virtualDavis

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)

Jacques Réda at Place des Vosges in Paris (photo via Irish Times)

[Jacques] Réda has lived in Paris since 1953, and his chronicling of the city’s landscape is one of the recurring features of his work. The French term flâneur is often applied to him, though he prefers circulation . After all, “the real flâneur is someone who has their head in the clouds, who stops everywhere, who has no objective. That’s not really my temperament,” he says. And yet Réda seems forever on the move: setting off, stopping, beginning afresh. His gaze is constantly being drawn, whether by a beautiful 19th century building, an elegant shopfront, or, as in his prose-poem The Ruins of Paris , “by a sky as incomprehensible as the approach of love”. As Jennie Feldman, a translator of his poetry, has noted, the realistic tone of Réda’s work has been credited with helping to “ground” tendencies to lyrical flightiness, and in contrast to the abstract form of expression found in much modern French poetry, there is a sharp visual instinct at work. He has said that many of his poems originated in a single stubborn image of something seen or imagined: a woman selling wool, a reflection in a puddle, a beggar on a street corner.

Réda’s vantage point is often that of a face lost in the crowd, marvelling at the ordinary or the nondescript – bottles lying in the gullies, “singing colossi of roses” or “olive trees in grand conversation/calmly smoking in the sun” – as the world barges past.

“I was never as happy as I was when I wandered slowly on the backroads of the French countryside,” he remarks. And yet the urban street has so often been his muse. “A crowd is a collection of individuals, and each individual is an atom of that crowd,” he says. “I don’t enjoy crowds that come together out of necessity, like on public transport at rush hour . . . but I don’t dislike wandering around in a crowd that has merely this wandering around as its purpose, for example during the summer, on the banks of the Seine, or a Sunday on Grafton Street.”

Read the full article at Irish Times…

Related articles

• Mindfulness and Flânerie (virtualdavis.wordpress.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…

Related articles

• 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…

Memoirs of a Scanner (Martinibomb Version) from Damon Stea on Vimeo.

I’m always excited by innovative techniques for storytelling in the digital age, and ‘Memoirs of a Scanner‘ definitely qualifies. It’s a giant leap for office nerds! The super creative folks over at Mindfruit Films made this uptempo melodrama using only an office image scanner… It’s short, intriguing, disturbing and only a minute long. How can you pass that up? And it just might trigger some ideas for how to tell your own story in a clever new way!

Check out these links:

• Mindfruit Studios
• View the video on vimeo.com
• View the Neatorama post
• Deconstructing André Breton To Feed The Scanner (Blind Flaneur’s intriguing follow-up blog post)

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