Geoff Nicholson's Blog, page 42

THE HOLLYWOOD MIDDLE

Some of you may still have enough short term memory to recall the little video I did a few years back with Anthony Miller to promote my novel The City Under the Skin, done under the auspices of the Los Angeles Review of Books and Los Angeles magazine.  The director was Jerry Gorin.  It looked like this, and still does:


Basically I walk around bits of LA, point at things and say something about them in a rather self-conscious way, not least about this onramp to the Hollywood freeway which I think is a wonderful zesty piece of engineering if not strictly speaking architecture. 

I seem to think that in the video Mr. Miller and I agree that it looks Ballardian.  The shot in the video looks like this:

And now, blow me down, I discover this album Do Hollywood by a band named Lemon Twigs, and they’re doing pretty much the same shot.  The NME website says of the Leom Twigs, “Their greatest talent is their ability to pick the pockets of rock’s dinosaurs without making it seem passé or pastiche.” 


Hollywood – so many options, so few genuinely original ideas – although of course that applies to the whole world, not just to Hollywood.

AND MICROAGGRESSIONS TOO!

DE QUINCEYEAN SENSORY DERANGEMENT - TO AN EXTENT

THIS JUST IN FROM THE BBC:
Lake District mountains: 'Drugged' walkers rescued2 hours ago  From the section CumbriaShare this with Facebook  Share this with Twitter  Share this with Messenger  Share this with Email  Share


Image copyrightCUMBRIA TOURISMImage captionThe walkers were said to be too "stoned" to get themselves off the mountain
A group of hikers who became unable to walk after taking drugs sparked a major mountain rescue.Officers from the Cumbria force tweeted: "words fail us" after being called by four men at Hardrigg Gill on Scafell in the Lake District.The police tweet said: "Persons phoning Cumbria Police because they are stuck on a mountain, after taking cannabis."Wasdale and Duddon mountain rescue teams were called out just after 18:30 BST on Saturday. The group was eventually brought down to safety at 21:45 BST.Supt Justin Bibby of Cumbria Police said: "Taking alcohol or any other substance that could impair your judgement significantly increases your risk of getting into trouble. It has no place on a mountain."

FONTS

Walking on Sunset Boulevard this morning:

BEYOND THE PAIL

Seen while walking in the 'hood.




Drive like your kids live where?  In the garbage?  In the tree?  And are the kids living somewhere that you don’t?  

Oddly enough, wisdom seems not always to be found on trees.

IN SINC

The Guardian on Saturday had a piece headlined “Iain Sinclair’s Farewell to London,” an extract from his book The Last London.  I assume Sinclair had no input on that headline and it doesn’t really fit the article below it.  A sub headline reads “after 50 years Iain Sinclair has lost his compulsion to write about the city.”  But of course, even saying that you no longer feel compiled to write about a place may be a form of writing about a city, and this is pretty much what he does.

Sinclair has always been a world-class complainer and that certainly hasn’t stopped.  Here he describes the anti-attractions of London: “Metropolitan hustlers, the monad of scurrying, dawn athletes coming out of their pristine, new-build, railside apartments, hitting the street like a treadmill, do not see the benched Buddhas. They are inoculated against empathy. Outpourings of public emotion are reserved for horrible media catastrophes: outrages on London bridges, underfunded and irresponsibly provided tower blocks that become crematorium chimneys, stealing the lives of the unregistered who live alongside stuccoed ghost terraces occupied by rumours of remote speculators.”        Seems to me like he’s writing about London, whether he’s “compelled to” or not.
Those who are interested in these things have known for a long time that he has a place in Hastings, and in the piece he describes an encounter he has there with a homeless man who mistakes Sinclair for one of his own tribe:  “I was on the street. Was it the clothes, the tilt in my walk? Another grizzled prospector for small brown coins gummed to tarmac. Did he sense that I had lost my project? That I was rambling without purpose, burdened with too many convenience-store bags?”  No point asking I suppose.
         Sinclair quotes a very nice line from William Burroughs, “A long time ago but not too far to walk.”  This sent me digging around in Last Words, The Final Journals of William S Burroughs in which this appears, along with one or two other mentions of walking: “I carry a .38 snubbie on my premises, at my belt at all times.  I leave the door open.  Someone walks in with something in mind, he won’t walk away.”The stuff of good noir fiction, right?  And how very different Bill’s life had been if he’d kept his taste for gunplay inside the covers of a book.
And I did I find the above photograph of Burroughs walking with Kurt Cobain - I bet there was some sparkling conversation that day – perhaps some talk of guns.  For what it’s worth, I think the Burroughs/Cobain collaboration The “Priest” They Called Him - Burroughs reads, Cobain makes glorious guitar noise - is about as good as “spoken word with music” ever gets.

Returning to Sinclair’s piece there’s another very fine phrase that I know is going to stick with me, he talks of “professional entropy tourists.”  I suspect we’re all entropy tourists these days, though some of us are more amateur than others.

WINGS OF DESIRE

When does a desire line become a walking path?

In order to avoid quoting wikipedia I’m going to quote yourdictionary.com  – they say that a desire line is “A path that pedestrians take informally rather than taking a sidewalk or set route; e.g. a well-worn ribbon of dirt that one sees cutting across a patch of grass, or paths in the snow.”

A perfectly good definition I’d say, and above is a very nice one in Vienna; and yes, if you look really closely you can see Harry Lime’s Ferris wheel in the middle distance.  I do wonder if there was always a gap in that hedge or whether pedestrian desire created it.

And above is another nice one seen on my travels, not as well-worn as many – it’s outside the library in Ely, Nevada, birthplace of Patricia Nixon (Ely – not the library).

The one above is clearly a walking path, actually part of the Essex Way, an 82 mile walking route from Epping to Harwich. Obviously there’s no sidewalk (pavement) and other routes across that patch of land would be possible but none so direct, and if you're walking 82 miles you don't want to do too much meandering.  You might think a desire line is the shortest route, and perhaps also the path of least resistance, though in this case that applies to the walking path.

So imagine how intrigued I was by the path above, seen just outside the boundary of Griffith Park.  It was leading off from a street I know pretty well but I’d never noticed it before. I thought it might be some indirect way into the park and it seemed pretty inviting so I started walking on it.It was, you’d have to say, a disappointment.  It runs for maybe 30 feet then takes a sharp left and then you see a gate:

It’s the entrance to somebody’s back yard, and the owner understandably wants to keep out wandering riff raff.  If the path had been perfectly straight and I’d been able to see the gate from the street I wouldn’t have even set foot on the path. I wouldn’t have had any desire. Some contradictions to be worked out there.

CARRY ON RAMBLING

From Carry On Cabbie, 1963, written by Talbot Rothwell.  Pintpot, played by Charles Hawtrey is applying for a job as a Taxi driver with Speedee Cabs. The boss of the firm,  Hawkins (played by Sid James) has been telling him and a group of would-be drivers what hard work it is, with very long hours.

PINTPOT:  We will get one night off a week won’t we?
HAWKINS:  Course.  Are you married?
PINTPOT:  Oh no, only I belong to this rambling club you see, and so does a very nice girl too and, well, once a week we do like to go as far as we can.




Hawtrey was one of those actors whose performances were so gay you could almost believe he was straight, but he wasn’t, as many a sailor could testify.  He came to a nasty, if ultimately very dignified, end. Told by doctors that his legs would have to be amputated he refused the operation, saying he preferred to die with his boots on.

A WALK IN THE (DISPUTED) WAR ZONE

I come late to this, over forty years too late probably, long after the fact, and some time after it’s appeared in various places on the interwebs:

It’s a pamphlet about the horrors of life in New York, published in 1975, warning of the dangers of muggings, break-ins, fires in hotels, the risks of travelling by subway, and what not. There’s a dire warning not to go out after dark, and the passage on walking is especially hair-raising:

 In fact the pamphlet is not exactly what it appears to be.  It’s a scaremongering and alarmist, though not exactly ironic, text published by something called the Council for Public Safety, an umbrella group of 28 unions of police, prison guards and firefighters reacting to the city’s threats to lay off thousands of their members. You might say these conditions would be the consequences of reduced services, although word on the street had it that those conditions applied already.
Now it so happens 1975 was when I first set foot in New York, and although I never saw the pamphlet, its message had somehow soaked into the general consciousness.  New York was by many accounts a terrifying place where no sane person would dare to set foot.  A stroll in Central Park was to be considered a suicide mission.  We were led to believe the place looked like a war zone, and obviously parts of it did, like this:

Now, I’m as much of a coward as the next man, and as I set foot on the streets of Manhattan, leaving the apartment I was staying in on 101st Street and West End, I certainly did see plenty of hookers and pimps and drug dealers on many a street, though I can’t say they were very scary.
photo by Leland Bobbe
More than that, as I made my first forays into New York I couldn’t help noticing that there were lots of little old men and women, lots of young girls, lots of people who looked a great deal more feeble and vulnerable than me.  If they were brave enough to walk the mean streets of New York, then I surely had to be too.
And I was.  Yes there was the occasional hassle as I walked, but the experience was not at all as advertised.  It was only as scary as you allowed it to be.  Famous last words, I know.  However, I realize now that I didn’t take any photographs on that trip.  I’m not sure why.  I think I was probably afraid that it would have made me look too much like a tourist, like an easy mark.  And I don’t remember ever seeing a cop on the streets.  
Here are the other pages from "Welcome to Fear City."

WALKING WITH DUMPSTERS

I walk around and I look at stuff, mostly in what we might as well call the urban environment.  One of the things that my kind of walking does is make me see things I hadn’t seen before, to note various repetitions and common features I might previously have taken for granted.  I like to note similarities and differences.  It's not record science, or in fact any kind of science.  And so we come to the dumpster.
Sometimes they’re come singly:

Often in pairs:

Sometimes in groups:

I can’t speak for the whole of the Anglophone world but I think dumpster is an all-American word.  The British don’t have dumpsters.  They have skips and wheelie bins, and I believe the Australians use the British terminology.

The dumpster was introduced in 1936, part of a mechanical trash-collection system devised by one George Dempster of Knoxville, Tennessee, and for a while it was know as the Dempster Dumpster.
I see a lot of the modern versions when I’m walking around and I don't think most of them find their way onto the back of trucks.  This one, in Santa Monica, is the most pristine I’ve ever seen but then Santa Monica does strive to be pristine.

The ones for hire tend to be fairly neat and clean too – nobody wants to rent a dumpster that’s some scarred, graffiti-spattered thing.  But in the day-to-day world dumpsters hang out at the back of buildings and in alleys, and so they become targets for tagging and other forms of self-expression.  I guess people worry less about graffiti when they’re on a dumpster as opposed to on walls and fences. 

But sometimes people build a little house for their dumpster which presumably keeps it safer from roaming street artists.

Fact is, they're everywhere.  This one was spotted in LA’s Arts District:


This one in the heart of Hollywood.

This one in Little Tokyo:

And as. matter of fact, dumpsters are not only found in the urban environment - they’re sometimes found in the wide open spaces too:

And sometimes when they’re in the wide open spaces they may get used for shooting practice, though it seems you don’t need to be much of a sharp shooter to hit a dumpster, but then perhaps it was to practice grouping


In conclusion: I enjoy looking at dumpsters.  It’s not about looking for ugliness, and I don’t think it’s even about finding beauty in ugliness, and I certainly hope it’s not some wanky art project.  I hope it’s just about walking and looking and, of course, recording.