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: political theater
O.K., Founding Fathers: Prepare To Eat Historical Reenactments!
When I was a little kid, I learned everything I Know about rugged individualism astride the mechanical horse outside the supermarket. I demanded, righteously, I begged, pitifully,, I wheedled and cajoled my parents to get a quarter to ride the beast. How did Stephen Colbert know that in my heart I was a Defender of Liberty reenacting the patriotic ritual of Paul Revere’s ride? Those redcoats weren’t going to get my guns, not even the plastic ones. Continue reading
Was Pablo Neruda Poisoned After the Coup?
I remember walking into a coffee shop on Cape Cod in September 1973 when I learned about the right-wing coup in Chile. There was no doubt in my mind, no doubt in the minds of any of the morning habitués there, that Richard Nixon and the CIA were involved in some way. When I heard later that Pablo Neruda had died not long after his friend, President Salvador Allende, I knew the poet had to have died of a broken heart. I was 18, and though I would have denied it then, I was an incurable romantic about Neruda and Chile’s fragile, Communist-led democracy.
No Rest for the Righteous: Even Osama Had Porn
I used to joke that the way to defeat the Mullahs was subverting them with American trash culture. Give them a taste of Brittany Spears, MTV, and spandex and you know who would win the Clash of Civilizations! The revelation last week that a secret stash of pornography was found in Osama bin Laden’s compound seems to substantiate the joke, although its spot-on irony makes you wonder if the CIA has hired some hip new script writers.
Zenga Zenga: Remixing the Dictator’s Speech
via noyalooshemusic: “Libyan(Ex?) leader Muammar Kadafi with his Auto Tuned version to “Hey Baby” by Pitbull & T pain. Remix by Noy Alooshe.”
