virtualDavis

The Day the Gingko Leaves Fell

Gingko Biloba carpet with Lake Champlain backdrop!

Each autumn the leaves of an enormous old Ginkgo Biloba tree in our yard retain their leaves until the frigid end. They’re among the last leaves to fall, and they remain green until just a day or two before cascading down. And when they decide it’s time to let go, they all do it at once.

An enormous canopy of a tree reaching about 100 feet tall covered in thick foliage one day and naked the next. It’s dramatic. And slightly surreal.

This morning, Wednesday, November 3, 2010 was the magic moment. We experienced a deep frost last night in Essex, NY, and I’m pretty certain that it’s the sudden temperature change which triggers the the leaves to fall.

The photos I took this morning capture the scene before anyone has driven up the driveway and marred the perfect carpet of almost succulent Gingko leaves. Perfect timing too because the wonderful father-son team who mow our lawns and remove our leaves come today. This is fortunate because the Gingko leaves fall so thickly and they are still so lush and heavy (unlike the crisp maple, ash and oak leaves which blow around in the breeze) that they smother the lawn. Prompt removal to the compost serves the lawn AND next spring’s gardens!

More Gingko Leaves:

• View the full flickr photo set
• View all Gingko photos on flickr
• Read more about Gingkos on Wikipedia

Kieslowski’s world

A table, a cup over this table, a woman looks the raindrops outside the window. Then, an old woman tirelessly tries to put the trash into the garbage collector. The Polish movie director Kieslowski was a genius in turning trivial instants into poetry. Finding art in triviality makes art closer to quotidian and makes life less difficult to be lived. The writer Brissac Peixoto discusses about this theme in his book “Paisagem Urbana”. Brissac defends the art arisen from the moment, the stare at something banal turning it into art — and only the instant in the middle of the contemporaneity’s paranoia can put the sceneries in relief. (obviousmag.org)

Transforming the quotidian into poetry and discovering art in the banal, this is the flaneur’s gift and responsibility. To create. To curate. To discern and share what is human, what it beautiful amidst the maelstrom. To frame and share what otherwise would have been lost, and in so doing to reawaken that humanity in all of us. A heady task for an idler, you say? Perhaps. But undertaken with resolve and satisfaction.

South Africa, Johannesburg: Fashion show (photo credit kool_skatkat)

Yesterday Linda Hollier (@lindahollier) put me on to “a new concept: a metro flaneur!” A what?!?! Of course, she had me at flaneur (What is a flaneur?), so I headed on over to Shoba Naraya’s post,”Solution to urban isolation: become a Metro flaneur“. The article, looking inside of the much anticipated opening of Dubai‘s Metro Gren Line, pits enthusiasts against indifferent Dubaians. She’s sympathetic to the former, helpful to the latter. Her wonderful waterfall of flaneurial advice flows from her friend Ria’s question: “And what would I do on the Metro?”

It was the French poet Charles Baudelaire who came up with the word “flaneur” to describe the attitude that he thought we should adopt while walking the streets… sauntering… eying the women walking by and enjoying the drama of the streets… [taking the time] to observe, imagine and gossip… Great cities of the world engender people’s hopes and aspirations. To plunge into Piccadilly, Fifth Avenue, Boulevard Saint-Germain, or Paradeplatz is to feel part of a great and variegated group of beings who are both similar to us and intensely different. Being in a public place is an exercise in subsuming the ego for the pleasures of being a part of the great tide of humanity. Sitting together on a subway allows people of different classes to mix and even decompress together. Soon, commuters will start talking, sharing stories and chores.(The National)

Intoxicating idea. Addictive occupation. I believe that many feel the flaneurial tug, but most have trained themselves to resist the siren-call in the name of focus, discipline and productivity. Fair enough. No doubt these ambitious souls are accomplishing and producing more than I. But at what cost? And not just to themselves. Is the race to the swift? Sometimes. But not always. And even when it is, is the race worth winning if you’ve missed the swish-swish-swish of the tedder raking the freshly cut hay into labyrinthine mounds for the hay bailer? If you’ve missed the smell of freshly drawn sap being boiled into maple syrup? If you’ve missed the feel of cool water against your skin while skinny dipping in Lake Champlain, swimming in the shimmering moonbeam? If you’ve missed the sight of three pheasants chicks breaking out of their shells in a corner of the back meadow?

In addition to Naraya’s article Hollier shared a blog post that she’d written a year ago to commemorate the passing of a date which intrigued her. There is much to ponder this fellow flaneur’s thoughtful post, but it’s her train reflection which offers the most apt and eloquent denouement for this morning’s rumination on the metro flaneur.

09.09.09 is a special day in Dubai’s history. It sees the opening of the Dubai metro which has taken 49 months, 30,000 workers and Dh28 billion to achieve. It will be the world’s longest automated driverless rail system and this new system… will no doubt have far-reaching effects on the lives of all who live here…  As I think about the metro, I think too of my late father whose love for trains and railways finds itself somehow continued within me. As Dubai’s first Metro train rolls out of the station today, another page of history will be turned. I am one passenger on the train of life.  Today is one station along the way.  Today is my birthday.  I feel privileged to be on this train. (Integral Life)

Why should you take the metro? What would you do on the metro? Be a flaneur. At least once in a while.
Related articles

• What is a flâneur?
• The Loquacious Flaneur
• Flaneur as Detective
• A raconteur in every flâneur
• Urban Flaneur Guidebook
• Fête du Flâneur
• A Flâneur’s Tour of Toronto
• Johannesburg Flaneur
• Friday Flaneur: Munching music
• The Flâneur & The City: Historic Core
• Staring Flâneur
• Flâneur videos all around the world
• Trespassing flâneuse
• Fish Flanerie at its Most Alluring
• Autoportrait à République
• Flanerie: Banal into Art
• A poet who moves to the city’s beat
• Observations by the Foto-Flaneur
• Cycling with the vélo-flâneur
• Look, Wander and Create
• Paris Flânerie

One of my favorite experiences living in Essex, New York is watching the sun rise out of Vermont’s Green Mountains, reflecting across the surface of Lake Champlain. This morning, the dense cloud bank on the eastern side of the lake created a dramatic effect, a narrow glimpse of color and light, refracted on the bumpy water then gone, snuffed out almost as quickly as it began. Once the sun rose into the clouds the light flattened and the mood changed. An interesting start to this post-Labor Day week…

Forest Sages, Leshan, Sichuan (via tedmitew.com)

On many occasions, under the influence of wine, Liu Ling would be completely free and unrestrained, sometimes even removing his clothes and sitting stark naked in the middle of his room. Some people once saw him in this state and chided him for it. Ling retorted, ‘Heaven and earth are my pillars and roof, the rooms of my house are my jacket and trousers. What are you gentlemen doing in my trousers?” (via tedmitew.com)

What better chuckle for Labor Day than a cheerful tangle of wisdom and levity from poet and fellow flaneur Liu Ling?

It’s a at least a pair of decades since I explored Toronto, and I’ll admit a bit of embarrassment on this front. It’s a day’s drive away, and a pleasant drive at that. I’ve added it to the short term bucket list, with ample time for flânerie. Until then, two delightful nubbins to pass along…

“A flâneur is anyone who wanders, and watches, the city. The 19th-century French poet Charles Baudelaire called the flâneur a “perfect idler” and a “passionate observer.” Baudelaire was a flâneur himself and, when he wasn’t writing poems and spending his trust fund on dandy outfits and opium, he drifted through the streets of Paris. Later, philosopher Walter Benjamin collected a chunk of thoughts on the idea of the flâneur in his epic volume of notes on Paris, The Arcades Project.” (Eye Weekly)

“The old notion of the flâneur will be different for whomever engages in this activity, even in a diverse metropolis such as Toronto. But that doesn’t mean that other flâneurs can’t carve out ways to navigate the city comfortably, recording their own insights and noticing the ways their own particular bodies and histories interact with the cityscape.” (Eye Weekly)

Related articles

• Mindfulness and Flânerie (virtualdavis.com)
• Joy walking (psychologytoday.com)
• Smile! I’m blogging you… (virtualdavis.com)
• Opinion: The Death of the Cyberflâneur (bits.blogs.nytimes.com)
• A Philosophical Portrait: Walter Benjamin on the 120th Anniversary of his Birth (wanderlustmind.com)

Random thoughts and observations, including photographs, in the tradition of a flaneur*: a stroller, a loiterer, a dawdler on street corners, a hanger-about who rambles through a city without any apparent purpose but is highly attuned to the history of the place and is in a constant covert search of adventure, esthetic or the exotic and erotic.

Obviously, Trespassing depicts the filmmaker walking various cities in the world and encourages audiences to link the video with the practice of female flânerie, a term from the French masculine word flâneur. Baudelaire’s flâneur depicts a man who walks the city to experience, observe, understand, and portray city life through both of his participation and detached observation. Therefore, flâneur is both an active participant and critical voyeur to portray and examine city life in sociological, anthropological, literary and historical aspects. However, the concept of flâneur excludes women from the spaces of modernity. As Wolff comments, “The influential writing of Baudelaire, Simmel, Benjamin and, more recently, Richard Sennett and Marshall Berman, by equating the modern with the public, thus fail to describe women’s experience of modernity. The central figure of the flâneur in the literature of modernity can only be male” (1985: abstract). It is because sexual differences were expressed through the segregation of space of public and private, and women were often defined in the private sphere. The experience of walks in the city mainly accounts for the experiences of men. The exceptions are the “non-respectable”, the prostitute (D’Souza & McDonough 2006:19).

This excerpt from a critique of flâneuse in “Trespassing world cities”, Linda Lai’s video travelogue mashup, touches on an aspect of flânerie that pops up from time to time upon which I’ve focused very little. Perhaps I find it easier to overlook the gender bias of historic flânerie in favor of a gender-neutral modern conception of the flânuer. What do you think?

Read the full review at Floating Projects Collective.

Related articles

• Mindfulness and Flânerie (virtualdavis.wordpress.com)

I often describe cities as being like a gigantic maze. However, unlike when I’m in a maze, I love being ‘lost’ in a city, wander about and notice. Albeit, I am not a proper flaneur; I want to do more than just look and wander, I want to create! I want the city I live in to be a great,  just, democratic and an exiting city at the same time.

Nynne Staal Parvang’s “Urban life” guest blog posting got my attention over at Spotted by Locals. (Check out this great site if you’re not familiar with it!) She opens with an evident but infrequently expressed truism, that we never truly understand a city in and of itself — as a whole and complete entity — but only as a collection of fragments. She explains, “bits and pieces give way to a broader understanding.” Certainly this is true, ditto the observation that this broader understanding is ephemeral. Seeking to learn, to know, to understand a city is an infinite process. But rather than feeling anxious, as we might in a maze without a solution, this is a comforting and intriguing aspect of cities.

“I never have to stop exploring, for the ‘thing’ that I am examining is constantly changing; new buildings arise, others are torn down, new shops open and old ones close, people move in and out, tourist comes and goes and so on and so forth.”

Read the full post at Spotted by Locals