Sunday, March 11, 2018

OLD CARY GRANT JUST FINE


I have, by degrees, and by default, become a cat person.  This surprises me a bit.  When I was a kid I desperately wanted a dog but my parents thought I wasn’t ready for the responsibility, and that I’d never walk it.  They were almost certainly right.

These days, however, I sometimes think it would be OK to have a dog because I could combine exercising it with my psychogeographic drifts, although in the end I think I’m still not ready for the responsibility.  And in any case, I have become a cat person.

The cat, not much of a walker.

A cat joined the household, some years ago now, and she has gradually seduced me – (and yes, there was some inappropriate touching along the way, on her part).  And once in a while I think maybe I could combine my own walking with cat walking,  with the feline striding along beside me on a leash, although I’m told this is only possible if you start when the cat is very young indeed. 




And so the other night I watched Harry and Tonto, a pretty good, if very much of its time (1974), movie about an old geezer (Art Carney who is actually playing a character much older than himself) who goes on a road trip with his cat Tonto, who indeed has a collar and a leash.  They end up on Hollywood Boulevard opposite Pickwick Books and yes, that is Larry Hagman:


Pickwick Books used to look like this on the inside:


Why can’t there be a bookshop like this in Hollywood anymore?  Well, we all know exactly why, but still …



Anyway it so happens I’ve had the above picture of Cary Grant sitting on my desktop for quite a while now. I read the street names, and realized that location is just round the corner from where I go to see my doctor.  In fact when I go to see him I always take a stroll around the neighborhood to calm myself before the appointment.  So last week when I went for another check up I decide to drift along to Swall and Charleville and try to find the corner where old Cary and his cat did their walking.  How hard could it be?


Finding the crossroads was no problem, but it was hard even to tell which corner Cary had been on.  There were some obvious changes - the streets signs and their poles had been replaced, and some had apparently gone completely, the mail box had gone, hedges had grown up everywhere, and I could see no sign of the house. 


I thought the chimney  and those arches in the Cary Grant picture would have been the give away, but I couldn’t see them either.  I was starting to think the house must have been demolished and replaced but then something clicked.


A wall had been built in front of the arches, the chimney was still there but it had been modified and was lost in the trees, but that front door, that window with the bars - not identical - but then 60 years have gone by - but I'm prepared to bet that’s the house old Cary and his (or somebody else’s) cat had walked in front of, possibly only for that one photograph. 




I can’t find any hard evidence that he lived there, or even in the neighborhood, so I guess he was probably there just for a photo op.



And then, much belatedly, it occurred to me that maybe the picture is an ironic take on his appearance in Bringing Up Baby,  but I don’t have any hard evidence for that either.

Thursday, March 1, 2018

WALKING AND LEANING


One of the smaller regrets in my life is that when I was unemployed in Sheffield in the 1980s I turned down the chance to become an apprentice dry stone waller.  How very different life might have been.   Maybe – and I realize this is very, very unlikely – I could have ended up as land artist in the mold of Andy Goldsworthy.


There’s a new documentary about him, titled Leaning Into the Wind, and in the trailer he says, “There are two ways of looking at the world.  You can walk down the path, or you can walk through the hedge.”

Does anybody still use that phrase “dragged through a hedge backwards”?  My mother used to say it about me when I was looking particularly disheveled, but as I used to point out, if you’re pulled through a hedge backwards you’re going to look rather better than if you’re pulled through it forwards.


Andy Goldsworthy has something in common with walking artists like Richard Long and Hamish Fulton, but as far as I can tell he doesn’t really use walking as part of his practice.  However, since he’s usually working outdoors, making site specific sculptures, then I suppose he must do a certain amount of walking to get to and from the sites.  The piece below at Storm King, titled Storm King Wall is a length of dry stone walling that runs to 2,278 feet, so a certain amount of walking is required just to get from one end of it to the other.


Actually it’s not even that simple – the wall disappears, as it were, into water and emerges on the other side, so unless you can walk on water a detour is involved.

I’ve also walked around a Goldsworthy in the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, this one, called Hanging Trees:  



I know I also saw his Garden of Stones at The Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York but as far as I can remember, at the time I went there you weren’t allowed to walk in it.  


The image below on the museum website suggests you can walk there now, though obviously not very far.


As far as I can see, there's an absence both of paths and hedges.








Wednesday, February 28, 2018

SCRUTABLE

One way or another I've been walking past this building on Franklin Avenue for the best part of 15 years, and it still intrigues me, and moves me in some quiet way.  Things around it change -  a brand new urban park has just been built nearby, and it's close enough to the Hollywood Freeway that a homeless tent city has grown up nearby but it remains square and solid and inscrutable, essentially unchanged, even if it's a bit frayed at the edges.



I guess it's the inscrutability that's the appeal. It looks like a bit of old Hollywood.  It's not stylish enough to be celebrated as a classic and yet there is something basic and elegant about it, something modernist and formal - form following function.  I like that in a building that I walk past.

It used to look like this:



And this:


Wednesday, February 21, 2018

WOKE WALKING




Meanwhile, down on Hollywood Boulevard, some folks still seem more woke than others.






Monday, February 19, 2018

DON'T GO THERE

Photo by Caroline Gannon.