THE FUNERARY FLANEUR

 

Photo from the Daily Telegraph's obituary, courtesy the Bax family

Last week I went to the funeral of Dr Martin Bax, best known in my circle as the editor of the literary magazine Ambit, though I was always well aware that he had a parallel life as a pediatrician with an international reputation.  He was one of the first people ever to publish my writing, I worked for Ambit as his prose editor, and in due course we became very good friends.  This was the Ambit office:

I had no idea how I was going to feel during the funeral itself, though I knew it would be a difficult day one way or another, and it was some distance from where I live.  Getting there would involve a train, Tube, and bus ride so I gave myself all the time in the world, which also meant that there would be time to do some walking, wandering, looking, and thinking about things that might or might not relate to Martin and his departure.

 

At Liverpool Street station I took a small detour to look at Richard Serra’s giant sculpture Fulcrum, which was installed in 1987, a time when my relationship with Martin was in its very early stages.  Fulcrum is a strange, magnificent and uncompromising thing, a visitor from a different dimension yet strangely at home in its environment, officially part of the Broadgate Development.  In fact the work seems to be so at home that the people walking by, workers, commuters, builders, pay it next to no attention.  

I look the tube to East Finchley and decided to walk up through the suburban streets to St Marylebone Crematorium where Martin’s funeral was to be held.  Of course just because you’re in a new place or on the way to an important event, doesn’t mean you forget all your old quotidian interests and mild obsessions, which in my own case includes metal buildings and in East End Rd I saw this fine example, a chapel I suppose, of the kind I’ve often seen in Wales. 

 

At that point I hopped on a bus so that I arrived at the crematorium early enough to have a short walk in the memorial garden, a neatly organized set of beds with low, trimmed hedges.  

 

I thought these were box plants and I happen to know that the world’s box population is being systematically devastated and destroyed by the box tree moth, but the website says the hedges are privet.  I hope they’re right.

 

After the funeral and a small lunch, a few of us walked down to Highgate Cemetery where Martin and his late wife Judy will eventually have a memorial.  For now we wandering and looked at graves of the famous, Eric Hobsbawm, Bert Jansch and George Eliot, among them – George Eliot even had an obelisk, and you know probably know that obelisks are among my more major obsessions.  

 

The Highgate cemetery provides many fine examples.

 

The cemetery is also, perhaps primarily, famous as the resting place of Karl Marx, and you’ve no doubt seen this:

 

I had assumed this was where the great man was buried, but no, this is only a memorial: Marx and his wife are actually buried nearby in this far more modest grave.

There was also a short detour through Waterlow Park. There seemed to be something poignant, poetic and symbolic about this meandering serpentine mown path, but perhaps, after a funeral all things seem poignant and poetic and symbolic.

WALKING WITH WORDS

 

I remember when I was a kid, when I was first learning to read, there was an occasion when I was walking with my dad, and we were in a part of Sheffield by the steel works, and I looked up at a big yellow sign, full of text, black on yellow and advertising Hillfoot Steel as I remember, and I stared at all those words and said to my dad, ‘I’m never going to be able to read all that.’  He did his best to put my mind at rest and said I’d learn soon enough.  And I suppose he was right.

 

One way or another, I’ve made my life out of words, and today when I walk through a city, I love the fact that I’m surrounded, beset, by language, by signs, by names, by advertising, by instructions, by warnings, by prohibitions, telling me what I should and shouldn’t do.  Of course there are also graffiti but I think that gets enough publicity.

 

Some of the words may be on street signs, for instance, though it seems to me there are rarely enough of those.  Here's an exception:

Some of these words express opinions, enthusiasms, philosophies, belief systems, though inevitably most of this isn’t very nuanced.

Some of it is downright inscrutable, which is perhaps to say that it’s not intended for everyone, such as me.  

Some of it, of course, is only directed at drivers.

 

As a walker I particular enjoy those messages that are directed specifically at pedestrians, some of which might make you think that walking is a hazardous, risky and confusing business. And you know, sometimes it really is.

EVERYBODY WALKS IN LA.

‘To perceive differences within the homogenous elements of the cultivated and inhabited urban landscape, I eschewed the common means of transportation, the automobile, and explored the entire area on foot … I closely engaged with people of different ages, occupations, social positions, and origins, I gathered oral narratives from people who seemed reliable and whom I encountered on my walks in different neighborhoods.’

These are the words of Anton Wagner, writing about his explorations of Los Angeles in the 1930s.

 

Until about three days ago I would have said I’d never heard of Anton Wagner.  He was a German geographer, who as a result of his LA explorations published a book in 1935, titled Los Angeles: Werden, Leben und Gestalt der Zweimillionenstadt in Südkalifornien, only now translated into English as Los Angeles: The Development, Life, and Structure of the City of Two Million in Southern California.

 

I’ve only heard of Wagner now because I read about the book in the Los Angeles Review of Architecture, in a piece by Namik Mackic.  The book’s published by the Getty Research Institute and It costs 60 quid in paperback, so reviews are as close as I’m likely to get. It looks like this:

 

The publisher’s blurb says ‘Although widely reviewed upon its initial publication, his (Wagner’s) book was largely forgotten until reintroduced by architectural historian Reyner Banham in his 1971 classic Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies.’ This was news to me, and I like to think I know that book reasonably well.

 

So I dug out my copy, the Pelican edition, and there’s one citation for Anton Wagner in the index – page 230 - but when you look at that page his name doesn’t appear. Only by going to Banham’s last chapter titled ‘Towards A Drive-In Bibliography’ will you find a mention of Wagner, which reads in part, ‘The only comprehensive view of Los Angeles as a built environment … The result is one of the few works of urban exploration that comes within sight of Rasmussen’s London: the Unique City, ’ – a book I’m pretty sure I own a copy of, though I’m damned if I can find it at the moment.

 

Anton Wagner, it seems, was something of a photographer and the California Historical Society has digitised a large number of his photographs.  He doesn’t appear in any of the histories of photography I’ve consulted, so I don’t know what kind of methodology or indeed camera he used, but the pictures are terrific.  They show a city that’s occasionally familiar but mostly alien, a city coming into being. Many of the photographs take a broad, distant, sometimes god-like look at Los Angeles, long and broad views, very few of them taken from ground level.

 

Now, if you’re a walker in Los Angeles, as I was for 15 years or so, you tend to meet other walkers, but I’m not sure that Wagner did.  There are remarkably few people in the pictures, even fewer people you can easily identify as walkers, which make the few who appear all the more intriguing, such as these people you can just about make out walking in, or through, Pershing Square.

And this is my current favourite, a single walker crossing a very quiet street, behind him a metal silo that looks like the kind of thing Bernd and Hilla Becher would have fallen in love with.  

 

The caption reads 'Looking north on South Andrews Place from south of West 62nd Street.' And thanks to Google we can see what it looks like now.  Still very quiet, in a different way, and not a single pedestrian in sight.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ldest oil derricks, Mexican neighborhood

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CAT WALKING

More often than not, when I look out of my front window into the suburban glories of Essex I see somebody walking their dog, sometimes two dogs. It’s often a slow process because indulgent dog owners stop so that their canine pals can have a good sniff at whatever it is dogs like to sniff.  And of course it’s made slower still if the owners have to pick up the poop excreted by the hound.  Personally that’s not my idea of a good walk but then I’m more of a cat person.

 

However, according to a story that appeared in the newspapers recently, there’s currently a trend for people to walk their cats on leads.  The Times headline read ‘Going walkies is cool for cats too as more peripatetic pets take the lead.’  They really worked hard on that one.

 

This trend doesn’t come as a complete surprise to me.  I once met the fellow in the picture below, named Steve, whose cat is named Boris the Bold:

 

And of course there’s good old Cary Grant with his:

 

The Times article did involve some discussion about whether or not it was cruel and unusual to walk a cat on a lead.   The RSPCA ‘warned that some cats may become frightened on leads.’ Implying of course that some may not.  

 

However, for me, the most surprising line in the article ran as follows, ‘a London-based cat behaviourist said that if it suited a cat’s temperament then walking them on a lead could be a great way to bond with a pet and allow them to get fresh air and explore safely.’  I had no idea there was any such thing as a cat behaviourist, but then I’m not that much of a cat person.  And I suppose the corollary of this behavourist wisdom is that if walking on a leash doesn’tsuit a cat’s temperament then he or she will let you know very quickly, possibly by clawing your eyes out.

 

 

WALKING WITH BOLLARDS

 

When I first got back to England after 15 years or so living in Los Angeles, I rented a small flat in London and walked the streets noticing things, and sometimes taking photographs. For some of us, walking and noticing are inseparable: that’s what walking is for.

       And among the things I noticed and photographed in London were bollards.  Now these are surely not a uniquely British thing: it seems that people all over the world would want to use something or other to block streets and traffic, but London seemed to have more than I’d ever seen anywhere in the States, though it seems that the American usage generally refers to posts on the side of a river or wharf, the things that boats are tied up to.  I stand to be corrected on this.

 

After a while, having acclimatized to London and England, I sort of forgot about bollards – well, I didn’t really forget, I just got distracted by noticing other things - though not before the inamorata had given me the fine print seen beside me in this picture (thanks young Caroline).  It’s attributed to Matt Brown/Londonist, and the highlight of the print is the J.G. Bollard.

 

But lately I’ve been reading Edwin Heathcote’s On the Street: In-Between Architecture, a book about street furniture.  It’s full of great pictures, many taken by EH on his walking travels, along with photographs by some of the greats – Henri Cartier-Bresson, Helen Leavitt, Robert Frank, Vivian Maier, Eugene Atget and others.

Heathcote is a great noticer and his noticing often overlaps with my own minor obsessions - public benches, discarded gloves, manhole covers, Thomassons, and as it happens, bollards. He confirms that bollards are indeed international and cites examples in Rome, Siena and Amsterdam, says that they’re ‘the ultimate symbol of defence and defiance’ and concludes that ‘the future is absolute bollards.’

 

Suddenly I started to find bollards interesting again. Even so I felt they were a big city thing, but finding myself in Mistley, a somewhat picturesque village on the Stour Estuary in Essex, though one with a maritime and light industrial element, they seemed to be everywhere.

And then, on Mistley Quay - which is a highly contested place – we can talk about it elsewhere – there were these bad boys:

 

A local information sign referred to them as bollards, ie the things that boats are tied up to as per the American usage. So much to learn, so much still to notice.