curating an archaeology of attention & culture
![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 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.
![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.![President George H.W. Bush signs into law the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) on July 26, 2023 as Justin Dart looks on. [Source: ucp.org]](../wp-content/uploads/2010/07/ada_signing_072690_ucp_2.jpg "ada_signing_072690_ucp_2")
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.
Fair Use Lab
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.
If there is an emerging genetic underclass, I could run for class president or class clown. Read more in Not This Pig (2003).
The legendary Kiki of Montparnasse posed for Man Ray’s Le violin de Ingres (1924). See more from Imaging Paris.
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.
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January 18, 2023 at 11:09am
by Mark Willis At the core of American music is a legacy of songs that yearn for freedom and redemption. This week’s American Routes presents a rich array of this music in its celebration of Martin Luther King, Jr. Here are two songs that convey the breath of that legacy, John Coltrane’s Alabama and Bob Marley’s Redemption Songs, sung here by the remarkable pairing of Johnny Cash and Joe Strummer.
See also MLK 2008: The Legacy of Strange Fruit; MLK 2009: Marion Anderson at the Lincoln Memorial
3 Comments
#1. Joost Burger 01.18.2010
This has been my favorite song for a while:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W08MS3ndUX0
#2. Mark Willis 01.18.2010
Thanks, Joost! Good to hear from you. Johnny Cash had a deep reservoir of redemption.
#3. Café Mouffe: John Coltrane at Antibes 1965 - a blind flaneur 01.22.2010
[...] I listened again to John Coltrane’s Alabama, I was moved by its prayerful tone. I heard the seeds of A Love Supreme in Coltrane’s soaring [...]
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