GIVE A STREET A GOOD NAME

Lawrence Ferlinghetti is much in the news at the moment:  he’s 96 years old and has recently published his travel journals, and his letters to and from Allen Ginsberg. 

So I decided to read his 1958 poem “Autobiography.”  I’m not sure if it’s a very good poem but I like parts of it a lot.  It starts out really well:

I am leading a quiet life   

in Mike’s Place every day   

watching the champs

of the Dante Billiard Parlor   

and the French pinball addicts.   

But then it gets a bit too “poetic” for my tastes – there seems to have been a point in literary history when few Americans could write a poem without name-dropping Ezra Pound.  But the part of “autobiography” I like best, for obvious reasons, runs as follows.

I am leading a quiet life

outside of Mike’s Place every day   

watching the world walk by

in its curious shoes.

I once started out

to walk around the world

but ended up in Brooklyn.

That Bridge was too much for me.   

That’s nice isn’t it?  And funny too – and of course you could walk around the world and still end up in Brooklyn.  And obviously it begs the question of which side of the bridge was he when he found it too much.

I’ve walked in Brooklyn, and certainly walked over the Brooklyn Bridge, and I’ve also walked in the alley than runs behind Ferlinghetti’s City Lights bookshop in San Francisco - Kerouac Alley.  Ferlinghetti worked hard to get the name changed.

And Ferlinghetti also has a street named after him, Via Ferlinghetti, less visited than

Kerouac Alley I’m sure, but now on the list of places I have to visit next time I’m in San Francisco.

Mr Ferlinghetti is a much photographed fellow, but the only picture I can find of him actually walking, is this one, where he’s with Jack Hirschman.

THE XMAS WALKER

One of the things about walking in my neighbourhood immediately after Christmas is that you see more walkers than usual.  I suspect part of it may be that people have relatives staying with them and don’t know what else to do with them.  Some no doubt think it’s a good for the soul to take a walk at least once a year.  Maybe the odd one has got a new puppy for Christmas and is swiftly realizing what a terrible responsibility that is.

However, my unscientific observation is that this year there were far fewer walkers than usual.  And a man who had acquired a new camera lens for Christmas pretty much had the streets to himself, which was fine but just a little surprising.

Of course Christmas decorations persist for a while after Christmas  – not sure if that Santa is breaking into that upstairs window or breaking out:

And just because a Santa is small that doesn’t mean he isn’t security conscious:

 This presiding demon stays in place whatever the season:

But the spirit of good cheer is not universal.  This sign appears on the door of the last house before you get to one of the entrances to Griffith Park, and you can understand the guy’s sentiments whatever the time of year:

And you can never quite escape the John Cage influence, nor would I want to.  Whereas he had mycological expeditions that involved walking deep into the woods, I found these beauties by the side of the road, just a few hundred yards from my own front door. 

I took a couple home, tried to identify them, couldn’t altogether, though I suspected they might be the evocatively named Funeral Bells, and even if they weren’t, and even though I’m generally all in favor of Cagean chance operations, I really didn’t want to take a chance on these.  I left them where they were.  Next day walking the same route I saw they were half eaten, though not sure by what – possibly one of the new, though unseen, puppies.

But I think the best thing seen while walking over the holidays was this electronic keyboard left out for the garbage men.  And I wonder what the story was there.  Had Santa brought a brand new one, or had the owner made a resolution, 2016 will be a year without electronic keyboards?

WALKING INDETERMINATELY, WITH CAGE AND KIRK

And speaking of John Cage – do you want to see a piece about walking written by John Cage?  Well of course you do.  It’s from Indeterminacy (and it’s sometimes given more orthodox layout):

And do you want to to see a picture of the great man walking?  Well, why wouldn’t you?  This is a still from the 2012 documentary Journeys in Sound.

There's a trailer for it here:

I also found an extraordinary, and not entirely easy to watch, documentary titled Sound?? From 1966 or 67 (scholars seem to differ).  It’s about Cage and Roland Kirk.  There’s a lot of free-blowing from Kirk at Ronnie Scott’s club, and there’s some 

electronic noise from Cage – and the two do kind of come together. 

 

And we do see them both walking, apparently in London.  Kirk walks along causing some (unnecessary) consternation to the passersby.  

And we see Cage walking in a children’s playground, somewhere near Spitalfields I think, and finally in an anechoic chamber.

ABIDE WITH ME - STREET-STYLE

I suppose that if you leave your art out in the street, you can’t be too surprised if it fails to stay pristine.  Even so, the last time I walked along Hollywood Boulevard I was surprised, and maybe shocked and offended, and certainly dismayed, to find that the above mural of Dolores Del Rio had been, so to speak, subverted some rather inelegant tagging.   It now looks like this:

Well, who could say they were completely surprised?  You might think the solution would be to put the art under transparent plastic, but that seems to be only a partial solution.  When I was in London earlier this year, wandering around Fitzrovia, I came upon a Banksy; genuine as far as I could tell.  It had started out looking like this:

   

But when I saw it, it looked like this:

It seems that a certain number of people want to “express themselves” in conjunction with or in opposition to Banksy.  In many cases this doesn’t look much different from being jealous and resentful.  Arguably the original remains intact but the effect is spoiled, or maybe it isn’t.  Banksy is obviously sussed out enough not to be surprised by this kind of thing.  Whether that’s the same as welcoming it, I’m not sure.

Want to see an amazingly unconvincing faux Banksy.  Then check out this one that was on the front of the Liberal Club in Woking a few years back:

 Although of course it does occur to me that it looks so faux that maybe Banksy (subversive that he is) actually did it just to confuse the art lovers and the art haters of Woking.

But sometimes you don’t need human intervention to create change and decay in a mural.  Nobody has tagged or vandalized Terry Schoonhoven Isle of California mural in the Sawtelle district of LA , but it’s now the best part of 45 years old.  It was created in 1970-2, when it looked like this:

And now it looks like this:

The California sun has been the main agent of destruction here, which again comes as no surprise.  But also the wall has been reinforced, which is obviously a good thing – nobody wants the wall to fall down-  but the anchors (I think that’s the right term) are evidently made from some kind of ferrous metal, and so each of them has rusted and bled.

As a man who enjoys a little ruin and entropy, as well as art, I find it hard to get too upset about it.  I also love walls, whatever state they’re in.  Here’s a picture of one I saw earlier, in New York – no sign of rust, but no sign of art either.