Boots

Perhaps the oddest thing about this image is that (unlike those of the past two days) it isn't manipulated at all.  It's just a stencil on the sidewalk on Santa Monica Boulevard, at the top of Myra, seen where I was on my way to catch a bus.  I don't know whether stencils quite fit into my arguments about pavement art for next month's conference.  I was talking about something quite other (Tristram Shandy, to be exact) to Emily Anderson this afternoon, and what she was saying really prompted in me some thoughts about anxieties of artistic impermanence, transience connected with pavement art (for pastels get rained on, trodden on, spat upon ...).  But nothing as violent as that tends to happen to stencils (though, to be sure, they can get painted out, deliberately) - rather, these boots, walking nowhere (though I now have a dim sense of having registered the fact that there may be some large footprints stencilled on the pavement too, marching off round the corner) - these images of boots are only likely to suffer being trampled on and obliterated by real, rubber and leather soled footwear.