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.Letting Go of Sight
![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.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).Media in Transition @ MiT
Disabled Americans today have to negotiate for the kinds of accommodations made for FDR, and the caveat “reasonable accommodation” is built into the law. President Franklin Roosevelt did not have to negotiate. He could summon vast resources of the federal government – money as well as brains – to accomplish the work of disability. And it was accomplished with such thoroughness and efficiency that its scale could be called the Accessibility-Industrial Complex had it been directed toward public accommodations and not solely the needs of a single man. Read FDR and the Hidden Work of Disability [MiT8 2013]
Shepard Fairey claimed that his posterization of a copyrighted AP news photo of Barack Obama was a transformative work protected by the fair use doctrine. In other words, it was a shape-shifter. I claim fair use, too, when I reproduce and transform copyrighted works into media formats that are accessible to me as a blind reader. Read Shape-Shifters in the Fair Use Lab [MiT6 2009]
The social engineers who created a system for licensing beggars in New York never imagined that a blind woman had culture or could make culture. She herself may not have imagined it, either. In the moment when Paul Strand photographed her surreptitiously on the street in 1916, he could not have expected that one day blind photographers would reverse the camera’s gaze. Read Curiosity & The Blind Photographer. [MiT5 2007]
Category Archives: surrealist economics
Take Flight, Unemployed Knowledge Workers: Data-Mining In The Cloud Pays A Penny A Ton
Before you start dreaming about buying a new boat with all the cash you’ll earn while working at home for Mechanical Turk, listen to this talk by Jonathan Zittrain of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. The messenger is brilliant, even as the message is scary and depressing: “a new range of projects is making the application of human brainpower as purchasable and fungible as additional server rackspace.” Continue reading
Hey, Paul Krugman - Fiscal Fan Boys Need You!
Hey, Paul Krugman by Jonathan Mann: Hey Paul Krugman, Why aren’t you in the administration? Is there some kind of politicking that I don’t understand? I mean, Timothy Geithner is like some little weasel. Wasn’t he in a position of … Continue reading
Down & Out In A Third-Grade Lunchroom
Just in case you need another surreal economic model to understand mortage-backed securities and credit-default swaps – a.k.a. why you are broke and I am broke and Warren Buffet isn’t feeling so hot right now, either – Planet Money has … Continue reading
Fashionably Down & Out: In Paris, The Gleaners
Paris is famous for its open-air food markets. But difficult economic times are turning them into giant foraging sites — and not just for the poor. [Source: iStockphoto.com/NPR] In my mind, NPR’s Eleanor Beardsley has become the Janet Flanner of … Continue reading
Let’s Drink the More-With-Less Kool-Aid!
If you want to do more with less and smile along the way, Bobby Jindal has some Kool-Aid for you. Americans can do anything. [AP TV/NYT] If you haven’t had any yet, you will. As NPR’s Chana Joffe Walt points … Continue reading
