WALK OF VIOLENCE

And speaking of limps, I just saw an interestingly odd movie titled Act of Violence.  It’s a very noir movie, set in and around Los Angeles, shortly after World War Two – it was released in 1948 - and although it has some standard nourish elements, not least car chases, there are some interesting walking elements too.

As IMDB more or less has it: “An embittered, vengeful POW (played by Robert Ryan – he’s the guy with the limp – that’s him above, crossing the street) stalks his former commanding officer (Van Heflin, who’s trying to live a new and decent life in the California hinterlands – a fictional town called Santa Lisa) who betrayed his men's escape attempt from a Nazi prison camp.”  Meaty stuff.

It’s directed by Fred Zinnerman and based on a story by Collier Young, who was married to Joan Fontaine and Ida Lupino, among others, so you know he wasn’t afraid of strong women. He also created Ironside, a hero who it must be said didn’t do a lot of walking.

Act of Violence has scenes set all over the place, including Big Bear and Glendale (the Glendale station stands in for Santa Lisa), but it’s when Van Heflin goes to downtown L.A. for some kind of trade conference, and falls in with some bad seeds, that things get really psychogeographic.

We see the mean streets of Bunker Hill, the Angel’s Flight Railway, the 3rd Street Tunnel (that's it above I think – though, if you told me it was the 2^nd Street Tunnel I wouldn’t argue with you).  The city looks magnificently menacing and magnificently unfamiliar, and no place for anybody to go walking at night.

Noir though the movie may be, the poster, is definitely colorful.

HEY I’M LIMPING HERE

 The other night I watched again (in a half-hearted way) the movie of Misery.  As many will know by now, James Caan plays the writer; Kathy Bates plays his deranged greatest fan, and she works all kind of mayhem on his legs, which were in any case broken in a car crash.  She has her reasons.

Well it all turns out for the best, except that the writer is left with a limp and has to use a walking stick when he goes to meet his agent, played far more convincingly than you might expect by Lauren Bacall, who is not most people’s idea of a literary dame.  Caan is less convincing I think because in general he (or maybe his persona) looks like a man who’s never actually read a book, much less written one.  

But the limp is convincing enough, which isn’t always the case with actors.  John Mahoney, who used to play Frasier’s dad, is a fine actor but I always thought he had least convincing screen limp I ever saw.  He just seemed to do a few shuffling steps while moving his cane, never actually using it for support. 

On his website he fielded questions from fans:

Kathy Smith asks: "Do you ever forget to walk with a limp on the set of Frasier? Or do you find that when you stop filming you still do it?"



John Mahoney: "Every once in a while I do, sometimes I forget to use my cane, especially if you are doing a scene and sitting down. Sometimes I jump up and walk away, the audience loves it, they love screw ups."

How we laughed. 

I know that Martin Crane is supposed to be a former cop who got shot in the line of duty, and the interwebs tell us that he got shot in his left leg, but from watching the show I’d never worked out which leg was affected.

I was always more convinced by Hugh Laurie playing Gregory House, though I know not everyone was, and the convincingness of his limp was apparently in some danger of becoming all too authentic.  A headline in the Daily Mail a few years back read, “The limping Dr House has wrecked my knees, says Laurie.”  This was an exaggeration, of course.  The article quoted Laurie as saying “The show might last through to series seven, eight or nine but I don’t know if I will because I’m starting to lose my knees. It’s a lot of hip work. There are things going badly wrong. I need to do yoga."

Somehow Hugh Laurie always struck me as the kind of man who might do yoga anyway.

At least in Midnight Cowboy, Dustin Hoffman made his limp convincing by making it “real.”  He put a stone in his shoe that meant he couldn’t help limping.  It seems like the perfect solution, and one that other actors might like to try.

Or, like Hopalong Cassidy, they could solve the whole problem by riding a horse.

WANDERING WITH VOGELS

Before we move on from Thomas Bernhard, as if we ever truly can, here’s part of the wonderful, and I think you’d have to say (despite various denials) Beckettian, opening to his novella, or long short story or whatever it ought to be called, Walking (titled Gehen in German) and translated here by Kenneth Northcott: 


Whereas, before Karrer went mad, I used to go walking with Oehler only on Wednesdays, now I go walking--now that Karrer has gone mad--with Oehler on Monday as well. Because Karrer used to go walking with me on Monday, you go walking on Monday with me as well, now that Karrer no longer goes walking with me on Monday, says Oehler, after Karrer had gone mad and had immediately gone into Steinhof. And without hesitation I said to Oehler, good, let's go walking on Monday as well. Whereas on Wednesday we always walk in one direction (in the eastern one), on Mondays we go walking in the western direction, strikingly enough we walk far more quickly on Monday than on Wednesday, probably, I think, Oehler always walked more quickly with Karrer than he did with me, because on Wednesday he walks much more slowly and on Monday much more quickly. You see, says Oehler, it's a habit of mine to walk more quickly on Monday and more slowly on Wednesday because I always walked more quickly with Karrer (that is on Monday) than I did with you (on Wednesday). Because, after Karrer went mad, you now go walking with me not only on Wednesday but also on Monday, there is no need for me to alter my habit of going walking on Monday and on Wednesday, says Oehler, of course, because you go walking with me on Wednesday and Monday you have probably had to alter your habit and, actually, in what is probably for you an incredible fashion, says Oehler.

*

I did wonder if Bernhard had ever had anything to say about the Wandervogel.  They were an outdoorsy, back to nature, German youth movement, dating from the late 19^th century, that certainly favored walking, and by various accounts were precursors of both hippies and the Hitler Youth.  Certainly they greeted each other by yelling “Heil” at each other, and sometimes they wore faux medieval costume while walking over the hills.  No good could come of this, obviously.

As far as I can discover, Bernhard never offered an opinion on the Wandervogel, though I think we can imagine what it might have been.   Since Bernhard was born in 1931 and the Wandervogel were officially dissolved in 1933, he obviously couldn’t have been a member, but in Gathering Evidence: A Memoir (which may or may not be strictly autobiographically accurate) the protagonist certainly joins the Hitler Youth and does pretty well, but as a sprinter rather than a walker.  But he does go for long walks in the countryside with his grandfather.

One of the things about the Wandervogel: as they wandered happily along the mountain track, knapsacks on their backs, they often liked to sing.  (The famous, and famously unbearable, song “The Happy Wanderer” seems to come from a later period, but obviously shares similar impulses).  And as you see, quite a lot of the pictures show the Wandervogel walking along with one or more the members playing guitars. 

Now, I like guitar playing and I like walking, but combining the two strikes me as tricky thing.  I mean you could do it, but surely not for very long.  It’s hard to imagine walking very far at all while shredding on your axe.  And it’s a damn awkward thing to carry if you’re just walking.  No doubt the Wandervogel were made of sterner stuff than I am.

WALKING WITH GEOFF & THOMAS

I’m in the middle of doing one semester’s part-time teaching at Cal Arts (MFA workshop on the novel).  Maybe you’ve heard of it.  They say of themselves, “As an internationally recognized school for the performing and visual arts—film, theater, art, dance, music and writing—the CalArts artistic philosophy places an emphasis on an exploration of new paths beyond conventional boundaries.”  That sounds like me, for sure.

Anyway, Calarts is thirty miles north of Los Angeles, set in the middle of a green, rolling campus and the first time I saw it I thought I, “Wow this place is huge, there’ll be so many opportunities for walking around and drifting and exploring it.”

I’m “mentoring” a couple of students and I have even been known to employ the peripatetic method when discussing things with them. I think they find it winningly eccentric, or at least eccentric. 

But the odd thing and the interesting thing is that once you’ve walked round the campus even once you realize it isn’t nearly as big as you thought it was, and also although it certainly does have elements that are green and rolling, an incredibly high percentage of its acreage is given over to parking lots.  This seems fair enough in one way.   You’re not likely to get there without a car and you have to have somewhere to park the damn thing once you get it there. 

The campus walk will also show you that there really aren’t very many people walking around, and the few that are most likely are walking from the car to their main building or vice versa.  

On my first cursory stroll I did see what looked like an intriguing path, running through a hillside on the edge of the campus, and I saw that some graffiti had been painted on it – a face and a penis – not precisely “beyond conventional boundaries” but hey, street art gets everywhere.

So last week, before I started teaching, I decided I’d try to walk along this path.  The first, and in some ways the last, problem was finding where it started.  I didn’t much want to scramble down the hillside, if only because I thought it’d be a terrible sweat to scramble up again.

I poked, I walked, I ambled around in the scrub and finally found the start of what proved not to be a “path” after all.  It looked like this:

And it wasn’t exactly an optical illusion, more a trick of perspective, the thing I was looking at wasn’t a path at all, it was part of a concrete drainage system. And it wasn’t flat, the way it had looked from the top of the hill, but it ran at an angle, which is no doubt what you need for water runoff along a concrete drainage system.

Well I was glad to have “solved” that problem though as a walking expedition it was a bit of a bust, and of course it meant there were even fewer opportunities for walking the campus than I’d thought.  I went off to teach my class and finally found some walkers; my own students.

Later in the week, after some discussion about Thomas Bernhard, one of them

sent me this passage from Bernhard's Wittgenstein’s Nephew:

“I do not care for walks either, and have been a reluctant walker all my life. I have always disliked walking, but I am prepared to go for walks with friends, and this makes them think I am a keen walker, for there is an amazing theatricality about the way I walk. I am certainly not a keen walker, nor am I a nature lover or a nature expert. But when I am with friends I walk in such a way as to convince them I am a keen walker, a nature lover, and a nature expert. I know nothing about nature. I hate nature, because it is killing me. I live in the country only because the doctors have told me that I must live in the country if I want to survive—for no other reason. In fact I love everything except nature, which I find sinister; I have become familiar with the malignity and implacability of nature through the way it has dealt with my own body and soul, and being unable to contemplate the beauties of nature without at the same time contemplating its malignity and implacability, I fear it and avoid it whenever I can. The truth is that I am a city dweller who can at best tolerate nature. It is only with reluctance that I live in the country, which on the whole I find hostile.”

Here’s a picture of Thomas Bernhard walking, or doing something anyway.