IT IS WRITTEN

 Even the joke in the Christmas cracker understands me.

LOAFING IS A KIND OF WALKING

 A little walking humour here, for fans of cricket and fans of Geoffrey Boycott.

          A story (perhaps apocryphal) in the Times last week said that Boycott was once talking to John Barclay, captain of Sussex, before the toss at a match in Scraborough.  Boycott asked Barclay if he was a religious man, and Barclay said that he was and that he always prayed before he went out to bat.  And Boycott said, ‘I’ve based my career on the first psalm.’ Barclay was evidently not religious enough to know the reference and had to look it up later.  The psalm begins, ‘Blessed is the man who does not walk.’  

 

To walk, in cricketing terms, in case you’re not a fan, is for a batter to give himself or herself out and walk off the field without waiting for the umpire to confirm the dismissal.  I suspect this is getting rarer all the time, and the reason often given for not walking is that umpires often give you out when you’re not, so staying in when you know you’re out is a small act of compensation.

 

Anyway, the line as it appears in the King John Bible runs as follows, ‘Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful.’

 

This is not my area of expertise, but a little research reveals thatJewish tradition has it that the Book of Psalms was composed by Adam, Melchizedek, Abraham, Moses, Heman, Jeduthun, Asaph, and the three sons of Korah.  

One more and they’d have had a cricket team.

 

Below: the umpire raises his finger.

 

EVERYBODY WALKS IN L.A.

 For various reasons, some of them obscure even to me (perhaps especially to me), I’ve been in southern California, pretty much avoiding all my old friends and acquaintances there, trying to sort out my feelings about a place I loved for decades, lived in for over 15 years, and have ‘lost’ one way or another.  I mean, I haven’t really lost it.  It’s still there and I know how to find it, but even so ...

 

Naturally I did a fair bit of walking while I was there because that’s what I do wherever I am, and although I was seldom the only person on the street, sometimes I was:

 

The walking was great. I really do think that the LA authorities should promote the place with some slogan such as “Los Angeles – One Helluva Walking City.”

 

The place is built on a grid of course, which makes finding your way around comparatively easy, although admittedly the things you might want to see and places you might want to go are seldom walking distance from each other, and once in a while you do have to walk around or through a tent city, but what’s pedestrianism without a little local difficulty?

 

On my wanderings I briefly thought I’d found a Thomasson – in this case a set of stairs to nowhere - but in fact I think they’re part of the emergency exit from the building above, so unlike a true Thomasson the stairs do have a function.

 

There were ruins, just like ancient Rome:

 

There was even an obelisk:

 

There were cool vehicles of course. Here is the author with the vehicle of his dreams:

 

photo by Caroline Gannon.

And I saw a couple of VW Beetles still in action on the street, which is always reassuring. I even managed to get a picture of one of them.

 

There was walking in the gardens at the Huntington in San Marino, not least the desert garden.

It was fabulous.  And then the inamorata and I got in the rented car and drove inland to do some ‘proper’ desert walking …

 

SO MANY SPOILED WALKS

 In Saturday’s Telegraph Magazine there was an interview with Catherine Zeta-Jones in which she asserts how happy her marriage is to Michael Douglas by saying, ‘We’ll walk around the golf course together for four hours at a time.’

 

This strikes me not just as grounds for divorce but grounds for murder. Has she never seen the Michael Douglas movie Falling Down?  Doesn’t she know that terrible things happen when you’re walking on a golf course?  Golf being just one of them.

NIGHT AND THE CITY

 A friend gave me a mighty pile of old copies of the London Review of Books - over a decade’s worth - and I’m very slowly working my way through them.

 

Victoria Roth

Inevitably I’m not reading them in historical order, and one of the most tantalizing things in any issue is the Letters page in which correspondents react to reviews from the previous issue, which I’ve generally not seen.

 

In the issue from May 2 2017 there’s a letter from Iain Sinclair reacting to accusations about his ‘failure to supply an adequate headcount of female characters (or influences) in any text I have written.’  To defend himself he calls in the chapter fromThe Last London‘celebrating the flaneuse and photographer Effie Paleologou.’

 

I remember thinking when I read the book that the name seemed so improbable it might be Sinclair’s fictional invention, although in that case I thought he’d have chosen something less improbable. But no, Effie Paleologou is a ‘real’ person with a considerable presence outside of any text by Sinclair.  Her work looks like this:

Most of Paleologou’s work that I’ve seen features this kind of nocturnal cityscapes in London, Athens, and for one project Hastings.  Her books and collections have titles like Mean City and Tales of Estrangement and at least one of the sources I’ve read describes the spaces she depicts as nightmarish, but I don’t find them that way.  I don’t even find them especially mean or estranged.  I just like them is all.

 

It seems that a fair amount of walking must have been involved in taking these pictures, and we know that nocturnal wandering is a very different thing for women than for men; the nocturnal flaneuse seems to be a special category within the ranks of flaneuses.

 

Paleologouis in some sense a street photographer: if you’re an urban walker and you take photographs you’re likely to be a street photographer one way or another.  

 

On many days of the week I think street photography is a dying form, which seems a terrible shame and means that that many of photographers I like - Garry Winogrand, Diane Arbus, Vivian Maier, Bruce Gilden, Helen Levitt, Daidō Moriyama - may be the end of a certain line.

People are increasingly touchy about those who brandish a camera in the street, with its overtones of intrusion, stalking and sexual harassment.  And when it comes to children -fuggedaboutit:

Helen Levitt

Of course taking photographs at night when the streets are empty is one way of getting past all that.  And in any case it must be as Joe Jackson put it, ‘It’s Different for Girls.’

Therefore I was pleased to discover the work of a ‘global community named Women Street Photographers  - there’s an Instagram account and a website. Some of the work seems to stretch the definition of ‘street photography’ but no doubt that’s the point.

Here’s a great picture by Marisa Popovic titled 'Mrs. "Sarma", Skopje, North Macedonia,' 2019.

 

There may be life in the old form yet.

https://www.womenstreetphotographers.com/photographers-ii