![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]](http://blindflaneur.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/gustave_caillebotte_paris_street_rainy_day_1877_wiki.jpg "gustave_caillebotte_paris_street_rainy_day")
![Fog at Isle Royale [Source: wildmengoneborneo.com]](http://blindflaneur.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/isle_royale_fog.jpg "Fog at Isle Royale [Source: wildmengoneborneo.com]")
"Brendan, this is what the world looks like all the time to me. Just a little fog. It’s a fine day for boating on the Great Lakes.” Without missing a stroke he turned to dart a skeptical glance at me. Brendan the Navigator. When we named him I didn’t tell his mother everything the legendary Irish name implied. But I imagined him taking on the role of navigator for me. Growing up with Coastal Survey charts and tales of Great Lakes shipwrecks, he came to know Superior as another home. He never doubted the wisdom of canoeing there with a father who was half blind. ![President George H.W. Bush signs into law the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) on July 26, 1990 as Justin Dart looks on. [Source: ucp.org]](http://fairuselab.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/ada_signing_072690_ucp_2.jpg "ada_signing_072690_ucp_2")
![Shepard Fairey’s “Barack Obama/Hope” image went viral during the 2008 election. Then controversy about the image’s source transformed it into the poster child for fair use in the public debate over copyright and free culture. Now FULAB takes “Hope” as its icon [Image source: Wikipedia]](http://fairuselab.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/shepard_fairey_hope_2008.jpg "shepard_fairey_hope_2008")
If there is an emerging genetic underclass, I could run for class president or class clown. Read more in 
The legendary Kiki of Montparnasse posed for Man Ray’s 
Laurence Stern: “Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine;—they are the life, the soul of reading!—take them out of this book, for instance,—you might as well take the book along with them.”
Entries Tagged as 'Flaneur'
Proto-Flaneur: Laurence Sterne on Digression
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August 29, 2010 at 3:44pm
by Mark Willis
The President-Elect As Frustrated Flaneur
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November 17, 2008 at 9:01am
by Mark Willis
At the end of his 60 Minutes interview last night, Barack Obama acknowledge that one of his biggest transitions as President-Elect is the loss of the simplest of pleasures: taking a walk around the neighborhood. What he says is heartfelt, and spoken like a true flaneur. No wonder I voted for him!
An excerpt from the [...]
Barack Obama · Flaneur Add Your Comment
Americans Drove 4.5 Billion Fewer Miles in April
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June 21, 2008 at 12:05am
by Mark Willis
I’ve never heard this metric before, although the U.S. Federal Highway Administration tracks and publishes it every month. Maybe it will become a number everyone watches nervously, like the Dow-Jones average, the Body Mass Index, or the weekend movie box office gross. What we need is a comparable measure of monthly miles walked. [...]
Flaneur · conservation · foot rage Add Your Comment
Playing By Ear: Pearls Before Breakfast
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April 9, 2008 at 12:15am
by Mark Willis
It’s the flaneur’s dilemma. Do you linger on the street to savor the scene? Do you rush on like an automaton so you won’t be late for work? You aren’t alone. As Henry Thoreau said, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”
Gene Weingarten decided to put Washington commuters to the test. He persuaded [...]
Flaneur · Playing by Ear · Washington · attention · street art Add Your Comment
Fashionista Street: April In Paris
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April 5, 2008 at 9:00am
by Mark Willis
[Source: The Sartorialist]
It wouldn’t be Fashionista Street without a flaneur to savor the scene. Thanks to Scott Schuman for documenting spring in Paris!
Cathy Horyn writes about Schuman’s and Bill Cunningham’s street photography in a recent On the Runway post:
Sunday’s blog:mode event at the Met went off pretty well, I think. .. There’s so much one [...]
Flaneur · Imaging Paris · fashionista · street · style Add Your Comment
Foot Rage and the Blind Flaneur
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December 18, 2007 at 6:00am
by Mark Willis
As I have lost eyesight over the past thirty years, walking has been the simplest and most dependable solution to the functional limitations of my disability. When I stopped driving cars at age eighteen, walking was the mode of transportation most accessible to me. This sounds reasonable enough – a problem to be solved , [...]
Flaneur · Paris · Rue Mouffetard · Ve · Walter Benjamin · foot rage · walking Add Your Comment
Hear Voices? It Ain’t the Angels Singing
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December 17, 2007 at 6:00am
by Mark Willis
When a blind flaneur walks down the street, he’s likely to be taking care of business, paying close attention to sensory cues and landmarks. The last thing he expects is to hear an advertisement coming from somewhere inside his own personal soundscape.
So a chill went through me when I heard an interview with Clive Thompson [...]
Flaneur · Playing by Ear · foot rage · walking Add Your Comment
Walkability in Toronto
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December 6, 2007 at 6:52pm
by Mark Willis
Mayor Nathan Phillips and wife Esther claim Bay Street in Toronto on February 27, 1960. In his autobiography, Mayor of All the People, he noted that the street was empty on a Sunday morning.
Christopher Leinberger’s report on walkable urban places surveys only U.S. cities. Richard Florida has lived in most of the cities in the [...]
Flaneur · Ms. Modigliani · Toronto · cities · walking Add Your Comment
What Makes A Walkable Urban Place?
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December 5, 2007 at 6:56pm
by Mark Willis
The term flaneur does not appear in the latest report from the Brookings Institution ranking the most walkable U.S. cities. Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin would shudder at the notion that walking and “walkability” could be measured or planned systematically. In Paris in their respective times (mid-19th century for Baudelaire, early-20th for Benjamin), walking [...]
Flaneur · Paris · cities · walking Add Your Comment
Introducing Flaneur’s Gallery: The Siren
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September 29, 2007 at 8:39am
by Mark Willis
The Siren, by John William Waterhouse (circa 1900) [Source: Wikimedia Commons]
I worked on a small literary magazine in the 1970s with a graphic designer who was smitten with the intricate book illustrations of Aubrey Beardsley. I should rummage around in the boxes of geologically stratified ephemera that constitute my literary archive to find a [...]