virtualDavis

I often take to wandering the city [Paris] toute-seule and although I do tend to find some really neat things, or things that I really didn’t expect to come across (especially in the 16th) I still think that this a city of meeting up with people, of being headed to somewhere where a group awaits you. I’ve often wondered how a Parisian would survive in Ann Arbor.

Yesterday’s post on La Flânerie was a halting but thoughtful rumination on cultural/social differences between studying abroad in Paris and living in cozier, more familiar Ann Arbor, Michigan. And more too… the differences between solo flânerie and group meandering, between France and Spain, between urban and rural. In closing Emily affirms that she’ll continue trying to understand Paris, but she also leaves us with a more universal and contemplative question: “So how are some people so easily flowing in the hyper-social society while others are perfectly content to have their jobs and come home… and stay there?”

Read the full post at Em Wanders Paris.

Eric Hazan's The Invention of Paris

Eric Hazan’s The Invention of Paris is a guide, quartier by quartier, to the “psychogeography” of the first great modern city. Hazan is a far-left radical editor now in his 70s, and has lived in Paris all his life. Not only does he know what a certain street smells like, but he can tell us about the geographical, social and political forces that put it there. A widening or a curve might conceal an entire history of oppression – or the moment Baudelaire admired a passing grisette.

Hazan reckons Baudelaire to be the first truly urban poet, a flâneur at the meeting-point between the nocturnal solitary and the individual lost in the crowd. The book proceeds in his urgent spirit, mingling personal knowledge and reminiscence with a Balzacian grasp of the whole. The ghost of Walter Benjamin, the leftwing thinker of a mystical bent who fled occupied Paris and committed suicide at the closed Spanish border, presides over this magnificent meditation on limits and boundaries.

Read the full review in The Guardian…

Photo via Photocapy on flickr.com

flânerie… it’s a walk in the park.

“…there’s just something amazing about being in the middle of a city, looking at the buildings and trees, the people who pass by, the smells of the food coming from corner cafes and restaurants. If you go slowly enough, you can really appreciate everything around you, and keep those memories for years to come…” (via the-flanerie.blogspot.com)

Fishing lures, seen in a window by South Kensington Station, April 3, 2010.
(I would be a very dead fish, because these little guys were so attractive.)

Photograph courtesy of Sydney Eye

An earnest folk-singer, in cavernous Martin Place, competes with a “burger with-the-lot”, for the attention of lunch time strollers. Better were she a plate juggling sword swallower, than guitar player.

Flaneur (n). A person who strolls the city in order to appreciate it.
Are YOU a flaneur – a la Baudelaire or Sontag?

View original post at Sydney Eye…

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• Mindfulness and Flânerie (virtualdavis.wordpress.com)

A little-known fact is that people wearing sunglasses never notice when you stare at them. Or, rather, you can’t see them noticing you, which amounts to the same thing: immunity to stare. [via Georgia Love.]

In Twenty Minutes in Manhattan, Michael Sorkin, an architect and critic, makes like Jacobs and immerses himself in the rhythms and patter of the street. He has shaped his book according to the contours of his daily stroll across a dozen or so blocks of Lower Manhattan, from the top floor of his five-story Greenwich Village walk-up to his office in TriBeCa. Walking, Sorkin writes, is “a natural armature for thinking sequentially,” providing opportunities for heady musings on all manner of city life. Yet his peripatetic narrative is anything but linear. Proving there’s a raconteur in every flâneur, Sorkin unspools strands of free-floating observations about a scattered array of urban issues and gathers them into a loose weave along his path downtown.

Read the article at The Nation…

2min15 is a video blog to share urban life in different cities around the world. Videos with a length of 1min to 2min15 using digital cameras and basic editing software is the base of the project. This blog was created with non commercial purposes.

2min15 is interested in expressing a personal side of life in cities and the way people live it through different cultural situations. The increase of disposable technology as digital cameras, telephones, iPods and webcams makes it easy to express it without losing its essence and making it accessible for everyone. Every city has its own sounds, colors, languages and even smells. 2min15 would like to create a place where simple videos show their people, streets, cafes, women, architecture, parks, subways and specially, the flow between them.

via 2min15

Urban historian Richard Schave’s site-specific discussion series “The Flâneur & The City” is an ongoing attempt to explore some of the more important issues revealed by the constantly changing heart of the metropolis. The core notion of the series is of culture and history as commodities that are packaged and sold to a target demographic; meanwhile, it’s the ignored and seemingly worthless scraps of meaning found on the sidewalks and marketplaces where the true remnants of positive public space can be found. All interpretations and nuisances of the word flâneur are examined — from the modern-day aesthete dreaming of Baudelaire while carried along in the human tide past the stalls and shops of Broadway, to its more recent and perhaps relevant use, someone who is loitering. At its heart this series is a celebration of the simple act of getting out of your car, walking through a neighborhood and learning to see it with your own eyes. Read more…

Full posting here: Los Angeles Visionaries Association

via columbiaspectator.com

“I like to think of myself as a flâneur, someone who wanders the corridors of culture in my life,” Wayne Koestenbaum said. “I am particularly in pursuit of experiences of bulge, glaze, pause, shock.”