Les flaneurs

An emerging subculture of urban walkers….

I took the following list of NY-centric links from http://www.newyorkcitywalk.com/html/Links.html:

• “FORGOTTEN NEW YORK: If you like my site, you’re going to love this one. Kevin Walsh is the KING of this nerdy urban explorer subculture that I’m proud to be part of: http://www.forgotten-ny.com
• SATANS LAUNDROMAT: Mike Epstein has a great photoblog of New York City and elsewhere. Mike is currently also walking every Manhattan street: http://www.satanslaundromat.com/sl/
• BIG ONION WALKING TOURS: If you want in-depth historical tours of the city, Big Onion can’t be beat. They are affiliated with the New-York Historical Society, and all of the guides are getting their graduate degrees in history:
  http://www.bigonion.com/
• CATRON COUNTY WALK: I’m honored to have inspired Suzanne to walk every road in Catron County, New Mexico: http://catroncountywalk.blogspot.com/
• WALKING IN LA: This guy is hardcore- a devoted walker in a city that was built for cars: http://www.walkinginla.com/
• CORRECTION HISTORY: A virtual tour of the oldest prison in New York City: http://www.correctionhistory.org/html/chronicl/nycdoc/harlemjail/
• THE CENTER FOR LAND USE INTERPRETATION: http://ludb.clui.org/ex/t/tag/NY/
• NEW YORK WIKI: Every Person, Place, and Hot Dog in New York City: http://www.nywiki.com/new-york-city/index.php/Main_Page
• HOW I WALKED EVERY STREET IN MANHATTAN IN 10 WEEKS This guy puts me to shame, took me almost three years!: http://linkage.cpmc.columbia.edu/Manhattan_Walk/Walk.html
• THE CRUISE: A documentary starring Starring Timothy “Speed” Levitch. Speed is a mildly crazy romantic, and New York City is his muse. He walks around New York in a swoon, mesmerized by the people, buildings and life around him. He’s always saying stuff like “you are 3 1/2 blocks from infinity”, this sort of thing. He’s definitely crazier than me, but I truly appreciate his love for the city, and his ability to find romance and excitement in parts of the city that other people think are mundane: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0150230/
• OPEN HOUSE NEW YORK: A weekend of free tours of various sites throughout the city. A good time to plan your next vacation: http://www.ohny.org/ohny_website/start.html
• URBAN RANGER: An enthusiastic urban walker: http://www.urbanranger.com/
• NEW YORK CITY ARCHEOLOGY: http://www.ci.nyc.ny.us/html/lpc/html/arch/home.html
  PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY: “19th Century opium eater Thomas de Quincey remains the first reported case & indeed the prototype of the obsessive drifter. With no other goal in mind than to satisfy his curiosity about what might be discovered around the next corner, De Quincey spent entire days randomly strolling around London. In the 20th century, the surrealists in the 30ties & the Lettrists in the 50ties elaborated on this urge by transforming it into a systematic practice. In the 60ties the Situationists took this activity to the next level by developing psychogeography: the science of the dérive, the drift…”: http://www.socialfiction.org/psychogeography/algoeng.htm
• NEW YORK SONGLINES: Not a site about singing- Virtual walking tours of Manhattan. No pictures, but very informative: http://www.nysonglines.com/
• A WALK TO REMEMBER: An exhibition that invites a group of Los Angeles based artists to conceive and carry out guided tours through neighborhoods and areas of the city with which they have a particular relationship or affinity and that deal specifically with the rich cultural history of the city: http://www.artleak.org/AWalkToRemember.html “
  

…But this is obviously just the latest in a long history of urban walking:

Baudelaire wrote a collection of poems on Parisian flanerie called “Les Fleurs du Mal”, and Walter Benjamin published a two-volume work called the Das Passagen-Werk (The Arcades Project) which discussed Baudelaire’s poems…

…what are the politics of loitering? the agency of those who loiter?
Makes me think of Mallboy (Australia 2001 Vincent Giarrusso)…

the city as palimpsest

walking around melbourne - like any city - if you are alert to it, you can see various elements layered over each other.

For example:

• lanes and alleyways, and gaps between properties that have been constructed in different periods.
• electrical wiring covers in the footpath
• telstra telephone wiring covers in the footpath
• MMBW covers in the footpath
• drainage outlets
• keg holes around pubs
• etc

sometimes you get the feeling the entire city is like a piece of honeycomb…..its very worthy of further investigation. In fact, a documentary or cinematic exploration could be quite interesting. In a similar genre, Subway (France 1985 Luc Besson) explores the underground spaces of the Parisien metro (and the quirky characters who live in these spaces).

The politics of gleaning

From a young age I have always exhibited tendencies towards collecting. This has developed over the years into a fascination with refuse and those who utilise what others discard. From Robert Rauschenberg, to food-for-homeless programs, to hard-rubbish collection, to dumpster diving (and even to boll wevils), I find those who reuse what others designate as waste inspiring and most resourceful survivers.

Recently, I have been reading Mongo: Adventures in Trash  (see this book review),

There is a particular aesthetic of this subcultural movement, and a variety of political motivations – for some, its simply out of necessity (homeless, poor, students); others its a way-of-life (a reaction against consumer capitalism).

Hard rubbish collections have been particularly fruitful resource for me over the years – this year, I have recently picked up some wonderful chairs that I will repair over summer. A couple of years ago I found a great block-mounted poster of Elvis (although I am not a fan of Elvis, i had to have it). It always amazes me what people throw out.

The 3-man theatre company, The Suitcase Royale (see photos below) claim that every single piece of their set and all of their props have been found through hard rubbish collections. (Incidentally, these guys produce superb, original theatre).   

Understandably, I was completely inspired when I saw The Gleaners and I (Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse) (France 2000 Agnes Varda). [Check out this interesting review at Senses of Cinema] 

The legalities (and consequently the politics, or vice-versa) behind gleaning are quiet interesting. For example, local councils make it very clear that those who “glean” from hard-rubbish collections are “stealing” council property. The policing and enforcement of these sorts of laws are far too costly and time consuming anyways; and I would think that most people would be happy for their discards to find new homes and new uses where possible, so long as the gleaners dont make a mess.

Its amazing that dumpster diving is considered such a political statement really….

Transparency, ubiquitousness, instant information

There is so much to like about Children of Men (UK/USA 2006 Alfonso Cuaron), and yet also so much to loathe.

 

Let’s be positive to begin with. The things I liked included:

• the aesthetic – the reality of the diegesis is intricately and intelligently realised through exceptional art design and production (simply breathtaking)
• the cinematography - captures the action and the reality surrounding the action in a beautiful manner (as Slavoj Zizek mentions, there is a wonderful tension between foreground and background throughout the film)
• the action sequences – unnervingly close to our contemporary reality (terrorist bombings, car-jacking, militant uprisings) 
• the film’s indirect dialogue with contemporary issues of migration, terrorism and the rise of military state.

 

And yet, with so much to like, I still found the film unpalatable for several reasons; so which I could immediately identify, and others that emerged from greater reflection.

Things that immediately annoyed me: 

• having great actors playing horribly underrealiesd two-dimensional characters
• corny pathetic dialogue
• use of cliched (and boring!) diegetical devices such as: romantic lovers torn apart and reunited for a common goal (please!); a succession of mother-like older women guiding/assisting the young fertile woman (come on, really!?);
• that the film works so hard to achieve a gritty realistic feel through multiple devices [eg, the incredible long-takes during action sequences, magnificent set pieces and creation of atmosphere through incredible attention to background detail], and then it completely destroys this finely achieved sense of diegetic reality (that is a lovely uncanny to our contemporary setting) through lame moments [eg What the hell is with Owen and Moore passing a ping-pong ball? And the soliders all stopping to watch the baby? That scene could have been executed so much better to maintain the sense of realism....]   

This film makes me so frustrated!!!

There is so much to like about its production aesthetics, the incredible detail, visual style and cinematic production values. It is visually stunning. Yet, incredibly, the basic story (the underlying foundation of any film) does not do justice to these other superb elements of the film. It has very interesting concepts and ideas that are poorly executed through weak (thin) characters, lame diegetic architecture, and internal contradictions.

Having voiced my concerns, Children of Men certainly provides one with a lot of different things to discuss….I feel that Paul Virilio’s quote (p 73 in “A travelling shot over Eighty Years”) accurately caputes the atmosphere that Cuaron has sort and achieved: “The intensity of automatic weaponry and the new capacities of photographic equipment combine to project a final image of the world, a world in the throes of dematerialization and eventual total disintegration, one in which the cinema of the Lumiere brothers becomes more reliable than Junger’s melancholy look-out who can no longer believe his eyes.” (p73). Cuaron’s vision is certainly quite apocalyptic.

New Rave Aesthetic

Marie Antoinette (US 2006 Sofia Coppola) got me thinking about the correlations between sound and image, and how fashion aesthetics are often deliberately linked with or directly associated with musical movements. 

In the 1980s for example, Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren ensured that their punk fashion aesthetic (which was ironically incredibly expensive and in this regard completely antithetical to the punk movement) was associated with the music of the Sex Pistols. (McLaren was managing the Sex Pistols – a nice fusion of goals).

.

From Westwood’s fashion collection from 1976-1980:

 

Text from the V&A Museum in London (which held a retrospective of Westwood’s work in 2004, which travelled to Australia – NGA, Canberra - in January 2005): “McLaren was now manager of the Sex Pistols and a key figure in the emerging Punk Rock phenomenon. The Seditionaries collection was an audacious fusion of all the subversive elements in Westwood and McLaren’s recent work. There were the ripped garments of 1950s pin-ups; the leather, chains and badges of the bikers; the straps and buckles of the fetishists. As Westwood said, ‘You couldn’t imagine the Punk Rock thing without the clothing.”

More recently, the Klaxons jokingly referred to their aesthetic as “new rave”, unwittingly spawning a huge following and coining a phrase to describe this new aesthetic that again straddles the (increasingly slim in some regards) divide between music and fashion.

The Klaxons provide this archetypal example of their “new rave” aesthetic in this film clip for their song “Atlantis to Interzone“. Here’s another example of their work that has a number of references to Vivienne Westwood’s early work – all black imitation-leather and faux buckles etc.

Arguably, New Young Pony Club have contributed one of the best other example’s to the genre with this video for their song “Ice Cream“. The first 40 seconds of this clip are sublime. The eroticisation, the gaudy colour scheme – all fluro and pastel complimentary and clashing colours, and the use of sugary sweet garish coloured foodstuffs reminds me very much of  Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette. The great thing about New Young Pony Club is that this clip pushes the aesthetic to into the realm kitsch – its a licorice all-sorts look.

the boss of it all

The Boss of it All (Danish 2006 Lars Von Trier) is the funniest film I have seen this year. Its wonderfully silly, eccentric and self-referential.

 http://www.direktorenfordethele.dk/index_uk.html

Mapping the architecture of the interior: Giuliana Bruno on Louise Bourgeois

 

“A window on the architecture of living opens with a paradigmatic series of paintings and drawings made by Louise Bourgeois, beginning in the early 1940s. Called Femme-Maison, they represent a woman in the shape of a house. In this “architexture,” the body and the house are joined in the itinerary of dwelling. In exposing this link, Bourgeois designs a haptic map of inhabitation , questioning what domus means for the female subject. Her work on architecturechallenges the long-standing association of domus with gender fixity. Instead, the drawings suggest that a woman can conceive of home as something other than an enclosed, and enclosing, world. She can opt for a “travelling domestic,” remapping herself in different notions of home. Here, this location is grounds of departure.

…This vision of emotion inspires us to consider the relation of voyage and dwelling, in order to see how sexual difference can be housed differently. To look architecturally, and with geographical eyes, at the relation of private to public space can advance former notions of gender identity based on psychoanalytically oriented feminist theory. This outlook enables us to incorporate the diversity of cultural landscapes into our forms of urban dwelling. It can lead us to understand sexual difference in terms of space – as a geography of negotiated terrains. Thinking geographically, we can design different cultural maps as we venture into the terrain of an architectonics of gender – a lived space.”

- Giuliana Bruno, Public Intimacy – Architecture and the Visual Arts, (MIT Press, Cambridge and London: 2007), p163-5.

  

Chechnya & Virilio’s Anthropophagic Aesthetic

There are an enormous number of videos on YouTube if  you simply type in “Chechnya“.

Chechnya: Battle of Grozny is rather incredible; at 0.31secs there is a shot of an endless stream of armoured military vehicles that is eerily reminiscent of the opening scene in 4 (Russia, 2005, Ilya Khrzhanovsky) where the street sweepers fill the screen, or indeed one of the closing scenes, in which the military troop-carrier planes take off the runway. A grim, gritty, militarized vision. Further on  in this YouTube video it depicts the pitch battles in the streets of Grozny – a scene of utter destruction.  Little wonder that  the United Nations listed Grozny top of the list of destroyed cities just several years ago…

aiding and abetting

At what point are you morally culpable for continuing to conduct business with a morally bankrupt regime?

- banks…see this article on Suing Hitler’s Willing Business Partners
- arms dealers…

- large corporations…

- energy companies (oil companies)…

- nations
Burma, Afghanistan, North Korea, Zimbabwe…