A LONG CRUISE ON A SHORT STREET

A LONG CRUISE ON A SHORT STREET

Nobody would pretend that Selma Avenue in Hollywood is one of the great walking streets, nor one of the great places for urban exploration - it runs for about a mile and a half, east/west, between and parallel to Hollywood Boulevard and Sunset Boulevard. But it’s not without interest, because nowhere is.





Back in the day Selma used to a be a place where young men, inspired perhaps by Midnight Cowboy, hung out and plied their trade. There’s still a YMCA in the street, but you can’t stay there these days however much fun it might be. This is John Rechy below on the steps of the First Baptist Church of Hollywood, which has stood on Selma in its present form since 1935.

V. AND ME AND OTHERS

V. AND ME AND OTHERS

I’m never sure how I feel about that old psychogeographic strategy of using a map of one place while walking in another. I mean it seems sort of interesting, but surely once you arrive at the first river or dead end then surely the conceit ends pretty abruptly. (I could be wrong, this isn’t my area.)





But suddenly I find some psychogeography avant la letter in a rather surprising place – in Evelyn Waugh’s travel book Labels. It was his account of the 1929 Mediterranean cruise he took with his wife, who was of course also named Evelyn. One of the places they visited was Malta, and Waugh bought himself a guide book titled Walks in Malta by one F. Weston.