apparently to be in the middle of a very posh suburban enclave, the kind of place that I’m pretty sure isn’t zoned for commercial enterprises.  Ah well, that would be interesting in itself.

I checked the weather and it promised to be warm though not punishingly so, but I set off walking and discovered the forecast was wrong.  It wasn’t just warm but scorching, and by the time I got to the gallery I felt like a mad, sweaty dog.      Incidentally, Duncan Hannah these days looks like such a cool customer I can’t imagine he ever sweats at all:

Doesn't look as though he perspired all the much in earlier years either:

PHOTO BY FERNANDO NATALICI

And yes the Parker Gallery is indeed in a suburban enclave, in fact it’s inside a mock Tudor mansion, and the casual gallery visitor would surely be deterred by the prospect of walking up that driveway and knocking on the door, which I suppose is the point. 

But I am made of sterner stuff.   I went up, rang the front door bell, and a very pleasant art gallery girl let me in, and I saw the Duncan Hannah exhibition which was terrific.  

I was all alone, there were no other visitors, and I was able to recreate my Van Gogh moment, walking through the rooms at the Parker pretending these Hannah paintings were mine, all mine.  It was rather a good feeling.

Hannah’s paintings are often both narrative and figurative (a tricky furrow to plow in this day and age), all calm surface but with a hint of inscrutable menace.  Something not quite right may have just happened, or may be about to happen but you don’t know what or why.  This is a particular favorite titled “Man Wrongfully Accused.”

A fellow traveler tells me that the setting is almost certainly Finchingfield, in Essex, and he's surely right, but I don't know what significance that has.

You'll note the absence of cars in the painting, but Hannah is really good with classic cars, such as this Karmann Ghia:

Want to see an old twentieth-century picture of your scribe with his Karmann Ghia? –  Course you do.  (NB I'm well aware that I was no Duncan Hannah looks-wise, but then, few are).

I had a vague plan that after seeing the exhibition I might walk on and have a look at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ennis-Brown house, which was not a million miles away, but it was too damn hot, and the route to the house was all up hill, so I went the other way, and I saw this, perhaps the most rigorously minimalist garden I've seen in a good long time.  Painterly.

EINFUHLUNG FOR THE DEVIL

This is how it sometimes works when you’re a determined pedestrian in Los Angeles. I was heading for the first annual Independent Art Book Fair, taking place as a pop up in a building on Maple Avenue, on the edge of downtown. I vaguely knew there was a street called Maple Avenue, but I had never knowingly set foot there, and I also knew it was part of the Fashion District, just a hop, skip and a jump from Skid Row.

I could have driven all the way there but there’s no joy in that, and besides, I have to protect my reputation as a walker.  But equally I wasn’t going to walk the whole of the eight miles each way, so the idea was to combine some walking with some other forms of locomotion.

 

So I got in the car, drove down the hill and parked, then walked the three quarters of a mile to the Metro station, got on the subway, traveled six stops, got out, then walked a circuitous mile and a half to the book fair, knowing of course that I’d have to do most of it again in reverse on the way back.  That pretty much adds up to a day out walking in Los Angeles. 

 

You know, I don’t hear the term “gendered space” as much as I used to, but that may say more about me than it does about space and gender.  I was by no means the only man on Maple Avenue, but it was interesting how out of place a man can feel when he's in a street festooned with strange, gaudy fabric, all of it for sale.  

Did I feel marginalized?  Well, maybe a little.   Did I experience the inverse tyranny of patriarchy?  Not so much.   Did my presence feel transgressive?  Well no, but it did feel like a small adventure, that I was in a place where I had no business and no involvement.  Clearly needs were being met, transactions were taking place, but they all seemed completely inscrutable to me.  What would you actually make out of fabric that looked like this?

I'm sure that Walter Benjamin has a fair amount to say about this. It didn’t seem to me that I was watching “high capitalism” at work but obviously commodities were involved and were changing hands.  Benjamin writes in The Arcades Project, “Empathy (in German einfühlung) with the commodity is fundamentally empathy with the exchange value itself.  The flâneur is the virtuoso of this empathy.”

I don’t know that I felt a great deal of empathy with the commodity in this case, kind of hard to have empathy with fabric that looked like this:

But I did notice one thing, that although some of (by no means all) the things for sale had prices on them, I had absolutely no idea whether this was a reasonable exchange value.