Quite a few people, including some who live here in Los Angeles, have
said they don’t “get” the cover of the fall edition of the Los Angeles Review
of Books. That’s it above, and I love
it. The photograph is by Mike Slack. One person whose opinion in other
circumstances I more or less respect said it looked like a furniture catalogue,
and now that I look at it more closely I’m not sure whether that chair has been
dumped on the sidewalk or whether it’s for sale. At first I assumed the former but then I saw
there’s a little yellow sticker on the back which could be a price tag, so maybe it’s outside a store
waiting to be bought, in which case I got hold of the wrong end of the stick
altogether. Still, I think there are
good reasons for my confusion, and indeed for my love of that cover: chiefly my
ongoing obsession with feral furniture.
I was going to say that people who don’t “get” the cover should do a
bit more walking in L.A. As I’ve written
elsewhere, every time I walk down the street anywhere in L.A., and it doesn’t seem
to have much to do with whether it’s a rich or a poor neighborhood, there’s
always some “feral furniture” lurking at the curb.
I know that unwanted stuff gets dumped everywhere in the world but
there does seem to be something quintessentially L.A. about throwing out more
or less serviceable sofas and chairs and letting them sit out in the sun, providing
a place where somebody might sit, in this city that has remarkably few public sitting
places. And if most of the abandoned chairs and couches don’t look quite as
good as that one on the cover of the LARB, there have certainly been times in my
life when I’ve lived with and sat on far worse things.
Other stuff is less admittedly less appealing. It’s hard to love somebody else’s used
mattress, and certainly nobody has much use for an old TV. I mean, I have a couple of dead TVs taking up
space in my own garage, and I would like to be rid of them, but I’m not
thinking of dumping them out on the street. And this one -
So on Sunday afternoon I went for walk around Atwater Village, and yes
feral furniture was on my mind, and indeed on the street. There was this chair – which had obviously
seen better days but didn’t seem completely unusable.
There was this TV, and yes it’s a TV that’s beyond redemption, but see
how the wreckage is cheered up by the presence of a yucca plant sprouting
up through the ground.
And then there were these really quite cool speaker cabinets, and yes
sure, it would be better if they had speakers in them but still they’re very
nicely positioned in front of that car, colored an orange seldom seen in nature.
And then I thought that taking pictures of household detritus in this suburban
neighbourhood might have been construed by the locals as a weird thing to be doing, so I put
my camera away and almost immediately spotted a feral cat grooming itself right in
the middle of the street.
By the time I’m got the camera out again the cat had stopped its grooming and
was just sort of posing (above) and then finally it wandered away (below). I guess L.A. isn’t the worst place to be
feral.
Mick Slack incidentally is a top photographer, not obsessed with feral
furniture per se, but clearly a man who does a good amount of walking and keeps
his eyes open for intriguing, defining curiosities. You can see more of his work at:
You could even buy one of his books. I did.
And then I just found this artist’s
statement by him:
“If I have a method, it’s basically to wander aimlessly,
preferably on foot, using the camera as an excuse to stop and stare, to push
into the visual arrangement of things, for no other purpose than to be doing
just that: shutting off my verbal brain, letting the light hit my eyeballs.
Over time, pictures (or, lately, image files) stack up and an editing impulse
takes over—more of a game with its own purpose. But the first and most
important step is always to wander.”
Hell yes, Mike. Hell yes. Seems he's been known to take the occasional cat picture too.
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