WALKING TOUR OF COMPOUNDS AND WASTELANDS: Apple and Englishman
The Los Angeles Times is a fine newspaper, sometimes even unintentionally. Its Calendar features section likes to showcase the work of reporters who work out their regret at washing out of a graduate studies program in the liberal arts at Gobble-Wallah University over more immediate journalism like the crime beat or the adventures of the Marine Corps in Dayala.
On Monday, reporter Dean Kuipers reverently interviewed some piece of upper class rubbish from England named Will Self.A long walking tour of the compounds and wastelands of LA ensued.
DD has only defaced the copy slightly. Can you tell where?
Author Will Self strode off a plane and into the Alaska Airlines arrivals hall at LAX on a recent afternoon, his long legs fairly gulping the yardage. He barely slowed down long enough to indicate that he didn't want to look at a map.
Self wanted to walk all the way to his hotel in downtown Los Angeles, where he was staying a few days to talk about his new book, "Psychogeography." The book is a series of short pieces about his use of walks as a literary-cum-political practice in the spirit of derive -- that's French -- a perceptual and experiential technique endorsed by Situationist radical Guy DeeBore in 1958.
The idea, to DeeBore, was to use a purposely aimless stroll -- enhanced by strong drink -- to liberate oneself from the tyranny of the deterministic universe whose plot points were work, home and market. Self has a related but different goal: His walks, he said, are about "liberating cities both at a personal and political level. They're about assaulting people's idea that there are places, like compounds and wastelands, not worth being in or traveling through."
Self is best known for his twisted, imaginative fiction including "The Theory of Insanity" and "So Pitifully Sodden." But he has been doing these walks for about eight years and more recently for a column he writes, "Psychogeography," in the Independent newspaper in London. He is both sincere and blunt about his shortcomings as a flaneur -- that's French -- the city stroller so beloved by Charles Baudelaire.
"I'm full of it," he said.
An apple confronted us from the battered concrete of southwest Los Angeles. Who had discarded it in time for our walk in the mid-day sun?
It was not a particularly hot day, but the miles of concrete from LAX to the Watts Towers seemed to suck the cosmic juice out of the sun and slather it red upon one's neck. The rays belched upon us as Self loped along past the airport's hooker hotels, halting to snap a photo of a porn shop. The distance unpacked and took on a different scale, measured not in songs on the radio or in landmarks but what Self describes in his book as "the metronomic rhythm of my legs, parting and marrying, parting and marrying, parting and marrying." Suddenly what matters is the texture of the asphalt, the color of the fast food wrappers drifting by as trash, the beleaguered looks on people's faces.
But this kind of hidden beauty isn't what we are looking for. The flaneur -- that's French -- moves through all environments in thrall to the picturesque, a 19th century ideal of beauty embraced by the Romantic poets, not just a word.
"They'll go into ecstasies over that manhole cover," said Self. "But I don't want the picturesque. That's why I took a picture of the porn shop. Pictures of a place that sells moving pictures of people having sex with tools. It is an act that only exists in doing it."
Self is looking for an internal state. "It is closer to Buddhist notions of satori," he added. "It is much more an internal state. It's a lot to do with not thinking."
Self is the guy infamously tossed off former Prime Minister John Major's campaign plane in 1997 for snorting heroin in the bathroom while on assignment. When he detoxed, he started walking wastelands.
"It's the antithesis of drug experience," Self said. "Addicts are the hard line determinists of the world. Walking is the opposite of that. Whatever happens, happens."
Sometimes s--- happens, too. "Psychogeography" is less than satisfying after Self's bent but ultimately compelling "Book of Dave," about a cabby's diary that becomes a sacred text 500 years in the future. One devours Self's toothsome descriptions of walkabouts in wastelands looking for the poetic beauty of Blake, or the alien insights of Baudrillard, or even the cultural love letter of Kerouac's "On the Road." But the reader cannot find such things.
It is as if viewing urban wastelands had rendered him intellectually pooped.
The Los Angeles Times is a fine newspaper, sometimes even unintentionally. Its Calendar features section likes to showcase the work of reporters who work out their regret at washing out of a graduate studies program in the liberal arts at Gobble-Wallah University over more immediate journalism like the crime beat or the adventures of the Marine Corps in Dayala.
On Monday, reporter Dean Kuipers reverently interviewed some piece of upper class rubbish from England named Will Self.A long walking tour of the compounds and wastelands of LA ensued.
DD has only defaced the copy slightly. Can you tell where?
Author Will Self strode off a plane and into the Alaska Airlines arrivals hall at LAX on a recent afternoon, his long legs fairly gulping the yardage. He barely slowed down long enough to indicate that he didn't want to look at a map.
Self wanted to walk all the way to his hotel in downtown Los Angeles, where he was staying a few days to talk about his new book, "Psychogeography." The book is a series of short pieces about his use of walks as a literary-cum-political practice in the spirit of derive -- that's French -- a perceptual and experiential technique endorsed by Situationist radical Guy DeeBore in 1958.
The idea, to DeeBore, was to use a purposely aimless stroll -- enhanced by strong drink -- to liberate oneself from the tyranny of the deterministic universe whose plot points were work, home and market. Self has a related but different goal: His walks, he said, are about "liberating cities both at a personal and political level. They're about assaulting people's idea that there are places, like compounds and wastelands, not worth being in or traveling through."
Self is best known for his twisted, imaginative fiction including "The Theory of Insanity" and "So Pitifully Sodden." But he has been doing these walks for about eight years and more recently for a column he writes, "Psychogeography," in the Independent newspaper in London. He is both sincere and blunt about his shortcomings as a flaneur -- that's French -- the city stroller so beloved by Charles Baudelaire.
"I'm full of it," he said.
An apple confronted us from the battered concrete of southwest Los Angeles. Who had discarded it in time for our walk in the mid-day sun?
It was not a particularly hot day, but the miles of concrete from LAX to the Watts Towers seemed to suck the cosmic juice out of the sun and slather it red upon one's neck. The rays belched upon us as Self loped along past the airport's hooker hotels, halting to snap a photo of a porn shop. The distance unpacked and took on a different scale, measured not in songs on the radio or in landmarks but what Self describes in his book as "the metronomic rhythm of my legs, parting and marrying, parting and marrying, parting and marrying." Suddenly what matters is the texture of the asphalt, the color of the fast food wrappers drifting by as trash, the beleaguered looks on people's faces.
But this kind of hidden beauty isn't what we are looking for. The flaneur -- that's French -- moves through all environments in thrall to the picturesque, a 19th century ideal of beauty embraced by the Romantic poets, not just a word.
"They'll go into ecstasies over that manhole cover," said Self. "But I don't want the picturesque. That's why I took a picture of the porn shop. Pictures of a place that sells moving pictures of people having sex with tools. It is an act that only exists in doing it."
Self is looking for an internal state. "It is closer to Buddhist notions of satori," he added. "It is much more an internal state. It's a lot to do with not thinking."
Self is the guy infamously tossed off former Prime Minister John Major's campaign plane in 1997 for snorting heroin in the bathroom while on assignment. When he detoxed, he started walking wastelands.
"It's the antithesis of drug experience," Self said. "Addicts are the hard line determinists of the world. Walking is the opposite of that. Whatever happens, happens."
Sometimes s--- happens, too. "Psychogeography" is less than satisfying after Self's bent but ultimately compelling "Book of Dave," about a cabby's diary that becomes a sacred text 500 years in the future. One devours Self's toothsome descriptions of walkabouts in wastelands looking for the poetic beauty of Blake, or the alien insights of Baudrillard, or even the cultural love letter of Kerouac's "On the Road." But the reader cannot find such things.
It is as if viewing urban wastelands had rendered him intellectually pooped.
posted by George Smith at 1:34 PM
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