a blind flaneur

Princeton University historian Emily Thompson is author of The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900-1933. According to Thompson, the sound in the spaces around us has a history; what we hear in the world and the way we listen result from architectural methods, technological innovations and even […]

“Playing by ear” is my shorthand for a process of letting go of sight, or, more precisely, letting go of the will to see, so attention can shift away from the deficits of blindness to experience the richness of other sensory possibilities. I love how the process sometimes becomes play: joyous, instructive, and surprisingly […]

Rupa is a doctor in San Francisco as well as a singer-songwriter. Born in SF, she was raised in India and France. As the title of her new CD, eXtraordinary Rendition, suggests, she is a citizen of the world with global concerns. She tells the back story of Une Americaine À Paris in a recent […]

Two companions have led me astray this week as I swore off blogging so I could work on restoring my gardens. One is this startling white iris, which I’ve waited three years to bring again to bloom. The other is the red-tailed hawk that streaks across the treetops, shrieking on the wing. It […]

Thanks to Alex de Jong for pointing me to Amina’s Le dernier qui a parlé. It was France’s entry in the 1991 Eurovision Song Contest. It should have won but didn’t, according to RFI Musoque. This clip is Amina’s live performance in Rome on May 4, 1991. Her contest preview is just as […]

“All my life, my heart has yearned for a thing I cannot name.”
“Had this yearning been for money, rather than revolutionary art,” says the Guardian, André Breton would today have seen his dream realised, on learning that a selection of his personal effects have been sold at auction in Paris for a total of […]

The original manuscript is a priceless fetish object now, but you don’t have to be a zillionaire to read the Manifesto of Surrealism. You can experience a little psychic automatism , and it’s free. Thanks to surrealist.revolution@skymail.fr for publishing this translation in the Creative Commons.
The Manifesto begins:
So strong is the belief in life, in […]

Don Tapscott, coauthor of Wikinomics, spoke on NPR’s Talk of the Nation this afternoon about Internet projects intended to engage citizens more fully in participatory democracy. According to the NPR blurb, “He says the Internet can make government more open, participatory and efficient — and maybe even smaller and cheaper, too.”
Tapscott mentioned a collaboration with […]

Esperanza Spalding (left) is a young jazz vocalist who just caught my ear. According to NPR Music: “There are many gifted singers in jazz today, and no shortage of accomplished acoustic bass players. But few jazz artists can be both. Esperanza Spalding’s new album, Esperanza, blends her soaring vocals and her deep bass lines. At […]

Solomon’s seal (Polygonatum) blooms in the Glen beginning in mid-May. [Photo by a blind flaneur]
As a kid I learned to distinguish two flowers called Solomon’s seal, one identified as “True” and the other “False.” The flower perched above the leaves in the first, and below them in the second. The fruit of at least one […]