Walking in L.A.

There is something perverse about walking in Los Angeles. Action and context never quite match. The city, despite my love for it, feels designed so that walking must happen in spite of its qualities: vague, decentralized planning, narrow or non-existent sidewalks, whole neighborhoods aggressively fenced off, streets that unexpectedly fail to connect, and above all great swaths of distance between things. Resisting and pushing through these obstacles can be thrilling in its wrongness, or it can just feel wrong—Los Angeles is just as fascinating, messy, and sporadically ordinary in slow motion as it is by car. The act of unhurriedly absorbing and taking in Los Angeles can be disturbing. It makes the city a real place rather than an idea or a myth, just as art devises material objects from immaterial concepts.

Sometime in the 1960s, the Santa Monica Freeway sliced right through the middle of West Adams, where I currently live, demolishing entire blocks of homes. Former neighbors, once able to stroll easily to one another’s houses, were left with sporadic connections across the freeway gulf in the form of occasional overpasses every four to six blocks, many of which now also act as on- and off-ramps for traffic. Reyner Banham defined the freeway system as “a single comprehensible place, a coherent state of mind, a complete way of life” for the Angeleno.¹ In Banham’s 1971 depiction, the world along the free- way—consisting of plants, architecture, and the people living there—is a kind flashing image, with all the depth that implies. In his schema, we only drive or arrive—the animating life behind the flickering architecture along our route remain opaque, and our own lives remain dangerously singular.

I have been walking multiple times a day, every day, since California began sheltering in place. I walk all the time anyway—sometimes to work; some- times halfway to work; sometimes getting off the bus early to walk a few blocks; sometimes just around and around in circles, departure and destination neatly overlapping. Walking for me serves two purposes—a slow, sustained physical wearing-out, and the temporary ordering of a very chatty mind. Walking offers a slow, unrolling focus, somewhere between leisure and exercise—a counter-rhythm to my own cycling thoughts and an antidote to my own restlessness. I walk in Los Angeles excessively, as if it were some- thing that I risk forgetting how to do, like writing in cursive. In some ways, this is one manifestation of a deep, reflexively contrary impulse: to never be anywhere too crowded, too popular, too obvious, or for too long.

There is something ordinary, even corny, about walking—hiking without the performative pressure, moving with no specific order nor even purpose. My mind ebbs from focus to distraction, stopping whenever, for whatever reason, then starting again. Walking and looking at my immediate surroundings have largely replaced biking, taking the bus, or driving to the manifold art galleries within Los Angeles to have a look at whatever is there. Art can appeal to a pondering mind or a sensual body; good art finds a way into both. Art is a rare kind of evaporative experience—resistant to strict standards of quality, slippery to define—and particularly so in a city as ambivalent towards history and memory as Los Angeles. Walking, when it’s good, ekes out an undulating rhythm of thought and recall. Art, on the other hand, works on a rhythm of disclosure and opacity, and looking at artwork, for me at least, is equal parts work and pleasure. The work part of it can invoke a pesky cynicism that I have to continually swat away, which in turn keeps the pleasurable moments enlivening.

Soon after I moved to Los Angeles, I remember seeing Mernet Larsen’s painting, Chainsawer and Bicyclist (2014): a woman in a blue dress, her hair in a bun, holds a chainsaw lightly beneath the crook of her elbow, as if cradling a purse. A bicyclist in the upper frame seems about to careen directly into the teeth of the saw; a single diagonal line links them both, suggesting their inevitable meeting. Larsen’s figures are blocky and geometric, positioned at oblique angles to the viewer and to one another. Action is frozen, and a course of action implied, but the simplicity and domestic ordinariness of the scene discloses little. The figures’ geometry suggests the monolithic, as if these beings, complete unto them- selves, can only hover at the point of collision, never meeting. The longer the movement in Chainsawer and Bicyclist is arrested (and it is always arrested), the calmer the composition begins to seem. The thin diagonal linking each figure might instead be keeping them a safe, but curious distance apart. As walking has become routine, I’ve started to recognize the same people on their own series of loops. Sometimes, I’m joined by friends, marching nearby at oddly-spaced distances. Standing near the edge of a green rectangle, Larsen’s chainsawer is perhaps seconds from stepping into the cyclist’s path, suggesting that the world beyond her own lawn is so precarious that an implement is in order. We all currently have our own defensive systems of masks, hand sanitizer, and wet wipes for dealing with the threat of contagion from the world outside.

Slow, prolonged contact with my immediate surroundings has taken the place of sometimes equally slow (or sometimes very brief) encounters with artwork. But focus begets fascination if you are curious enough, and
the observed object tends to grow in weight as you continue looking. Walking as its own end suggests that focusing plainly on the world around you is something to take seriously. It requires a certain amount of faith in the unre- markable to hold your attention. Howardena Pindell’s Video Drawings: Baseball (1973–76) painstakingly maps delineates, or attempts to predict a compressed sequence of movements between baseball players, who stand blurry and frozen in a video still under- neath her teeming notations. Pindell’s marks suggests the real-time, predictive flurry of a sports announcer eager to wring greater detail from the freeze-frame. Walking slightly differing routes, at slightly differing times in the same neighborhood brings difference and texture to a repetitive experience, a reminder that there are many paths between points, as in Pindell’s drawing, which looks to describe most of them.

I remember the peculiarity of watching my grandfather, in West Virginia, zoom out from my Google-mapped Los Angeles address on his iPad, pinching again and again with two fingers, the city demurely failing to reveal its edges. The smattering of nature throughout Los Angeles tends to obscure its overwhelming size, break- ing the city down into a series of loose, colliding neighborhoods. Google Maps revealed the lie, or rather the limits of the truth, and it felt as if I were watching myself through my grandfather, trapped in a maze. In Mary Reid and Patrick Kelley’s retelling of the myth of the Minotaur in the labyrinth (Priapus Agonistes, 2013), the Minotaur reinterprets the labyrinth from within, wandering its depths and coming across trinkets left by visitors past. The graffiti and objects left behind animate the labyrinth further, like a narrative that never discloses its overarching order but suggests its shape. If Los Angeles cannot be understood, it can at least be slowly digested. A city that repeats itself, endlessly. Hoping that something will stick in its mind.²

A sequence of objects along a walk, simply by way of being encountered, takes on the rhythm of narrative. In Los Angeles, garbage and litter interlace with wild and domesticated plant life, climbing and crawling along- side the walls, chain-link fences, cracked sidewalks, and parking meters that define the city’s narrow bands of public space. Litter has as mysterious and impenetrable a story to tell as the most esoteric and busy artwork. There is a section along Washington Boulevard filled with haphazard arrangements of garbage that tell so many partial stories that a cohesive narrative is hopeless: what looks like five pounds of (cooked) spaghetti next to three mismatched shoes and an overturned stroller; a refrigerator with the front door torn off, housing a single, unopened box of caster sugar. A series of small, identical, empty liquor bottles set at regular intervals along a nearby chain-link fence indicates both effort and specificity. And idleness.

Whether the product of idleness or an illustration of graceful tedium, Alejandro Almanza Pereda’s photograph Just five blocks away (2015) pictures a precarious underwater still life. Pool noodles, fruits, and vases float and are weighted down in a tight arrangement of cinderblocks. The objects—glassy, synthetic, sometimes organic—are unrelated beyond the fact that they have been corralled into the same frame, and they teeter in gently refracting underwater light. Harmony is less the point than balance, brevity, or the coy impermanence of the photographed moment. Pereda’s image, like a strange arrangement encountered on a walk, suggests boredom as an opportunity for pause; if instead of avoiding the mundane, we treat it as one of many states, a disarrayed moment might align into meaning.

The air in Los Angeles is strangely clean lately, free of traffic’s drone and less frantic in its mix of smells. It is only since movement has slowed that I can take in a deep breath of a blooming flower without the immediate, accompanying riptide of urine, marijuana, or unidentifiable aerosol. In walking, my mind meanders now as often as my path: zeroing in on details of houses— particular shades of wood stain, or tiny, strangely-placed windows—as well as budding flowers, arrangements of graffiti and litter, and glum perspectives down alleyways. There is discord and near-harmony, in endless combinations. In at least this sense, Los Angeles is settling, like sediment in water.

The air in Los Angeles is strangely clean lately, free of traffic’s drone and less frantic in its mix of smells. It is only since movement has slowed that I can take in a deep breath of a blooming flower without the immediate, accompanying riptide of urine, marijuana, or unidentifiable aerosol. In walking, my mind meanders now as often as my path: zeroing in on details of houses— particular shades of wood stain, or tiny, strangely-placed windows—as well as budding flowers, arrangements of graffiti and litter, and glum perspectives down alleyways. There is discord and near-harmony, in endless combinations. In at least this sense, Los Angeles is settling, like sediment in water.

This essay was originally published in Carla issue 20.

Travis Diehl has lived in Los Angeles since 2009. He is a recipient of the Creative Capital / Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant (2013) and the Rabkin Prize in Visual Arts Journalism (2018).

More by Travis Diehl