WALKING WITH ROCKETS

“As you walk deeper, you retrace the Rocket's becoming: superchargers, center sections, nose assemblies, power units, controls, tail sections . . .”

       The above quotation (you guessed?) is from Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. Tyrone Slothrop is walking through the factory where they made V2 rockets, the Vergeltungswaffe 2, Nazi Germany’s super sonic “revenge weapon,” subsequently seized by the Russians and Americans.

I was a little surprised, as I was walking down Tooley Street, in London earlier this year to find that this thing was still in place on the wall above what used to be, and perhaps still is (though their website seems to be in hibernation) a museum called Britain at War.

That rocket (let’s call it that) has been in place for 20 odd years, but I really don’t know what it is.  It’s obviously not a “real” V2.

         There are quite a few of the real things around, though they tend to be in serious aeronautical museums rather than on the wall of tourist attractions.  The nearest I’ve been to one was at the White Sands Missile Range, outside of Alamogordo in New Mexico.  I walked around it, stood beside it, and could probably have reached out and touched it, but since but I was standing on the property of the American military industrial complex I decided against that.

There’s a kind of “rocket garden” at the White Sands Missile Range where you can walk around and look at scary hardware.  Most of the stuff is out in the open air, but the V2 is in a solid substantial building, because it needs protection and preservation.

Not many miles down the road from the missile range is the entirely separate White Sands National Monument, a fabulous, two hundred plus square miles of white desert that are a wonder even to a skeptical old desert rat like me.

White Sands has been on mind lately since I was looking for something else in the Nicholsonian archive and found this photograph taken of me – oh good god – probably 25 years ago.

The thing I’m holding that looks like a bit like a clipboard is in fact some kind of rocket debris that must have found its way into the dunes from the missile range next door, after some kind of explosion or jettisoning operating.

It’s one of the smaller regrets of my life that I didn’t stick this piece of detritus in my hand luggage and take it home, though conceivably it was drenched in rocket fuel and evil chemicals and would have done awful things to me.  And maybe I wouldn’t have got it through airport security – though this was obviously well before 9/11.

I know I’ve bleated on elsewhere about gardens of subversion, places that are less than Edenic, and possibly all the better for that.  And without having more than the average interest in rocketry or space or ballistics I seem to have walked among quite a few flying objects, some identified, some not.  This one in Essex for instance:

The most recent one I went to was in Utah, actually called the Thiokol Rocket Garden, belonging to ATK Thiokol, “Supplier of aerospace and defense products. Munitions, smart weapons, propulsion and composite structures.”  It’s a place designed so that you can walk and sit and have a snack – all of which I did.

Depending on your finer feelings you can regard this place as a garden of death, or a tribute to man’s greatest achievement, or a piece of accidental “land art.”   But my favorite thing about it was this:

Sure, a standard rocket is good enough for me – who needs anything too fancy?

And finally a last word from one of White Sands’ most famous inhabitants, begetter of the V2, and therefore of much else besides, Herr Wernher von Braun, words that form the epigraph to the first section of Gravity’s Rainbow, from an article he wrote titled “Why I Believe in Immortality.”

“Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation. Everything science has taught me, and continues to teach me, strengthens my belief in the continuity of our spiritual existence after death.” 

         This is him in later life, with a very nice display of model rockets behind him:

And this is him earlier, working on his Dr. Strangelove impersonation.

WALKIN' A YELLOW BRICK ROAD

I always feel ambivalent about visiting the sites of murders, death houses, scenes of long ago violent crimes.  Partly it’s because of my inherent squeamishness.  If there actually is some remaining malevolent aura there, I’d rather not be around it.  And just as important, I don’t want to revel in and be entertained by the deaths of others, nor to make light of pain, whether that of victims or survivors. 

Yet I know one can protest too much about these things. There’s no denying the frisson that comes with walking through, say, Dealey Plaza in Dallas, or for that matter past the Bloody Tower in London.  I think the frisson is imaginative rather than supernatural, but nonetheless real for that.  One way or another a kind of shamanism is involved, raising the spirits of the dead, but equally a kind of dubious tourism is involved too

I don’t feel a whole let less ambivalent, though in a different way, about visiting the homes where my “heroes” once lived, even if I seem to have done plenty of it.  In recent years I’ve found myself visiting JG Ballard’s house in Shepperton, HG Wells’s in Woking, Raymond Chandler’s many Los Angeles homes. 

Of course when I say “visiting” I simply mean that I walked down the street and stood around outside the building.  I don’t go in for knocking on doors to interview the current inhabitants, although I know some who do.  My friend Anthony Miller, aka the Dark Sage of Sawtelle, recounts disturbing the tenants of Thomas Pynchon’s old apartment in Manhattan Beach, and found the occupant, a surferish dude, amazingly hospitable.  He invited him and let him look around.  A Swiss film crew had been there not long before, the one that made Thomas Pynchon: A Journey Into the Mind of P.

The objection here is not that it’s intrusive, but rather that it’s no big deal.  These are homes much like any other.  Everybody lives somewhere, lives don’t vary nearly as much as some people like to think, and houses and appartments are not always totally fascinating.  And in my experience there’s seldom any kind of lingering aura, even if there may occasionally be a plaque.

Having said all that, and with all my reservations, when I recently connected a couple of dots of information than had been floating in my head for a while, and realized that the childhood home of Don Van Vliet, aka Captain Beefheart, was in the same street where the Manson murders of Leno and Rosemary LaBianco took place, well, you couldn’t call yourself a psychogeographer if you didn’t take a walk down that street, could you?

Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band were really the first act that completely excited me in my difficult but dull youth.  They seemed subversive, poetic, avant-garde, extremely cool – all the things I wanted to be.  These days it seems to me that there were times when Beefheart put rather too much effort into buffing his image as the unschooled, sui generis genius born out of nothing, but I’ve had a few decades to think about that.  At the time the freaky image was part of the attraction, and no doubt in some sense necessary for the grand project. 

Of course we also tended to think he was some crazy guy straight out of the Mojave desert: we knew that he came from Lancaster where he was best friends, later less so, with Frank Zappa.  But before he was a desert rat he lived in Los Angeles, at 3467 Waverly Drive, in the northeast corner of Los Feliz, a thoroughly pleasant suburban enclave right below Griffith Park; a great place to bring up kids then and now, you might think.

We also know that while he was at that address he was schooled, at least to the extent of attending art classes at the Griffith Park Zoo, where he was taught by a Portuguese artist named Agostinho Rodrigues.  When he was 10 years old Little Don Vliet (he wasn’t even van Vliet at that time, much less the Captain) won first prize in a 1951 sculpture competition run by the parks and recreation department, and made it into the local paper with his model of a polar bear.  The contest was monthly, and I don’t know how big the class it was, so winning it may not have been the greatest honor, though his polar bear looks just fine.

There are a few pictures of the lad from this period but I’ve never seen any of the family’s house, so I don’t know if the current 3467 Waverly Drive looks anything like the way it did back in 1951.  As far as that goes, I don’t know whether Don’s parents had the whole house or just part of it.  I’d assume the latter.  In the current configuration 3467 is the right half of the house, 3469 is the left half, and I think there are more than two dwellings in there.  When you peer round the side it looks as though the building’s been extended to make a small apartment block, though I’d guess the changes have been made post-1951.  

Waverley Drive is a long street but the young Don surely walked its length, in which case he’d have gone right past the LaBianca house.  At that time it would have been owned by the previous LaBianca generation, Antonio, who founded Gateway Markets and the State Wholesale Grocery Company.  It wasn’t till 1968 that the son Leon, who by then was running the family business,  bought the house from his mother and moved in with Rosemary his second wife. 

Photographs of the couple suggest they weren’t much influenced by alternative culture, but Lord knows there were some divergent energies abroad in Los Angeles at the time.  Even in this quiet suburban enclave, the LaBiancas’ neighbor, one Harold True, had thrown an “LSD party”, and some of the Manson family attended.  The day after they’d committed the Tate murders up on Cielo Drive, Manson instructed his followers to kill again.  They might easily have selected a different house and different victims, and if things had played out just a little differently the LaBiancas wouldn’t even have been home.  They they’d been to pick up Rosemary’s daughter Suzanne from Lake Isabella and had thought of staying there overnight but decided to come back late Saturday night rather than the following morning.

Manson had found the Tate killings needlessly chaotic, and to show his followers how it was done, he went into the house and tied up the LaBiancas with the minimum of fuss, so that the killings could be done in a nice orderly fashion.  I’ve done my best not to become a Manson obsessive, but if you need a full account of the events, I reckon Vincent Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter is still the best.

Photographs from the time show the La Bianca house to have been remarkably accessible and vulnerable – a long straight driveway, no gates, the house visible and inviting at the top of the hill, yet a fair way from the street.

Some things are noticeably different at the house these days; the street number’s been changed for one thing, though that’s hardly bought them much privacy.  There’s now a gate across the entrance to the property, and you can see that a large separate garage with a second curving driveway has been built between the house and the street, at the very least providing protection from prying eyes, though not inevitably from Google. 

It still looks like a very nice house in a very nice neighborhood.  Would I personally want to live in it, given its history?  I suppose not, but if there price was right; everything’s negotiable. 

Charles Manson famously said to an interviewer:

My eyes are cameras. My mind is tuned to more television channels than exist in your world. And it suffers no censorship. Through it, I have a world and the universe as my own. So...know that only a body is in prison. At my will, I walk your streets and am right out there among you.

Captain Beefheart once sang:

my baby walked just like she did 


walking on hard-boiled eggs with a -- 


there's a -- 
she can steal them 
-
oh, I ain't blue no more, I said 
lord,

Words to live by.

UNDER THE PAVING STONES, MORE PAVING STONES

Two quotations for your consideration (as Mr. Rod Serling might say):

ONE: “If I do not walk I cannot make a work of art.  The physical involvement of walking creates a receptiveness to the landscape. I walk on the land to be woven into nature. A road walk can transform the everyday world and give a heightened sense of human history.”  Hamish Fulton.  That's him below, and yes, that's a map of Paris - stay with me on this.

TWO: “Under the paving-stones, the beach!” which is the translation of a graffito seen on the streets of Paris in May 1968, and I suppose for some time after that.  I wonder when they cleaned it off.  It also happens to be the epigraph of Pynchon’s Inherent Vice.

Frankly I’ve never been very sure I understand all the nuances of what “sous les pavés, la plage” really means, and perhaps that very ambiguity is the reason it’s had such wide currency, why it’s become such a hit.

Certainly we all know that some of the paving stones of Paris were dug up and thrown during the events of 1968, but as images from the time show, there was no beach beneath them, which of course we all knew anyway.  Paris – believe it or  not - was not built on a beach.

The slogan does fit a little better with Pynchon’s novel set in the fictional Gordita Beach which bears a striking similarity to Manhattan Beach, just 2O miles down the road from Hollywood, and where Pynchon lived in the late sixties and early seventies while writing Gravity’s Rainbow.  I’ve walked there and it’s a good place to walk but I think very few, if any, early-career novelists can afford to live there these days.

As for the Fulton quotation, well, after you’ve read and thought about Hamish Fulton’s heroic walking activities, any walk you’re likely to do in your own daily life is likely to seem a bit trivial and timid.  At the weekend, for instance, the Loved One and I were in Yucca Valley, and we went up to Landers, driving, walking, poking around in ruins, including a walk partly up and partly around Goat Mountain.

Walking and poking around is what I do (it may even be my “art”) – but I’m always aware that certain walkers would turn it into something more thoroughly programmatic - maybe ten circular walks around Goat Mountain at different times of the day, at different phases of the moon, stopping and taking a photograph or picking up a rock every hundred yards.  Well, why not?

And something that occurred to me while I was in Landers: I like walking in cities and I like walking in “nature” but I actually think I may have done the majority of my walking in suburbs.  Now, I think that suburbia is surprisingly hard to define, but I know it when I see it, and I’ve seen plenty of it.  I grew up in various suburbs in Sheffield.  Vast swathes of London, where I lived for a long time, are by any measure suburban, and Los Angeles where I live now is, by many accounts, the most suburban city in the world.  You might think I’m attracted to suburbia.

And it so happened that the motel where we were staying in Yucca Valley was right next to a thoroughly suburban subdivision.  My knowledge of Yucca Valley is patchy, but as I remember it this suburbia scarcely existed even ten years ago: it was just naked desert.

And so these suburban bungalows and ranch houses have descended on the desert like alien presences.  I can’t say I found it especially horrible (though it would surely have been better left untouched), and as I walked around the sidewalk-free streets there was always something interesting to look at, some interesting architectural features, some quirky gardens, and what you see in most cases is a willingness to let the desert show through – to celebrate the desert, within the confines of a domestic plot.

Some of this, admittedly, seems less than authentic. I did see a few garden-bound saguaro cacti, and I think no saguaro ever got to Yucca Valley except on the back of a truck. 

The gardens with Joshua trees seemed a little more “natural” but even here I couldn’t shake the feeling that some of the trees had been, at least, moved around and transplanted for the sake of the picturesque (see John Ruskin, op cit).  The presence of desert quail and jackrabbits was far more convincing.

At the time I was walking, early morning, people were leaving home and going to work – some in very clean trucks, some in surprisingly fancy cars, and one or two of them seemed to slow down to take a good look at me to see if I was up to no good, but maybe that was just my paranoia: an honest enough Pynchonian trait.

Would I like to live in a desert suburbia?  Well no, not much, since in the case of Yucca Valley there’s no adjacent “urbia” where I could go to get my city-boy thrills.  The desert fantasy is to own 100 acres of sand and scrub, big enough that a couple of laps of the boundary would constitute a reasonable walking expedition, though I’m sure some would still find that trivial and timid.

On the other hand, I’d quite like to walk a few laps of this place, though I can’t tell you exactly where it is.  The photograph is by Christopher Gielen and is titled (as it were) “UNTITLED XXXI Arizona” from the book Ciphers.

Under the desert, another damn desert.