A collection of writings about place space writing and art …
as the tradition of this blog has it here are some of my favourite pictures from 2017. this time they come from a variety of places like zürich, paris, den haag, cologne, texel, munich, venice, kassel, duisburg and last and definitely not least hong kong. but most of them are of course from good old […]
Shot on location in Paris by Danish film Director Torben Skjødt Jensen, this highly atmospheric and engaging film as written and narrated by Ulf Peter Hallberg, provides an overview of Walter Benjamin’s life and work as well as some fabulous images of the Paris arcades.
Originally posted on YouTube by Jo Takahashi
In my last blog I discussed the act of walking and in particular the figure of the flâneuse in Ruth Orkin’s famous 1951 photograph of a woman walking in Florence. I also briefly touched on the ambulant subjects in Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and I want to […]
via The Flaneur in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde — Mr Hanson’s English
“Louis Aragon guides us through the Passage de L’Opéra, imaginatively exploring the allure of various establishments found in the covered arcades, including seedy lodging houses, cafés, hairdressing salons, public baths, theatres, washrooms and quaint specialist shops selling such items as handkerchiefs, walking sticks, and exotic stamps. He evokes the ambiguity of these places, their pleasures and secrets: ‘the ephemeral, the ghostly landscape of damnable pleasures and professions’. Aragon playfully opens up the arcades as diverse laboratories of sensations against what he sees as respectable, inoffensive bourgeoisie sensibilities. The passageway becomes a ‘method’ for loosening inhibitions, revealing both the shadowy and bright secrets that can be found behind its doors. In his stroll through Passage de L’Opéra the public baths and brothel are described in terms of ‘other places’, different worlds secreted in the heart of Paris, and when he moves out to the district of Butts-Chaumont, Aragon’s description and celebration of gardens and parks likewise become zones of mystery and enchantment. Gardens become places of, and for, dreams and mad invention. Parks, particularly at night, become places of sensual delight and lurking danger.”
Review of Peter Aragon’s Paris Peasant by Peter Johnson (12 February 2014) via http://www.heterotopiastudies.com/paris-peasant-aragon/
Page Images from A Rare Hardcover Edition of Paris Peasant. Photography by Marcus D. Niski © 2004-2017
…
But now it is evening. It is that strange, equivocal hour when the curtains of heaven are drawn and cities light up. The gas-light makes a stain upon the crimson of the sunset. Honest men and rogues, sane men and mad, are all saying to themselves, ‘The end of another day!’ The thoughts of all, whether good men or knaves, turn to pleasure, and each one hastens to the place of his choice to drink the cup of oblivion. Monsieur G. will be the last to linger wherever there can be a glow of light, an echo I of poetry, a quiver of life or a chord of music; wherever a passion can pose before him, wherever natural man and conventional man display themselves in a strange beauty, wherever the sun lights up the swift joys of the depraved animal! ‘A fine way to fill one’s day, to be sure’ …
– Charles Baudelaire, The Artist, Man of the World, Man of the Crowd, and Child in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays (1863) , Translated and Edited by Jonathan Myne, Phaidon, 1964, P 11
I have a distant recollection of walking all the way from the Gare du Nord to lunch in the Café Marly by way of the nineteenth-century arcades so beloved of Walter Benjamin. I tried to reconstruct this journey in reverse, starting in the Galerie Vivienne not far from Adrien Gardère’s office:-
A fabulous piece of flânerie and visual tour of Benjamin’s Passages by Charles Robert Saumarez Smith via Passages — | Charles | Saumarez | Smith |
City – the word evokes such dichotomous imagery. As I savour the languorous beauty of William Dalrymple’s City of Djinns, the words speak to me and I learn to see through new perspectives, the city I live in. Feeling every bit the outsider, adjusting to the linguistic differences, the charms of this city have begun to work on me […]
by Nirupama via http://themadrasponnu.wordpress.com/2017/04/18/poetry-in-a-city/
What is an arcade? In its classic sense, the term denotes a pedestrian passage or gallery, open at both ends and roofed in glass and iron, typically linking two parallel streets and consisting of two facing rows of shops and other commercial establishments – restaurants, cafés, hairdressers, etc. “Arcade” is the English name: in French the arcades are known as “passages”, and in German as “Passagen”.
The modern arcade was invented in Paris, and, while the concept was imitated in other cities – there are particularly fine mid-nineteenth century examples in Brussels – the Parisian arcades remain the type of the phenomenon. Benjamin quotes a passage from the Illustrated Guide to Paris, a German publication of 1852, which sums up the arcades’ essence:
“These arcades, a recent invention of industrial luxury, are glass-roofed, marble- panelled corridors extending through whole blocks of buildings, whose owners have joined together for such enterprises. Lining both sides of the corridors, which get their light from above, are the most elegant shops, so that the arcade is a city, a world in miniature, in which customers will find everything they need”.
– Christopher Rollason, The Passageways of Paris: Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project and Contemporary Cultural Debate in the West as found at: http://www.yatrarollason.info/files/BenjaminPassagesYatraversion.pdf as accessed on 22 September 2017.
By Marcus D. Niski
The flâneur – or the notion of the flâneur – is a creation of the nineteenth century Parisian streets. The flâneur is, by definition, an ‘exemplary stroller’ who strolls though the streets at a pace at which observation becomes the centrepoint of his or her experience.
As Edmund White suggests in his stunningly observant account of the flâneur and the ‘paradoxes of Paris’ *, Walter Benjamin was probably one of the most acute observers of the idea of the flâneur and one of literature’s most important writers in documenting the activities of this unique Parisian creature.
For Benjamin, the flâneur ultimately, is –
“… In search of experience, not knowledge…’ [Edmund White, p47]
The flâneur is also by definition not a tourist or pedestrian eager to rapidly ‘consume’ the landscape, but one who is almost overwhelmed by the delectable possibilities of the urban landscape; so much so that he or she is not really sure where to start or where the journey will take them.
Marcus D. Niski (2011)
* Edmund White, The Flaneur: A Stroll Through the Paradoxes of Paris, Bloomsbury, London, 2001.
Naked Cities Journal 
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