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Click Pic to Watch Donald in West Hollywood
Whilst I'm stalling to figure out how to pay the rent and keep on walking, as well as holing out the heat, I thought I'd post this vid which I've been meaning to post for ages but haven't had the time to whittle down into web-friendly length.
Very rough editing here - just trying to cut it down without losing too much of what I liked about it.
Donald is one of my favorite walks so far...
Click Pic to Watch Nancy in the Valley
It's been a tough week. I've been waking up at 4.30am to go out walking and beat the heat. But it's still not happening. People don't wanna walk with me. I'm raining sweat by 9am.
A friend had a word with me and told me I might be a masochist for trying to do this right now. I'm thinking of taking her advice.
If my word's not good enough for you, listen to Nancy who was waiting for the bus in the Valley at 9am on Thursday morning. She's the only person who's talked to me all week. She confirmed my friends' thoughts - as you'll see.
I'm still completely out of funds for the project. Still passing round the hat. I guess if I get the vote of confidence from you all, the project'll be able to regain momentum when this heat passes a little. The 'Donate' button is still to the left of the screen if you feel you would like to see this project reach its potential.
Till then, I'll keep in touch and let you know what's going on.
And join the mailing list! Send me an email with 'subscribe' in the header to lisa@walklawithme.com
- Breaking my promise of giving you the details from the Valley. They're there and I'll write them up soon. For now I'm fobbing you off with a map of the area I've covered in the c.2months so far. I have to be up really early tomorrow to avoid the heat and from now till my disgustingly early bedtime, I want to have some fun.
Incidentally - for now I'll try to be as nonchalant as possible about this - I'm completely out of cash. Can't even pay my phone bill. I'm just going to make a brief allusion to the 'Donate' button to the left of this screen as I haven't figured out a formal way to deal with this issue yet without giving up the project. Other vloggers refer to the donate button as the buskers' tip hat. If you feel so inclined, please don't hesitate to point and click.
BLACK = WHERE I'VE BEEN. RED = WHERE I'M NOT GOING.
Click on map to enlarge. View the key and other details at http://walklawithme.com Click on the 'Route' page.
- I'VE ALWAYS WANTED TO SEE ONE!
This is just a taster with a promise of more tomorrow.
Had a great day today - set out real early cuz the heat starts closing in at about 10.30am.
Was in Burbank, Toluca Lake, Universal City and thereabouts.
A friend gave me a tour of the Warner Brothers lot.
Between Sherman Oaks and Studio City there are more pedestrians than I would have expected. Except they're all on their cell phones, staring straight ahead, striding along in focussed, independent universes. I might have to try to penetrate somehow. I'm not sure how.
I'm still commuting from home. Have been since Beverly Hills. It's not working out so badly. We'll see how it goes.
On Friday I walked between Woodman Avenue and Studio City and back again in a loop. I feel down in these areas mostly. They seem so sterile.
I found a winding road in the hills above Ventura called Sunswept Drive. I asked the mailman how far down Ventura it would drop me if I walked it's length. He said, 'Oh, about three miles.' He said it was a really long walk, that I might want to turn back. It took 20 mins tops in the end and dropped me less than a mile down the road I think. Odd that the mailman thought that way.
I came across 3 animals run over by cars. I found a skunk being eaten by maggots. A squirrel secretly decomposing by someone's drain and a lizard flattened in the position it died in - no sign of flesh at all. It was like irredescent paper.
I found some cool things along Sunswept Drive - signs of original life to foil the sterility of the main streets. Here's something I especially liked:
101. FRIDAY AFTERNOON. AS VIEWED FROM MULHOLLAND DRIVE.
Here is a quote from the book I’m reading called ‘Wanderlust: A History of Walking’ by Rebecca Solnit. In it, Solnit is quoting something from Virginia Woolf’s essay ‘Street Haunting: A London Adventure’:
“Of the people (Woolf) observes (while walking) she says, ‘Into each of these lives one could penetrate a little way, far enough to give the illusion that one is not tethered to a single mind, but can put on briefly for a few minutes the bodies and minds of others. One could become a washerwoman, a publican, a street singer.’ In this anonymous state, “the shell-like covering which our souls have excreted for themselves, to make for themselves a shape distinct from others, is broken, and there is left of all these wrinkles and roughness a central oyster of perceptiveness, an enormous eye.’ “
On Friday I left the stroller behind and walked along Mulholland Drive near Studio City - out where there's the lookout for the Hollywood Bowl and heading west towards Beverly Glen. It's kinda backwards in terms of my route but it was a Friday and I preferred the idea of being at that end of Mulholland rather than by all the traffic near the 405.
It was boiling. There was no pavement or pedestrian area. The cars whizzed by. I felt too exposed because of all the blind-spots created by the hairpin bends and the narrow lanes. To be honest, I wasn’t sure if walking up there was a good idea.
I got some aggressive cat-calls. Over the period of three hours, five sets of Hispanic laborers practically fell out of their cars whooping, cheering and cat-calling me, slowing down. One guy was leaning so far out his window I could see his belly button. - On those narrow roads, with the blind turnings! It was unrestrained and primitive. Not just let loose but unleashed. It seemed that just by walking in that situation I was generating some kind of chaos. Or maybe it was just because it was out of the ordinary. Maybe they thought I was a hooker. I don’t know. Perhaps it was similar to when I walked downtown by Our Lady of Angels church and those teenagers made fun of me - how they needed to react in some way and what they came up with just happened to be ridicule. But it was unnerving . I felt very exposed and vulnerable.
I turned off Mulholland and walked a while along Outpost. I turned off Outpost into a secluded cul-de-sac at the top of a hill. I sat and rested on the pavement in the privacy and peace up there. There were only two houses. They looked like villas. I was looking over into the canyon and also to the green hills beyond. They seemed so still and quiet, contained in a haze of heat and smog.
They were mirroring my own need for quiet right then. Or rather, serving as a model for it. Not the kind of quiet that’s the absence of noise – there were some squawking birds and two maids were speaking in Spanish in one of the garages - but it was all contained in a luxurious bubble of tranquility.
I was in a cul-de-sac on the edge of the world. Or at least the edge of LA, which is the world for me right now. The valley below was the moat that divides and separates. The hills were a mysterious and different world. It felt like I was resting my bones after walking to the end of a flat Earth.
Just by looking at what was in front of me, I could have been in Spain – except that there was a big American flag waving from the center of the roof of the villa just ahead.
Sitting there in that location, at one end of the spectrum, I got a more objective sense of the amalgam that is LA. I could look at the rest of Los Angeles in relation to this place. The people who live in those villas, obviously ‘successful’ and ‘wealthy’ people, have stuck themselves in a situation where they can feel like they’re not in LA – the logical and common outcome of ‘making it’ here. And yet, the whole scenario is such an LA scene and predicament. It’s an odd practice. I can understand it in some ways, but still it's odd that things became like this.
That day, someone from KPCC asked me to write a couple of sentences for their website about what my view of community is from the perspective of this project. But I have little idea of what community is these days, in this place anyhow. In that sense, this project often confuses me more rather than making that clearer for me.
Perhaps why I wanted to do this project is because I can’t integrate how these people can live here in this way, while all the parallel universes within LA exist also. Not that variety exists, but that each way of living here is so insulated and that so many people seem to be okay with that. That they seem comfortable with dislocation.
Maybe I just can’t digest LA – it’s too much, too sprawling, too varied. But what I can do is pluck things like experiences, information, conversations, facts. Perhaps somehow I can weave those things into my own being more and have a more direct relationship with the place I live in – be more integrated or at least less shut-off – which can be such a violent thing to be.
All this made me remember a religious Jew in London when I was a child. He used to walk incredible distances along the side of the motorway so as to get to synagogue without breaking the Sabbath. The neighborhoods he walked through were amongst Londons' most grey and depressing. It often pelted with rain and no warmth emanated from the speeding cars that skidded passed every second. He was trying to force the mould of the secular city to live out his devout and religious beliefs. He was using a tool for something other than what it was designed for. I wonder whether he liked it, all that walking. All those days. All that rain. Sometimes, when I'm in London, I still see him out there. I admire his commitment. I wonder what London looks like through his eyes.
Click Pic to Watch Courtney in Sherman Oaks
Here is the Sherman Oaks video - It's a little large in file size but many of you will have immediate streaming no problem.
Courtney had some interesting things to say about what it was like growing up as an upper middle class black male in the Hollywood Hills...
Today, in Sherman Oaks, I bumped into a guy I used to know from Hancock Park when I lived there. He works at a magazine stand in Sherman Oaks now. In the course of our conversation, we figured out we'd been neighbors for two years and never realized it. We'd seen each other at the same coffeeshop 5 times a week, had mutual friends, but never seen each other in the apartment building we both lived in. How crazy is that? And yet I bet it's common.
I'm trying to post one of todays' videos but I'm having difficulties with compression. Check in tomorrow as I'll have it up by then.
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