WE'LL CRINGE IN THE SUNSHINE

If you’re one of those people who likes walking, deserts and ruin (and I think you know that I do), then why not leave your sun-drenched patio, hop in the Jeep and drive to Hinckley, in Utah?  There, just a little way outside of town, you can stroll among the remains of the Delta Solar Project.  I just did it.  It’s a more or less 1100 mile round trip from were I live.  Maybe you live closer.  Maybe you live further way.  But in any case, it’s well worth the effort to get there.

I was hipped to the place by the wonderful website Atlas Obscura, a celebration of, and information source for, a great many things I love:  ruins, ghost towns, eccentric museums, curiously absurd tourist attractions, and whatnot.  The website says:  “Conventional solar energy collection is generally done via the use of fragile and expensive solar panels which require a great deal of time to collect energy in relation to the amount of usable energy returned. However the engineers with the Delta Solar Project developed a new way to harness the sun's energy using cheaper materials and a much more basic principle. Using satellite-like arrays which would follow the arc of the sun during the day, cheap plastic panels impregnated with magnifying elements would shoot intensified rays of sunlight into a crucible of combustible material which in turn created steam to power a generator.”

Well, this begs a lot of questions, the first being (in my mind anyway) what exactly do they mean by “combustible material”?  Coal?  Animal dung? My less than exhaustive research suggests that one of the proposed materials was molten sodium, but I think there were others.  RaPower3 Technology, who developed the idea, are still in business and their website talks enthusiastically about heat exchangers, jet-propulsion turbines, and photovoltaics (CPV).  It also sounds as though they'd like you to invest some money with them.  Maybe you'd like that too.

The principles sound convincing enough to the know-nothing layman (that would be me), and maybe this is the future, but right now the place in Hinckley looks more like the remnants of an overambitious piece of land art, or a neglected funfair, something futuristic from the age of wire and string.  The effect is simultaneously playful, sad, not really threatening but not wholly benign.  And the experience isn’t merely visual; a mournful groaning sound drifted through the site when I was there, not quite mechanical, not quite animal, but sentient, a spook in the machine.  The sails or lenses or whatever you want to call them, were swaying in the wind, not all that gently, and it didn’t seem impossible that some chunk of metal or plastic might come crashing down on the unwary trespasser.

And once you looked more closely it seemed that the place wasn’t so much ruined as simply abandoned, shrugged off, as though the technicians and the workers had got out of there in a hurry, leaving plenty of good stuff behind, a generator, a circular saw, construction materials, and a lot of vehicles, one of which was a crane marked as a vehicle belonging to the Marines.  

         As I was walking around the site, two pick up trucks arrived: one average size, one massive, and I wondered if somebody was coming to tell me to clear off, but no, the guys in the trucks were Mexicans, come to scavenge the site, and one of them waved to me in a cheerful way and I knew I wasn’t going to get told off after all.

        
For all I know, RaPower3 Technology may be a viable solution to America’s energy problems.  Their version of solar power would supposedly take up far less land than the vast solar panel farms currently eating up vast expanses of the deserts of the American West.  The Center for Land Use Interpretation (an LA based, deadpan, ironic and surprisingly fun “research organization dedicated to the increase and diffusion of knowledge about how the nation’s lands are apportioned, utilized, and perceived”) has been tracking these things, and the latest edition of their newsletter “The Lay of the Land” says that at current levels of efficiency solar panels would need to be covering 10,000 square miles of the landscape to take care of America’s energy needs.

I’ve tried to love these solar farms but so far I’ve failed.  They continue to strike me as a terrible desecration of the land.   However, one thing I feel reasonably certain about sooner or later, by some method or other, these things will become obsolete, the technology will improve, smaller, more efficient solar farms will be able to get the job done.  This sounds like a good thing, but it does raise the question of what will happen to all those occupied square miles.   History suggests that not all energy producers are very keen on cleaning up after themselves.  It’s easy to imagine thousands of square miles of solar ruin.   I hope I live long enough to be able to walk among them.

The Atlas Obscura website is here:

http://www.atlasobscura.com

The Center for Land Use Interpretation site is here:

http://clui.org/page/los-angeles

NAKED CITY WALKING

I like big maps, and I cannot lie, and small ones too, and after my little online ramble with Cab Calloway around 1930s Harlem in the last post, I’ve been finding various fascinating and in some cases utterly inscrutable maps.  Generally I like them better the more inscrutable they are.

          Since New Orleans is on everybody’s mind right now, and although I know this isn't  WHY New Orleans is on everybody's mind right now, I was nevertheless knocked out by the beautiful simplicity of this antique map of the French Quarter:

As an Englishman, of course, the grid is essentially unfamiliar to my experience of walking in cities, or was till I moved to the States, but I do think if you’re going to have a grid it should be as grid-like as possible.

The one above – quite grid-free  - is from Popular Map Reading by E.D Laborde, published in 1928, a kind of textbook, and the image is part of a revision test to see how much you’ve learned about map reading.  Admittedly it’s not much of a walking map, but as a visual object I think it sings.  You could also, quite easily, do a walk inspired by or conforming to it.

           And now this one: 

Naturally, the familiar London Tube map by Harry Beck is much used and abused, subverted and appropriated in all kinds of ways, but this seems more fun than many. The notion that Miami is just a few stops away from Jerusalem would no doubt appear to a lot of people, maybe even William Blake.

         That image actually appears in Wikipedia as an illustration to the entry on Psychogeography, and sure I get the general idea of the map but its deeper meaning remains mysterious, which is no doubt the intention.  Maps mean different things to different people, and some are designed to be meaningless to those not in the know.

And OK, if we’re going the Psychogeography route, above is Guy Debord’s map of The Naked City – Paris, cut up, exploded and messed with.  Good luck finding your way with this one, though that is no doubt the “whole point.”   
          Debord's Naked City map is from 1957.   The American TV series Naked City ran from 1958 to 1963.   Were the creators of these two things aware of each other?  I do hope so. 

And perhaps both parties were aware of Weegee’s book also titled Naked City, published in 1945.

And, since I style myself as the Hollywood Walker I should obviously point out that Weegee also published a book, in 1955, titled Naked Hollywood.   Sometimes it seems like all the great titles have already been used.

And life being as it is, I now discover that a website title http://weegeeweegeeweegee.net has made a map of Weegee’s New York – “A map of locations in New York City where Weegee worked, made photographs, lived and loved... organized geographically... downtown to uptown to the outer boroughs and ending at Coney Island... and/or Jersey City... (An experiment and work in progress.)” as they say.  
          You need to go to the website to be able to click on it, but I still like it as an image in itself:

MAPLESS

I grew up partly on the Longley Council Estate in Sheffield.  When I look at maps of the place these days it seems that the urban planners must have been familiar with very modern and/or very ancient designs for cities.  It wasn’t exactly Bauhaus because it was all essentially single family houses, nor was al-Mansur’s circular city, but those geometrical designs didn’t come out of nowhere.

         I can’t remember precisely when I first saw a map of my neighborhood, but I know it was after I’d been walking the streets for some years and thought I knew the layout of the place pretty well.  At ground level however, I had no sense of those geometrical designs, those semi-circles and spokes.  I was surprised but also somehow enlightened.   I can’t say this was when or why I first developed a liking for maps, but develop a liking for maps I certainly did.

Longley wasn’t the worst place to live, and you definitely didn’t worry about walking the streets there, but we had bad neighbors in the house next door and that had a lot to do with why my parents eventually moved out.

The father next door was a glowering and occasionally violent presence – a hod carrier by trade.  There were two children, a boy and a girl.  The boy was a year or two younger than me, and a poor, timid little thing, not very bright, and it occurs to me now that he was very possibly knocked about by his father. 

         After we’d left Longley my mother still got reports from other (perfectly decent) neighbors.  The boy next door left school young, without any qualifications, was unemployed and probably unemployable.  The way my mother put it, “All he does is mooch around the streets all day,” presumably drifting around thosee semi-circles and spokes.

         “Mooch” is an interesting word, and my mother used it a lot, and always to mean walking aimlessly, loitering, doing nothing much, though the sense of being a scrounger or a good for nothing was probably there too.  I’m not sure if she knew the Cab Calloway song “Minnie the Moocher.”  I’d guess she probably did, though I imagine she didn’t know that in the song to “mooch” is to be a drug addict.  Perhaps our wandering neighbor lad eventually went that way too.

“Minnie the Moocher” was recorded in 1931 and to modern ears it sounds as much of a drug song as, say, the Velvet Underground’s “Heroin.”  Some of the lyrics run 

She messed around with a bloke named Smoky

She loved him though he was cokey

He took her down to Chinatown

And he showed her how to kick the gong around

To kick the gong is to take opium.  In 1932 Calloway sang a kind of a sequel, titled “Kickin' The Gong Around,” in which Smoky Joe searches for Minnie in an opium den: and finds her.  What’s of particular interest to scholars of walking, is that Calloway performs the song in the movie The Big Broadcast and does a kind of dance, maybe more of an exaggerated walk, which is a very early precursor of the Michael Jackson moonwalk, though I gather it was called “backsliding” at the time.

Calloway was also responsible for the  “Hepster’s Dictionary” –  teaching squares how to be groovy.  I’m not sure how seriously anybody took this at the time, not very I think.  Today it seems a mixture of language that’s either entirely obvious, as in “the joint is jumping,” or elaborate constructions that would be just too much trouble to use.  “Have you got the line in the mouse?" (Do you have the cash in your pocket?).  The word “mooch” doesn’t appear in the version I’ve got there were different various “editions.”

But the term “map” does appear in this form:

Sadder than a map (adj.) -- terrible. Ex., "That man is sadder than a map."

I just don’t get that.  What does it mean?  How sad is a map anyway?  Is a map, in fact sad in any way whatsoever?  Is there some hipster meaning of  “map” that we non-hipsters are missing?  Is it possibly the sense that only a real loser would walk the streets consulting a map?  (Compare and contrast with the Thomas Wolfe story “Only the Dead Know Brooklyn”).  I really have no idea, and I’d be grateful for any enlightenment anybody cares to throw my way.

I have no idea how Calloway felt personally about maps or about walking, but thanks to this handy map you could (circa 1932) have walked to his club in Harlem: