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.
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Tag Archives: Paris
John Trumbull: The Declaration of Independence
John Trumbull’s Declaration of Independence is a 12-by-18-foot oil-on-canvas painting in the United States Capitol Rotunda that depicts the presentation of the draft of the Declaration of Independence to Congress. It was based on a much smaller version of the same scene, presently held by the Yale University Art Gallery.[1] Trumbull painted many of the figures in the picture from life and visited Independence Hall as well to depict the chamber where the Second Continental Congress met. The oil-on-canvas work was commissioned in 1817, purchased in 1819, and placed in the rotunda in 1826. Continue reading
Bouquiniste: Touching The Book Like A Talisman
One of the first books I ever touched – long before I knew how to read – came from Paris. My father sent it to my sister for Christmas in 1945. It is inscribed, “To Diana Lee – Love, Daddy” which makes it priceless in my esteem.
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Les Bouquinistes and the Enlightenment’s Literary Underground
In my chat with the BBC producer, I suggested that he talk with Robert Darnton, the eminent historian of the history of books and publishing in 18th-century France. Darnton wrote a trilogy of books about the literary underworld thriving on the banks of the Seine, and many other places. The books are: The Business of Enlightenment (1979), The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (1982), and The Forbidden Bestsellers Of Pre-Revolutionary France (1995). Darnton’s project was writing a social history of the ideas of the Enlightenment. Continue reading
Looking Back At Les Bouquinistes
I talked with a BBC producer who is putting together a half-hour radio show about les bouquinistes in Paris. He found me via this story, one of the earliest posts on a blind flaneur. I was sad the day it dropped off the bottom of the home page. I thought, maybe no one would ever find or read it again. Not so! Talking about the bouquinistes transported me back to idyllic afternoons strolling on the banks of the Seine. Continue reading
Adieu, Louise Bourgeois. The Spiders Will Miss You
Sculptor Louise Bourgeois died today at age 98 in New York City, reports NPR/Associated Press. Continue reading
Café Mouffe: Parisian Hip-Hop with Anita Tijoux
Anita Tijoux has a French mother and Chilean father. She speaks French but chooses to rap mostly in Spanish. Global Hit has an interview with her this week coinciding with her first U.S. release, 1977. The title alludes to the year she was born. She says Dada and Surrealist poetry were big influences. Continue reading
