Geoff Nicholson's Blog, page 57

PROOF

... if proof were needed, that Dwight Garner
"a book critic" (his employer's nomenclature) for the New York Times, leads a
charmed life.









I suspect that for readers of this blog, the
connections between walking, writing and reading don't need much explication, and
here is Dwight, earlier this year, writing in the Times, and making a
persuasive case for audio books.




He writes, “Keep an audio book or two on your
iPhone. Periodically I take the largest of my family’s dogs on long walks, and
I stick my iPhone in my shirt pocket, its tiny speaker facing up. I’ve listened
to Saul Bellow’s “Herzog” this way. The shirt pocket method is better than
using ear buds, which block out the natural world. My wife tucks her phone into
her bra, on long walks, and listens to Dickens novels. I find this unbearably
sexy.”









Above is a picture of the wife in question, Cree
LeFavour.  No sign of audiobook, nor bra
for that matter. 

THEORETICAL WALKING

When I was writing The Lost Art
of Walking, my fellow psychogeographer (or whatever the hell we are) Iain
Sinclair offered the opinion that people hadn’t lost the art, rather that we’ve
lost the environment in which people can do any walking.  A nice distinction, though of course once the
environment’s gone, people lose the art
pretty shortly thereafter.












This issue of the walking environment is discussed in a new book titled
Walkable City by Jeff Speck, a “a city planner who advocates for smart growth and sustainable design.” Funny, isn’t it,
how you never come across a city planner who favors stupid growth and
unsustainability?  Maybe they don’t write
books.  Or maybe they just lie in their
author bios.











I’ve only just started reading the book, but I immediately see it
contains a “General Theory of Walkability.” 
Yes yes, a THEORY of walking, just what the world needs. “To be favored”
Speck writes, “a walk has to satisfy four main conditions: it must be useful,
safe, comfortable and interesting,” which strikes me as simultaneously feeble
and condescending.  Of course I’m not
going to argue that a walk should be dangerous and dull, and yet “useless”
walking with a certain degree of “discomfort” is pretty much what I live for.









I’m also, in general, fairly happy making my own definition of “interesting,”
but in case you’re one of the poor souls who doesn’t feel the same way, here’s
Mr. Speck to help you.  “Interesting
means that sidewalks are lined by unique buildings with friendly faces and that
signs of humanity abound.” Kind of makes you want to get in your Hummer and do burnouts,
doesn’t it?  Only theoretically, of
course.







"Buildings with friendly faces" - indeed.

YOUNG AND RESTLESS

We know that Oliver Sacks is not a man who does things by half.  Some people might trip and fall while out
walking, and end up with a twisted ankle. When Dr. Sacks falls, the results are
dramatically catastrophic.  In his book A Leg to Stand On he meets a bull while
walking on a mountain path in Norway.  He
turns and runs, falls down the mountain, tears off his quadriceps, crawls for
an hour or three, is found by reindeer hunters, stretchered to safety, goes
back to England, has a big operation, and tumbles into an existential tail
spin.  This of course is good for the
writing even as it may be bad for the body and mind.




And things haven’t got any better with age for Sacks.  In his new book Hallucinations he’s walking across his office, trips over a box of
books, falls headlong and breaks his hip. 
Thus: “I thought I have plenty of time to put out my hand to
break the fall, but then – suddenly, I was on the floor, and as I hit, I
felt the crunch in my hip.  With
near-hallucinatory vividness in the next few weeks, I reexperienced my fall; it
replayed itself in my mind and body.” Well,
of course it did, Dr. Sacks.










 I’ve also been reading Neil Young’s Waging
Heavy Peace, which is sometimes kind of annoying but sometimes very
readable and once in a while very moving. 
And walking is occasionally involved. 
Neil’s father, who was a journalist and a pretty good dad by all
accounts, eventually suffered from Alzheimer’s, becoming in Young’s words
“there and not there” and after a while he was “just gone.”


        

Young writes, “Last time we were at the farm we went for one of our
many walks.  We always took long walks in
the forest together when I visited him, at the farm or anywhere … On that day
when we were back on the farm walking, Daddy got lost.  That really was the last walk we went on
together.”









I haven't been able to find an image of Oliver Sacks walking, but above is one of him at least standing up. It seems, incidentally, that Oliver Sacks gets lost all the time.  In an interview with the New York Times he
said, “A friend gave me a hat with a built-in compass,
since I have no sense of direction. It beeps when you face north and the
intensity of the beeps shows how close you are. I like to think it’s improving
my awareness but truthfully, I don’t think I’m getting any better. And I get a
little embarrassed wearing a hat that beeps.”











It was actually easier than I thought to find an image of Neil Young walking.  Here he is by the Berlin wall in the early 80s.  BUt perhaps I shouldn't be surprised.  After all, Neil Young did write a song titled Walk
On.  The chorus runs as follows:

     Walk on, walk on,

     Walk on, walk on.

MORE DRIFTING THAN WALKING

No, no, the title isn’t a reference either to Guy Debord or Scott
Walker, though I suppose by saying that, I’ve sort of turned it into one.  Rather it’s a reference to David Goodis.  That’s him above.




This being the season of good will and good cheer, any man with blood
in his veins is likely need a bit of hairy-chested, noir fiction, to remind
himself of other possibilities.  And so,
over the weekend, I read Goodis’s “Black Pudding” in Manhunt magazine, December
1953.  That’s it below.











The magazine describes it as a “novelette” though I think most of us
would say it was a short story of fairly average length.  The metaphor lodged in that title is slightly
lost on me: one of the characters says, “It’s a choice you have to make.  Either you’ll drink bitter poison or you’ll
taste that sweet black pudding.”  That
would be the sweet black pudding of revenge, but you know, still ....  Apparently there’s a TV adaptation starring
Kelly Lynch as Hilda.









Goodis was a massively prolific writer which no doubt explains why his
output is so mixed, but I think there’s a pretty top notch noir paragraph right
before the climax of “Black Pudding.” The hero, Kenneth Rockland, watches his
ex-wife, Hilda, from outside the house she’s holed up in.




“She moved with a slow weaving of her shoulders and a flow of her hips
that was more drifting than walking.  He
thought.  She still has it, that certain way of moving around, using her body
like a long-stemmed lily in a quiet breeze. 
That’s what got you the first time you laid eyes on her.  The way she moves.  And one time you said to her, ‘To set me on
fire, all you have to do is walk across a room.’”




OK, I could probably do without the long-stemmed lily, but otherwise, I
like that.  I like that a lot.  There is actually a far more overwrought
reference to walking in Goodis’s The
Burglar.  In which the hero and his
woman are strolling on the boardwalk in Atlantic City, watching the other
strollers.  He says, "Look at them walking. When they take a walk, they take a walk,
and that's all. But you and I, when we take a walk it's like crawling through a
pitch black tunnel."

GEOFF NICHOLSON HAS GONE FOR A WALK

THE WALKING LIFE

I don’t suppose many people go to see movies in search of “great
walking scenes.”  Even I don’t do
that.  But if a movie happens to contain
the odd great walking scene, then so much the better.









And so it is with Seven
Psychopaths, which I saw at the weekend a movie that’s so in love with
itself it’s actually rather hard to love, but which has its climax in Joshua
Tree National Park.  The director has a
casual disregard for distances and proximity (it’s that kind of movie, and I
have no complaints on that score), but any movie that has both Colin Farrell
and Christopher Walken tramping through the desert void is OK by me.









A couple of hours after I’d seen the movie I encountered a hot and
bothered young woman walking along the street, flustered, maybe a little lost, and
she asked me urgently which way was Hillhurst Avenue.  I pointed her in the right direction.

“Is it far?” she asked.

“Yes,” said, “it’s a bit of a walk.”

I didn’t specify how far.   It was probably a mile and a half, and she
didn’t look like much of a walker but I didn’t want to jump to conclusions.

“Oh my fucking LIFE!” she said, to nobody in
particular, certainly not to me, and walked on.  Well, I
didn’t expect to be thanked …

OF WALKING AND SCALDING

We’re inclined to think that walking is a pretty simple and
straightforward business, and yet as I wander through the world I find a
staggering number of signs telling me how to walk, where to walk, and far more
often, where not to walk.












Some of these signs are obviously intended to be useful, and actually
are.  Most of us are grateful to know
that there may be rattlesnakes in the area or that we’re in danger from other
pedestrians and forklift trucks (a double threat if ever I heard of one).









But some seem a little superfluous, such as this one at edge of the
Ubehebe

Crater in Death Valley. 









I mean, if you’re too dumb to realize that walking around the edge of a
600 foot deep volcanic crater might be a little risky, you’re probably too dumb
to take any notice of the sign.




Some seem more general and philosophical – such as this one:












although if you ask me pedestrianism, and indeed life, is always about
crossing the line, one way or another.




Some are more simply inscrutable. 
Like this one:









 OK, so climbing on groynes may be forbidden, but the guy on the sign
isn’t climbing, he’s just walking.  So
does that mean that walking on groynes is OK, but climbing isn’t?  We may never know.




Some seem to contain simple philosophical truths, this one for
instance, telling us that a parking lot is not a pedestrian walkway, which
I’m happy to accept and agree with, but I think what they’re really saying is
“keep out.”









One of my favourite, though ultimately very melancholy, signs comes from the
Desert Tortoise Preserve outside of California City, a sign that is genuinely
surprising and informative: 












Who knew that desert tortoises urinated if you get too close?  Who knew that urination could lead to death?
That’s quite an evolutionary disadvantage I’d think, but I do like the bold use
of italics and exclamation mark on DIE!




But now, just last week, I found a new favourite at the Hot Creek geothermal
area up by Mammoth Lakes. 









Scalding water, unstable ground: has walking ever seemed more exciting?

OF WAKING AND SCALDING

We’re inclined to think that walking is a pretty simple and
straightforward business, and yet as I wander through the world I find a
staggering number of signs telling me how to walk, where to walk, and far more
often, where not to walk.












Some of these signs are obviously intended to be useful, and actually
are.  Most of us are grateful to know
that there may be rattlesnakes in the area or that we’re in danger from other
pedestrians and forklift trucks (a double threat if ever I heard of one).









But some seem a little superfluous, such as this one at edge of the
Ubehebe

Crater in Death Valley. 









I mean, if you’re too dumb to realize that walking around the edge of a
600 foot deep volcanic crater might be a little risky, you’re probably too dumb
to take any notice of the sign.




Some seem more general and philosophical – such as this one:












although if you ask me pedestrianism, and indeed life, is always about
crossing the line, one way or another.




Some are more simply inscrutable. 
Like this one:









 OK, so climbing on groynes may be forbidden, but the guy on the sign
isn’t climbing, he’s just walking.  So
does that mean that walking on groynes is OK, but climbing isn’t?  We may never know.




Some seem to contain simple philosophical truths, this one for
instance, telling us that a parking lot is not a pedestrian walkway, which
I’m happy to accept and agree with, but I think what they’re really saying is
“keep out.”









One of my favourite, though ultimately very melancholy, signs comes from the
Desert Tortoise Preserve outside of California City, a sign that is genuinely
surprising and informative: 












Who knew that desert tortoises urinated if you get too close?  Who knew that urination could lead to death?
That’s quite an evolutionary disadvantage I’d think, but I do like the bold use
of italics and exclamation mark on DIE!




But now, just last week, I found a new favourite at the Hot Creek geothermal
area up by Mammoth Lakes. 









Scalding water, unstable ground: has walking ever seemed more exciting?

WALKING WITH MITTENS AND HITCH

This may surprise you.  It
certainly surprised me.  Last night I
dreamt that I was walking in a strange city with Mitt Romney.  He was on some kind of political walkabout,
meet and greet, but it was just me and him. 
We walked together down a long narrow alley, and at the end it opened
into a vast cube-shaped courtyard, with four high, windowless walls and one of
them had a sign for a “Chapel of Rest.” 
There was one old woman sitting on the ground with her back to us.  The walls were made of some kind of curious
brickwork, very thin brittle, bricks, in many different shades of red and brown, and Romney
talked about this, showing himself to be very knowledgeable about the history
of bricks.  And in the dream I thought to
myself well you know, a man who explores a strange city like this and knows
about the history of bricks can’t be all bad.













In some oblique way I think this was related to the Kelvedon Hatch Secret
Nuclear Bunker (above), in Essex, which I visited when I was England last month.  The whole place is a temple of cold war gloom
and obsolete office equipment, and it has a long narrow entrance corridor,
which could well have been a precursor of the long narrow alley I walked down
in the dream with Mitt.














The late Christopher Hitchens was somewhere in the dream too.  He was alive, but already terminally ill, and
I argued with some heckler on Hitchens’ behalf: a thing he would surely never
have required in life.  I think he was
there in the dream because of the time he was walking down a street in Beirut,
strolling “in company … on a sunny Valentine's
Day  … in search of a trinket for the
beloved and perhaps some stout shoes for myself” and defaced a
poster from the Syrian Social Nationalist Party
because it bore what he described as a "spinning swastika," and was duly beaten by SSNP heavies.  A bit of political graffiti that actually
meant something.

BACK IN THE LOW LIFE AGAIN

I realize that despite the title of this blog, I’ve not been doing
very much walking in Hollywood lately. 
The reasons are explicable enough. 
I’ve been finishing a novel, I’ve been away, and the weather has been
punishingly hot.  On the first day of
October the temperature around these parts hit the high nineties.  Come on. 
That’s not right.









So it was good to get out last week, walk from the lower slopes of the
Hollywood Hills and head down for lunch at a little place on Melrose Boulevard
- Melrose being the southern boundary of Hollywood in most people’s estimation
– and then I walked back again.  It was
about a 3 and a half mile walk in each direction, and it did punch a bit of a
hole in the day, but that was the idea. Of course I saw the “typical” Hollywood
stuff, which in some ways was a bit predictable: the big cacti, the stylish
architecture, the cool old cars, the interesting people.  But a walk in Hollywood is never wholly predictable.









As I walked along Hollywood Boulevard, for instance, there was a
parade, or I suppose motorcade, of vintage police cars.  My first thought was OK, well maybe this is
just the kind of thing that happens in Hollywood on a weekday afternoon, but I discovered
later that it was an event “to increase awareness of
public safety officers,” and the cars were driving from the Los Angeles
Fire Museum to Broderick Crawford’s Walk of
Fame star – not a huge distance.  And
it’s true - nothing heightens your awareness of cops like hearing sirens, seeing
a bunch them packed into old cars and glaring out the windows at pedestrians.





Broderick Crawford - good looking cop.


Of course there was feral furniture:
mattresses, couches, a gigantic mirror 
There even seemed to be some feral art – though it could just have been
a piece of old board with paint on it, but who am I to judge?









Everyone says that LA is the most suburban major
city in the world and that’s probably true – but it
did strike me on my walk just how industrial parts of Hollywood are.  The industry in question happens to be the
movies, but a warehouse or storage facility for movie equipment or props looks
much like a warehouse or storage facility for anything else. 











And then
right there on La Brea Avenue there’s the Cemex cement works, churning out lord
knows how many tons of ready mix, right across the street from the Target and the
Best Buy.  How many major western cities
have one of those in the middle of a shopping area?












And of
course I saw some fellow walkers – not so very many but enough, a combination
of the cool and quirky, those who were working too hard at being cool and
quirky, and those who were just downright quirky.









There
were graffiti-slash-street art, naturally – some Bansky-esque stenciling –
which is getting a bit old, surely, although it hasn’t got to look actually retro
just yet.  And I saw this extraordinary
graffito on Melrose itself:












When
did anyone last feel the need to write Bill Cosby’s name large on the side of
anything?  And did it have some
connection with the vaguely lewd ad for pants on the bench next to it? Or with
the pita store behind it?  I don’t know. Every
city has its mysteries, and some just have to remain that way.