]
]
]
More trains.
That was taken from the the high line… I was so looking forward to this but THERE WERE SO MANY PEOPLE. You walk in a line of people up one way then back the other. They stop in front of you. They are slow. They have selfie sticks. They are everything I hate as a fast walker in the big city.
Bridges and ferries:
And to end? Trash collection:
and garbage trucks. They gotta park somewhere.
The forest invites, sun dappling leaves and winds softly blowing, heat driving you deeper and deeper into shade.
The brook gurgles now on your right, it will follow you throughout, or you will follow it, bending back on your tracks, crossing and recrossing it and snaking alongside it through the trees.
Then the ruins come, singly, in brick
then stone and iron
Then enshrined mystery without a visible guardian god.
Gaping mouth that cannot speak.
Cannot warn of incipient destruction.
Hollow but for stone.
The same stone shaped into bridge form in the medieval age.
The same stone built to mark a holy well, once venerated, cared for by St Anne who welcomed pilgrims and believers. These stones now fill it, there is no room for wishes or prayers now. Something still crowds the gaps and crevices, ignoring the iron bars that attempt to hold the ethereal prisoner.
Goats most domestic are followed by Victorian devil-may-care power imposing straight lines and railways and bridges in the air.
You stumble across rusting memories of a more modest aspect of some decade of our modern age, flaking paint of white.
The woods end, spitting you out into sunlight and fumes and paved roads once again. Unsure of where or when you are.
Until you suddenly remember. Time resumes its flow towards our ending.
Bridges.I love them.
I heard a fascinating lecture by David Gilbert (London Holloway University of London) the other day, on London’s Hungerford Bridge. Also known as the Charing Cross bridge…it was a look at the symbolic significance of the prosaic, not the splashy and fanciful architectural feat. In fact, Hungerford was long considered the eyesore of London, there’s an amazing little illustration from Punch magazine showing a devil staring at the bridge titled ‘The Spirit of Ugliness’. The name of the talk in fact, but I don’t want to steal the thunder. Here is an image of it as it is today, the prosaic and ugly metal railway bridge now hidden by the pedestrian walkways:
It is beautiful. And even its ugliness was painted many times, its metal disappearing into the mist of the Thames…
What I loved most about the lecture was how it made me think. Bridges are fundamental elements to the city, but often unsung (with the exception of those towering examples of technical steel and beauty, or history). They are spaces of connections, flows, and movement, as opposed to walls which contain. They are a kind of unique public space, a meeting place of difference, they have constantly changing rhythms depending on the time of day, and they open up vistas of the city in ways nothing else does. And I’ve always loved bridges, so I went to my flickr page to pull photos and meditate on this love.
Apparently I primarily love what is found under bridges. How extraordinary.
Perhaps it’s the years in LA where bridges are somehow none of these things, but have been distorted and twisted into something entirely different. Here many of them are built so that you can never cross them on foot. It is true that you can cross one or two of the bridges that span the river, but that is the division between East and West, one of the hardest LA divisions to step across in every sense. For most bridges, their function is to move as many cars as possible as quickly as possible through a landscape controlled and despised by its occupants.
Here poverty and resistance send people under the bridges. Into spaces that fill you with rage at what can be done to a city, spaces that give you that undeniably pleasant feeling of mixed tragedy, beauty and danger, that thrill of the photographer that I always try to keep a close watch on…
These bridges built over the pulverized skeletons of a destroyed community, and supporting freeways that divide L.A. into its terrifying sections of racial segregation and despair, it is underneath them that new communities grow, communities that break your heart
And the beauty?
Where everyday resistance has taken them back, reclaimed them, like Chicano Park in San Diego
And this
And so even when I lived in Glasgow I seemed to keep my eyes down, though the view was untouched by pain
Maybe I shall think about trying to photograph what is on top of bridges, and what can be seen looking outwards…without ceasing to spend time underneath.
I’m still impossibly sad. So this is reflecting on past glories. We headed east from Frogtown on Monday. Frogtown will get its very own post because it’s such an amazing place, but today it is the river. A piece of it, because there was too much.Here is one of the most fascinating and strangely beautiful places I’ve encountered in L.A., and one that actually scared me. You are always being watched here. And no one can hear you scream.But enough of the melodramatics, I respectfully took no pictures of the watchers, so let me show you the amazing and incredible bridge.
This is the outside, but it has unguessed depths, and that’s where you are being watched from. More of my people with nowhere else to go but the depths and darkness.
The ground is littered with spray cans and strange sculptures of rocks and wood piled high on top of each other. The world of graf artists and those seeking some kind of home coming together.
And the cars, I don’t know how they got down here, or when.
I love twisted pieces of rusted metal, I find them…beautiful. I think beautiful is the right word. But it’s a dark, jagged, decaying beauty of sharp lines and curves and deep shadows.
And the combination of rusted twisted metal, architecture, nature, and graffiti? Stunning.
The graffiti was incredible, I have to go back. You could spend days I imagine, documenting some of the tags, and a sunny day would be better. But I love rivers as much as dark places, and the river has nothing of the bridge’s enclosed creepiness, with all of the characters.
The view looking out from the caves was incredible too, if you like mazes of concrete and bridges and freeways
I do. And to turn this place into a home? Someone had tied up things all along the fence. If I were a believer I would say this was brujeria, a witchcraft protection or warning, a wrapping of potent charms in black plastic bundled with flowers and wrapped in yellow cord and shoelace.
I’m not much of a believer at any rate. This guy was just fun.
From here we headed further east, even though that required cutting cross country. But more on that later…Save
