A DAY LATE FOR PYNCHON IN PUBLIC DAY

“Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would either be a transcendent meaning, or only the earth.”  - Gravity's Rainbow.

Or possibly the beach.

Story of all our lives, right?

MEANDERING WITH MARX

Maybe everybody in Los Angeles knows this already …

Getting on the subway at Pershing Square station yesterday afternoon, the board told me I had 14 minutes to wait till the next train.  Even when I’m not being a walker I’m quite an obsessive pacer so I tramped back and forth, up and down the platform, trying to find things to look at. 

 It’s got some neon sculptures overhead which are kind of OK, but I settled on looking at the fire hoses and fire extinguishers, which are stored behind glass and frankly look as though they’d be quite a bit of trouble to access should you have need of them.  But then, imagine the joy of discovering that the extinguishers are supplied and serviced by a company named Marx Brothers.  

What could go wrong?  It made the wait, and the pacing, totally worthwhile.

SOME BENCHES

Some inhabitants of Los Angeles (I’m one of them) regularly complain about the lack of public space.  Oh sure there’s are biggish parks – Griffith Park is over 4000 acres – but going there can be a major expedition, especially when all you want is somewhere to sit for twenty minutes and eat a sandwich.  You need a little area – doesn’t have to be fancy - with a bit of grass and a bench, the kind of thing you find all over London and other cities.  This kind of thing:

For a long time there used to be a bench in my neighborhood.  It wasn’t strictly public, I think, because it was on a long thin strip of land that actually belonged to somebody’s house.  Clearly it was unusable as part of a garden, and there was no point fencing it off because that made it even less usable.  And so the land was left open, and a bench placed there for the public weal.

In ten years of walking around the local streets I believe I saw the bench being used exactly twice.  I sat on it a couple of times myself because I felt it should be embraced, but nobody could pretend it was a great local resource.  And in any case, it’s now gone.

--> Of course I noticed this a while ago on one of my daily walk, but I’d never got around to photographing the bench’s absence (for obvious reasons).  Even as a bit of negative space I realize it’s not much of a picture, but here’s the beauty part.  Until I tried to photograph the absence of the bench I hadn’t noticed the presence of that shiny new, white, replacement wooden fence behind it. 

        

Walking: I do believe it sharpens up the powers of observation.  But sometimes you need a nudge.

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DAWDLING WITH DORIS

 So Doris Roberts has died, the “mother in law in Everybody Loves Raymond,” as she was generally known.  She was aged 90 so it was hardly premature but I’m still very sorry to see her go.

The great and improbable thing about her performance in “Raymond” was that if anybody had behaved in real life the way she behaved in the show you would have truly despised and wanted to kill her, but within the show, even as the behavior still seemed both completely believable and despicable, you came away with a great fondness for her.

I didn’t know much about Doris Roberts except for that show, but I gather she’s been in a great many TV shows and movies including Remington Steele, and The Honeymoon Killers.  In the latter she played Bunny.

Since I didn’t know much about her, I obviously didn’t know that she was a walker but it seems she was.  The LA Times obituary has this quotation from a 2000 interview with her:

“Sometimes what I do for fun with friends is go on a ramble … My life is always planned.  When you ramble you choose north, south, east or west and you just go.  And when you see something you like, you stop.  It could be anything – a flea market, a restaurant.  And if you don’t like it you can just leave.”

Not just a rambler, but a psychogeographer!

PERAMBULATING WITH PEVSNER

I’ve been reading Susie Harries’ book Nikolaus Pevsner: The Life – it’s dead good.  Of course, the books in Pevsner’s Buildings of England contain “perambulations,” self-guided routes that enable you to walk round a place and look at the architecture Pevsner found worthy of attention.  So it’s no surprise to anybody that he was a great walker.

Even so I was quite tickled by the above photograph in the book, which is captioned,  “The Professor in Mufti: Pevsner with Lola and two of their grandchildren on holiday in the Tyrol, 1961.  In Who’s Who he listed his recreation as ‘twelve-mile walks’.”

When Pevsner first wrote about the buildings of London he divided the place into two volumes, one for Westminster and the City, and one for the rest.  This caused some amusing consternation among the staff at Penguin.  Editor Alan Glover (who according to Harries and other sources had once worked as a tattooed man in a circus) wrote, “I can only say that if I were walking from Charing Cross to the Bank making a rapid study of architecture I should be a bit disturbed at having to carry one fat volume in my right-hand trousers pocket and another fat volume in my left, and as you may have observed I am not over-particular about the set of my trousers.”

WALKING BOOKISHLY

So I went to the Los Angeles Times Book Fair at the weekend.  It takes place these days on the University of Southern California campus – a big old spread – 226 acres, so it turns into a walking experience whether you want it to or not.

You see crowds of people wandering aimlessly, some cheerfully, some less so, and some of them may actually be heading for lecture halls and panel discussions - the line for the Henry Winkler signing was quite long, though not nearly as long as the line for the stand where they were giving away free frozen yoghurt - but the sense I get yesterday was that there were a lot of lost souls, walking, ambling, looking for something, though they didn’t know what. 

And that’s just fine by me – and with psychogeographers too -  a chance to drift without knowing what you’re going to find.  I also suspect that what a lot of people were doing was just walking around looking at all the other people walking around.  I’m not sure this really constitutes a bookish experience, unless of course you write a book about it.

Pico Iyer was there, as he usually is – on the Travel Stage - and I stopped to listen for a bit, but all the seats were taken and I always think that standing still for an hour is much, much harder than walking for a hour, so I didn’t stay till the end, but I did remember a quotation of Iyer’s, “Not having a car gives me volumes not to think or worry about, and makes walks around the neighborhood a daily adventure.”  I have had long periods of owning cars, interspersed with periods of not owning a car – and you know, I somehow always managed to find plenty of things to worry about.

DAMN

"Hell's Pedestrians" - why didn't I think of that?  Sounds like the kind of thing I might have 
thought of.

TRACKING

First there was this guy:

And then there was this guy:

And then there were these girls who probably weren’t aware of their filmic predecessors.  And I wonder if they were aware of the timetable and knew when the next train was coming:

And then there were these 5000 people in Tokyo at the end of 2015:

At 8 am on November 16^th an overhead cable broke on the Japan Railways Kobe Line between Kobe and Motomachi Stations.  The train service was suspended while a repair crew got to work, and 5,000 or so passengers had to leave the train, and walk along the tracks to the nearest station.

They weren’t in danger, but even so it’s hard to imagine the commuters of most nations remaining so calm, and obeying instructions, and walking in single-file.  And at some point an employee of Japan Railways arrived, to apologize and give a bottle of tea to each person who walked by.  He opened the bottles for them.  I’m not sure why I find this so moving, but I do.

LOST IN THE MISTRANSLATION

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Here’s Beryl Markham writing in West With The Night, 1942, which is a book about her travels in what was then British East Africa, now Kenya.  “A map says to you, ‘Read me carefully, follow me closely, doubt me not.’ It says, ‘I am the earth in the palm of your hand. Without me, you are alone and lost.’”

         

Safe to say that Beryl Markham never went to Tokyo, but I just did.  I walked a lot while I was there and most of the time I was carrying and frequently consulting a map.  Unlike Ms. Markham I didn’t feel as though I had the earth in the palm of my hand.  Mostly I felt as though I was carrying a rather useless piece of paper.  Sometimes, of course, I was also consulting a rather useless graphic on a cell phone screen.  True, given the dense population of Tokyo, I was rarely alone, but a lot of the time I was lost.

         

To be honest, only rarely was I completely and utterly, irredeemably lost.  Most of the time I had some rough, nebulous idea of where I was, and I’m enough of a psychogeographer to find that experience interesting, even desirable, but getting from where I was to where I wanted to be was (let’s say) challenging, and often confusing and ultimately downright exhausting.

      Roland Barthes had something to say about this.  In Empire of Signs he writes, of Tokyo, “This city can be known only by an activity of an ethnographic kind: you must orient yourself in it not by book, by address, but by walking, by sight, by habit, by experience; here every discovery is intense and fragile, it can be repeated or recovered only by memory of the trace it has left in you: to visit a place for the first time is thereby to begin to write it: the address not being written, it must establish its own writing.”

         

         Not completely sure about that, Roland.  For one thing I would say that by no means every discovery in Tokyo is fragile; many of them are extremely robust, but they’re intense certainly. Still, does Barthes make Tokyo sound like my kind of town.  And it is.

I walked in Tokyo, I walked a lot, in Shinjuku and Akihabara, in Ueno and  Yanesen and Roppongi Hills, and it was very alien in some ways, surprisingly familiar in others.  I mean we’ve all seen those pictures of the big bustling neon lit main streets.  And if we’ve seen the photographs of Araki and Moriyama then we’ve seen the back streets and alleys too. 

These images were accurate enough.  I was rather more enchanted with the alleys than the main streets, and of course we’re always told how safe Tokyo is. I wasn’t taking anything for granted but I was probably less guarded as I walked around the edgelands of Tokyo than I might have been in some other cities.

I took a couple of maps with me, but once I got there I kept picking up dozens of the things.  They seemed to be everywhere.  Some, of course, were just tourist maps whose main reason for existing wasn’t to help travelers go wherever they pleased, so much as direct them to some very specific places, i.e. the businesses that had paid to have advertisements on the back of these maps.  This was a plain enough illustration that maps are always in somebody’s interest, and that these interests may not necessarily be the same as yours, though of course if you’re looking for a sushi restaurant then these interests may coincide.  Here's part of the collection:

There were also a lot of public maps, on street corners, in parks, in stations, even sometimes in the sidewalk.

 And I did find it some consolation that as I walked I saw many locals who seemed as lost as I was.  They too stared at those street corner maps with as much confusion as I did.  I’d also see them staring at maps on their cell phones, sometimes using the cell phone to photograph the street corner map.  It made me feel just slightly less of a buffoon.

There were also these helpful signs directing you to places where you could cross the street.  I’m an observer of these things.  I have photographs taken in Suffolk, in England only a few years back in which the walking man is wearing flared trousers, and here the walking man was wearing a hat:

The parts of Tokyo I was in weren’t absolutely, completely free of graffiti, but by any standard I know they were very limited, and such street art as there was seemed very minor.  I don’t know if this means Tokyo really needs Banksy or whether they’d just throw him in jail. 

But oddly enough those street crossing signs were quite a target for low level doodling and stickering and general abuse.  I haven’t worked out why that is.  Maybe it’s because of the hat.

Tokyo, certainly to a first timer, though I’d imagine to anyone, seems to be a place of strange and complex and often mysterious spaces, some are big and broad and strangely empty, elsewhere there are tiny alleyways and gaps between buildings that are barely wide enough for a human being to walk through, though the cats seems to like those places just fine.

And there are certain spaces, under freeways or bridges or railway lines that do feel strangely different from their western equivalents.   In the west they might be considered non-spaces, but in Tokyo they seem much more part of the fabric of the city.  Maybe that’s because there are so many of them that if you thought of them as non-place then you’d have to think of much of the city as a blank.

I walked reasonably far and reasonably wide, though I could certainly have walked further and wider.  Most of the walking was not quite aimless.  Generally I was trying to get somewhere, say to a gallery or bookshop or bar or restaurant.  More often than not I got there, but not absolutely always.  Still I was well prepared for serendipity, and that I found in spades.

And if nobody was in any doubt that I was a tourist and didn’t belong there, I never sense any hostility, nor frankly much in the way of curiosity about me.  Maybe this was an illusion.  If we accept that the Japanese are a very polite race, maybe they were just too polite to express either their hostility or their curiosity.  Just one old jogger came up to me and me where I was from and how long I’d been in Tokyo, otherwise I was ignored as just another gaijin.  I was prepared to settle for that. 

Since I got back I’ve been reading Barrie Shelton's Learning from the Japanese City.  He writes, “To a Westerner, the Japanese maps may be seen to fragment the landscape. The Japanese maps are rather like a cubist painting where one can see on a single surface, many aspects of a three-dimensional object which could not be seen from a single static viewpoint. Considered another way, they may be seen to integrate the landscape for they show it, as it is commonly experienced by the majority of those who move through it. In other words, it is more a product of experience than the Western map which is more one of intellect.”

I think I know what he means, though of course I also think you could argue that one of the main duties of a map is to offer information for people who don’t have experience of moving through a given landscape.  If you “commonly” move through it then why did you need a map?

 

Shelton also refers to an early eighteenth century map showing the whole of Japan, a map that was 7 inches high and 28 feet long.  I haven’t seen this map and it doesn’t sound as though Shalton has either, but it sounds a wonderful thing.  I wonder if Ed Ruscha knew about this map when he did his Every Building on the Sunset Strip and Then and Now).  In any case, in honor of this concept I did buy the map you see below, by no means as long and thin as the 18^th century map, but long and thin enough.  Suitable for framing no doubt, but quite a challenge for the framer.

WALKING AWAY

The Hollywood Walker is away, walking (among other things).

THE LIMOUSINE WALK

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So, this happened. I was invited to a pre-Oscar party given by German Films and the German Consulate General at the Villa Aurore (yep, I’m THAT well connected.  That's it above).  The Villa is a splendid place, right on the edge of the Topanga State Park.  We were told to park in Los Liones Drive, which is the road where the State Park hikers leave their cars, and then board a shuttle bus to get to the Villa.

There were a few hundred guests, and who knows how many hikers: not a single bit of parking was to be had nearby.  I ended up parking a good 20 minute walk away. 

 I’m a walker, right, so I told myself that this was a good thing, but once I’d parked. I had to schlep up a substantial hill to the place where you signed in and got your wristband and then waited for the shuttle.

I’d spruced myself up a little for the event – jacket, proper trousers - and it was a hot day and, walker or not, halfway up the hill I was feeling it.

Now I’m not one usually one of those writers who listens to conversations and writes them down in his notebook – but here I happened to overhear a fellow in shorts doing some mansplaining to the girl he was with, thus “Bowie was Bowie because he WAS the Starman.  And he was so unique.”  That almost made the walk up the hill worth it. 

And at the party there were quite a lot of women in “limousine shoes” – I have no idea how they got there.  I’m pretty sure they didn’t walk up that hill.