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]
Tag Archives: films
Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin: Two Film Clips
Henry Miller & Anaïs Nin on Death and Dreams | Anaïs Nin reflections Continue reading
Doing the “Duck and Cover” at Café Mouffe
From a distance of 50 years, I like to remember my childhood as a carefree time filled with daydreams of Brigitte Bardot and Leave It To Beaver. Truthfully, though, it was suffused with paranoia and existential despair. Only later did I learn to relax with help of Dr. Charles Mingus and the power of prayer. Oh Lord Don’t Let them Drop That Atomic Bomb On Me.
Fare Thee Well, Liz Taylor
I hadn’t thought much about Elizabeth Taylor until a few weeks ago, when I happened to listen to Bob Dylan’s I Shall Be Free. what do we need to make the country grow? Brigitte Bardot, Anita Ekberg, Sophia Loren, and in the end, Elizabeth Taylor – all the impossible fantasies of my 1960s childhood! It’s a helluva song, but just try and find a video clip of the original. Give it up Bob! It’s a national treasure!
Finding a Flaneur in “The Moviegoer”
Certification, repetition, rotation, the genie-soul of a place – I found the footsteps of Walter Benjamin and “Return of the Flaneur” throughout The Moviegoer by Walker Percy. No sooner had we finished reading it than I wanted to start all over again at the beginning, ready to annotate the text to make my case.
Art Lives Forever at Pere-Lachaise
Forever: I love the way this documentary is put together. Filmmaker Heddy Honnigmann brings patience and faith to the interviews, allowing her subjects long stretches of silence to gather their thoughts and emotions. She finds extraordinarily fresh ways to tell the stories of famous artists immortalized in the Pere-Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. Three blind film buffs listen to a movie with Simone Signoret and Judy Garland, collectively recreating the scene from what they hear. An illustrator describes his improbable path to rendering À la recherche du temps perdu into a graphic novel, and another pilgrim to Proust’s tomb speaks passionately, in untranslated Korean, about what the master meant to him. Perhaps most affecting of all is a quiet man explaining how he tries to bring the artistic sensibility of Modigliani to his own craft – embalming corpses for burial.
