TRAVELS


This article at UrbanTick describes this Parisian time lapse by Luke Shepard, entitled 'Le Flaneur' as Debordian, or Situationist.  However,  Le Flaneur, the original, is of course Baudelairean (I have included the poem, A une passante, in French and English after the page break), and embodies quite a different perspective and way of engaging with the city. There is a very interesting article here about the flaneur as it moves into Benjaminian terms. Also, though I like the xx, I prefer the film without sound, without climax, with the images alone telling the tale of how time passes and shifts and speeds to the eye, rather than the images conforming to the rhythms and climaxes of the external song. 

In other armchair travels, I have discovered the newly released Google Art Project and am, as many others, utterly enamoured. 



À une passanteLa rue assourdissante autour de moi hurlait.
Longue, mince, en grand deuil, douleur 
majestueuse, 
Une femme passa, d'une main fastueuse 


Soulevant, balançant le feston et l'ourlet;Agile et noble, avec sa jambe de statue. 
Moi, je buvais, crispé comme un extravagant, 
Dans son oeil, ciel livide où germe l'ouragan, 
La douceur qui fascine et le plaisir qui tue.


Un éclair... puis la nuit! — Fugitive beauté 
Dont le regard m'a fait soudainement renaître,
Ne te verrai-je plus que dans l'éternité?
Ailleurs, bien loin d'ici! trop tard! jamais peut-être! 
Car j'ignore où tu fuis, tu ne sais où je vais, 
Ô toi que j'eusse aimée, ô toi qui le savais!
— Charles Baudelaire

To a Passer-ByThe street about me roared with a deafening 
sound. Tall, slender, in heavy mourning, majestic grief,
 A woman passed, with a glittering hand
Raising, swinging the hem and flounces of her 
skirt; Agile and graceful, her leg was like a statue's. 
Tense as in a delirium, I drank
From her eyes, pale sky where tempests 
germinate, The sweetness that enthralls and the pleasure 
that kills.A lightning flash... then night! Fleeting beauty 
By whose glance I was suddenly reborn,
Will I see you no more before eternity?
Elsewhere, far, far from here! too late! never 
perhaps! For I know not where you fled, you know not 
where I go,O you whom I would have loved, O you who 
knew it!

— William Aggeler, The Flowers of Evil (Fresno, CA: Academy Library Guild, 1954

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