DESERT DRIFTERS

 One of the cool things, possibly the only cool thing, about being me is that people send me 

free books from time to time.  The most recent is a book of photographs by John Brian 

King titled Ghost Variations.

 

         

The images are the results of King walking through the Coachella Valley desert at night, carrying a basic instant film camera loaded with black and w

hite film, and from time to time taking a picture using the built in flash.  In fact to my eyes the end results look less black and white than varieties  of dark grays and blues.

 

         Rocks, boulders, scrub, a couple of palm trees, a fallen branch, are caught in a cone of light with dark, distant shapes looming and lurking in the distance. The pictures are sometimes mysterious, aften ambiguous, sometimes very dark, sometimes washed out.  If you’re so minded you could consider these things metaphors for the desert itself.

 

The results are eerie, indeed occasionally ghostly.  And I can imagine that some people would find them scary or disturbing, but I suppose it all depends on how you feel about deserts. Personally, with the occasional I’ve generally felt at home in deserts, found them a source of wonder, beauty and solace.  Great places to walk and take (often not very good) photographs. But I know that other views are possible.  

I thought Ghost Variations was a great idea, beautifully executed.  It made me want to go wandering through the desert at night with an instant camera, even though I know it’s already been ‘done.’

 

         Thanks to all involved for sending me the book.  Publication day is May 5^th,  published by Spurl Editions.

 

Ghost Variations becomes part of what I realize is a small, not quite randomly accumulated, collection of what we might call books of desert photography.

 

There’s Ansel Adams of course, and especially his book Manzanar, about the Japanese internment camp.

 

There’s John Divola’s Isolated Houses

          Lee Friendlander’s The Desert Seen

           Richard Misrach’s Bravo20, the Bombing of the Ameirican West.

 

Mark Flett’s Saguaros, a giant book of giant and wonderfully strange-looking saguaros.

 

All these books I assume involved the photographer in doing a certain amount of walking, although I also assume that John Divola’s Dogs Chasing My Truck in the Desert involved no walking at all, and that’s one of my favourites.

 

I wish there were more women in the collection, but that’s my bad. I can name plenty of great female desert photographers: Karen Halverson, Wander Hammerbeck, Michelle VanParys, Susie Keef Smith and Lula Mae Graves.  I just don’t own books by them.  

 

Karen Halverson

All these photographers look at the desert with different and very selective eyes.  The desert is an inexhaustible subject but then I suppose all subjects are.

 

I learn there is also a recent book (which nobody is likely to send me) titled Georgia O’Keefe, Photographer, edited by Lisa Volpe.  O’Keefe is an interesting case because according to Volpe ‘she didn’t pick up a camera until she was in her late 60s.’ 

 

Obviously she was a walker long before that. Volpe quotes her as saying ‘I don’t wale to get places.  I walk to be inspired.’ I’ve never thought that these two things are mutually exclusive.

 

Below is the first picture I ever took in anything that could even vaguely be thought of as the desert.  It’s somewhere in California.  I was hitchhiking across the States, as was the style at the time, but we’d stopped for a walk to stretch our legs.  They were good guys. They didn’t understand much of what I said, but who does?

(Obviously I don't own copyright in any of the above photographs except the one of my own - I hope nobody sues me, cos I ain't got nothing.) 

CHARACTER, DESTINY AND SO ON

 And another thing about being a writer, especially one with an interest in quirks and 

obsessions, sometime you feel that the world is delivering the right kind of ‘character’ to 

your door for your delectation and potential exploitation.

 

Today a new window cleaner came to the house.  I opened the back door to be friendly and to say hello, and I noticed he was walking very slowly and gingerly down the garden path.  

That didn’t strike me as remarkable in itself but he said, ‘I’m walking slowly because I’ve got a false leg and I don’t want to end up falling down and you finding me on my back in your garden.  I’m not worried about the leg.  I’m worried about my pride.’

This was so perfect that I didn’t say anything else and now of course I wish I’d asked him all about how he lost the leg, was he in pain, was he able to get about, etc etc. But perhaps that would have spoiled it.

 

Incidentally I used to date a girl whose father had one leg.  He claimed that in his youth he’d been quite a hit with the ladies.  I can well believe that.

 

CAGE VERSUS CAGE

 

Here is a Zen parable as retold by John Cage in Indeterminacy.  It’s not specifically about 

walking, but it definitely involves walking.

 

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In this version it looks like she could have got across without any help, doesn't it?

John Cage is also responsible for the profoundly wonderful piece Water Walk, in which he walks around the stage (or in the most famous version, see below, a TV studio), and creates watery noises using a bathtub, kettle, watering can, pressure cooker and so on.

 

The best thing is that he’s wearing a suit and tie. I think more avant-gardists should try that.

*

John Cage alas was not related to Nicolas Cage, though I've heard him say in an interview that John was part of the inspiration when he chose the name Cage as a pseudonym.

I can’t swear that Nic Cage is much of a walker but obviously acting always involves doing a bit of walking now and then:

 

Nor can I confirm that he’s carried women across rivers but it wouldn’t surprise me. However floating around the internet I did find an image depicting Nic performing a sort of Water Walk. 

HOPE AND GLORY

 I like land and I like art, so obviously I like land art, work by people like Nancy Holt, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Andy Goldsworthy, Richard Long etc.  Some of this art, and certainly seeing some of this art, involves a fair amount of walking, which is all to the good.  And of course in some cases the traces of walking create the art.

 

Certain works of land art look like they must have been massively difficult to make, like Smithson’s Spiral Jetty:

  

But other kinds look less so. You go to some out of the way place, rearrange some stones or twigs or leaves or pieces of wood and Bob’s your uncle.  Not that art needs to be difficult.  This is by Andy Goldsworthy:

However, this sometimes raises the question is it art or just a row of rocks? 

 

Is it a JG Ballard-inspired installation of crashed cars?  Or is it just a row of crashed cars?

 

Perhaps one doesn’t preclude the other.

 

On Sunday I was in Shingle Street in Suffolk, where there was a white line of shells that led from the sea’s edge all the way up the beach, more or less to where the houses were, about 300 yards away. 

This looked about medium difficult – a lot of searching to find the shells, a chance of back ache because of all bending to create the line, but I assume that cranes and earth movers  were not involved.

 

A little research reveals that the Shingle Street line is the work of Lida Kindersley and Els Bottema who both grew up in Delft.  The former is a letter cutter, the latter a ceramicist.  The line was first made in 2005 when they’d both been diagnosed with cancer and has endured as a symbol of friendship and survival.

 

This image from their website, shows them at work:

 

I WOULD WALK 500 STEPS ... AND SO ON

  

This is Peta Bee:

 

A little while back she had a piece in the Times Weekend Section – ‘Why walking is the best midlife exercise. Peta Bee on how many steps you really need.’

 

It was variations on the usual flannel –  ‘Improve the scenery to improve your pace,’  ‘Walk faster,’ ‘Complement walking with weights,’  - but there was an interesting part in which she quoted someone called Thomas Yates who is – wait for it -  a professor in ‘physical activity, sedentary behavior and health.’  Imagine that.  I suppose later in his career he may become a professor just of sitting about.

 

The quotation runs as follows, ‘If you are someone who is very sedentary then increasing you daily walk by 500 steps or just aiming for five minutes of continuous walking would be enough to provide a reasonable health boost.’

 

You see that.  You don’t actually have to DO it.  You just have for AIM to do it.

 

However, according to a sign currently displayed at the Barbican Centre, the government takes a different view – 

 

They say you need ‘a daily walk lasting 20 minutes or more to reduce the risk of heart disease,’ though they don’t say how MUCH more than 20 minutes.  And of course it doesn’t say you actually reduce heart disease, just RISK or heart disease.

 

Now, if you find yourself between trains at Chelmsford station, as I did recently, you’ll have the time to walk from one end of the platform to the other.  In fact you’ll have time to walk from the middle, where the platform entrance is, to one end, back to the middle, down to the other end and back to the middle again. 

 

I’d estimate that the platform is 250 yards long, so that’s your 500 steps right there, though it seemed to take me longer than 5 minutes.

 

In fact if you’re at Chelmsford station and your train is cancelled you’ve got a good half hour to walk back and forth, do you 500 steps and then a great many more.  That must begged for your health, though that's not why I walk.

 

And at the southern end of the platform there was a sign, in fact a use of language, in fact a concept, that I’d never seen before:

 

‘Cess path continues at other end of platform.’

 

I'd never seen the term 'cess path' before. It was the kind of thing that makes a walk worthwhile.  Strange that it's not a category of experience mentioned in Peta Bee’s article.