Geoff Nicholson's Blog, page 37

WALKING IN PATCHES

As I walk around Hollywood, I still see a few patches of open, undeveloped land. It’s been a wet spring and they’re still green now, in early May.  Of course, as the building bubble continues to stretch and inflate, I think, “Well, that won’t be there long much longer.”  And I'm generally right.And as I look, and sometimes take a picture, I think to myself, there’s an art project here – "The last patch of green in Hollywood."  It isn’t a project for me but it definitely could be for somebody.
For instance, there used to be a patch of bare ground on Franklin Avenue that stayed empty all year and then each December some local entrepreneur rented it and sold Christmas trees from it.  This was recently paved over and it’s now the staff parking lot for Gelson’s supermarket. I don’t know what will happen come December.

And a couple of days back I was looking at a patch of land on Hollywood Boulevard, empty and still with a few remains (rather than ruins) of whatever had previously been there. 


As well as some greenery there were also, naturally, piles of rubbish, although you can see worse piles of rubbish in this city, in pretty much any city.  There was even this surprisingly stylish, abandoned bra (although maybe it's half a bikini):

And as I was taking these photographs I heard a woman shouting, “That’s right.  Take more pictures.  Take more pictures.”         She sounded annoyed although not specifically with me, and she did, in some sense, mean what she was saying.“Take more photographs and send them to the mayor,” she said, with passion rather than anger.  “I’ve written to him but it does no good.  Maybe he should see some pictures.”         So we talked, and she said that this empty lot had become a hangout for homeless druggies, hence the garbage, though it was uninhabited at that moment.  She lived in the apartment block next door and she thought this lot was disgusting and dangerous, and you could definitely see her point.  Sympathy with the homeless doesn’t necessarily mean you want them as immediate neighbors.And then she said, “Ah well they’ll be building there soon,” which was undoubtedly true.
Not very far away, in a corner of a newly built apartment block, I did find this patch of green.  It’s a (very, very small) dog park.  The “grass” is Astroturf.

WALKING CHIPLESS

Maybe you saw this recent walking story.  It was all over the news this weekend. It’s so remarkable, so improbable, so “good,” that it’s hard to believe it’s true, though nobody seems to doubt that it is.

Jacob Cartwright, aged 22, (that’s him above) set off in his tractor trailer on Tuesday, to deliver a truckload of potato chips from Portland to Nyssa, in Oregon, a 390 mile trip according to Google maps, through snow, intending to make the delivery by 7:30 a.m. Wednesday.  And he went missing.


         There was a land and air search, which failed to find him.  After 4 days Cartwright’s wife went home from a meeting with local officials about the search and found him sitting in their house.   He’d been walking.  He’d walked home. He told his wife he was “hurting real bad” and she took him to the hospital.
Almost certainly not Jacob Cartwright's truck, but it's from the company he works for.
The story Is that he punched the wrong address into his GPS and so it sent him up the wrong road. He became aware of that sooner or later, and he had the GPS recalculate, but then it sent him up a forest service road which started out paved but then became dirt and so the truck got stuck.  Cell phone service was patchy and in any case his battery had died, so he got out of the truck and started walking to his home in La Grande, which at that point was about 36 miles away.
He walked without any food or water from just after midnight Wednesday and kept going, wading through snow at some points, and by Saturday morning he was near enough to La Grande, to hitch a ride to his home.
         I’m well aware that people can go long periods without food, but surely he needed water.  He could have drunk the snow, I suppose, but apparently he didn’t.  According to his boss Roy A. Henry, owner of Little Trees Transportation, “He was so dehydrated that his kidneys stopped functioning.”  On the other hand, the nursing supervisor Danita Thamert at Grande Ronde Hospital said, “He looks to be pretty good. He’s a big boy. He kept moving and stayed warm enough. So it doesn’t look like he’s going to have too many injuries.”

And the punchline: despite having a truckload of potato chips he didn’t touch any of them. According to Henry again, when he asked Cartwright why he didn’t take some potato chips with him for the walk, Cartwright said, “That’s worth money. That’s the load I was hauling and I didn’t want to damage the property.”         The man’s a walking hero, though I don’t think he’d be any less of a hero if he’d taken a few bags of potato chips with him for the walk.

THINGS WILL BE GREAT WHEN YOU'RE ...

Somebody’s been making art in my neighborhood and leaving it in the street, which I think is not quite the same as making street art.  So far, I’ve only seen it on Franklin Avenue but it’s perfectly possible it’s elsewhere too.

Some pieces look more skillful than others, some more crazy than others.  Someof it seems kind of paranoid, and potentially offensive, and possibly racist, but at this point in art history who knows whether lack of skill, craziness, and offensiveness aren’t just artistic strategies.  Quite a few people were walking by as I was taking these pictures, but nobody paid any attention either to me or to the art.

Of course much of Hollywood, like the rest of the Los Angeles, perhaps like the rest of the world, continues to be demolished and rebuilt at a frenetic pace.  There are plenty of ruins and building sites, and some structures that look like both simultaneously.

And some new buildings require the digging of deep holes that will eventually become subterranean parking garages. Do note how “nature” is still coming up through the ground – though that won’t last long.

Some short sections towards the eastern end of Hollywood Boulevard remain much as they were when I first arrived in LA, over a decade and a half ago, even as things change all around them. There are at least three old school motels, which remain in business and you imagine may be kind of sketchy - the yelp reviews are mixed.


 The Harvard still offers in-room “adult movies” but you suspect that may be just a retro affectation.   The whole place looks a movie set and may well be used as one.  

 The Hollywood Dowtowner, a place I’ve photographed a few times in passing over the years, is certainly my favorite from the outside, and I was quite cheered to see these guys below working on the neon sign.

I guess they knew what they were doing – they certainly had a very big truck, but I did wonder if they really needed those high visibility yellow vests.  When you’re 30 feet in the air in a cheery picker, people are going to see you with or without a fluorescent jacket.


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SOME WALKING HUMOR

Devorah Baum (that's her below) recounts the following joke in her newish (2017) book Feeling Jewish (A Book for Just About Anyone) - got to love that subtitle.
"Two Jews, Moishe and Itzhik, are walking in the forest in the Ukraine some 150 years ago.  In the distance they see two local guys walking toward them.  Moishe turns to Itzhik, panics and says, 'Itzhik, what shall we do?  There’s two of them, and we’re all alone!' ”
I think I understand this joke, but I’m sure I don’t “get it” the way a Jewish Ukrainian would.

But I definitely don't get why it was 150 years ago.  That would be 1867 - and if Wikipedia is to be believed this was one of the few times when Jews in Ukraine were comparatively safe.  But maybe that's the whole point.  Minefield, innit?

BOYS OF VARIOUS CENTURIES

Half a lifetime ago I was, very briefly, a security guard/gallery attendant at the Royal Academy of Art in London.   They’d taken on extra staff for a big Post-Impressionist exhibition. First thing in the morning, you had at in your place ten minutes before the public were allowed in, so for that very brief period of time you found yourself alone pacing up and down in a gallery of, say, priceless Van Goghs.  And as you paced it was very possible to imagine that you were some kind of supervillain, and these Van Goghs were yours and yours alone.  And funnily enough something very slighty similar happened to me at the weekend in Los Angeles.


I went to the Parker Gallery to see an exhibition by Duncan Hannah, top quality painter, and author of a newish memoir titled Twentieth-Century Boy which is getting masses of attention, and according to its publisher is a “rollicking and vividly immediate account of his life amid the city's glamorous demimondes in their most vital era as an aspiring artist, roaring boy, dandy, cultural omnivore, and far-from-obscure object of desire.”And if you can’t trust Penguin Random House, who can you trust?
I checked a map – the gallery was walking distance from where I live, maybe a forty minute walk in each direction.  Easy.  On the other hand, the map showed the gallery apparently to be in the middle of a very posh suburban enclave, the kind of place that I’m pretty sure isn’t zoned for commercial enterprises.  Ah well, that would be interesting in itself.
I checked the weather and it promised to be warm though not punishingly so, but I set off walking and discovered the forecast was wrong.  It wasn’t just warm but scorching, and by the time I got to the gallery I felt like a mad, sweaty dog.      Incidentally, Duncan Hannah these days looks like such a cool customer I can’t imagine he ever sweats at all:

Doesn't look as though he perspired all the much in earlier years either:
PHOTO BY FERNANDO NATALICI
And yes the Parker Gallery is indeed in a suburban enclave, in fact it’s inside a mock Tudor mansion, and the casual gallery visitor would surely be deterred by the prospect of walking up that driveway and knocking on the door, which I suppose is the point. 

But I am made of sterner stuff.   I went up, rang the front door bell, and a very pleasant art gallery girl let me in, and I saw the Duncan Hannah exhibition which was terrific.  I was all alone, there were no other visitors, and I was able to recreate my Van Gogh moment, walking through the rooms at the Parker pretending these Hannah paintings were mine, all mine.  It was rather a good feeling.

Hannah’s paintings are often both narrative and figurative (a tricky furrow to plow in this day and age), all calm surface but with a hint of inscrutable menace.  Something not quite right may be about to happen but you don’t know what or why.  This is a particular favorite titled “Man Wrongfully Accused.”


He’s also really good at painting classic cars, such as this Karmann Ghia:

Want to see an old twentieth-century picture of your scribe with his Karmann Ghia? –  Course you do.  (NB I'm well aware that I was no Duncan Hannah looks-wise, but then, few are).


I had a vague plan that after seeing the exhibition I might walk on and have a look at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ennis Brown house, which was not a million miles away, but it was too damn hot, and the route to the house was all up hill, so I went the other way, and I saw this, perhaps the most rigorously minimalist garden I've ever seen.  Still, give it a few years. 

EINFUHLUNG FOR THE DEVIL

This is how it sometimes works when you’re a determined pedestrian in Los Angeles. I was heading for the first annual Independent Art Book Fair, taking place as a pop up in a building on Maple Avenue, on the edge of downtown. I vaguely knew there was a street called Maple Avenue, but I had never knowingly set foot there, and I also knew it was part of the Fashion District, just a hop, skip and a jump from Skid Row.

I could have driven all the way there but there’s no joy in that, and besides, I have to protect my reputation as a walker.  But equally I wasn’t going to walk the whole of the eight miles each way, so the idea was to combine some walking with some other forms of locomotion.

 
So I got in the car, drove down the hill and parked, then walked the three quarters of a mile to the Metro station, got on the subway, traveled six stops, got out, then walked a circuitous mile and a half to the book fair, knowing of course that I’d have to do most of it again in reverse on the way back.  That pretty much adds up to a day out walking in Los Angeles. 

 
You know, I don’t hear the term “gendered space” as much as I used to, but that may say more about me than it does about space and gender.  I was by no means the only man on Maple Avenue, but it was interesting how out of place a man can feel when he's in a street festooned with strange, gaudy fabric, all of it for sale.  

Did I feel marginalized?  Well, maybe a little.   Did I experience the inverse tyranny of patriarchy?  Not so much.   Did my presence feel transgressive?  Well no, but it did feel like a small adventure, that I was in a place where I had no business and no involvement.  Clearly needs were being met, transactions were taking place, but they all seemed completely inscrutable to me.  What would you actually make out of fabric that looked like this?


I'm sure that Walter Benjamin has a fair amount to say about this. It didn’t seem to me that I was watching “high capitalism” at work but obviously commodities were involved and were changing hands.  Benjamin writes in The Arcades Project, “Empathy (in German einfühlung) with the commodity is fundamentally empathy with the exchange value itself.  The flâneur is the virtuoso of this empathy.”I don’t know that I felt a great deal of empathy with the commodity in this case, kind of hard to have empathy with fabric that looked like this:

But I did notice one thing, that although some of (by no means all) the things for sale had prices on them, I had absolutely no idea whether this was a reasonable exchange value.

THE STREET AND I

I just reviewed Geoff Dyer’s The Street Philosophy of Garry Winogrand – there’s a link below at the end of this post – so I’ve been thinking a lot about Winogrand and street photography.


Neither the book nor the review discusses walking per se, but as a street photographer, Winogrand obviously did a lot of walking, as I suppose all street photographers must.  We tend to thing of his “beat” as being in Manhattan but he traveled widely and spent time in LA.  Here he is on Hollywood Boulevard; the photograph is by Ted Pushinsky.

And here’s his most famous Hollywood Boulevard picture:

Towards the end of his life (whether he knew that he was coming to the end of his life is a moot point) he moved to Los Angeles and since he was suffering from a slow to recover broken leg, he had people drive him around and he took photographs out of the car window.

In a sense this seems like no way for a street photographer to operate, and his “strike rate” for good pictures seems to have been pretty low at this stage, but it did result in pictures such as the one above.  And this one:

That link is here: 
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/unknown-unknowns-come-sweeping-in-on-geoff-dyers-the-street-philosophy-of-garry-winogrand

SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH GEOFF

Lately I’ve been going for a walk on Sunday afternoons – no big deal, just in the neighborhood, East Hollywood and sometimes drifting up into Griffith Park, more of a stroll than a psychogeographic expedition.

And since more and more places are open on Sundays, and since more and more people work on Sundays, you might think Sunday shouldn’t feel so very different from every other day of the week, and yet it does.  I’m not completely sure whether it’s me or the universe, but there is something curious and melancholy about the world on a Sunday when you’re walking.
My best guess (for the time being) is that the people who are on the streets on a Sunday have more time on their hands, they move at a different pace than in the week, they have some sense of being “at leisure,” they’re drifting just like I am, and this creates some specific “ambiance.”
And naturally I found myself thinking about Thomas De Quincey’s line, “It was a Sunday afternoon, wet and cheerless: and a duller spectacle this earth of ours has not to show than a rainy Sunday in London.”  And yes I do think that a rainy afternoon in London is much worse than a sunny afternoon on Hollywood Boulevard, but the latter is not without its melancholy.
I can’t swear that the fellow below on the sidewalk is an opium eater, but I’d guess he’s probably taken an opiate if not an opioid.

And I can’t tell you what, if anything, this fellow’s taken (maybe beard-enhancer) but it didn’t seem to have cheered him up much:

And as for this person, well I don’t know if anything had been taken at all, which is to say I don’t know if this is a man or a woman, transvestite or transsexual, or someone who’s just gender fluid  – hey, in Hollywood in the park on a Sunday afternoon we don’t always check IDs.

AND THERE'S THIS

https://nicholsonland.blogspot.com

WALKING CURATORIALLY

I am, or at least used to be, a bit of a scavenger when I walk.  I’m well away of the eco tourist mantra “Leave only footprints, take only photographs” which the interwebs attribute to Chief Seattle of the Suquamish tribe.  However, since his dates are 1786 – 1866 it seems unlikely he’d have given all that much thought to photography.  There is one, and only one, known photograph of him, from 1865.


I have no argument with the chief, or anyone else about this.  Obviously I’m not in favor of driving a truck into the Mojave desert and loading it up with native flora and fauna, but if you’re walking in some scrubby bit of territory, outside any kind of designated park or preserve, and you find a horse bone or a bit of inscrutable machinery lying in your path, well I don’t think it’s the crime of the century to pick it up and put in your backpack and take it home with you.

And when you’re walking in the city I think it’s perfectly ok to pick up just about any old thing that’s lying in the street – books, toys, a loud speaker.  You could claim you were picking up litter, beautifying the environment.


But then the question arises of what you actually do with all this disjecta when you get it home.  For years I’ve been accumulating stuff and putting it on shelves in a little room off the garage.

And I suppose there was always some idea in the back of my mind that I might become a junk sculptor like Noah Purifoy, or one of those curator-artists like Mark Dion, both of whom I admire greatly.


But the years go by and the sculpture doesn’t get made, and yes I suppose any accumulation involves a kind of curating but I don’t see the good folks from the Pitt Rivers museum knocking at my door, asking me to install a display of the Nicholson collection, and so recently I’ve been thinning the archive, perhaps better described as throwing away junk, which is, in general, a remarkably pleasurable experience. 
At the same time (and I’m not sure if this is part of the same impulse or its opposite) I’ve been photographing the stuff before I throw it away.   As you see.

But then just a few days back I was out walking and I saw a machete on the ground at the side of the street.  Obviously it had been left there by a worker who’d forgotten it when he was packing up, and yes it’s obviously wrong to steal a man’s tools, but equally the man couldn’t have valued the machete all much or he wouldn’t have left it behind.  And so despite my resolution not to pick up more stuff I really did want that machete.  And the only reason I didn’t take it was because I’d have had to walk down the street with it in my hand, and I thought that by the time I got home somebody would have seen me and called the cops to report a dangerous armed lunatic in the neighbourhood.  So I left it where it was and I had to make do with a photograph. 


But I kept thinking about it and the next day I went for a walk down the same street and the machete had gone.  I hope it went to somebody who needed it more than I did, not hard since I didn’t really needit at all.