LOTS OF PARKING LOTS

If you have some reputation as a walker, a lot of people assume you can’t or don’t or won’t drive.   In my own case this isn’t true.  As I often say (in fact I’ve said it so often I’m not absolutely sure I mean it anymore), “I love driving.  It’s parking that I hate.”

On the other hand I really do like walking in parking lots (that’s car parks to my English readers).  It feels vaguely transgressive to walk in a place that’s designed for cars not for walkers, although of course people have to walk at least a short distance once they’ve found their parking spot.

And of course most people want that parking spot to be as close as possible to the exit or to the store they’ve parked in front of.  I try to have the best of both worlds by parking in some distant, empty spot so that even though I’ve driven to a place I still get to do a certain amount of walking; a small thing, but my own.

I’ve discussed Ed Ruscha elsewhere on this blog, and I don’t know what his walking habits are, but since he published an artist’s book titled Thirtyfour Parking Lots I think we do know a little about his attitude to parking lots: detached, ironic, blank, subversive, romanticizing the mundane. 

And I did just read an interview with him that originally appeared in Ruscha and Photography.  Sylvia Wolf asks, “Was the idea of mapping a motivating factor in your work?  I see this in Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966) and Thirtyfour Parking Lots in Los Angeles (1967) and Ruscha replies.  “The first pictures I made of the Sunset Strip were taken by walking along the street. Only when I could see that it didn’t produce works that I approved of … did I decide I should maybe try something with a motorized camera.  That’s how that idea was born: with Thirtyfour Parking Lots in Los Angeles when I realized that I wanted aerial photographs of downtown.  I thought, wouldn’t it be great of they were professional pictures.”  He went up in a helicopter with the photographer Art  Alanis.  He continues, “It was astounding that, for less than five hundred dollars, we went out in a helicopter one Sunday morning – Sunday being the proper day because all the parking lots are empty – and photographed all these works in a matter of maybe an hour and a half or something.  You can cover a lot of ground in an hour and a half in a helicopter.”

To be fair not every one of Ruscha’s lots is completely and utterly empty, a vehicle pops up here and there, but even so they’re some of the most denuded parking lots I’ve ever seen.  You definitely can’t see any people walking in them either but maybe we’d be too high to see them even if they were there.

Empty and abandoned parking lots are wonderfully attractive, and of course perfect for the perverse pedestrian.  It’s even better if the lot is attached to a business that’s no longer functioning.  The cars are gone and nature reasserts itself trough the tarmac.

 Thanks to Google earth the parking lot enthusiast can easily make any number of faux Ruscha images, although generally there are plenty of cars visible.  Here’s the parking structure at the Arclight Theater on Sunset Boulevard:

Here’s the parking lot at my local Vons supermarket:

And here’s lot at the LA Zoo:

I became unwillingly reacquainted with the parking lot at LA Zoo just last week.  I was driving up the 5 Freeway when my car started madly overheating and by the time I got to the exit and found the zoo lot (much emptier than in the pic above) the small quantity of coolant that remained in the reservoir was boiling fiercely.

        I coasted to a halt in an empty part of the lot, and called the AAA who said they’d send out a tow truck.  While I waited I paced up and down the lot, but it wasn’t exactly “real” walking, and then a cop in a truck pulled up to see what I was doing.  He could see that the car hood was up and he seemed pretty sympathetic (I guess cops who work the zoo beat don’t get too embittered) and he said he’d send the AAA man in my direction if he saw him.

         And then, in one of those “Only in L.A. moments” he said, “Wait a minute.  Don’t I know you?  Don’t I know your face?  Are you an actor?”

         I said I wasn’t.

         “Well in that case, did I ever arrest you for something?”

         How we laughed.

The tow truck came, my car ended up in a repair shop in Glendale where it would have to stay overnight, and I had to find a way of getting home, which was about ten miles away.  I knew the route pretty well and had walked every section of it at one time or another and so I set off walking.  And after I’d been going for a short while, in considerable heat, not dressed for it, in shoes that weren’t good for walking, I suddenly thought, “Are you insane?”  And then I saw a bus that said “Hollywood” on the front and I got on.  In fact the bus didn’t go all the way to my part of Hollywood so I still ended up walking a couple of miles, which somehow seemed appropriate, the end of a thoroughly imperfect day.  And of course my car remained, parked (as it were) since it wasn’t going anywhere, in a repair shop ten miles from home.  From above it would have looked much like this (not really impressive enough to be a Ruscha).

PRIME WALKING

I knew a few mathematicians when I was at university.  They were wonderfully strange and generally not very happy people, though I hardly knew a representative sample.  The mathematics faculty was notorious for being a sort of playroom: very serious people sitting around staring into space or playing three-dimensional chess, and then one of them would say “Ah, I’ve had a thought about the scaling limits of critical Ising correlation functions in planar domains,” then get up and jot down a few equations and this would be a good day’s work.  In some cases it might be a good year’s work.  The whole place looks like a funhouse these days:

I never met a mathematician who was much of a walker, but now thanks to an article in the New Yorker, by Alec Wilkinson, I know about Yitang Zhang – a Chinese-born American mathematician who’s done some genius-level work on prime number theory, who is also something of a walker.

Although Zhang was thoroughly trained as a mathematician, with a PhD from Purdue, he nevertheless spent many years outside of academia, doing various bum jobs: delivery man for a New York restaurant, working in a motel in Kentucky, and in a Subway sandwich shop, before doing his great work, formalized in a paper titled “Bounded Gaps Between Primes” which won him a bunch of prizes including a MacArthur “genius” grant and enabling him to become a professor at the University of New Hampshire.

In the New Yorker article Wilkinson asked Zhang if he was ever frustrated in those “missing” years. and he replied, “I was tired.  But many times I just feel peaceful. I like to walk and think. This is my way. My wife would see me and say, ‘What are you doing?’ I said, ‘I’m working, I’m thinking.’ She didn’t understand.”

Wilkinson also tells us about Zhang’s current situation, “Outside his office is a long corridor that he likes to walk up and down. Otherwise, he walks outside.” You can see why he might stick with a tried and trusted method since his great mathematical breakthrough came while he was walking.

He was visiting his friend Jacob Chi, a music professor, in Pueblo, Colorado, a visit on which he taught Chi’s son calculus.  Wilkinson writes, “Zhang had planned a break from work in Colorado, and hadn’t brought any notes with him. On July 3rd, he was walking around the Chis’ back yard. ‘We live in the mountains, and the deer come out, and he was smoking a cigarette and watching for the deer,’ Chi said. ‘No deer came,’ Zhang said. ‘Just walking and thinking, this is my way.’ For about half an hour, he walked around at a loss.”

And then came the breakthrough, a theorem that proves there are an infinite number of prime pairs that differ by some number N, and that N is less than 70 million.  I think that’s the deal, anyway.

There is a documentary about Zhang by George Csicsery titled Counting From Infinity which shows Zhang walking, and to be fair sometimes not walking.

Of course, Zhang’s is a great story because it’s about a genius who spent a some time in the wilderness and then returned in triumph.  From what I know of mathematicians, quite a few of them walk in the opposite direction.

UNDER THE PAVING STONES, MORE PAVING STONES

Two quotations for your consideration (as Mr. Rod Serling might say):

ONE: “If I do not walk I cannot make a work of art.  The physical involvement of walking creates a receptiveness to the landscape. I walk on the land to be woven into nature. A road walk can transform the everyday world and give a heightened sense of human history.”  Hamish Fulton.  That's him below, and yes, that's a map of Paris - stay with me on this.

TWO: “Under the paving-stones, the beach!” which is the translation of a graffito seen on the streets of Paris in May 1968, and I suppose for some time after that.  I wonder when they cleaned it off.  It also happens to be the epigraph of Pynchon’s Inherent Vice.

Frankly I’ve never been very sure I understand all the nuances of what “sous les pavés, la plage” really means, and perhaps that very ambiguity is the reason it’s had such wide currency, why it’s become such a hit.

Certainly we all know that some of the paving stones of Paris were dug up and thrown during the events of 1968, but as images from the time show, there was no beach beneath them, which of course we all knew anyway.  Paris – believe it or  not - was not built on a beach.

The slogan does fit a little better with Pynchon’s novel set in the fictional Gordita Beach which bears a striking similarity to Manhattan Beach, just 2O miles down the road from Hollywood, and where Pynchon lived in the late sixties and early seventies while writing Gravity’s Rainbow.  I’ve walked there and it’s a good place to walk but I think very few, if any, early-career novelists can afford to live there these days.

As for the Fulton quotation, well, after you’ve read and thought about Hamish Fulton’s heroic walking activities, any walk you’re likely to do in your own daily life is likely to seem a bit trivial and timid.  At the weekend, for instance, the Loved One and I were in Yucca Valley, and we went up to Landers, driving, walking, poking around in ruins, including a walk partly up and partly around Goat Mountain.

Walking and poking around is what I do (it may even be my “art”) – but I’m always aware that certain walkers would turn it into something more thoroughly programmatic - maybe ten circular walks around Goat Mountain at different times of the day, at different phases of the moon, stopping and taking a photograph or picking up a rock every hundred yards.  Well, why not?

And something that occurred to me while I was in Landers: I like walking in cities and I like walking in “nature” but I actually think I may have done the majority of my walking in suburbs.  Now, I think that suburbia is surprisingly hard to define, but I know it when I see it, and I’ve seen plenty of it.  I grew up in various suburbs in Sheffield.  Vast swathes of London, where I lived for a long time, are by any measure suburban, and Los Angeles where I live now is, by many accounts, the most suburban city in the world.  You might think I’m attracted to suburbia.

And it so happened that the motel where we were staying in Yucca Valley was right next to a thoroughly suburban subdivision.  My knowledge of Yucca Valley is patchy, but as I remember it this suburbia scarcely existed even ten years ago: it was just naked desert.

And so these suburban bungalows and ranch houses have descended on the desert like alien presences.  I can’t say I found it especially horrible (though it would surely have been better left untouched), and as I walked around the sidewalk-free streets there was always something interesting to look at, some interesting architectural features, some quirky gardens, and what you see in most cases is a willingness to let the desert show through – to celebrate the desert, within the confines of a domestic plot.

Some of this, admittedly, seems less than authentic. I did see a few garden-bound saguaro cacti, and I think no saguaro ever got to Yucca Valley except on the back of a truck. 

The gardens with Joshua trees seemed a little more “natural” but even here I couldn’t shake the feeling that some of the trees had been, at least, moved around and transplanted for the sake of the picturesque (see John Ruskin, op cit).  The presence of desert quail and jackrabbits was far more convincing.

At the time I was walking, early morning, people were leaving home and going to work – some in very clean trucks, some in surprisingly fancy cars, and one or two of them seemed to slow down to take a good look at me to see if I was up to no good, but maybe that was just my paranoia: an honest enough Pynchonian trait.

Would I like to live in a desert suburbia?  Well no, not much, since in the case of Yucca Valley there’s no adjacent “urbia” where I could go to get my city-boy thrills.  The desert fantasy is to own 100 acres of sand and scrub, big enough that a couple of laps of the boundary would constitute a reasonable walking expedition, though I’m sure some would still find that trivial and timid.

On the other hand, I’d quite like to walk a few laps of this place, though I can’t tell you exactly where it is.  The photograph is by Christopher Gielen and is titled (as it were) “UNTITLED XXXI Arizona” from the book Ciphers.

Under the desert, another damn desert.