Geoff Nicholson's Blog, page 11

WALKING WITH BACON

 I was reading about Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1662), philosopher, writer, begetter of the Baconian method of scientific investigation, and latterly a disgraced politician in the days when politicians were capable of grace.

 

He also had a lot to say about gardens, and from the late 1590s he was responsible for the grounds of Gray’s Inn,  known as The Walks.  In 1702 it looked like this:

 

Like this in 1804:

currently like this:

 

Bacon’s Walks were a place to go for a walk, and a fashionable one at that, as recorded by Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn.  I suppose they're less fashionable now; a private garden but open to the 

polloi at lunchtime.

 

Polymath though he was, Bacon seems not to have been much of a walker.  John Aubrey’s Brief Lives contains this passage, ‘I remember Sir John Danvers told me that his lordship (Bacon) much delighted in his curious garden at Chelsea and as he was walking there one time he fell down in a dead swoon.  My Lady Danvers rubbed his face, temples etc and gave him cordial water: as soon as he came to himself, said he ‘Madam, I am no footman.’” I can’t help feeling I might be missing something in that reply.

 

And here’s an illustration by Joseph Ratcliffe Skelton titled, ‘Accompanied by a friend to jot down his thoughts, Sir Francis Bacon takes a walk in his garden.’

 

I made a note to go for a wander around The Walks just as soon as the weather warms up, and while I had this in mind a couple of days ago as walking in London, around the back of the Royal Academy, what was the old Museum of Mankind, and blow me down, there was a statue of Sir Francis Bacon, which of course I'd seen before but never took any notice of:

Sir Francis Bacon was a quotable man – “knowledge is power” that’s one of his - but of course he is not the only Francis Bacon in the world.  This is how he’s remembered on goodreads.com:

 

That, of course, is the wrong Francis Bacon, the one seen below, ‘Francis Bacon Walking on Primrose Hill’ by Bill Brandt.

WALKING AND FINDING

 Sometimes I like to think that walking is an abstract, immaterial activity without any end product.  You go out, you come back, and although you may be changed or uplifted or enlightened, you haven’t made or acquired anything.

         Unless, of course, your walk involves scavenging or shopping, and if you’re an assemblage artist.

 

         Having thought about Harry Smith picking up paper planes from the streets on his walks around Manhattan, I started to think about Joseph Cornell.  It seems possible that they met, though I can’t find any hard evidence for it. 

 

I reread parts of Deborah Solomon’s biography of Cornell, Utopia Parkway and she does have Cornell as something of a walker. Apparently he would often go walking in Central Park after visiting the galleries on 57thStreet, including Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century.  The Cornell exhibition at London’s Royal Academy was titled Wanderlust.

 

But this was the passage in Solomon’s book that really stirred me up, ‘In the 1920s, as Cornell was combing through jumbles of objects in New York City, across the world, in the streets of Paris, Andre Breton was scouting flea markets for intriguing trouvailles … and in his autobiographical Amour fou (1936) he described his practice of “wandering in search of everything.”’  I suppose the thing about searching for everything is that wherever you go, you find what you’re looking for.

 

Breton is widely quoted as saying ‘The simplest act of Surrealism is to walk out into the street, gun in hand, and shoot at random.’  But I’ve never seen why walking had to be involved.  Wouldn’t it be just as surreal to fire your gun out of the window? Or into your own ceiling?

 

In 1942 Breton and a few other Surrealists were in New York, and were not much impressed by the city. Solomon again, ‘Left with nothing to do, the once-scandalous Surrealists visited galleries, sat through movie matinees and strolled down Third Avenue as Breton pointed out surreal-like objects in the windows of the secondhand stores.’

I can’t find a convincing picture of Breton walking – hard enough to find a picture of him outdoors - but here he is collecting butterflies with Benjamin Peret; some walking must surely have been involved.

 

Cornell and Breton did meet – Cornell organized a showing of some ‘nickelodeon classics.’ And as Solomon says, the Surrealists realized ‘Cornell himself was as exotic as any Surrealist creation, a passive autodidact who wandered the city with a brown shopping bag full of trouvailles.’

 

And then, from the dusty dossiers of my memory, I remembered, a long time ago, I was wandering around Manhattan and went into a fairly modest antiques emporium where various dealers were doing business, and the guys were still all aflutter cause the previous day Michael Jackson had been in and bought a couple of items.

 

         I’m sure this was true, though the idea of Michael Jackson wandering around New York looking for unconsidered trifles seemed as unlikely then as it does now. But a little research reveals the pictures above and below of Michael antiquing, and according to online sources he was a major collector of, among other things, comic books, clowns, unusual jewelry, and materials relating to Charlie Chaplin and the Three Stooges, much of it, it must be said, acquired at auction rather than by wandering the streets looking in antique shops.

 

And then the thought of auctions reminded me of a curious moment in my life when I was staying in the Daily Telegraph flat in Paris.  Did you know the Daily Telegraph had a flat in Paris?  I didn’t.  And there on a bookshelf was the 8 volume auction catalogue of the Andre Breton sale.  

 

I thought very seriously about stealing it, but I didn’t a) because of my own moral compass, though that was probably the least of the reasons, b) because I thought somebody might notice it had gone, and I didn’t want to be pursed by the Daily Telegraph and/or the French police, and perhaps most important of all c) because the volumes were immensely heavy and I would have had to carry them on my long walk to the station to get a train back to England.  

I see that catalogue currently sells for a few hundred quid and I don’t know if that makes me feel better or worse.

WRONG AGAIN

 In the interests of half-arsed research I typed ‘walking wrong’ into Google and wasn’t very surprised by what I found – this kind of thing:

 

Now of course I’m not actually going to read these articles, though I was almost sucked by this one:

 

Mistakes while walking may not be the same as walking mistakes but I didn’t trouble to find out – nice font variety through.

 

Of course many of the mistakes are apparently about posture.  Yes, sometimes the internet is just like a punishing and over critical parent – stand up straight, don’t slouch, look where you’re going. And in these cases the mistake was often revealed in the image.

But there were some surprises. Overstriding.  I’d never heard of that. 

 

Insufficient weight change – how much is sufficient?

 

And how about this one?

 

It’s the whole universe telling me that I’m walking wrong, and in the wrong direction, such as when I find myself walking into space on a concrete parabola that looks a bit like Lubetkin’s penguin pool:

And of course if you Google ‘walking right’ you still get a lot of hits telling you how you’re walking wrong. However, I this one found moderately consoling.  

Invoking scientists always raises the stakes – and scientists are rarely invoked in order to say everything’s just fine, carry on as you are. But in this case, I was encouraged by that line, ‘And there is nothing we can do about it.’ Which is fine, because nothing is exactly what I was planning to do about it anyway. 

WALKING WRONG

PHOTO BY CAROLINE GANNON

Sometimes it seems to me that people only buy weekend newspapers so they can be told that they’re doing things wrong.  They’re eating wrong, drinking wrong, sleeping wrong, dating wrong, bringing up their children wrong, and so on.   For me this  reached new heights of annoyance in Saturday’s Times, in an article by Lucy Cavendish, in which told us that most people are walking wrong too.

This is Lucy Cavendish

She was trying to improve her memory by one method or another (and walking was just one of them).  Of course I’m well used to being told that I walk too slowly.  Briskness is the new healthy walking orthodoxy, but you know, I’m inclined to walk at whatever damn speed I want. 

 

 Cavendish talked to one Susan Saunders who’s a Health Coach (yep that’s a job) who suggested that Cavendish could ‘maximise the benefits’ of her walking by combining it with mindfulness.  More than that, apparently researchers at UCL have ‘found a link between preserving cognition and undertaking self-reflection.’  The article then explained what self-reflection is for the benefit of slack-jawed readers who might be new to the idea of introspection.

 

I found the whole thing so annoying that I went for a dawdle while thinking unintrospectively about Helena Bonham Carter and Harry Styles.  I suspect they both walk wrong.

 

 

PEDESTRIAN ANTHROPOLOGY

  

I was first aware of Harry Smith as an avant-garde filmmaker.

 

 

Only later did I discover he’d put together the 3 volumes of the Anthology of American Folk Music which is a thing of great beauty and wonder.

 

These days when people describe Harry Smith they have to add that he was also a painter, occultist, anthropologist, and collector of many things, not least paper planes.  Like this:

 

This is the cover of a book titled Paper Airplanes: The Collections of Harry Smith: Catalogue Raisonné, Volume I.  I just bought it.  It too is a thing of beauty and wonder.

 

I can’t swear that Harry Smith was much of a walker per se, though one way or another he certainly spent time on the streets of New York, where he picked up and collected paper airplanes: the perfect found object.

 

If the book’s introduction is to believed, and with Harry Smith very few things are to be believed completely, there was a time, say late 60s to early 80s, when you couldn’t walk the streets on Manhattan without seeing a paper plane on the ground, sometimes even in the air.

Smith would swoop down, pick it up, then annotate it with the time and place he found it, just like a ‘proper’ anthropologist.

 

Smith’s friend William Breeze is quoted in the introduction as saying,

‘He and I discussed it more than once as we usually met for dinner and had a trip to the Strand on Fridays …  and walked the neighborhood.  He found several planes and would immediately stop to fish out a pencil and make notes on it. As I recall he was interested in in the changes in their morphology over the years, with some plane designs disappearing and then mysteriously reappearing years later.’

 

In due course the planes went into storage. Some of them at one time were at the Smithsonian, now 251 of them, all the ones in the book, are at the Anthology Film Archives. Very possibly there are a lot more elsewhere.

 

Many things about this collection surprise me.  I think I’m a pretty good scavenger and observer of street detritus, but I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a paper plane lying in the street.  But times do change. I remember when I used to see quite a few playing cards lying around in the street and for a while I picked them up thinking I’m do something or other with them, but in the end I never got round to it.

 

Is it possible that people have got more conscientious about littering, and now they take their paper planes and their playing cards home with them or put them in a bin?  If this is the case, then on balance I suppose it’s a good thing, but it’s a real disadvantage for the street anthropologist.

FROM THE ASHES

I sometimes worry that my enjoyment of walking in gardens is just another sign of having one foot in the grave, and of course I want to seem preternaturally youthful. 

However I (temporarily) overcame my worries last week as I wandered into The Phoenix Garden, a green space and community garden, tucked in between the dwindling number of bookshops of Charing Cross Road, the similarly dwindling guitar shops of Denmark Street, and right by the Elms Lesters Painting rooms in Flitcroft Street (now no longer painting rooms).

 

The Phoenix Garden is great, not big, though it seems to have expanded since I was last there.  It’s a work in progress and at present parts of it are wonderfully chaotic, and although it’s not a place for a long walk, it’s a great place to wander around.

 

And what really appealed: the things that the gardeners grow there are pretty much the same things I try to grow in my own humble patch: acanthus, euphorbia, cardoon:

and above all echiums, though it must be said that The Phoenix Garden has rather more success with echiums than I do:

Photo: Caroline Gannon

Given the cold it wasn’t a place to stay for too long and I certainly didn’t want to hang around sitting on a bench, though somebody else apparently had done, and then left behind, abandoned or lost, a couple of books.

 

The one on the right was a rather fine notebook containing various not very legible pencil notes about art and film. In other circumstance I’d probably have taken it away with me as an acquisition for the Nicholsonian Institution but I was already quite laden and in any case the book was soaking wet.  I left it for a more or less discerning walker/collector/scavenger.

TOTTERING IN TOTTENHAM COURT ROAD

 I’ve been walking in London, nothing too fancy.  It was tiring but I was tired BY London, not tired OF London, a distinction Dr. Johnson would surely appreciate.

 

I used to live and work in the area and I always find myself there any time I'm in Central London. 

 

Of course large parts of Tottenham Court Road and Charing Cross Road are barely recognizable from even just a few years ago, though fortunately those twin Brutalist peaks of the St Giles Hotel and Centre Point are still in business.

 

There was this wonderful bit of idiocy on a building site just north of the St Giles.

 

You know I suspect those lads up on that gantry have never so much as skimmed Derrida’s Writing and Difference. This is the fun-loving man himself, walking:

 

 

Much as I like the Tottenham Court Road/Charing Cross Road nexus, I’m not sure I’d take anybody there to try to impress them with the wonders of London, but as I was standing on the corner waiting to cross Oxford Street I saw and overheard two young women, teenagers I suppose, maybe out oft owners  though they didn’t look like innocents, and one of them was saying to the other, ‘I’ve never been to this part of London.  It’s really NICE!’

 

This pleased me enormously.

I'm not in the business of giving advice to tourists but if I were I'd have suggested they pop up to Whifield Gardens, now supposedly improved as part of the 'greening' of Tottenham Court Road.  I'd have suggested they savour the fact that this used to be a graveyard associated with grave robbing, and very close to the spot where the last V2 fell on London.

It looks like this:

STAND UP WALKING

Steven Wright is a very funny man. I don't know how much of a walker he is.

I’m aware of him chiefly as a deadpan stand up comedian but he’s also an actor, writer, and film producer.  The humour is usually verbal, with a lot of puns, some philosophy, and a shedload of absurdity. To be honest I don’t know if he writes all his own stand up material but he’s all over the internet credited with the line  ‘Everywhere is walking distance if you have got the time.’

 

I think he’s wrong about this.  The Americas aren’t walking distance from, say, London because you’d have to walk over or under the Atlantic Ocean, although admittedly there is some suggestion that this is what Buster Keaton does in The Railrodder – jumping into the Thames and emerging on the coast of Canada.

Steven Wright does have another line about walking which I think is much better than that first one

.

FRISKING IN FRINTON

New Year’s Day was spent walking in Frinton on Sea. Once upon a time people used to say Harwich for the Continent (because that’s where the ferries go from) and Frinton for the incontinent (because of the number of retirees). These days you have to be a pretty well-heeled retiree to live there.  I can’t speak for the level of incontinence, but you’re seldom far from a defibrillator.

 

These days I (and all the other hipsters) tend to go there to gawp at the very cool mid-century architecture of the Frinton Park Estate:

It’s great stuff, though it seems to me that a white building against a pale grey sky is a lot less attractive than a white buildings against a blue sky.  This may be why white buildings aren’t as popular in Britain compared with, say, Greece or California.

 

But if, like me, you’re fascinated by suburbia in all its manifestations, it’s a lot of fun to find an example of mid century modern right next to an archetypal suburban bungalow.  I wonder if the neighbouring inhabitants have much in common on.

 

But it’s not all modernity in Frinton. It’s also home to St Mary’s Old Church (aka St Mary the Virgin) which is a very old church indeed, parts of it (very small parts I think) dating back to 1199.

 

It is also apparently the smallest church in Essex. It looks as though the pews would accommodate maybe 50 people at a pinch.

 

There’s some good stained glass which the handy leaflet in the church says was designed by Edward Burne-Jones and installed by William Morris and Co., and no I’m not sure what ‘installed’ means in this context.  I mean, I assume old William didn’t pop round with a bucket of putty.

The church also has two, yes two, keyboards:

Very Keith Emerson:

 

Try as I might I can’t find any connection between Keith Emerson and Essex, much less Frinton, but should you be looking for famous connections and find yourself walking past McGrigor Hall, home to the Frinton Repertory Theatre, you’ll find a blue plaque commemorating the life of Lynda Bellingham, star of the Oxo ads, Confessions of a Driving Instructor, and much more besides.  Here she is walking for charity:

WALKING SCHTUM

          In December I did a bit of walking in the California desert; nothing too extreme, and some of it very tame indeed, but I did find it moving and uplifting and all the things the desert is supposed to be.  And once in a while I was struck by the profound silence of the desert.

Photo by Caroline Gannon

         In my experience this kind of desert silence is actually quite rare.  Often the sounds of wind, traffic and even low flying aircraft disturb the supposed tranquility.  

 

    At this point in history it’s hard to find untouched desert, or even to know what untouched desert looks like - you can be stuck in a traffic jam trying to get into Joshua Tree National Park - but in general I’m happy to be where the desert and the human intersect; the unusual structures, the desert art, the occasional gas station dinosaur.

Nevertheless, when I got back to England I found myself poking around for literary sources about silence and the desert.  There’s Edward Abbey, of course, but I also came across these words attributed toJean Baudrillard, ‘The desert is a natural extension of the inner silence of the body.’

 

         As usual I find myself in less than perfect agreement with old JB, and I’m not sure the body has an inner silence.  If it did, stethoscopes would be redundant wouldn’t they?  And of course I thought about John Cage’s, admittedly now contested, experience in the anechoic chamber, of hearing the sound of his ‘nervous system in operation’ and his ‘blood in circulation.’

 

I have, from time to time, wondered what (if any) music ‘goes with’ walking in the desert: maybe Steve Reich’s The Desert Music, perhaps Painted Desert by Robert Quine, Ikue Mori and Mark Ribot, for that matter Cage’s ‘In a Landscape.’  But in general I don’t need a soundtrack when I’m walking, although I’m well aware that others do.

And then, as it goes with these things, a copy of ‘Weird Walk’ Number 6 arrived. 

It's a zine that calls itself ‘a journal of wanderings and wonderings from the British Isles.’  So no deserts in there, but it does contain an article, by Archer Sanderson, ‘a regular feature (in which) we explore an artist or genre well-suited to soundtracking lone perambulations.’  The current article is titled ‘Doom Strolling: The Solo Rambler’s Doom Metal Primer’ and the text says, ‘Doom can be paired with a host of environments, though epic, widescreen scenery seems to be a potent choice.’

Sounds great for the desert, no?

 

Now the fact is, I think I prefer the idea of Doom Metal to actually listening to Doom Metal, and although the article references one or two bands whose music I do kind of know - Sunn 0))), Earth, Napalm Death - it concentrates on Cathedral, Bell Witch, Pallbearer and a duo called Divide and Dissolve, all of whom were closed books to me.

 

I've done some research and some online listening, and I've discovered that Divide and Dissolve make quite an interesting noise, while also according to interviews referencing ‘decolonisation, the destruction of white supremacy and (the) prison industrial complex and the survival of indigenous sovereignty.’ 

Nevertheless I haven’t been able to find any explicit reference in any of these bands’ music to the desert or indeed to walking, though I may have missed it.  But you don’t have to be too literal about these things, do you?  You can always listen to Cage’s 4’ 33”.