The King Is Dead. Long Live The Herons! – a blind flaneur

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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

The King Is Dead. Long Live The Herons!

0 December 9, 2009 at 8:16pm by Mark Willis

The statistics are staggering for the wine auction at La Tour d’Argent, the venerable Left Bank restaurant with a 27-room wine cellar [left; photo by David Queen/Wikipedia]. The auction fetched more than a million euros, according to AFP. A bottle of Vieux Cognac Le Clos Griffier sold for €25,000, according to the Globe and Mail. The cognac was dated 1788, only five years before Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette lost their heads. When La Tour d’Argent opened in 1582, according to NPR’s Eleanor Beardsley, Henry III would stop there after a royal hunt for some heron pâté. For the birds’ sake, let’s hope that feasting on their chopped liver was jettisoned long ago with the monarchy.

Tagged Edible Dramas

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