To Kiki the Lascivious Tortoise, Adieu – a blind flaneur

Search
About the Flaneur

I walk through my blindness the way I saunter down streets in Paris: unfettered and alive, enchanted and engaged by the raw material of the senses. I am a blind 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. If you don’t find me on the street, take a look in the Fair Use Lab. You can browse the archives or contact me.
Brendan the Navigator

"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. Read more.
ADA 20th Anniversary

On its 20th anniversary, pundits will debate what the Americans with Disabilities Act has accomplished. I still believe what I said in a TV interview after the ADA signing ceremony in 1990. “The ADA will not end disability discrimination overnight. But in a nation governed by the rule of law, getting it in writing is the place to start.” So what is the ADA's legacy? A Generation of Problem-Solvers.
Re-Imagining Accessibility

Re-imagining accessibility through the transformations of culture -- particularly the transformative promise of accessible technology for people with disabilities -- is the work of the Fair Use Lab. What does Shepard Fairey’s Hope poster have to do with accessibility? Read more: Shape-Shifters in the Fair Use Lab [MiT6 2009]
Fair Use Lab
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.
Photo Flânerie
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).
Café Mouffe
Imaging Paris: Dada Muse

The legendary Kiki of Montparnasse posed for Man Ray’s Le violin de Ingres (1924). See more from Imaging Paris.
Archives
Yellow Springs 2.0

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.
Linking Out

To Kiki the Lascivious Tortoise, Adieu

0 December 8, 2009 at 7:29am by Mark Willis


Kiki's long lust for life lasted 146 years. [Photo by F-G Grandin/AFP/guardian.com]

From Kiki of Montparnasse to Kiki of the Jardin des Plantes… sad news comes from Paris via Lizzy Davis at guardian.com:

France was in mourning today for one of its oldest and best-loved lotharios, a giant tortoise named Kiki, who died at the age of 146.

Staff at the Ménagerie du Jardin des Plantes in Paris announced that its veteran resident had succumbed last week to an infection.

They paid tribute to the zoo’s “doyen”, whose distinctive personality and “demonstrative lovemaking” had made him a favourite with the French public.

“We are rather upset to have lost Kiki. He had been here for such a long time …that we had kind of thought of him as eternal,” said Michel Saint Jalme, the deputy director of the Ménagerie. “He had a kind of charisma … a certain personality.”

Kiki, who arrived in the French capital as an exotic newcomer from the Seychelles in 1923, when his species was on the brink of extinction, was never slow to use that charisma to full effect.

According to Marie-Claude Bomsel, a vet at the zoo, he was so vigorous in his pursuit of female tortoises that his grunts could be heard from the other end of the zoo and the Jardin des Plantes.

“To be honest, from time to time I even saw him go after a wheelbarrow. You see what we were dealing with,” Bomsel told French radio. “That was one of his characteristics. We all loved him.”

Hmm… I had nights like that in my misspent youth. Kiki gives me courage for the golden years.

Frédéric Lewino, a science writer at Le Point magazine, wrote that, though advanced in age, Kiki remained “fresh” to the end.

Kiki weighed 250kg and had to be moved about using a forklift.

“However crushed they were by his 250kg, the females suffered his assaults without any complaint,” he remarked.

The oldest and largest of five giant tortoises at the Ménagerie, Kiki’s remains are to be preserved and exhibited at France’s Natural History Museum.

His fellow creatures are among the world’s longest living.

Harriet the Galápagos tortoise was reported to be 175 years old when she died in 2006 in Australia, while Tu’i Malila, a tortoise who died in 1965 in Tonga, lived to 188.

Tagged Imaging Paris

0 Comments

There are no comments yet, be the first by filling in the form below.

Leave a Comment