March 2013

MARCH 2013

It would be an anti-flaneur novel, collage, of course, review of Renata Adler's Speedboat, title of which I remember well from the 70s and because she was a writer known then, new yorker or elsewhere?  No idea her book was a collage novel.  Just took the wrapper off Robert Walser's Microscripts in its new translation and edition.  Another name for collage novel. Another name for the trunk into which Pessoa and Dickinson threw their scraps of paper.  Anti-flaneur because these trunks full of scraps do not fill up from the walkers walks through the city for pleasure and sensation.  I will google this to prove my point, if there is a point worth pointing, worth tuck-pointing.  Was Walser a flaneur?  Nope, betcha no one thinks so. 

So, here it is, research from Wiki demonstrates that yes, I was

absolutely wrong. 

Architecture and urban planning

The concept of the flâneur has also become meaningful in architecture and urban planning describing those who are indirectly and unintentionally affected by a particular design they experience only in passing. Walter Benjamin adopted the concept of the urban observer both as an analytical tool and as a lifestyle. From his Marxist standpoint, Benjamin describes the flâneur as a product of modern life and the Industrial Revolution without precedent, a parallel to the advent of the tourist. His flâneur is an uninvolved but highly perceptive bourgeois dilettante. Benjamin became his own prime example, making social and aesthetic observations during long walks through Paris. Even the title of his unfinished Arcades Project comes from his affection for covered shopping streets. In 1917, the Swiss writer Robert Walser published a short story called "Der Spaziergang", or "The Walk", a veritable outcome of the flâneur literature.

“

The crowd was the veil from behind which the familiar city as phantasmagoria beckoned to the flâneur. In it, the city was now landscape, now a room. And both of these went into the construction of the department store, which made use of flânerie itself in order to sell goods. The department store was the flâneur's final coup. As flâneurs, the intelligensia came into the market place. As they thought, to observe it - but in reality it was already to find a buyer. In this intermediary stage [...] they took the form of the bohème. To the uncertainty of their economic position corresponded the uncertainty of their political function. (Walter Benjamin (1935), «Paris: the capital of the nineteenth century», in Charles Baudelaire: a lyric poet in the era of high capitalism)

”

In the context of modern-day architecture and urban planning, designing for flâneurs is one way to approach issues of the psychological aspects of the built environment. Architect Jon Jerde, for instance, designed his Horton Plaza and Universal CityWalk projects around the idea of providing surprises, distractions, and sequences of events for pedestrians.

nor had I ever quite realized that the flaneur was key to urban design and architecture in the 20th C.  Ignorance is bliss once more.

those two projects mentioned above were in 1985 and 1993 and American (hollywood) shopping malls, or entertainment malls--Universal studio project.  So they can't really count here, can they?  For what?  Or not what? 

well, our Copenhagen man is the anti-flaneur because it is no longer randomly observed urban pleasures and sensations he seeks. 

Phil and I worrying about Apple's massive hoard of cash

regarding Apples' massive nest-egg, I can't help wonder if it might just be a herd of nouveau-riche geek-necks

who have put their sudden wealth under the mattress because they really don't get high-finance, high

level money the way they do high level-gadgetry?  Recall that Jobs resisted founding a foundation because

he didn't like dealing with the money types.  

Also -- regarding the corporate kingpins like Carly who wreck a company and then collect their intolerable

parachutes to leave, witness it happening all over again with the Apple genius who moved on to re-make

J C Penny and ruined it instead.  He'll collect his bonuses too.  

That graph raised all the same sorts of worries as you described so well.  And as good as it is as a graph, it

still irritates in so many ways as we witness the image-mind trying to handle really really complex

questions and not really able to do so.  For example--recall the say "socialism" is pictured as an equal

distribution of green cash bars along the level horizon.  But just the modest experience of hearing about

Dave living in France has demonstrated, "socialism" there does not mean a green-cash distribution

that is somehow more "ideal" or "fair" in a pictogram sense---the socialism is a cultural construct of

infra-structure and super-structure and under-structure.  Having a baby there is free and comes with it

all sorts of support-systems---pre-natal care clinics, natal care clinics, day care structures from 2 yrs old

on, parental leave, parental support, some cash incentive, actually, too, and lots of other things I don't

know about.  And that's just having one child.  If you want to change your housing situation, again,

there are far more complex housing options than we can imagine other than "free market buy/rent" vs

public or subsidized housing.  

So that graph imagery is just so inadequate for showing wealth and poverty on a statistical distributive

scale.  Except very roughly

And---the one Verbally conveyed item that catches everyone's ear and raises everyone's hackles is not

at all the scale of the money pile on the right hand side---it is the report of CEO tribal members having

rigged themselves into a new system of getting not 9 times what their average workers get (1970)

but 3-400 times what the average corporate worker gets.  That's when the slowest girl in the class

can say, hey, no matter whether the company makes jet planes or jet black lace panties, that ratio

is just insane by any measure, be it medieval warlord or jungle tyrant or alien spaceship commander.  

B

Phil

Very interesting point about socialism.   A couple could have ten kids and get all kinds of expensive help from the government - day care, food allowances, special housing, etc. etc. etc.  Meanwhile I have no kids and live in an apartment that I pay for and, therefore get nothing from the government.  As you point out,  how does that bar graph account for that?  Equal little bars along a line?   Don't think so.  "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs?" Yeah,  sorta, but that doesn't fit on that graph.   In fact, it's a very different kind of inequality.

Apple:  Peg told me that Apple has purchased HP's huge Silicon Valley campus and plans to tear all the buildings down and erect buildings that Steve Job wanted.  Okay, big, unnecessary expense, but that could cost one or two billion at most.   Are the geeks just hoarding dollars?   Perhaps, but I think there has to be something more than that going on.  But what it could be eludes me totally.

The big snow storm that was supposed to bring DC area to a halt has turned out to be just some rain.  But the media were shrill for the past week about the dangers that were about to descend on us.

I just sent off copies of my book to Brown and Exeter, hoping for a decent mention in the alumni mags.  Exeter responded right away that they will try to put a mention in the spring issue.  I've asked them to delay until summer hoping that I'll get more than a two-line entry.

P

PS The article about health care in Time Magazine is incredibly long, but a real education about paying for health care, drugs, etc.  I still haven't finished it.

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