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: Patti Smith
Robert Maplethorpe’s Iconic Image of Patti Smith
Patti Smith receives the National Book Award tonight for Just Kids, the memoir of her friendship with photographer Robert Maplethorpe. He took the photo of Smith on the cover of Horses, the debut album that made her the Queen of Punk in 1975. She told the story of how this iconic image was made in an interview on NPR’s Fresh Air Continue reading →
Free Money With Patti Smith At Café Mouffe
The last CD to grace my stereo deck was Anne Sofie von Otter’s collection of Grieg Songs, which I return to like an Arctic tern when the snow is deep and the sun bright in a crystalline sky. I Tonight some kind of chthonic leap of faith made me switch von Oter’s Grieg for Patti Smith’s Horses tonight. Who’d think I could feel like I was 20 years old again and very punk? It started this morning when I heard a snippet of Gloria on NPR. Now I’m rummaging in the closet for the leather jacket with the ripped shoulder so I’ll look like I could walk into CBGB’s and not get rolled. Then all I’ll need is some Free Money.
Just Kids: Patti Smith Remembers Robert Mapplethorpe
Patti Smith met Robert Mapplethorpe on her first day in New York City in the summer of1967. They were both kids from stern religious backgrounds who yearned to be artists. Smith tells the story of their relationship in a new … Continue reading →
