GEOFF AT THE RADAR STATION

This is a good story, maybe even too good, though it’s a true one.

Even if you’re only a fringe member of the “urban explorer community” (and they don’t come much more fringe than me), you still get to hear about cool, ruined places where a psychogeographer might want to walk.  And I’d heard from more than one source about the abandoned federal prison outside of Boron, in the California desert.  The place had been the Boron Air Force Station before it was a prison, and by all accounts it was now some kind of radar outpost, though nobody seemed sure whether it was manned or unmanned.

It’s not exactly a secret location.  Anybody driving up the 395 can see the white radar globe sitting up on top of the hill, and as I found out last Thursday when I made the expedition, there’s a crumbling but perfectly serviceable road leading up to it.

I never get my hopes up too high when heading for places like this.  For one thing I thought the site might be all locked up, and although in general I’m not averse to hopping over a fence or ignoring a few no trespassing signs, I was aware that this was the American military I was dealing with here.

We drove up the road (yes, my lovely wife was with me - I take her to all the best places) expecting to come to a barrier or fence or at least a keep out sign, and we found none of these.  We arrived at a big, wide empty parking lot in front of a building that in other circumstances we might have thought had once been a motel.  We parked and began to wander.  The place looked thoroughly deserted, though a couple of fighter jets were flying in parallel high above us.  We made a couple of weak jokes about drones.

Of course nothing was signposted, but there wasn’t much that looked very prison-like, certainly no cells and no bars, and there were a few buildings that looked like dining or recreation halls.  People had tried to make gardens here and there, there was something that looked like an outdoor stage, there were squash courts.  

I’ve since done some research and found out this was a prison for white collar criminals, or at least for criminals with very, very good lawyers.  Prisoners could have simply walked out if they’d wanted to, but there were few escapees.  They’d have had to face the open desert, and if recaptured they’d have been thrown into real  prison.

There was also a small abandoned and ruined housing development on the site; what had been homes, first for the guys in the air force, and then for prison staff.  Here the old post-apocalyptic movie feel was unavoidable and many before us had been unable to avoid it too, painting various movie-based graffiti around the place.

And it occurred to me that the post-apocalyptic world (should there be one) will be very much as seen in the movies, because that’s how people learn so much of their behavior.  This world would be just like The Walking Dead or Zombieland because people have no other source of reference for post-apocalyptic etiquette.

In general the graffiti around the place were surprisingly restrained, surprisingly low on obscenity.  There were some some fabulous metal buildings and Quonset huts scattered around (I’m sure I must have told you about my love of metal buildings). 

And on the wall inside the one above there was this thing with sunlight shining in through those holes, which may or may not have been bullet holes. 

And as we were admiring this bit of art it seemed that World War Three started.  There was a bang, as loud as any bang I’ve ever heard, coming from all directions at once.  The building shook down to the concrete foundation, and the metal amplified the sound, and if I hadn’t been paralyzed with fear I might  well have thrown myself to the ground.  They were on to us it seemed.  They were using the metal shed for target practice.  We were terrified. But although there was so much noise, we realized more or less immediately that there was no explosion, no destruction: the shed and we were all perfectly intact.  And then a second after that we realized that we hadn’t been struck my some form of dark weaponry, but that one of the jet fighters up above us had just gone through the sound barrier.  It was a sonic boom that had hit us and the building.  A word to the wise here: do not stand inside a metal building when a plane is about to break the sound barrier overhead.  Good advice, I think, though not always easy to apply.

And shortly after that we realized we were not alone in any sense.  We saw a couple of unmarked SUVs driving down the hill, through the site and away.  They may not have seen us, but they’d certainly have seen our car.  We thought maybe they just didn’t care.  And when we got closer to the radar tower we saw, behind some serious fencing, there were a couple of guards in military uniform.  They certainly saw us and I wondered if it might be a good idea to go and talk to them, to show that we were innocents, but we decided against it.  We had been there walking around for an hour and a half, maybe more.  We reckoned it was probably time to leave.

We were nearly back at the car when a small civilian pick up truck came down the hill, and the driver stopped, stuck his head out the window and called to us.

          “You can’t be here,” he said, “This is federal property.  You’re trespassing.”

         “Oh, we didn’t see any ‘no trespassing’ signs.”

         “No, they got stolen a couple of days ago.”

          He didn’t laugh, and neither did we until after he’d driven away.

WALKING WITH DESIRE

I can’t remember exactly when I first came across the term “desire lines” – it was a while back certainly, but I do recall that it was both exciting and disappointing.  It was exciting because here was a term describing something I’d noticed but didn’t know there was a name for.  But it was disappointing because I’d somehow thought I was the only one who’d spotted this phenomenon.  It was a downer to realize that my powers of observation weren’t as unique as I’d thought they were.

A desire line, as you may well know, is a walking path created over time by pedestrians, in preference to more formal routes along a sidewalk or paved track.  It generally involves a shortcut, and repeated walking of the line generally leads to a line of bare grass or mud.  Here’s an especially fine example in Atlantic City

And below there’s an image from the website for vanseo design who say  “Don’t fight desire lines. Learn to embrace them.”  I do.  I definitely do.

Once you’re aware of them, you see them everywhere.  Up at the Cal Arts campus where I’m doing a bit of teaching these days there’s a lot of grass, a lot of pedestrian routes, a helluva lot of parking, and in fact precious few desire lines.  You could argue that this is a mark of good design and that the formal paths are laid out very skillfully and already cater for all of people’s walking desires.  But I knew there had to be some somewhere.  In due course I was able to find one, or depending on how you look at it two of them, but it wasn’t until a couple of weeks back when I was taking my Wednesday afternoon pre-class constitutional.

One of the college dorms is set down a slope from the main walking and driving route that runs through the campus.  There are stairs nearby, the steps painted with yellow edges for health and safety reasons, and in fact it’s probably easier to use the steps than to climb up the slope.  Nevertheless, I saw what appeared to be a desire line running up the slope (above and below).

On closer inspection however I saw, and you can see, that it wasn’t a true desire line at all, but a paved path.  My guess is that this had started out as a genuine desire line, a track of bare earth in the grass, and the powers that be had helpfully paved it, with biggish cobbles for extra traction, making the ascent that much easier.  Fair enough, you might say.

But this hadn’t been enough for the Cal Arts pedestrians.  About fifty feet away there was another desire line still extant, shorter, less steep and as yet unpaved. A REAL desire line.  For all kinds of reasons this made me very happy indeed.

LONDON (NOT REALLY ALL THAT) PECULIAR

Of making many books about London there is apparently no end.  That’s almost a quotation from Ecclesiastes 12:12, which continues “and much study is a weariness of the flesh.”  And to the mind too you might say, though some books are more wearisome than others, obviously.

A few days back I got an email from Jamie Manners, a friend of a friend who’s been commissioned to write a book about, as he puts it, the “interesting/quirky details in London buildings and places.”  And he asked could I think of any “favourite spots, oddities, places with a good story behind them, or notable features in London buildings that might be good for an entry.”.

A direct question like that is pretty much guaranteed to make my mind a complete blank, and as Jamie himself says “of course, when you look through the 'Secret London/Hidden London' stuff you realise this book has already been written 20 times and people recycle the same stuff (Wellington's horseblock outside the Athenaum, etc). They (the publishers) told me to make sure the City/West End are well represented, but I think it'd be nice to give equal weight to the areas where the people of London actually live nowadays.” 

Well, I like to make friends when I can, so I agreed to do my best, which is what I’m doing now.

When I was writing my novel Bleeding London (which is partly about a man who tries to walk down every street in London) I too went walking in London and I started carrying a camera with me, to record any such quirky details I might see; and I’ve pretty much carried a camera with me on all occasions when walking ever since.  Bleeding London was written in pre-digital camera days and I certainly took far fewer picture then that I do now, but so does everybody.  I wish I’d taken more.

There’s always a problem, of course, with “unknown” bits of any city.  The truly unknown bits are likely to remain that way, and then there are “well-known unknown” bits.  I remembering finding, by chance, the statue of Samuel Johnson’s cat Hodge, complete with oysters, and thought it was a wonder.  But now every damn fool knows where it is.

Sir Richard Francis Burton’s tomb in Mortlake is much less visited than the statue of Hodge, largely because it’s in Mortlake, and it’s very odd and wonderful, but there’s nothing unknown about it.

Digging through my old photo files has revealed some very dull pictures indeed, but one or two still seem sort of interesting.  And I’ve only Photoshopped them a little bit in order to retain that “retro” feel.  I can’t swear that all the things shown are still in existence.  (The photos of the noses and the space invaders aren't mine, as may be obvious, nor Hodge, nor the book maze, but otherwise, sure.)

Above for instance is a picture of what I believe is the narrowest building in London (though the internet shows there’s a lot of competition for that title).  The address is 10 Hyde Park Place, and it seems once to have been just an alleyway between two other buildings that got blocked off and became a building in its own right, just 3 feet 6 inches wide.   It’s also, I learn, now part of the Tyburn Convent next door, and I’ve always liked this outdoor pulpit hanging off the side (below).  I’ve always imagined nuns standing out there, delivering fire and brimstone sermons to the corrupt citizens of London, but I never saw one.

But if you want to be reminded of mortality and end times you might do better with the stone skulls in the gateway to St Olave’s churchyard.

As you see, the church is in a street named Seething Lane, which of course reminds me of the stand up comedian/punk poet active at more or less the time I was taking this picture, named Seething Wells.  He died prematurely (I discover) in 2009.

And above is a sign for the “pledge entrance,” above what must once have been the door to some kind of temperance hall.  It was very near to the flat where I lived in Sutherland Avenue, Maida Hill.  At the time I moved out the area was becoming increasingly Islamic, which might lead to a difference kind of temperance, I suppose.  Though not necessarily.

I always loved the Eduardo Paolozzi sculpture at Pimlico tube station, which I believe is actually used to disguise an air vent from the underground.  I used to have a girlfriend whose flat overlooked the station, and I spent a fair bit of time there.  It seemed the vent was very high-maintenance: there were always guys on ladders doing something or other to it.

But here’s where the memory fails, and where the Internet almost saves it. I knew that the above picture was taken somewhere near London Bridge, but I couldn’t have told you exactly where.  Online evidence shows it was there to draw attention to a sort of museum named “Winston Churchill’s Britain at War Experience” though I don’t think Winston Churchill was much involved with the enterprise.  In any case the Internet also suggests it's now closed.  As a long time Pynchonian, I was pretty excited to see what purported to be a V2 rocket up on the wall of any building in London, though I feel reasonably certain that isn’t an actual V2.  Unlike this one, which you can walk around at White Sands in New Mexico:

Incidentally Jamie’s publisher’s want to call his book The Seven Noses Of Soho, a reference far too oblique for me to catch, but according to Jamie “Apparently, in the 90s these bronze and plaster noses appeared all over walls in the West End and urban myths sprang up that anyone who could locate all "seven noses of Soho" would come into great wealth. There was one on Admiralty Arch and people said it was put there to mock Napoleon, & that cavalrymen would tweak it when they passed under. Eventually an artist came out and said he had put them all up as a protest against CCTV.”  Well, London remains a source of wonder and surprise, and curious artistic enterprise.

I was never aware of those but I did like the Space Invader mosaics that appeared around London at about the same time.  The artist also went by the name of Space Invader.  He’s French, apparently.

I gather he came to Los Angeles (they all do in the end it seems) for the MOCA “ Art in the Streets” show in 2011, and was arrested while putting up a mosaic, but released without being charged.  Hey, LA cops aren’t all bad.

The last time I walked around London was May of last year – seems like only yesterday, and I can’t say I found a lot of full-one quirkiness, but I did find a couple of curiosities that I hadn’t seen before, this statue of Bela Bartok near to South Kensington tube, for instance:

This pointy metal thing to tell you that you’re in Shoreditch:

And this splendidly blank and inscrutable door to the London Fruit Exchange (I mean, surely we've all got some fruit we'd like to swap).  I don’t imagine tourists are flocking there, but it quite made my day.