THE HOLLYWOOD WALKER

THE QUESTION EVERYBODY’S ASKING

2013-02-04T17:03:00.002-08:00

The question is this: “But is it safe to wear high heels when exercising?” Don’t ask me, I haven’t a clue, but Elise Sole (a made up name surely) has some answers on shine.com. in an article headlined "Would You Exercise in High Heels?" You can look it up, I'm sure. She certainly doesn't seem to regard walking as exercise.

She tells us about a class taught by certified (in some sense anyway) fitness instructor Kamilah Barrett, 35, called “Heel Hop” “a no-impact hour of strength-training that helps women develop cardio vascular strength and the confidence and skill to rock high-heeled shoes.” Yes, it’s the lack of confidence that’s really the root of the problem, I expect.

Then there are Stiletto Fitness Classes in Kansas City, M.O. "core and lower body high-impact strength and training fitness class." That’s high impact as opposed to no impact. “Created by former dancer Coryelle Abney in July 2012, her class helps women look graceful wearing heels while offering a serious calorie burn.” No downside to that.

But then of course a doctor gets dragged in, Dr. Elisa M. Kavanagh, DPM, who treats the New York City Rockettes. She says, "I wouldn't advise women to bring their Jimmy Choos to a class like this. If you're curious, wear character shoes (they look like a classic Mary Jane with a chunky heel) that are flexible and designed for stomping, kicking, and twirling.” I see: character shoes with a chunky heel. You haven't quite grasped this concept, have you doc?

And above, for no very good reason, is Lindsay Lohan – I’ll bet she does a lot of things in high heels that aren’t entirely safe, walking being one of them.

THE LAST PSYCHOGEOGRAPHER ON EARTH

2013-01-22T11:39:00.002-08:00

I’ve been thinking about Immanuel Kant, author of The Critique of Pure Reason, and Charlton Heston, star of The Omega Man.

Immanuel Kant, 1724 – 1804, lived his whole life in Konigsberg, in Prussia, what is now Kaliningrad, in Russia. He was man of rigorous habits and walked every day as he thought and philosophized. So regular were these walks that people said you could set your clock by the time Kant strolled past, even though there seems to be no absolute agreement about exactly where he walked.

In the early 2000s an artist named Joachim Koester created The Kant Walks, doing his best to plot and then walk Kant’s route or routes. The proposition was made trickier given that large parts of the city were destroyed by Allied bombing at the end of World War Two, and the center was never rebuilt. Koester took some gorgeously bleak photographs along the way.

Koester writes, “… Kant’s walk is often invoked but rarely specified. A walk is like a manual, a way to engage in space, a recipe to follow but also to improvise with, allowing for drifting, losing oneself.”

And so, at the end of last week I found myself in downtown Los Angeles drifting and improvising, trying to follow in some of the footsteps of Charlton Heston, as taken in the The Omega Man, based on Richard Matheson’s novel I Am Legend. Charlton, playing Robert Neville, is nearly but not quite the last man on earth, but most of the ones that remain are zombie-ish vampire types. I admit I get slightly lost on the detail.

Tracking Charlton Heston is certainly easier than tracking Kant, not least because one or two online movie obsessives have already done some of the spade work. Everyone says how much downtown LA has been revitalized but there are still some amazing pockets of neglect and desolation. I happened to walk along Skid Row, and amid the many homeless people there was an old black man with dreadlocks who was carrying a hammer, and thought that the tarmac of the road needed a lot of hammering, which he duly delivered.

Above is Charlton Heston walking along Santee Street, and below is the street as it is is today. Some buildings are gone, some spruced up, but the basic structure is perfectly recognizable from the movie. This is the building at the end of the street that Heston's walking towards.

Then there’s the Olympic movie theater where Heston goes repeatedly to watch Woodstock (your guess is as good as mine).

Not sure if the resolution's good enough, but there's a fallout shelter sign to the right of the theateris frontage. The place is now a store selling elaborate decorative furnishings - complete with a sign that says everything must go – but the place where movie titles could de displayed is still intact.

And here, not very far away, is a remnant from a now closed down jewelry store, once so successful they could even replace the sidewalk. I'd definitely have had that in the movie.

And then, completely untouched as far as I could tell, exactly as in the movie, although with new buildings in the distance, is the Water and Power building at First Street and Hope.

It’s hard to see the building from many of the surrounding streets because it’s right behind Gehry’s Disney Hall, and of course in the normal run of events, you’re not likely to go there unless you have some business concerning water and power. However, and this is truly a wonder, the building is surrounded by water – it’s MOATED – with a bridge, though not a drawbridge as far as I could tell.

At the end of the afternoon I went into the Last Book Store, a huge and I hope not doomed enterprise, and found a used copy of The Image Of The City by Kevin Lynch, a 1960s city planner, and a pioneer of one psychogeography according to some sources, a book which contains this terrific passages: “It must be granted that there is some value in mystification, labyrinth or surprise in the environment ... This is so, however, only under two conditions. First, there must be no danger of losing basic form or orientation, of never coming out … Furthermore, the labyrinth or mystery must in itself have some form that can be explored and in time be apprehended. Complete chaos without a hint of connection is never pleasurable.” Something I suspect that we could all agree on, Imannuel Kant and Charlton Heston, included.

LE MARCHEUR DE HOLLYWOOD

2013-01-16T08:41:00.000-08:00

It’s got to be difficult to be French, hasn’t it? What do they call “film noir” for instance? “Black Cinema” just doesn’t cut it. And you can see why they’d want to reclaim the term for the French movie industry, but when the French try to make a native film noir, it always ends up looking, forgive me, a little too French.

This crass overgeneralization comes as a result of having watched Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1967 movie Le Samouraï over the weekend. It has Alain Delon, with fedora, trench coat, gun, and occasionally white gloves, being extraordinarily insouciant and Gallically engaging, but also utterly unconvincing as an assassin. You’re not sure if you want to hit him or kiss him – I’ll bet he gets a lot of that.

Even David Thomson, in the handy little booklet that comes with the DVD, has his reservations. He calls the movie great but says it’s “poised on the brink of absurdity, or a kind of attitudizining male arrogance.” Some of course might say it’s gone over the brink. But it does have a fair amount of elegant walking in it.

The movie is famous, at least in some quarters, because of a brilliantly original chase scene, not involving cars but using the Paris Metro. In a book titled Atlas of Emotion Giuliana Bruno makes a great deal of this subway chase. She writes, “from the ruins of film noir, a story about mapping emerges ... Here, we engage in the very flux of psychogeography. Our hero knows his city “intimately”; that is, he knows all its inner workings. He has internalized the subway map … So familiar is streetwise Delon with this map that he can move jointly with it.”

Well yes, OK, sort of. Ms. Bruno is also responsible for a book titled Streetwalking On a Ruined Map – which is a title so wonderful that I’m not sure any book could ever possibly live up to it.

It’s pretty hard, for me anyway, to watch Le Samouraï and not think of Jean Luc Godard’s Alphaville, made a couple of years earlier, which is also “poised on the brink of absurdity” but it helps a lot that Eddie Constantine looks more like a bullfrog than a pretty boy. It’s a long time since I saw it, and I wish I remembered it better, and to be honest I can’t tell you whether it involves much walking or not. But if the stills are to believed there’s certainly some film noir strutting and posing, and I dare say some attitudizining male arrogance.

And finally a more or less current picture of M. Delon. Still walking, still French, but just a little less insouciant.

BAD WALKING MEN

2013-01-10T17:33:00.006-08:00

I seem to have seen more than the usual numbers of trailers for the new movie Gangster Squad, which may mean that the movie’s very good, or it may mean it’s very bad – large amounts of bought publicity attach to both. Either way, there seems to be something all too familiar about the way it’s being sold: lots of images of dangerous looking men walking (or I dare say striding or strutting) across the screen or into the camera.

We’ve seen a lot of this before haven’t we? If we’ve seen Mulholland Falls we’ve already seen Nick Nolte, who actually appears in Gangster Squad, doing something very similar indeed.
If you saw any of these guys walking down the street towards you, you’d cross the street to avoid them right? The fact that they’re cops, that they’re morally ambiguous, but they’re more or less on our side, really doesn’t make any difference, does it?

Gangster Squad is based on a “true” story - which somebody, somewhere, decided long ago was a selling point for a movie – and it deals with the take down of gangster Mickey Cohen. There’s no denying that Cohen was a very bad guy, but as a walker, above on the right, he just didn’t have that dangerous, threatening stride.

Compare and contrast with the Kray brothers. If you saw these two psychos walking towards you, you wouldn’t just cross the street - you’d leave the neighbourhood.

Certain kinds of rock band have always liked to employ a dangerous strut, or swagger, as well as a bit of moral ambiguity. For me there’s always been some serious disconnect between the image and the reality of the Clash, but there’s no denying they looked and dressed the part, above.

And finally this image, by Terry O’Neill, of Chairman Frank Sinatra, accompanied by admittedly fringe members of his “board.” To some eyes, this picture shrieks “links to organized crime,” though defenders say no, no, he’s actually with his stunt double, his bodyguard, his personal assistant and the film set's head of security, who was an ex-cop. The fact these guys just happen to look like mobsters is a complete accident.

And even if Sinatra’s guys are complete softies, the image still delivers the same message: “I’m walking here, get out of my way.” And you can see in the picture that everybody has.

“Your way Frank, sure.”

THE WALKING CAMERA

2013-01-08T14:40:00.000-08:00

If I look up from my desk and peer across the room, my eyes inevitably fall on a poster of one of my favourite images by one of my favourite photographers. It’s Garry Winogrand’s image of two women at LAX airport walking toward what’s known as the Theme Building. It looks like this:

In fact Winogrand took a great many of my favourite photographs. He was, you’d say, a street photographer (one of those terms that seems to mean less and less the more you say it), and in the course of his work he did a lot of walking and photographed a lot of other walkers. He’s usually associated with New York, but he took a lot of pictures in LA too.

He even took some in London. The received wisdom is that his London photographs weren’t as good as his American ones, that his great skill was seeing a familiar environment with fresh eyes: when confronted by an unfamiliar environment this freshness disappeared and he was reduced to taking pictures of guardsmen or men in bowler hats. Still, I’m very taken by the odd familiarity and strangeness of this one, titled Woman Entering a Cab, London:

Winogrand did like shooting women in the street, so to speak, which in these days of the demonized male gaze seems a dodgy activity at best, but hell he had nothing on Miroslav Tichý. I love Geoff Dyer’s description of Tichý’s working method, “he spent his time perving around Kyjov, photographing women.” Well yes indeed. I suppose Winogrand’s method was less pervy because it was less sneaky, though I know there are those who’d find this an overfine distinction.

Street photography has been much on my mind lately, having been hunkered down with Reuel Golden’s London: Portrait of a City, a grand photobook, showing London, its people and inevitably its walkers, from Oswald Mosley to the Kray Twins. Full disclosure: I am mentioned approvingly therein. One picture that particularly stays with me, is the one below by Cecil Beaton, not really pervy I suppose, since it’s obviously a set up with a model, and because the photographer’s perviness was directed elsewhere.

I like taking pictures, I do it all the time, and I’m a good enough photographer to know I’m not a very good photographer. But once in a while I take a photograph that makes me happy. Here is the best walking I've taken in a very long time, but Garry Winogrand, it know it ain’t.

PROOF

2012-12-28T11:48:00.000-08:00

... 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

2012-12-15T15:55:00.001-08:00

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 advocates 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" - oh spare me.

YOUNG AND RESTLESS

2012-12-12T09:35:00.001-08:00

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

2012-12-10T11:37:00.000-08:00

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

2012-11-11T14:41:00.000-08:00

THE WALKING LIFE

2012-10-28T12:50:00.000-07:00

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

2012-10-22T17:39:00.002-07:00

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

2012-10-11T08:00:00.002-07:00

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

2012-10-08T11:58:00.000-07:00

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.

NAKED RAMBLING

2012-10-05T09:57:00.001-07:00

Spare a thought today for Stephen Gough, also known as the Naked Hiker or the Naked Rambler. He’s the English ex-marine who has turned his whole life into a legal campaign about being allowed to walk naked in public. I’m sure there are places where this wouldn’t create much of a stir but for one reason or another quite a bit of Gough’s naked walking, and far more of his legal troubles, have occurred in Scotland where the old Puritan tradition remains strong.

And there’s no denying that things have got a little out of hand. In the last few years Gough has spent more time in prison than he has walking. He now refuses to wear clothes at any time, so he’s been naked in court – leading to contempt charges, and has refused to wear clothes in prison, leading to him being kept separate from other prisoners (which is certainly the way I’d want to do my time in prison), but the objection is that he’s cost the tax payer an arm and a leg. Also, in the past he’s started walking naked the moment he leaves jail, leading to his re-arrest and a further waltz round the legal ballroom.

Anyway, if the BBC is to be believed, he was today allowed to walk naked out of Perth jail and wasn’t immediately rearrested, which sounds like a step in the right direction, though I assume it’s only a matter of time. Gough also used to have a rather winsome girlfriend who walked naked with him, at which time he got a good deal more sympathetic press coverage. No mention of her in the recent reports. Now, it seems, Stephen Gough walks alone, and it seems that he smiles rather less than he used to.

LOST IN SPACES

2012-09-29T15:11:00.001-07:00

While I was in England I read Simon Armitage’s book Walking Home subtitled “Travels with A Troubadour on the Pennine Way.” It’s a terrific account of walking the 250 plus miles of the Pennine Way in the “wrong” direction, north to south, the trip made a good deal more arduous (in my estimation) because each night our author gives a poetry reading. Blimey. I’d have been on my hands and knees by the end of that.

(Photo: Jonty Wilde)

I do maybe half a dozen readings a year (not poetry admittedly), and although I enjoy them well enough, I do find them surprisingly knackering. The idea of doing one more or less every night for three weeks after a hard day’s walk, sounds like it would become absolute torture. Or maybe it works another way. Maybe you’d just go into a fugue state: walking, reading, sleeping; walking reading, sleeping, for as long as it takes. Although to be fair, Armitage keeps his wits about him throughout the book. Not so much in this picture, perhaps:

There were two things that really surprised me (in a good way) in Walking Home. One, that Simon Armitage used to have ambitions to be a cartographer. How often do you hear somebody say that? Although in his case he did have the benefit of a geography degree. I too, in idle moments, have thought it might be very cool to be cartographer, although without ever really knowing what that entails, and certainly without having a geography degree.

The second surprising thing is his description of getting lost while walking. He writes, “I have noticed a very alarming and rapid change in my psychology, as if the claustrophobia and disorientation brings about a particular condition, the symptoms of which include fear, panic, and loss of logical thought, but also less expected and harder-to-define sensations akin to melancholy, including something like hopelessness but also close to grief.”

What interests me about this description is the extent to which I recognize all these symptoms except the very last one. The fear, panic, and loss of logical thought are, I assume, what everybody feels when they’re lost, and that naturally enough leads to hopelessness. But I pretty much thought I was the only one who experienced melancholy, that sense of “I’m lost and alone in the world, and what else could you expect, and why does it even matter?” But I’ve never made that final leap to grief. Perhaps I haven’t been sufficiently lost.

I did, however, get thoroughly lost last month while I was in London, not in any life-threatening way, but because London is a place that I flatter myself I know pretty well, and because I even had a map, it was unusually humiliating. I’ve written elsewhere about being lost (mercifully, briefly) in the Australian desert, and that was certainly scary, but being lost in a place you think you know is actually even more disorienting.

My plan in London was to do a short walk to see two ruined city churches, St. Dunstan-in-the-East (above) and Christ Church Greyfriars (below) – both more or less destroyed by German bombs in the Blitz, but the ruins preserved as deconsecrated war memorials. The route from one to the other inevitably takes you past St Paul’s Cathedral which miraculously survived the Blitz, though it does have shrapnel scars.

I decided to start at St Dunstan’s, and Monument looked like the nearest tube, so off and I went, came up out of the station – which had the exits marked with street names - and I stepped into the city and I had absolutely no idea where I was. I couldn’t tell which street was which, which was north or south, east or west, and I set off along Gracechurch Street, and found myself approaching London Bridge which I knew was wrong. I stopped, turned back, walked for a bit, and felt more lost than ever.

I decided there’d be no shame in consulting the map, which I thought I’d have no need of, but I got it out, and you know as a sometime wannabe cartographer, I reckon I’m pretty good with a map, but this time I couldn’t make any sense of it whatsoever. I’d look at, think I’d worked it out, start walking in one direction, and a couple of minutes later realize I was obviously heading in the wrong direction again. This happened time after time. It became frustrating; it became absurd, though it never quite became comical.

It was infuriating but also, per Armitage, a deeply melancholy experience. I was lost in some deeper, non-geographical sense. It wasn’t simply that I didn’t know where I was, where I was going, or how I was going to get there to get, but rather that, after a while, I no longer understood why I wanted to go there at all, and in some odd way I felt like I didn’t even know exactly who I was. Was I losing my mind? Was the Alzheimer’s kicking in? It really didn’t seem to matter.

Well inevitably I got over it before very long, found my way, found the churches, had a good (modest) walk. And I know you could make too much of this, but there was something salutary in the experience of being lost. As a psychological, existential, maybe even cosmic dilemma, it's actually far more interesting than knowing exactly where you are all the time. But to appreciate it, it does have to come to an end. Being lost only makes sense if, in the end, you find yourself again.

ROAMIN' WITH RUSKIN

2012-09-27T12:18:00.000-07:00

One of the things I did while in England was go to Sheffield and the Peak District to go walking over the Monsal Dale Viaduct, which is officially the Headstone Viaduct but I never heard anybody call it that. I was with my oldest pal Steve, a Sheffield resident, and one of my regular, if increasingly less frequent, walking partners. My living in Hollywood and Steve having a bad back are the two primary causes.

The viaduct once formed part of the Derby to Manchester railway line, and is most famous for having been railed against by John Ruskin. He wrote, “That valley where you might expect to catch sight of Pan, Apollo and the muses, is now devastated. Now every fool in Buxton can be in Bakewell in half an hour, and every fool in Bakewell at Buxton.” Growing up in Sheffield, I never heard of John Ruskin, but I did know Monsal Dale as a place the family sometimes went on Sunday afternoons. We never did much of anything there except walk about, which I suppose was the whole point.

Ruskin might be somewhat cheered by the current state of things in Monsal Dale. The railway has gone, and although the viaduct remains, no trains run across it. It’s a reminder, a relic, and now it’s the preserve of pedestrians, cyclists, and the occasional horse rider. Our plan was to join them.

It was in fact rather harder than we imagined. We started at the car park outside the Monsal Head Hotel, and we took what seemed the obvious path, that looked like it would lead us down to the viaduct, but before long it was clear we were heading in completely the wrong direction. The viaduct was behind us and to the right, and we were walking away from it, alongside an increasingly broad stretch of water with no crossing place.

Reluctant to turn back, or admit our mistake, we kept going till we met another walker, a large, jolly young woman, and we asked her if we could get to the viaduct this way. She assured us we could, so we pressed on. After a while we wished we’d asked her exactly how we could get to the viaduct this way, since we could see it very definitely wasn’t getting any closer, and a little after that we began to wonder if perhaps the woman didn’t know what a viaduct was, especially when we came to a weir, which made the water get broader still, and cascade fiercely over its edge. Maybe the woman had thought “viaduct” was another name for weir.

Fortunately Steve knew his history and wasn’t afraid to repeat it. He recalled the Duke of Wellington at the battle of Assaye, in the Second Maratha War, in central India, in 1803. Wellington, he explained, who was still Arthur Wellesley at that time, was leading British and East India Company forces against two Maratha chiefs. Unexpectedly, and after he’d split his forces, he spotted the Marathas across the other side of the Kaitna river, at the village of Assaye.

Outnumbered and outgunned, he nevertheless decided to attack. There was a ford at that point in the river, and although it would have been possible to cross there, it would also have been suicidal. The local guides assured him there was no other crossing, but Wellington wisely didn’t believe them. He reasoned that there must be another crossing somewhere else, and sure enough one of his men scouted out another ford not so far away. Wellington took his troops there, crossed, and launched an unexpected, thoroughly bloody, but successful attack on the Maratha. We, Steve suggested, should do something similar.

Like Wellington, he reasoned there must be a crossing somewhere nearby, and sure enough we eventually found a small footbridge. Once across we could go back along the other side of the river and come to the viaduct. And we did. After a longish walk, an encounter with a herd of ominously insolent cream-coloured cattle, and a scrabble up a steep bank, we got to the top, and set foot on the place where the rails had once been, where the trains once ferried fools from Buxton to Bakewell. As we walked across, Steve told me this was the site of the worst and, he insisted, the only, dirty trick he ever played on his two sons.

Some years back, when the boys were aged six and eight, he’d brought them to walk across the viaduct, much as we were doing now. The tracks were already gone, but at that time the mouth of the Headstone Tunnel, at the far end of the viaduct, was boarded up, with a couple of solid wooden doors. It must have looked somewhat like the image above, though in fact that's the other end of the tunnel. Steve went ahead of his boys, walked up to the doors and peered through a crack into the darkness of the tunnel. Then he suddenly feigned exaggerated panic, turned to his kids and yelled something like, “Oh no, there’s a train coming. Run for it!” and began to run back across the viaduct the way they’d come.

The kids panicked for real, were absolutely terrified, and ran desperately after their dad, until at some point Steve stopped running and turned, laughing just a little guiltily. He hadn’t really meant to terrify his boys. He’d thought they were old enough and smart enough to have noticed that since there were no tracks along the viaduct there would be no trains either, but they were young and naïve, and above all they’d made the mistake of trusting their father.

Steve decided to make this a teachable moment, and pointed out to his lads that even if there had been trains and tracks it would certainly have made no sense to try to outrun the train. The sensible thing would have been to clamber up the embankment at one or other side of the tunnel mouth; although looking at it now he noted now that there wasn’t really much embankment in evidence.

He said to me later, “I thought it was a useful lesson in observation and the ways of the world. And I also told them that that would be the last time I would ever play a trick on them. Others might in the future but from that moment they could trust me implicitly.” He says he has stuck to his bargain. Next time he and his sons are out walking and he says they’re about to get run down by a train, they can absolutely believe him.

These days the Headstone tunnel is open to walkers, though rather overburdened with health and safety notices, and in we went. Below is Steve disappearing into the distance of the tunnel, creating an image suitable for the cover of his next, or in fact his first, doom drone album.

WALKING IN SHORTS

2012-09-25T17:53:00.000-07:00

I’ve been in England for a bit, doing some walking, among other things. I arrived in London at the tail end of the Olympics, which was followed by the Paralympics, an event that stirred British hearts even more than the real thing.

And as part of this, Transport for London (the latest incarnation of what most of us still think of as London Transport) published some rather nifty and stylish maps to help non-Londoners get around. That’s one of them above at the top. I like that faux-3D effect (I imagine there may be a proper cartographic word for it), but here’s the cover of one of them, which I like less.

It raises two observations. One: of course variations of the phrase “Why not walk it?” pass my lips all the time. All else being equal, and I know it seldom is, I’d much rather walk than take a tube or bus. On the other hand, coming from Transport for London, doesn’t it seem a bit defeatist? Like a restaurant with a sign in the window saying, “Why not eat at home?”

And two, I know the rest of the world thinks of British men as epicene fops, but we don’t have to reinforce that stereotype, do we? Couldn’t they have found a walker to put on the front of the maps who looked a little more butch, and for that matter a little more British? No, no, I don’t have anyone particular in mind.

WALKING IN SILENCE

2012-08-27T16:58:00.002-07:00

You know, the older I get, the more and more I love John Cage; his music, his philosophy, his Zen attitude. Also, judging by the photographs, he smiled and laughed more than any serious artist I’ve ever seen.

If you go to youtube you can see him performing “Water Walk” on the tv game show “I’ve Got a Secret,” which does in fact have moments of vague insult and agony, but Cage holds up very well, as in fact you’d expect him to, and when the tv host asks him to explain that title “Water Walk”, he says “because it contains water and because I walk during the performance.”

Elsewhere on youtube, and in other places too, you can find him reciting a text sometimes known as “At the Middle” and sometimes as part of “Lecture on Nothing” and it is certainly included in “Silence.” In any case, below is not precisely that text: I have “appropriated” it for my own dubious pedestrian ends, replacing his word “talk” with my word “walk.” I hope and trust Mr. Cage would not have objected. My typographical layout is considerably more orthodox than his usually was.

Here we are now at the beginning of the fourth large part of this walk. More and more I have the feeling that we are getting nowhere. Slowly, as the walk goes on, we are getting nowhere and that is a pleasure. It is not irritating to be where one is. It is only irritating to think one would like to be somewhere else.

Here we are now a little bit after the beginning of the fourth large part of this walk. More and more we have the feeling that I am getting nowhere. Slowly, as the walk goes on, slowly, we have the feeling we are getting nowhere. That is a pleasure which will continue. If we are irritated it is not a pleasure.

Originally we were nowhere; and now, again, we are having the pleasure of being slowly nowhere.

GEOFF IN VENICE -- (YES, YES, I KNOW IT'S BEEN DONE)

2012-08-27T14:20:00.000-07:00

I regularly say that LA is a tough town for tourists, especially European tourists. They’re used to going to Paris or Amsterdam or even New York, and when they’re there they do a lot of walking, expect to do a lot of walking, moving more or less effortlessly, from hotel to art gallery to restaurant to park, and so on, supplemented by public transport if necessary. This is the holiday experience. And then they come to LA where none of this applies.

That’s why so many LA tourists end up in Santa Monica or Venice, where walking is a reasonable thing to do, and a perfectly good way of getting around. Santa Monica has 3^rd Street Promenade, Venice has its Ocean Front Walk, sometimes called the boardwalk though it’s a long time since there were any boards there, with its hippies, panhandlers, incense-sellers, body builders, street performers, and artists. (I was tempted to put that in inverted commas - “artists” – but hell, who am I to be a snot?)

Actually, the Venice ocean front was the scene of one of my more excruciating walking experiences. Back in the day, my then girlfriend and I, on a two week break from London, came to Venice and rented one of those four wheeled tandems, and we set off from the rental store at the south end of the boardwalk, and pedaled a couple of miles north - at which point we had a flat tire.

Even at the time, and many times since, I thought we should just have stayed on the tandem, ridden the damn thing back to the rental place, and if we’d shredded the tire and destroyed the wheel, well SFW? But they had my credit cards details and we’d no doubt have got stung with a punitive charge, so we did what was probably the best thing. We WALKED the tandem all the two couple miles back to the rental store. This would have been a little annoying in most circumstances, but essentially no big deal. However on the ocean front in Venice, there seemed to be a million people, all of them staring at us, all of them deeply fascinated, the best of them saying, “Oh, bummer, man.” But others saying, “What happened, man?” as if there might be some metaphysical explanation, others saying we should make sure to get a refund (I’d already thought of that, oddly enough), and several who claimed sufficient bicycle repair skills that they could fix it there and then if we pulled over and gave them a little time. We declined. It was, I think, the longest two miles I’ve ever walked, by no means the most arduous, but as I say, the most excruciating.

Well, as an Angelino, I have now learned pretty much never to go to Venice, but I was summoned there recently by Loretta Ayeroff, she of California Ruins fame, because she was participating in the Hammer Museum’s Venice Beach Biennial (that’s a geographical art pun). The idea was that “real” artists (inverted commas acceptable here, I think) would show their work alongside the boardwalk artists. So Loretta had a small exhibition space, actually a rectangle of tarmac next to the beach. This picture is by Sol Terringer:

Loretta had lived in Venice in the 1970s, and had taken pictures there including a set of people walking – she was now offering prints at $35 a pop - an unbelievably good price for a signed, numbered photograph by any photographer and absolutely amazing for an Ayeroff. However, business was both stressful and bad. I’m tempted to say she “couldn’t give them away,” but she did at least give one away – to me. It looks like this:

I love this picture. It shows people walking and of one person being (as it were) walked. Loretta says she thinks the two guys are Vietnam vets, which sounds perfectly likely. I also found myself reminded of Midnight Cowboy – Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman, one messed up guy looking after some even more messed up guy.

You know, of course, that Hoffman put a stone in his shoe so he was forced to limp and didn’t have to “act” it – some seem to think this is another example of Hoffman’s vanity and absurdity but it actually sounds pretty reasonable to me.

Anyway, in order to people interested in her wares, Loretta started running a competition to see if anybody could recognize exactly where the photographs were taken. I was happy enough to join in. I didn’t for a moment expect to find the one story building on the left; that was surely long gone. But I did have vague hopes of spotting the large nondescript black on the right. I schlepped up and down looking at buildings, looking at change and decay, and indeed at some rebuilding and refurbishment, and I was damned if I could see anything that reasonably looked like that setting. I tried to talk myself into believing I could see some resemblance here and there, but in all honesty I found nothing.

By then I’d had enough, I decided to walk back, go say farewell to Loretta and leave, but I arrived at her show area, and she’d obviously been exhausted by the zoo that was Venice and there was no sign of her. Something quite symbolic there I think.

Loads more Ayeroff here:

http://Loretta-Ayeroff.photoshelter.com

WONDERING

2012-08-21T16:48:00.001-07:00

For a while now I’ve been really enjoying the website I’m Just Walkin’ run by Matt Green (that’s him above with the camera - pic is from the NY Times) who previously walked across America from Rockaway Beach in New York, to Rockaway Beach in Oregon. I think his title maybe a reference to the Sonic Youth song “The Wonder,” the lyrics of which run “I’m just walkin’ around, Your city is a wonder town,” though I’m not sure about that.

Green’s current grand project is to walk every street in all of New York’s five boroughs. He’ll be the first to do this, I think. A few people have definitely walked ever street in Manhattan, but as far as I know he’s the only one to have gone for the whole bagel.

The online project is largely visual – he takes photographs of the interesting things he sees as he walks, and much of it is the kind of thing that interests me when I walk: architectural curiosities, quirky signs, graffiti, eccentric gardens, soulful old cars, “portals of the day.” But the site isn’t merely “Hey look at this cool stuff,” it’s also very well researched. Many of the photographs come with very knowledgeable captions or links that reveal amazing snippets of the history of the city. If you want to call this “deep topology,” you'll get no argument from me.

Green charts his progress as he goes. The Google map on the website shows the city increasingly covered by spidery red lines, indicating the streets he’s already walked down. So far Staten Island is looking a little thin but no doubt he’ll get there soon enough.

Anyway, a little while back the featured portal of the day was the above quasi-geodesic entrance to a children’s playground in a park in Queens, named for Louis Windmuller, who I admit I had never heard of, but he turns out to be a very interesting man.

Windmuller was a 19^th century German immigrant to New York, who did well in banking and insurance, before turning to civic life. He wrote articles about economics and public affairs, including one titled “The Vexations of City Pedestrians.” His suggestion was that cars “should be restricted to inclosed (sic) roads of their own, as locomotives very properly are.”

He was also founder of the Pedestrians Club, an organization that almost certainly wouldn’t have welcomed the likes of you or me as members, prestigious enough to merit a news item in the New York Times, of February 7, 1913, which described it as “the most exclusive, distinguished and enthusiastic walking club in America,” dedicated to “furthering the fine art of walking and enjoying it right here in the City of New York.”

Windmuller is described as “the noblest walker of them all” and he’s interviewed in the piece, and he says he walks for 4 hours a day. However he recommends walking fairly slowly, not much more than two miles per hour, so that you take in more of your surroundings. He says, “You should see what is about you as you go. Don’t let the automobiles frighten you. Learn to dodge, like I have. They nearly got me once, but they can’t any more, and I am 78 years old.”

Here's Matt Green's website:

http://imjustwalkin.com/

SIDEWAYS TOWARDS BABYLON

2012-08-19T11:58:00.001-07:00

Here’s something my fellow pedestrians might be interested in - the Sideways Festival, in Belgium. According to the organizers, others who might also be interested include “peripatetics - roamers - wildcrafters - nightwalkers - lay and experimental geographers - earthworkers - environmental activists - ramblers - sci-art practitioners - urban and rural explorers - asphalt botanizers - trespassers - adventurous kids - psychogeographers - local historians - site-specific performers - travelers - bike messengers - hauntologists – horse riders - anarchitects - heterotopia enactors - naturalists - pedestrians - critical massers - shepherds - pilgrims - traffic transformers - fieldworkers - new topographers - carbusters - romantic geographers - outdoors people - roadside picnicers - public domain campaigners - geomancers - disruptive innovators - joggers - locative media subverters - ecocity visionaries - hikers - trekkers - mythogeographers - soundwalkers - bicycle assemblers - field recorders - shoe repairers - journeyers - liquid urbanists - sightseers - peregrinators - critical cartographers - wanderers - and everybody going out for a stroll once in a while…” I believe I am quite a few (though by no means all) of those things.

The festival is essentially a four week walk across Belgium from east to west, and it certainly isn’t too late to hop over there and participate in at least some of the events, which include workshops and walkshops, symposia, sound mapping sessions, performance art, and whatnot.

The Sideways website can probably explain it all much better than I can - that's where the photographs in this post come from:

http://www.sideways2012.be/

I know about Sideways because of Andrew Stuck, the begetter of talkingwalking.net and he’s arranged for participants to listen to inspiring podcasts from talkingwalking participants, including one from me (though you'll have to go to Belgium if you want to hear that):

The talking walking website is here:

http://www.talkingwalking.net

WALKING BLITZED

2012-08-12T12:07:00.003-07:00

I’ve written elsewhere about my own father going to work the morning after the Sheffield Blitz of 1941, walking through ruins, stepping over dead bodies as he went. The picture above is from the Sheffield Libraries archive but, need I say, that is not my father.

I’m never sure exactly what is we want from war photographs. We want the “truth,” of course, but we know that truth is war’s first casualty. We also know that certain war photographs are in fact “set ups,” sometimes in a “good cause,” sometimes not. And equally we do know that many war photographers have a good-enough and trained-enough eye that even in the midst of chaos their photographs can be surprisingly formal and well-composed.

When it comes to photographing the aftermath of war, photographers are inevitably confronted by ruins: piles of rubble and masonry which in themselves may be rather unphotogenic. In those circumstances, what photographer can resist putting a walker or two in the picture?

The images above and below come from the conflict in Aleppo, and I have been following things there with a special interest. A long time ago I did an MA in European drama at the University of Essex, along with (among others) a melancholy Syrian named Tarek. He was specializing in Beckett and had hopes of teaching English literature at Aleppo University. Occasionally we walked to the campus together, discussing modern European drama rather than the state of things in Syria, which even then seemed a very touchy subject.

I have no idea of what happened to Tarek, whether he fulfilled his ambitions, and in any case I imagine he’d now be about retirement age. Of course, I don't seriously expect to see him when I look at the news photographs from Aleppo, but if he is still there now, I feel pretty certain that he’s walking in ruins.

And speaking of modern European drama: those of you have been following the Nicholson “literary career” since its beginning (there may perhaps be three of you) will know that my first serious bit of writing was a play titled Oscar, a two-hander, less than an hour long, but performed in several different productions in Cambridge, Edinburgh and (improbably) Nottingham. We needed an image for the programme, so our designer dug out something from an underground magazine, and used the image below.

At the time I thought it was wonderful, but I’d more or less forgotten about it, had certainly forgotten the name of the artist. But recently, for one reason or another, I happened to be looking for images of the ruins of Hollywood, and there it was. The artist is Ron Cobb, who I'm sure I should have known more about. The image seems as terrific as ever. I had imagined that an updated version would have our protagonist carrying a computer rather than a TV, but who’s to say he wouldn’t be carrying a fan, like this man in Aleppo?

THE WANDERING OF ART

2012-08-07T15:31:00.000-07:00

The author Merlin Coverley recently sent me a copy of his new book The Art of Wandering. It’s subtitled “The Writer as Walker,” which might suggest a book of infinite length, but in fact he brings it in at a trim and attractive 250 pages.

In it, he speaks well of me and my writing, for which I’m very grateful. But more than that, I think it’s a good book because it covers all the bases but still has room to include various texts and authors that are unfamiliar, and in some cases completely new, to me. And this is exactly what you want from a book of this kind: an incentive to run out and buy some new books to further expand the “pedestrianism” section of your library. Zymunt Bauman’s “Desert Spectacular” in The Flâneur edited by Keith Tester, for example, sounds like it was written with me in mind, though in fact the going rate on Amazon for a hard cover copy is currently $343.93.

Equally you want a book like this to send you back to rereading things you already know, and in this case I’ve found myself pulling out Poe’s “The Man of The Crowd” which is actually one of those shape-shifting stories that seems to be different every time I read it.

Coverley is hardly the first to have stressed the importance of this story in the history of modern, and indeed post-modern fiction, and in the literature of pedestrianism per se. Baudelaire and Benjamin were big fans. Benjamin Benjamin wrote that the story, “is something like the X-ray picture of a detective story. In it, the drapery represented by crime has disappeared. The mere armature has remained: the pursuer, the crowd, and an unknown man who arranges his walk through London in such a way that he always remains in the middle of the crowd.”

Well, yes and no. In Poe’s story, the unnamed narrator sits in the window of a London coffee house watching the world go by. He’s recovering from an illness and finds the spectacle both fascinating and alarming, and is finally struck by a single devilish face belonging to an old man whom he feels compelled to follow. The pursuit continues for the next 24 hours as the old man walks through London, apparently with purpose, though that purpose becomes increasingly indiscernible.

It’s a walk on the wild side: “wooden tenements were seen tottering to their fall … horrible filth festered in the dammed-up gutters … large bands of the most abandoned of a London populace were seen reeling to and fro.” None of this will seem at all unfamiliar to anyone who visits contemporary London. The old man has a “wild energy,” and doesn’t slow down. And neither does the sickly narrator, at least not until as the “shades of the second evening are coming on” he’s finally had enough and gives up the pursuit. Our narrator concludes, “this old man is the type and the genius of deep crime. He refuses to be alone. He is the man of the crowd ... I shall learn no more of him, nor of his deeds.”

For me, it’s one of those stories that keeps slipping in and out of focus. Sometimes it seems sublimely prescient of most modern literature (think Thomas Pynchon passim), a mystery that refuses to give up its mystery, that refuses even to state what the mystery is, asserting that attempts to make sense of a character, or the world itself, is ultimately futile. I know there are many supporters for this view of “The Man Of The Crowd.”

Other times I wonder if Poe didn’t simply paint himself into a corner, realized he couldn’t resolve this story, couldn’t find a “solution” that would be equal to the quest, and so inverted and subverted the narrative: now the mystery is too profound to be understood, or perhaps there is no mystery at all. And there’s at least some suggestion that the narrator never actually leaves the coffeehouse and that the narrative takes place entirely in is his fevered imagination.

Either way, to decide that the old man is “a man of the crowd who can never be alone,” doesn’t really seem to be saying very much, whereas to describe him as “the genius of crime” just seems like character assassination. How could you possibly come to such a conclusion when you’ve followed the old geezer for 24 hours and he’s never, so to speak, put a foot wrong.

You could, of course, give Poe the absolute benefit of the doubt and say that this kind of ambiguity, this oscillation between the genuinely and the bogusly mysterious is precisely what he intended. But was he really that kind of writer?

Finally, Poe holds a special place in the annals of aimless pedestrianism, because of the way he died. On September 27, 1849, he set off from Richmond, Virginia heading, via Baltimore, for his home in New York: the trip was to raise funds for his magazine The Stylus. He evidently made it to Baltimore, though whether directly we can’t be sure (he may have visited Philadelphia): but in any case what happened to him once he got there is certainly a mystery, and at this point in history an apparently unsolvable one.

We do know however than on October 3 he was found in a very bad way, delirious, walking the streets of Baltimore, wearing cheap clothes that were not his own: eventually pitching up outside, then inside, Ryan's Tavern, sometimes known as Gunner's Hall. Some reports have him sober, others have him in a state of drunken collapse.

He was taken to the Washington College Hospital, and died there on October 7, never having recovered sufficiently to give an account of himself. Death certificates were not required at that time and place, and the local newspaper The Baltimore Clipper, reported that his death was caused by “congestion of the brain” which may, or may not, have been a euphemism for alcoholic poisoning. A recent theory suggests Poe actually died of rabies.

Of course, these days everybody “knows” that Poe was a debauched wreck, an authorial image in keeping with his work (though he cleaned up nice for his stamp), but most of this comes from an obituary printed in the New York Tribune, attributed to one “Ludwig,” actually Rufus Wilmot Griswold, once Poe’s friend, then his rival in love and letters, and eventually his posthumous enemy, as well as his posthumous literary executor, N.B. Among other charges he laid against Poe, was that Poe often walked the streets, either in "madness or melancholy", mumbling and cursing to himself: to which any self-respecting flâneur, or even man of the crowd, would surely respond, “Well who the hell hasn’t?”

H.P. Lovecraft wrote a pretty dreadful poem titled “Where Once Poe Walked.” It starts:

Eternal brood the shadows on this ground, 

Dreaming of centuries that have gone before;

 Great elms rise solemnly by slab and mound, 

Arched high above a hidden world of yore.

Nuff said, surely.

However, I am rather taken with the above print “Poe Walking High Bridge” by B. J. Rosenmeyer, ca. 1930. Courtesy of the Print Collection, The New York Public Library,  Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

And incidentally I discover that there’s a bust of Poe above a winebar, the Fox Reformed in Stoke Newington Church Street, the former site of a school Poe attended. I think I’ll have a walk over there when I’m in London, next month. The art of wandering has not been lost.

WALKING WITH PATINA

2012-08-03T08:00:00.001-07:00

I happened to be walking early one morning this week in the streets around the Beverly Center, here in Los Angeles. I wasn’t looking for the seamy underbelly, since it’s a fairly swank neighbourhood, and I’d have looked in vain, but I was looking for things with a bit of quirkiness or patina.

Quite a few people were leaving their houses and apartments, getting in their cars and going to work. A young couple fell in step walking behind me, so I didn’t get the very best look at them, but I got a general impression of young, attractive, cleanish cut, and I could hear their conversation quite clearly.

HE: I can’t believe Bobby’s got a job already. He’s only been in LA like a week.

SHE: He got four casting calls in his first three days! He’d have got the J.C. Penney job if he’d been able to ride a motorcycle. He looks like the kind of guy who could ride a motorcycle.

HE: That’s the thing about Bobby. He’s so straight, but casting directors always think he’s so gay.

As you may have read elsewhere in this blog I have an ongoing interest in what I call “feral furniture” – couches, chests of drawers, televisions, that have simply been dumped on the street. Some, of course, look in better shape than others, but I have never seen such a stylish abandoned couch as the one I saw that morning in the environs of the Beverly Center. It looked like this:

And I was thinking to myself, man, this must be a really classy neighborhood. The people here throw away furniture that looks cooler and more elegant than any furniture I’ve ever owned. And then half a block later I came across something else feral, an abandoned toilet tossed into the ivy at the curb, which suggested that some of the area’s inhabitants may be slightly less classy than others.