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]](http://blindflaneur.com/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.Kiki: Man Ray’s Dada Muse
The legendary Kiki of Montparnasse posed for Man Ray’s Le violin de Ingres (1924). See more from Imaging Paris.Lee Miller: Surrealist Muse
Lee Miller traced a meteoric trajectory from flapper fashionista to surrealist muse. She played the Statue in Jean Cocteau's first movie. Picasso painted her portrait. She apprenticed with Man Ray and later became a noted war photographer for British Vogue. Read more.Miss Tic: Paris Street Art
Poet and street artist Miss Tic isn't exactly a kid in a hoodie with a can of spray paint. Maybe she can still run like hell when the police show up, but can she sprint in high heels? Well-known in international avant-garde circles, her work is exhibited now at the Venice Biennale as well as the alleys of Paris. Read more. See Ethics of Love for a video montage of Miss Tic's provacative poetry. More Paris Street Art.
The Lake and the River
![Fog at Isle Royale [Source: wildmengoneborneo.com]](http://blindflaneur.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.
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.
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).Re-Imagining Accessibility
![Shepard Fairey’s “Barack Obama/Hope” image went viral during the 2008 election. Then controversy about the image’s source transformed it into the poster child for fair use in the public debate over copyright and free culture. Now FULAB takes “Hope” as its icon [Image source: Wikipedia]](http://fairuselab.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/shepard_fairey_hope_2008.jpg "shepard_fairey_hope_2008")
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]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.BottomFeeder U.S.A.
![Grant Wood. Parson Weem’s’ Fable. 1939. Amon Carter Museum, Forth Worth.. Steven Biel describes the painting: “Parson Weems, imitating Charles Willson Peale’s pose in The Artist in His Museum (1822), opens a red velvet curtain on the legendary scene: Augustine Washington, elegant in crimson coat, white ruffle, tan breeches, silver-buckled pumps, and green tricornered hat, grasps in his right hand the slim trunk of the bent cherry tree. A row of cherries dangles from the perfectly rounded treetop, mirroring the very cherry-like fringe of the Parson’s curtain. Augustine’s outstretched left palm and furrowed brow signal a serious inquiry. His son George, boyish in stature and dress—coatless, with sky-blue breeches and petite buckled pumps—is manly in his expression. In fact, his white-wigged head is that of Gilbert Stuart’s portrait and the dollar bill. He points with his right hand to the hatchet in his left. Wood chips lie in the circle of soil at the base of the tree, its lower trunk smoothly incised and poised to split off. In the background, a well-dressed slave couple harvests the fruit of a second tree.” [Alt Text Source: Common-Place/ http://www.common-place.org/vol-06/no-04/biel/ ]](http://www.bottomfeederusa.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/grant_wood_parson_weems_fable_200px.jpg "grant_wood_parson_weems_fable_200px")
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Tag Archives: film
Roger Ebert’s Computer Voice Will Break Down Barriers
I was very pleased too hear Roger Ebert speak via voice synthesizer yesterday on NPR. I listen to the same kind of machine voice day in, day out. That’s how I read, how I write and edit the words you’re reading now. It isn’t weird or the stuff of science fiction, like 2001: A Space Odyssey. It’s no big deal. Like disability itself, it’s an everyday fact of life. Ebert’s comfort level with his surrogate voice will help a lot of people to get used to that kind of accommodation, too. Continue reading
William Hurt Listens To Stanislavski: “Breathe The Ethic Into The Play”
I paid attention to a Fresh Air interview this morning when I heard William Hurt talk about an ethical approach to the craft of acting. He described the process he followed to prepare for a single scene in the film A History of Violence, which he resists calling a cameo, for which he received an Oscar nomination in 2005. In the interview he quoted Russian director Constantin Stanislavski on the core ethos of method acting. Continue reading
Serbia Swoons For Canadian Actor Who Played Nick Savage. Nick Who?
In 1991 he portrayed the buff detective in a cheesy TV show called “Sweating Bullets” (aka “Tropical Heat”). Today he lives with his parents in Brampton, Ontario. Maybe his star faded in Tinsel Town, but he’s feted like a rock star in Belgrade, where his reruns earned rebellious cultural capital even after Canada helped NATO to bomb Serbia in 1999. Rob Stewart learned about his own legend from a Facebook fan page. So what’s an underemployed actor to do? Fly to Belgrade to heal Canadian-Serbian relations, of course, and make a documentary film about it. Continue reading
Shed A Tear For The Subversion of Images… and Hackneyed Colonialism
I admit it. When I compared Man Ray’s “Emak-Bakia” to Avatar the other day, I was listening to the crasser angels of search engine optimization. You know, the ones that tell you to forget everything you ever learned about writing clever magazine headlines. Just pack every Google ad word you can into the blog title. So I threw in Avatar and nothing happened.
Was Man Ray’s “Emak-Bakia” the “Avatar” of the 1920s?
When Man Ray’s short film “Emak-Bakia” debuted in Paris in 1926, critical opinion was mixed. One angry viewer shouted that it gave him a headache and hurt his eyes, to which another retorted, “Shut up!” A brawl ensued, which spread through the audience and spilled into the street. Then the police arrived to quell the riot. Continue reading
Building a Log Cabin in One Man’s Wilderness
The memory of Dick Proenneke has been a welcome presence this Christmas. I gave Brendan a copy of One Man’s Wilderness, and on Christmas Eve, Ms. M and I watched the PBS documentary based on the book and Dick’s vintage … Continue reading
Isabella Rossellini Dances the Sex Life of Calamari at Café Mouffe
If you’re striving for that nerdy, campy “adult” costume for Halloween, look no further than Isabella Rossellini’s simple garb in Green Porno, her series of anatomically correct nature films on the Sundance Channel. You could be a sexy spider or praying mantis. Rossellini discussed the project last month on WBUR’s On Point with Tom Ashbrook. Continue reading
Mouffe at the Movies: Sue Lyon’s Lolita
We finished Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita today — reading it aloud, mind you — and almost immediately asked ourselves the question posed by the trailer for Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 movie adaptation. “How could they make a movie out of Lolita?” My … Continue reading
William Kurelek’s Canadian Art
Kurelek by William Pettigrew – NFB: (1967, 10 min 7 s) A documentary about the self-taught painter William Kurelek, told through his paintings. There are scenes of village life in the Ukraine and the early days of struggle on a … Continue reading
