Geoff Nicholson's Blog, page 19

RANK AND GROSS - A GREAT DOUBLE ACT

 

 

Oh come on Hamlet, you say that like it’s a bad thing.

 

One of the things I do as I walk through the world is peer into people’s front gardens.  This seems reasonsable and unintrusive.  Somebody (and I wish I could remember who) said back gardens are for yourself, front gardens are for others.  So I feel justified in my prying.

 

It’s evident that some people are happy to show an eccentric face to the world via their front garden.  As above and below: 

 

I like this stuff, obviously.  But I’m equally intrigued by the gardens where people appearto have done nothing and just ‘let nature take its course’ (whatever that might mean).

 

Once upon a time you’d have thought these people were wastrels of slackers, or people who were just giving an ‘up yours’ to their neighbours, but now we’re all in favour of wildness (or even rewilding), aren’t we? So it’s even possible to convince yourself that your overgrown garden has become a nature reserve.  Mine used to look like this: 

 

But there are always limits. Walking through Mark Street Gardens in Shoreditch t’other day I came across this sign:

 

Yes, we may love nature but we always like some kinds of nature better than others.

WELL RAPPED

 I know I was once in the same room as Christo and Jeanne-Claude.

 

And I know where it was – at a signing at the Strand Bookstore in New York, but I can’t remember when it was.  It seems like only yesterday, but Jeanne-Claude died in 2009 so it was at least before then.  Christo died in 2020.  This means that the wrapping of the Arc de Triomphe, currently to be seen in Paris is a posthumous work.

 

But, you might say, who needs artists at all, when you can currently walk down Kingsway in London, as I did at the weekend, and see this:

 

It’s a building (or two buildings depending on how you look at it – the tower and the office block next to it came as a set) that has gone by various names.  It was originally Space House, then Civil Aviation Authority House, with the tower known as I, Kemble Street.  And, it may be changing its name again – I understand the Civil Aviation Authorityhas moved on - to Gatwick.

 

It’s a building I ‘discovered’ for myself while walking around, a bit of not too brutal sixties Brutalism, and a lot of Londoners seem never to have heard of it, which strikes me as surprising since it was designed by George Marsh of the Seifert’s architectural practice for the property developer Harry Hyams.  This is the same lot that  – the same team that built Centre Point, which I did (secretly) like even when it was a symbol of capitalist evil.

 

Pevsner said Centre Point was ‘coarse in the extreme.’ He called Space House (as it was then) ‘an intruder.’ Will it surprise anybody if I say that both buildings are now grade 2 listed.

WING WALKING; YES, THAT KIND

You may remember t’other day I put up a picture, actually a gif, of Peter Falk walking in a scene from Wings of Desire.  Below is Bruno Ganz in the same movie, playing an angel. Can angels walk?  Yes, I suppose they can, though I don’t suppose they have to.

 

I was led to other pictures of Peter Falk walking, some of them in Beverley Hills, in 2008, on an occasion when he was in great distress caused perhaps by the presence of paparazzi, and certainly by the dementia that he experienced towards the end of his life. Some of these pictures are shocking and terrible, and I think it would be wrong to show them again, but here he is after he’s been calmed down by a cop.  Still not looking his best.

 

I headlined that original post ‘Wing Walking: No, Not That Kind,’ so as to distinguish it from this kind of wing walking:

 

I does look terrifying but then I thought maybe it wasn’t so bad, as long as you were firmly lashed to the plane, what could go wrong?

 

And then I heard that at the weekend, at the Bournemouth Airshow, a plane piloted by David Barrell and carrying a wing walker named Kirsten Pobjoy, plunged into Poole Harbour.  

 

Pilot and walker survived without injuries, though presumably with a certain amount of 
trauma.  But it seems there’s a lot more of this kind of thing going on than you might 
imagine – you can look it up.  It's grim stuff.   But obviously a wing walker has a much 
better chance of surviving if the plane crashes into water as opposed to solid ground.  
Nobody walks away from those.

 

But to return to Peter Falk. I never knew anything about his private life but according to a website titled The Life and Times of Hollywood he was quite the womanizer.  For instance he spotted Shera Danese walking through the streets of Philadelphia and chased her begging for a date.  He was, of course, married to somebody else at the time.

 ‘She wasn’t interested,’ Falk said. ‘I kept at it. She conceded to a hello over a cocktail.'

Reader, he married her, though by all accounts he continued to womanize.  She appeared in six episodes of Columbo, though not as Mrs Columbo (obviously).

 

  

WING WALKING; NO, NOT THAT KIND

You looking for a walking gif?
This will do nicely

Peter Falk in Wenders' 'Wings of Desire'

YEAH, MORE OF THAT KIND OF THING

I was recently directed to a curious piece by Alejandro Chacoff on the New Yorker website. It’s a kind of review of Antonio Muñoz Molina’s book To Walk Alone in the Crowd. I admit I’d never heard of either of these authors. The piece was titled ‘Is the Digital Age Costing Us Our Ability to Wander?’ – which suggests that nobody at the website is aware of Betteridge’s Law of Headlines: ‘Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.’ To be fair, in the print magazine it was titled ‘Doom Strolling.’ As for the piece itself, it’s extraordinary just how many of the usual suspects Chacoff manages to cram into the first 900 words of the piece before mentioning Molina’s book. These include Virginia Woolf, Sebald, de Certeau, Baudelaire, Benjamin et al. 
 The reason for Chacoff’s delay in getting round to talking about the book is because he obviously doesn’t rate it. He writes that the book’s ‘excursions into literary history lend the proceedings a certain gravitas, but they also highlight the relative monotony of the narrator’s own wanderings.’ Ouch. Glad the monotony is only relative.’ It is apparently a book of fragments, which sounds reasonable enough to me, but Chacoff says, ‘The use of fragments is not uncommon among flâneurs, but Muñoz Molina’s set pieces read as mere compilations of visual and sonic data, with no thread looping through them, no enigma being circled.’ Do walkers need to circle enigmas? I didn’t know that. This is Molina (he looks like a walker): Chacoff also says, ‘In the age of Google Maps, it is difficult to follow Benjamin’s exhortation to get lost,’ a sentiment I hear all the time, and it strikes me as absolute nonsense. I have never been so lost as when trusting and following directions on a phone. Chacoff again, ‘Throughout the book, it is difficult to tell which city the wandering narrator is in unless he explicitly names it. There may be a tacit critique in this approach: have big cities across the globe become products, too, soulless and interchangeable?’ (To which again any sane person would answer no). This leads Chacoff to conclude, ‘Still, there is something self-defeating in an homage to flânerie that offers little sense of place.’ And there I think he does have a point. 
 I haven’t read Molina’s book as yet but I'm sure I will. In the meantime I ‘looked inside’ on Amazon and was rather taken by this passage; ‘I read every word that meets the eyes as I walk by. Fire Department Only. Premises Under Video Surveillance. We Pay Cash for Your Car … Do not leave plastic containers outside the trash bin. No Pedestrian traffic. Enjoy our cocktails.’ That’s exactly what I do. I thought it was what everybody did.

WALKING AND WEEPING

I hear that Yayoi Kusama has an exhibition titled Cosmic Nature, in the New York Botanical Garden, a place I won’t be walking in the forseeable future, given the current state of Covid rules, which is a damned shame. Some of it looks like this: I’ve always thought Kusama’s work was cosmic though not exactly natural, though there are days when I have trouble knowing what either of those words means. The art looks fun and colourful and playful and it has primary colours and polka dots, which is enough for me, and more than that the NYBG website says, ’Her artistic concepts of obliteration, infinity, and eternity are inspired by her intimate engagement with the colors, patterns, and life cycles of plants and flowers.’ So OK, everybody wins. In general I do think there are few things more fun than walking through a garden and being smacked in the eye with a startling piece of art, like this one in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden: ‘Spoonbridge and Cherry’ by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen. In 1966 Yayoi Kusama created a performance titled Walking Piece which was recorded in a series of eighteen color slides, which doesn’t seem quite enough. Kusama walked the streets of New York City wearing a kimono and carrying a customized parasol, and from time to time, she wept without reason, though frankly who needs a reason? The images still look good over 35 years later and might make you question received ideas of otherness and exoticism, although it seems to me these are ideas that have served Kasuma very well over the years. It might not have meant so much in Tokyo.

MARKS OF WEAKNESS, MARKS OF WOE

There’s something about walking in London. Wherever you go in London you see strange, interesting and sometimes incomprehensible things. And some of us take photographs. Of course, to be walking down a London street taking photographs may suggest that you’re a rube, or possibly a mark, but I like to think of myself as a photoflaneur, a term that I just made up, but I’m sure others have used it already. Now, I know there are strange, interesting and incomprehensible things everywhere, but it seems to me that in London you see more oddities per mile, per street, per minute, than in any other place in England. And I’ve been wondering why this should be. Obviously it has something to do with population density. Pack people in tightly, and the weirdness will start to show. When a city acquires a certain size and mass, the population feels freer to be more eccentric, to express their peculiarities, and I’m not saying that’s always a good thing. I wouldn’t for example be thrilled to be living next to this house: But in London my feelings would be of no consequence. The bigger the city, the less likely you are to know your neighbours, and for many of us that’s an attraction. You don’t know them, they don’t know you, and even if you did know them, you wouldn’t care what they thought about you. There’s a lot to be said for that. Or maybe it’s not so much about the city as about the walker’s perception, by which I mean that a big bad city sensitizes you. You need to keep your eyes peeled, your wits sharp, in case of real or imagined dangers, and that makes you aware of all kinds of things that are going on around you. Ultimately I think this is only a partial explanation. Among the Instagammers I follow are Dinah Lenny, and Lynell George who wander around LA taking pictures like this in Dinah’s case: And this in Lynell’s case: In LA, I suppose, the real or imagined dangers would be drive-by. I also follow Carl Stone who wanders around Tokyo, which we’re regularly told is the safest big city in the world, taking pictures like this: Incidentally, I did an online search for the world’s most dangerous cities. There seems to be some difference of opinion. Mexico seems over-represented, and Port Moresby and Caracas always very high on the list, though I’d have thought Kabul or Baghdad would be higher. I don’t doubt that these places quicken the senses, and I don’t doubt there are some walkers, observers and on the streets there, though I don’t suppose they think of themselves as flaneurs, photo or otherwise.

WALKING WITH WINDOWS

 And speaking of flaneuses, I see that Deborah Moggach is back in the news: new book and newly single.  

 

I remember a time when her Who’s Who entry listed one of her recreations as ‘walking around London looking in people’s windows.’  This sounds so much more fun that just ‘walking.’  This is as close as I can get to a picture of her walking:

 

I did once walk with her for several hundred yards, maybe half a mile, around central London, near Oxford Circus, as we looked for a place to have lunch.  We didn’t look in any people’s windows, and at the time I didn’t know this was one of her recreations, but I certainly would have given half a chance.

PARISIAN WALKWAYS

* 

I was reading about Paris Hilton, who apparently has a cooking show on Youtube, despite not being able to boil an egg.  Good for her.  The show sounds like an unmissable car crash, though in fact when you watch it, it's just slow and dull.   But I did see a quote from Paris  that I’d never seen before, ‘I don’t think, I just walk.’

 

The woman is a flaneuse!!  And possibly a bit Zen. This is her walking:

GARDEN WALKS, GOGH WALKS, GOD WALKS

Back in the day I had a girlfriend with a flat in Brighton, so on many a weekend I’d go down 

there from London. I liked the sea and the Volks Railway, but mostly I liked the secondhand book and record shops.

         And one weekend the girlfriend said ‘Let’s go on a day trip to Sheffield Park and Gardens,’ which is less than 20 miles from Brighton. ‘And what will we do there?’ I asked, and she said ‘You know, walk around.’  At the time I couldn’t think of anything worse.  Walking in gardens seemed so middle-aged and boring.  I didn’t say no and I didn’t complain once we got there, and although I don’t remember much about it, I'm sure I didn't enjoy myself much.  Though I do vaguely remember this bridge.

 

Now, of course, I find that walking in gardens is a perfectly good way to spend time.  This is Westbury Court in Gloucestershire where I was last month:

 

And it so happens I’ve been reading Lesley Chamberlain’s book A Shoe Story about Van Gogh and Heidegger.  The latter is likely to remain a closed book, but Vincent is OK by me, even though I had no idea he was much of a walker.  How ignorant I was.  Here is Chamberlain on van Gogh: ‘early in his life van Gogh associated walking very closely with his artistic practice …. He believed in nature as both his moral and artistic authority and to walk was to put himself physically in touch with that wisdom’ and she quotes van Gogh as saying in one of his many letters to Theo, ‘Our goal is “Walking with God.’’' Rather an overambitious goal I’d say, though this is not my area of expertise.

 

And I was lead to this picture which I’d never seen before, titled A Woman Walking in a Garden.  It’s all over the internet, though no two reproductions show it with the same colours.

 

Life being as it is, I spent last Sunday walking around the Secret Gardens of Mistley.  They weren’t as secret as all that – there was a map and everything. Most of the gardens were small and domestic and not at all grand, which is OK with me.  

 

And in one of them, the one shown above, there was a table full of used books for sale.  What a haul – Beckett, Pynchon and Shrigley for a total of 3 quid.  It’s the kind of thing that makes walking in gardens worthwhile.

 

Here’s Beckett: ‘For as I have always said, First learn to walk, then you can take swimming lessons.’

 

Here’s Pynchon: ‘Death is not a real outcome, the hero always walks out of the heart of the explosion, sooty-faced but grinning.’

 

I can’t find any specific utterance by Shrigley about walking, so here's this picture, which does show a stick figure walking: