- BLDGBLOG
BLDGBLOG (“building blog”) is written by Geoff Manaugh. Architectural Conjecture | Urban Speculation | Landscape Futures | BLDGBLOG | Wired UK
- Reagan Daily, 2023/08/25 edition
scraped MW tweet: “Lynnyrd Skynnyrd @ #GOP convention, that fits. #Heartbreak was Ray Charles hugging Ronald Reagan, 1984.”
- Paris by Julian Green – review | Books | The Observer 082512
This is no ordinary memoir, or even an alternative travel guide. It’s a tale of Julian Green’s obsession with the French capital, a love of place that is a kind of possession: “Thinking about the capital all the time, I rebuilt it inside myself. I replaced its physical presence with something else, something almost supernatural.” Green takes on the role of flâneur in this book: the leisurely, Baudelairean dandy originally identified and named by Walter Benjamin. This flâneur perspective has two implications for the text. First, Paris is a languid and bourgeois memoir, indulgent and at times hyperbolic, though it has many moments of truly arresting beauty. Second, the attention to detail is astonishing, and reflects the memories of someone who has devoted years of their life to the art of getting lost in the city. Green urges readers to “waste time”, and to experience “the faint distress that comes from thinking you have lost your way”.
About the Flaneur
![Gustave Caillebotte. Paris Street, Rainy Day (La Place de l’Europe, temps de pluie). 1877. Oil on canvas. Art Institute of Chicago. [Source: Wikimedia Commons]](../../../../wp-content/uploads/2009/02/gustave_caillebotte_paris_street_rainy_day_1877_wiki.jpg "gustave_caillebotte_paris_street_rainy_day")
I walk through my blindness the way I wander down streets in Paris: unfettered and alive, alert to the raw material of the senses. I am a flaneur. Come along with me. Just don’t try to take my arm, unless I ask. What’s a flaneur? Read the first post, Return of the Flaneur to Galerie Vivienne. After that, try Foot Rage and the Blind Flaneur. Then stay tuned.Kiki: Man Ray’s Dada Muse
The legendary Kiki of Montparnasse posed for Man Ray’s Le violin de Ingres (1924). See more from Imaging Paris.Lee Miller: Surrealist Muse
Lee Miller traced a meteoric trajectory from flapper fashionista to surrealist muse. She played the Statue in Jean Cocteau's first movie. Picasso painted her portrait. She apprenticed with Man Ray and later became a noted war photographer for British Vogue. Read more.Miss Tic: Paris Street Art
Poet and street artist Miss Tic isn't exactly a kid in a hoodie with a can of spray paint. Maybe she can still run like hell when the police show up, but can she sprint in high heels? Well-known in international avant-garde circles, her work is exhibited now at the Venice Biennale as well as the alleys of Paris. Read more. See Ethics of Love for a video montage of Miss Tic's provacative poetry. More Paris Street Art.
The Lake and the River
![Fog at Isle Royale [Source: wildmengoneborneo.com]](../../../../wp-content/uploads/2008/04/isle_royale_fog.jpg "Fog at Isle Royale [Source: wildmengoneborneo.com]")
I’ve canoed on Lake Superior for almost as many years as I’ve been losing eyesight. I return year after year like a migrating loon to learn the other side of a slow, uncertain process that we could call “going blind.” After 35 years with the lake as my teacher, I know what lies on the other side. I call it letting go of sight. Read Big Water. See more about the Great Lakes.
What is a village? A small place, yes, as wide as the world, layered with histories and stories, where you can walk wherever you want to go. My vision of that place is Yellow Springs 2.0.
Not This Pig
If there is an emerging genetic underclass, I could run for class president or class clown. Read more in Not This Pig (2003).Blind Photographers
In the moment when Paul Strand photographed her surreptitiously on the street in New York, the social engineers who created a system for licensing beggars never imagined that a blind woman had culture or could make culture. She herself may not have imagined it. Paul Strand probably didn’t give her much credit for making culture, either. Read more: Curiosity & The Blind Photographer [MiT5 2007] See more on blind photographers.
BottomFeeder U.S.A.- Twitter Weekly Updates for 2023-10-07
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- Food Chain – September 10, 2023
