Friday, November 1, 2013

GOING DOWN TO ROSENDALE - WALKING IN WALLKILL



While I was in upstate New York I walked along the “extended Wallkill Valley Rail Trail,” in and around Rosendale.  I used to spend a lot of time in Rosendale because my girlfriend lived there, and we did often go walking around the area.  It was a while ago, and not all the routes are very clear in my memory anymore, and although I did remember walking along a former railroad line here and there, I certainly didn’t remember it ever being called the Wallkill Valley Rail Trail, extended or not. 

I also remembered that on one of ours walks we found some ruins, decaying stone buildings, with the windows and half the roof missing, perhaps originally a site office or workshops, and nearby were various bits of abandoned machinery and pipes. These, like the railroad itself, were remnants of the golden days when Rosendale cement ruled the world, starting at the beginning of the nineteenth century, peaking around 1900, but still in production in a minor way even today.  Rosendale cement is in the Brooklyn Bridge and the base of the Statue of Liberty.  Consequently when walking around the woods you’d often suddenly come across the opening of a former mine, a big, dark mouth in the rock.
        

Back then you could walk right inside the mine openings, which actually looked very much like caves, and I did.  Being of sound mind I never went very far in, not least because most of them had flooded, but it was good to be able to go just far enough inside to scare yourself.  If anyone ever came to any harm in there I never heard about it.


Far more scary was an abandoned railway trestle that crossed the main street of Rosendale, some 150 feet above road and creek.  I never went up there because it was unfenced and it looked kind of lethal, and (I was told) it was a favorite spot with suicide jumpers, though I now suspect this may have been an urban, or I suppose, rural, myth.


Well it’s all different now.  The trestle is part of the rail trail, a pedestrian walkway.  It’s been tidied up and made very secure indeed.  I’d read an article in About Town magazine (a Mid-Hudson Valley Community Guide) by one Vivian Yess Wadlin that “the trestle has substantial railings that cradle you and yours in safety, actual and psychological.”  And when I got up there I saw it was absolutely true.  The handrail across the top was thick and broad, the uprights plentiful and close together: something with half the heft would be enough to stop you falling off, but its good to feel doubly secure when you’re 150 feet in the air.  They didn’t use to care so much about these things apparently:


It was cool walking up there, but the real task was to find those ruins and mine openings.  It was actually no trouble at all to find the mines, but – will it surprise you? – they’re now are all fenced off.


 And there are signs like this to keep you on the trail:


Now this strikes me as some sort of apotheosis of 21st Century priorities, authority and control.  First of all there’s the primacy of private property.  Then there’s some unctuous plea to protect the wildlife.  Then, as a bit of an afterthought, there’s some bogus health and safety concerns for the individual.  And finally there’s the threat of prosecution, to be shored up the evidence from electronic surveillance.  Authoritarian? You think?

I knew I would have to wander from the straight and narrow in order to find the ruins, and after a while I did find them, or at least some very like them.  In fact I can’t absolutely swear these were exactly the ruins I’d been before.  That tank and its extraneous bits and pieces didn’t look quite like the machinery I recalled. 


And this giant stone chimney, no longer attached to anything, and hemmed in my trees,  was far bigger and more impressive than anything I remembered.  I was pretty sure I was seeing this for the first time.  And I was impressed, and moved.



And I absolutely didn’t recall this vast, substantial, stone edifice.  In fact it contains a series of kilns, and presumably something pretty massive was needed to withstand the extremes of heat and chemical reactions, but surely they didn’t have to make it look so picturesque.


In fact from the back it was crenelated (crenelated!) so that it looked like a castle, English perhaps, though I think more likely to be Irish.   Since Rosendale is in Ulster County I don’t think it’s unreasonable to suspect there may have been a few Irishmen involved in the building trade around those parts.  Whether they knew it or not (and frankly I reckon they did) they managed to create something that a century and half down the line had turned into a very impressive, utterly convincing (if not in any sense genuine) ancient ruin.  I wanted to cheer.  I wanted to blub.


Eventually I got to the trailhead where another notice told me that the old kilns I’d just visited would be the site of the “future rail trail cafĂ©.”  I was ready to blub for quite different reasons.


SHELTER FROM THE STORM KING


I went for a walk at the Storm King Art Center, an hour north of New York City, in Cornwall-on-Hudson.  It’s a sort of sculpture park, but since it covers five hundred acres of hills and woods they prefer the term sculpture landscape.  There’s work by Caro, Calder, Moore, Hepworth, and many more, mostly big outdoorsy pieces that can stand up to and react with the weather.


I’d been there a couple of times before, once in the summer when it was so hot and humid that even walking from the parking lot to the first sculpture felt like an ordeal.  And I was once there in winter, when it was very cold and gloomy, much easier for walking but the experience was fairly bleak, not that I’m entirely against bleak experiences.  But all in all I suspect autumn, when the leaves are changing color is the best time to go, and that’s when I was there this year.

It’s an interesting question: do people go to Storm King for the walking or for the art?  Well, both obviously, but certainly they could still do the walking if there was no art there, whereas they couldn’t see the art if they didn’t do any walking, so I suppose the walking “wins.”


Even given that it was a cool autumn day, the place is so big that walking from one exhibit to another can still be quite a hike. And sometimes you’re at the top of a hill and you see a sculpture down at the bottom and you think, “Well yes, I wouldn’t mind going down to have a look at that, but then I’d have to climb all the way up this hill again afterwards.”  And so you decide to give that one a miss.  I’m sure that the true art lover has no such Philistine thoughts. (Yeah, right).


And given the park’s great size, and the broad distribution of the sculptures, you’d think it would be easy enough to avoid other people and find your own space.  But not so.  I was standing, admiring Alice Aycock’s Three-Fold Manifestation (that's it above), when I saw two women a couple of hundred yards away who abruptly changed the direction they were walking, and started powering toward me.  I don’t think it was my own magnetic personality, nor the siren call of the art, I think these two women thought, “That piece over there must be good because that guy’s looking at it.”

I started to edge slowly away, although at the same time I thought that a real art should stand his ground.  The woman leading the charge was a plumpish, pleasant-enough looking middle aged woman, and she was wearing a tie-dye tee-shirt, though frankly she didn’t look like a woman who ordinarily wore tie-dye.  I suspected this was her special day, a chance to let her hair down, and she was wearing it as a special treat.  I started to feel a certain sympathy for the woman.

However when she got within hailing distance, her cell phone went off.  It played “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” (really) and she yelled into the phone, “Hey, how ya doin’ Louie?”  I yomped rapidly away.  There was other art to be seen.


There was an exhibition at Storm King of work by Thomas Houseago, an exhibition called “As I Went Out One Morning” – a reference to the Bob Dylan song that I thought nobody liked very much.  I was obviously wrong.  I’ve met young Houseago a few times, he’s a Yorkshireman like myself, though in his case from Leeds (and we folk from Sheffield think they’re a very rum bunch in Leeds).  He’s a loud, cheerful, hairy, argumentative, roaring boy, and he makes the kind of sculpture you might expect; big, rough, muscular, untidy works, many of them figurative though not quite human, looking like half-finished or half-decomposed robots or aliens constructed from junkyard parts.


I like the work a lot and there were two pieces at Storm King I liked especially.  Houseago looks like a man who never simply walks, much less strolls or saunters.  That would be far too gentle, far too undemonstrative.  And it was no great surprise that the two works I liked were, Striding Figure II (Ghost) – that’s it above; and Untitled Striding Figure 1 - that’s it below.


Of course the great thing about any piece of work at Storm King that invokes walking, is that when you look at it you’re pretty much guaranteed also to see some actual people walking as well, sometimes in a rather playful way.  This seems very right, very appropriate, so long as they’re not playing “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” on their cell phone.

You weren’t allowed to touch Houseago’s work, understandable enough, but people were finding it very hard to resist.  Some just walked right up and grabbed it.  Attendants told them to stop, but you felt their hearts weren’t really in it.

And here’s an interesting confluence, or perhaps just a funny thing: lately a friend of mine has been in China, posting the occasional snippet of news on Facebook, and it seems the Chinese have a peculiar attitude towards walking or at least towards the English language.  


They have some rather wonderful signs that say “No Striding.”  Of course it would be tempting to ignore the sign and when challenged say, “I wasn’t striding, I was only meandering.”  But my guess is that this distinction might be lost on the Chinese authorities.  Equally, looking at the stick figure on the sign, maybe they actually mean no running.  Semiotics, isn’t a minefield, innit?

Thursday, October 24, 2013

LOST(ISH) IN NEW YORK





I’ve been in New York, the city and the state, doing some walking among other things.  On the first day there I went to my publisher’s office, a place I’d been before and it’s right there in the middle of town, on 18th Street, and so I had no worries about finding it and getting there on time.  And so, I set off for a meeting, and in due course I got completely and utterly (and inevitably) lost.  I suddenly couldn’t tell whether I should be on east 18th or west 18th, and in any case I had some kind of brain fade and couldn’t tell east from west anyway, and so I got there late and sweaty and panicky, and feeling like a complete rube, who couldn’t find his way around the big city.  This was not precisely the impression I was trying to convey to my publisher.


Of course, when I’m in my walker/urban explorer mode, I think that being lost in the city is a very good thing, but it’s not nearly so cool when you have to be at a certain place at a certain time.  The ­real problem, I told myself later, is that you never get quite as lost as when you’re certain you know exactly where you’re going.  If I’d had any doubts about where I was going, where the publisher’s office was, I’d have double checked the address, consulted a map, taken the map with me, but I had no such doubts, and in the event my unmerited confidence undid me.

I was staying in the apartment where photographer Dudley Reed and his wife Betty live, and the place was full of photographic books, including Susan Sontag’s On Photography, a book I’d read a very long time ago, and I thought I remembered it pretty well, but it seems not.  Or perhaps it’s that I now have a different set of priorities and obsessions, than I did back then when I first read it, and there seemed something very fresh about a couple of paragraphs from the book.


Sontag writes, “…the earliest surrealist photographs come from the 1850s when photographers went out prowling the streets of London, Paris, New York, looking for their unposed slice of life.”
         Then later, “In fact, photography first comes into its own as an extension of the eye of the middle class flaneur, whose sensibility was so accurately charted by
 Baudelaire.  The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising, the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes.”
Interesting and significant, I think, that she doesn’t categorize either the flaneur or the photographer as male, though historically (and with notable exceptions) the majority of both flaneurs and street photographers have been men.

As you wander the streets of New York these days it seems that everybody is taking pictures, women just as much as men.  One or two seem to be “real” photographers, brandishing bulky SLRs, but the majority are using their cell phones.  I don’t know how many of them are looking for the Surrealists’ “chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella,” but I’m sure they’d take a picture of it if they saw one.


And of course a lot of people are looking at their cell phones, texting rather than taking pictures with them, and of course they walk into others, and others no doubt walk into them, which seems a kind of rough justice. They can’t say they haven’t been warned.  The streets of Manhattan now display posters like the one below, which is actually on the side of a public phone booth.  Does anybody use public phone booths anymore?

As it happened, there were was a Banksy street art exhibition going on all over New York while I was there.  One of the pranks involved some guy on the street selling “real” Banksies for the price of fakes - $60 as opposed to the $15,000 or so they’d cost in a gallery.  Of course $60 does seem a bit steep for fake Banksy. 


But knowing that the man himself was in town and in action meant that as I walked the streets of New York I kept seeing Banksy-esque stenciled graffiti, and asking myself is that a real or a fake.  Only a fool would have claimed to know with any certainty.  But I did spot this on 24th Street at 6th Avenue.


Of course I couldn’t have sworn it was the real thing, but I thought it might be, and I definitely thought it was worth a picture; and having got home and done some research it seems that yes, as far as I can tell, I was looking at a REAL Banksy. I walked past it again a couple of days later, and it seemed it was being surrounded by other, much less artful-looking tags and graffiti, which you might think spoiled the effect, though for all I know Banksy might have been doing those too.

WALKING INTO THE FUTURE


Want to hear me talking about the "future of walking"  Well, I mean, it's possible, people have wanted starnger things.  If so you can find me on Andrew Stuck's talkingwalking website, which looks like this:


Geoff Nicholson – walking 5 years from now



Geoff Nicholson
Best selling author of some dozen and more novels including “Bleeding London” in which one character walks every street in London. In 2008 Geoff turned his hand to writing about his life long passion of walking, publishing the acclaimed “Lost Art of Walking“.  Earlier this month a companion volume, “Walking in Ruins”, treats us to Geoff’s reflections on what makes a ruin and what makes them so attractive to him. “Walking in Ruins” makes beguiling reading.  Sheffield-born and bred, Geoff now lives in Los Angeles, California one of the places where you are least likely to see a pedestrian, but this hasn’t discouraged him from daily walks in and around his local neighbourhood. Geoff’s forecast offers an insight into Californian life and comes with a sting in the tail.
Find more information on Geoff_Nicholson  and listen to an interview with him here.
If you have a prediction for walking in the next 5 years, and you want to have it heard then why not call this number +44 20 8144 9554 and tell us your forecast.

And a link to the website homepage is here:

http://www.talkingwalking.net