dan walks around: entry one
in the tradition of charles baudelaire, rebecca solnit, my two favorite "walts" (whitman and benjamin) and - come to think of it - my dad, i've decided i'm going to go for walks and document them.
my work is moving in a landscape-y direction at the moment, so i figured this might be a good way of "sketching," both mentally and physically. yes, this marks my entry into the already crowded club of over-educated wannabee flaneurs. and fair enough - they seem like good company. this idea is also inspired by a growing reading list i've unofficially prepared for myself, including folks like anne dillard, lisa robertson and jane jacobs (in addition to solnit's book about walking). who knows when i'll get around to all of that reading. in the meantime, i'm just gonna use lj to document these experiences. i tend to have decent conversations around here, so i figure this is the best place for it. and don't worry - i'll try not to act all willfully profound about it. cool? if so, read on...
WALK ONE: philly (20th and chestnut to fishtown)
* walk one is pragmatic. i left work at about 12:30 am - just late enough to miss the last subway train. and a taxi ride would have cost about $15 bucks, so fuck that option. if the tradition of people-with-master's-degrees-documenting-their-walks calls to mind 19th century french dandies, than the contrarian within me is happy to report that my first excursion began as an attempt to save money, among other things.
*
heading down 20th, i decide to walk around the parameter of philly's huge, neoclassical free library. there's an odd little brick path that runs to the left of the sidewalk. i walk through it, and immediately feel like i'm trespassing. which i'm actually not doing - i'm just taking a peculiar route at one in the morning. this anxiety arises a lot when i move through a city; an odd, subconscious awareness of legality. walking becomes an act of non-insurrection. it's mundane, boring, rudimentary - there's nothing punk rock about it. but i still feel like i'm gonna get caught.
* at 18th and callowhill, there's this huge, gated empty lot that sits beside some corporate office buildings. i'm reminded that certain spaces encourage you not to look at them. rebecca solnit wrote this great essay about the parking lot of the getty museum, which gets into this idea a bit. how spacial context dictates one's attention. what gets to be beautiful and what doesn't - the politics of structured attention spans, basically. you can watch her read the essay online, actually (thanks, bikerbar):
... anyway, these corporate office buildings are impressive and bland at the same time. they appear as objects, rather than parts of the landscape. it's difficult to envision what sits to the right or the left of them. as buildings, they're meant to be feared or entered, never contemplated.
since i'm trying to be quasi-honest with these notes, i must confess that my dirty mind got stuck on the phrase "feared or entered." (*please pardon the sexualized metaphors here*... or take me to task in the comments, if you'd like) in a way, the femme fatales of american noir are meant to be "feared or entered," i think. i've never been attracted to this archetype, with its authoritarian vibe and master/slave dynamics. my desires rarely arrange themselves in a hierarchy, i guess. or maybe a battle of wills appeals to me intellectually rather than aesthetically or sexually. most of the time at least.
when i encounter these buildings, i sense the femme fatale mechanics at work in a less horny way. oppression/submission/possession/etc. - awaiting me, perhaps, along "the corporate ladder." discouraged, i end up looking at the parking lot. hell, i even end up feeling like the parking lot, in a way.
* on spring garden street, there are political banners arranged along an island in the middle of the road. one is for a judge named ted vigilante. is that really his name? does it help or hurt a dude running for office to have a name like that?
* at broad and spring garden, i get an idea for a painting. it doesn't have the faintest thing to do with the walk i'm taking, but hell - maybe this little exercise is working? i'm probably not the most physical person in the world, but i swear i find my best ideas while moving.
* there's a bike lane along spring garden street, and some hipster-ish kids ride by from time to time. if there's any real case to be made for 21st century flânerie in philly, the bike kids probably deserve the claim to it. i like bike-riding, and as far as hip trends are concerned, i think it's one of the most endearing. but i don't notice things the same way on a bike. and this project is really about noticing.
* at 10th and spring garden, there's an abandoned lot with striking purple flowers growing alongside a fence. i'm not sure if someone planted them or if they're just the remnants of an old garden, growing with the rest of the weeds at the edge of the concrete. are certain plants categorically weeds? or do we just call them weeds when we don't like them? is calling a plant a weed like calling a dude an asshole?
like the purple flowers in the weed patch, this part of town sits at a funny threshold. it's a few blocks north of real-deal gentrification, but not far enough to threaten my pale white ass at 1:30 in the morning. i walk by a few shops that seem geared towards artists and immigrants simultaneously. they seem legitimately inviting.
* the path toward gentrified northern liberties is marked by a series of nightclubs, which become progressively less hip hop, and progressively more fratty. as a slight, inhibited white artist, club culture is unsurprisingly the aspect of hip hop i have the least affection for. while i walk by these clubs, i end up thinking about my prejudices about these places. i don't like the idea of condemning things i know little about, but i must confess that this shit really doesn't appeal to me. i probably haven't approached a strange girl on a dance floor since middle school, and i'm not eager to start trying now (i'm spoken for anyway). on one level that probably makes me a total chickenshit. but it's also part of who i really am. eventually, i turn north to escape the noise.
* my two favorite walkable restaurants are in the ballpark of 7th and girard. the closer i get to them, the more my sense of taste overlaps with my memory. these few blocks are about mole sauce and samosas. too bad it's almost two in the morning.
*
closer to my house i think of something that annoys me, and for about five minutes i don't notice much of anything. it's amazing how annoyance can blind you to your surroundings. ironically, my sense of this walk as a performance ("snap out of it, dan! you have to come up with poignant observations for your livejournal!") cools me off a bit. it's amazing how much pleasure i get from noticing my surroundings. i remember that people aren't the only things speaking to me, i guess.
* near the post office a few blocks from my house, i see bird corpses on the ground. then i realize they're BABY PIGEON CORPSES. then i realize one of them is STILL ALIVE. the little dude is quirming around quite a bit and i'm not sure what to do. then the little creature looks up and makes full-on creepy eye contact with me. it occurs to me that mama pigeon may soon return. i heard somewhere that if you touch a baby bird, it's mother won't recognize the scent and will abandon it. this seems like a reasonable enough reason to walk away. i still feel kinda terrible about this. me and erin_lindsay are the only two people on the planet who really like pigeons, sadly.
when i decided to start my "dan walks around" project, i promised myself not to get too carried away with unusual observations. the point was (and is) to pay attention to things differently, and see what ideas i can generate. so, in a sense, it's disappointing that something this dramatic and horrifying interrupted what i imagined would be a contemplative experience. suddenly, i felt like i was stuck in the climax of some raymond carver type story - the part where the ordinaray becomes extraordinary, and i recognize the futile nature of my own existence. or whatever.
* in the opposite spirit, i must confess that i found it oddly soothing to get an awful pantera song stuck in my head. the song is called "walk" - i'm sure you can guess why i thought of it (wakka wakka wakka). it's a wretched song, but it actually kinda captures the rhythm of walking? it reminds me a bit of a marching song from the military. there's something kinda fascist about heavy metal, and "walk" is metal at its absolute most goose-steppy. but for a few minutes, it kept me focused on moving.
SOME STATS ABOUT THIS WALK
LENGTH: about an hour and ten minutes (12:40am to 1:50am)
DISTANCE: 5-6 miles, if mapquest is accurate (yes, i am a dork)
FOOD CONSUMED: a banana, most of one of those "honest teas" which are so delicious, a bag of "dirty" potato chips
SOME NOTABLE OBJECTS ENCOUNTERED: an orange bucket with a hand-drawn "recycle" logo drawn on it in sharpie, a giant concrete blob in the middle of an abandoned lot, an antique advertisement for the marines that says "READY" spotted in someone's window.
... finally, since you've read this far, your reward is a cellphone pic i took of a super-crazy rainbow in the park next to my house a few weeks back:
