The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire (2006) – Walter Benjamin

New English-language collection of Benjamin’s writing on Baudelaire: the title an obvious pun on Painter of Modern Life (1863) – Charles Baudelaire

The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire (2006) – Walter Benjamin
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Book Description
Walter Benjamin’s essays on the great French lyric poet Charles Baudelaire revolutionized not just the way we think about Baudelaire, but our understanding of modernity and modernism as well. In these essays, Benjamin challenges the image of Baudelaire as late-Romantic dreamer, and evokes instead the modern poet caught in a life-or-death struggle with the forces of the urban commodity capitalism that had emerged in Paris around 1850. The Baudelaire who steps forth from these pages is the flâneur who affixes images as he strolls through mercantile Paris, the ragpicker who collects urban detritus only to turn it into poetry, the modern hero willing to be marked by modern life in its contradictions and paradoxes. He is in every instance the modern artist forced to commodify his literary production: “Baudelaire knew how it stood with the poet: as a flâneur he went to the market; to look it over, as he thought, but in reality to find a buyer.” Benjamin reveals Baudelaire as a social poet of the very first rank.

The introduction to this volume presents each of Benjamin’s essays on Baudelaire in chronological order. The introduction, intended for an undergraduate audience, aims to articulate and analyze the major motifs and problems in these essays, and to reveal the relationship between the essays and Benjamin’s other central statements on literature, its criticism, and its relation to the society that produces it.

See also: Walter Benjamin – Charles Baudelaire

Interview with Salvatore Principato of Liquid Liquid

The year is 1979, and five young guys are free-flow jamming, in a Hispanic neighbourhood in downtown Manhattan, N.Y.C. The vocalist of this group is Salvatore Principato. By day, he works in a toy store (with Kim Gordon). By night, he‘s dropping his vocal inflections onto the rhythms of his group, who go by the name Liquid Liquid. Their own brand of ‘body music’ began to be heard not only alongside bands such as Suicide and ESG, but also in the pioneering sets of DJ’s like Afrika Bambaataa and Larry Levan. And without changing tack for new audiences, the band played on.
»When you go into the production stage of it, that’s when you think of ‘who is it that is gonna possibly care about this and how should I present it to them?’ But the original spark of inspiration, your groove or your melody or your catchy vocal line, it’s got to be just for you or the one you love.« —RedBullMusicAcademy

Sal Principato: »Alright, this video actually was done in 1927 by an animator called Oskar Fischinger and I don’t know if you know the history of animation. He was the guy behind the concept of ‘Fantasia’. [Walt] Disney’s ‘Fantasia’ and this video is called ‘When The World Got Drunk’. One of the guys from Liquid Liquid went out to L.A., California, to talk to his widow, like his 100 years old widow, to get the permission to use this for ‘Cavern’. She gave us [the permission], so it’s all straight up. And we are streaming it off the web, that’s why the sound and everything is a little twisted.«

Fischinger at YouTube.

The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (1989) – Susan Buck-Morss

The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (1989) – Susan Buck-Morss
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Review
“Wonderfully imaginative…. Like Benjamin, Buck-Morss is a surrealist explorer, her mysteries unraveled by intuition, revealed by illusion.” — Eugen Weber, The New Republic

“Buck-Morss has written a wonderful book. Although rigorously analytic, the book doesn’t sacrifice those qualities in Benjamin’s writing that are not reducible to method. his lyrical, hallucinatory evocation of the city as a place of dreams, myths, expectations.” — Herbert Muschamp, Artforum

From the publisher:
Walter Benjamin’s magnum opus was a book he did not live to write. In The Dialectics of Seeing, Susan Buck-Morss offers an inventive reconstruction of the Passagen Werk, or Arcades Project, as it might have taken form.

Working with Benjamin’s vast files of citations and commentary which contain a myriad of historical details from the dawn of consumer culture, Buck-Morss makes visible the conceptual structure that gives these fragments philosophical coherence. She uses images throughout the book to demonstrate that Benjamin took the debris of mass culture seriously as the source of philosophical truth.

The Paris Arcades that so fascinated Benjamin (as they did the Surrealists whose “materialist metaphysics” he admired) were the prototype, the 19th century “ur-form” of the modern shopping mall. Benjamin’s dialectics of seeing demonstrate how to read these consumer dream houses and so many other material objects of the time – from air balloons to women’s fashions, from Baudelaire’s poetry to Grandville’s cartoons – as anticipations of social utopia and, simultaneously, as clues for a radical political critique.

Buck-Morss plots Benjamin’s intellectual orientation on axes running east and west, north and south – Moscow Paris, Berlin-Naples – and shows how such thinking in coordinates can explain his understanding of “dialectics at a standstill.” She argues for the continuing relevance of Benjamin’s insights but then allows a set of “afterimages” to have the last word.

Susan Buck-Morss is Professor of Political Philosophy and Social Theory at Cornell University. The Dialectics of Seeing is included in the series Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought, edited by Thomas McCarthy.

Susan Buck-Morss is Professor of Political Philosophy and Social Theory, Department of Government, and Professor of Visual Culture, Department of Art History, Cornell University.

See also: seeing – dialectic – Arcades Project – Arcades Project blogathon

Gustave Caillebotte (1848 – 1894)

The Impressionist and patron of other artists Gustave Caillebotte (1848 – 1894) painted the Boulevard Haussmann under many aspects of seasonal and daily change.

Gustave Caillebotte: Urban Impressionist (1995) – Anne Distel
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Book Description
Caillebotte’s vivid representations of Parisian life bridged the gap between Realism and Impressionism during the 1870s and early 1880s. His Paris Street: Rainy Day and Floorscrapers–each the subject of a fascinating, extensively illustrated analysis in this book–have become icons of the Impressionists’ devotion to scenes of modern urban life.

Prepared by an international team of scholars to accompany the major 1994-95 retrospective organized by the Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Musée d’Orsay, Paris, and The Art Institute of Chicago, Gustave Caillebotte: Urban Impressionist reproduces 89 of his paintings and 28 of his drawings and studies, many of them from little-known private collections. Thoughtful essays examine both his work and his crucial role as an early patron and promoter of Impressionism. A chronology, list of exhibitions, and selected bibliography provide additional invaluable information.

See also: French art – realism – impressionism – Arcades Project

Girish on Archiveology

I know the blogosphere values currency, so as a small gesture against our impulse to only highlight the links du jour, I’m starting up a new feature called Archiveology devoted to unearthing valuable writing on the web that is not brand new. Today: an homage to five voracious [what a lovely word, it is also featured in V’s opening speech in V for Vendetta] cinephiles whose curiosity, open-mindedness, energy, intelligence and appetite I find truly inspirational. Reading them is like catching a bug that galvanizes me: to watch more, read more, think more, write more. Now to share that bug with you—in alphabetical order: —Girish

Girish then highlights the work of the following cinephiles: Zach Campbell, Raymond Durgnat, Adrian Martin, Olaf Möller and Michael Sicinski.

I could not agree more with Girish’s post (see The past is a much bigger place than the present)

Boulevards

Related: road – car – Baron Haussmann – Paris

Works with boulevard in title: Hollywood Boulevard (1976)

Avenue de la Grande Armée, one of Haussmann’s twelve grand avenues radiating from the Arc de Triomphe. La Défense and the Grande Arche (the hollow white cube) can be seen on the horizon. [Oct 2006]
Image sourced here.

Picture of Boulevard Haussmann during the Paris flood of 1910, photo by Pierre Petit (1832-1909)
Image sourced here.

1800s photograph of Printemps (meaning “spring” in French), a French department store (or a grand magasin, literally “big store”). I grandi magazzini Printemps in una foto d’epoca
Image sourced here.

Definition

Boulevard (French, from Dutch Bolwerk – bolwark, meaning bastion) has several generally accepted meanings. It was first introduced in the French language in 1435 as boloard and has since been altered into boulevard.

In this case, as a type of road, a boulevard is usually a wide, multi-lane arterial divided thoroughfare, often with an above-average quality of landscaping and scenery.

Baron Haussmann made such roads well-known in his re-shaping of Second Empire Paris between 1853 and 1870. The French word boulevard originally referred to the flat summit of a rampart (the etymology of the word distantly parallels that of bulwark). Several Parisian boulevards replaced old city walls; more generally, boulevards encircle a city center, in contrast to avenues that radiate from the center.

Boulevard is sometimes used to describe an elegantly wide road, such as those in Paris, approaching the Champs-Élysées. —http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boulevard [Oct 2006]

Haussmann’s boulevard

Boulevard Haussmann running from Paris VIIIe to Paris IXe arrondissement, 2.53 km long, is one of the wide tree-lined boulevards driven through Paris during the Second French Empire by Baron Haussmann, who retained the complete confidence of Napoleon III.

The department stores (“grands magasins”) Galeries Lafayette and Le Printemps are sited on the Boulevard Haussmann, which is mostly lined with apartment blocks, whose regulated cornice height gives a sense of regularity to the Boulevard.

At No. 102 lived the great French novelist Marcel Proust (1871 –1922) a martyr to asthma spent much of his life writing through the night hours in the famous cork-lined bedroom of his ornate townhouse. Alan Bates starred in 102 Boulevard Haussmann a 1991 made-for-television docudrama written by Alan Bennett [1].

At 158 and 158 bis the Musée Jacquemart-André presents a private collection of French furnishings.

The Impressionist and patron of other artists Gustave Caillebotte (1848 – 1894) painted the Boulevard under many aspects of seasonal and daily change. —http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boulevard_Haussmann [Oct 2006]

Soul Jazz presents: Give Me Your Love (2006) – Sisters Love

Soul Jazz presents: Give Me Your Love (2006) – Sisters Love
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Tommy’s disco delivery blog features audio of this new Soul Jazz compilation and good commentary:

The people at Soul Jazz Records have done it again. After having their Tom Moulton Mix compilation on my changer constantly for several months, they release this collection compiling many of the singles released by The Sisters Love (mostly on A&M and Motown from 1968-1973). So far, this is the first time any of their material has been assembled together in one place, let alone on CD.. After hearing about them on various forums, but never actually hearing them, I decided to take a chance and buy this thing. So far, the featured track “Give Me Your Love” from 1973 has become one of my absolute favourite proto-disco tracks ever. —Tommy at discodelivery blog [Oct 2006]

Approaching Nowhere: Photographs (2006) – Jeff Brouws

Approaching Nowhere: Photographs (2006) – Jeff Brouws
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Jeffrey T. Brouws (born 1955) is an American photographer whose work captures the social experience and cultural relevance of classic American iconic images, from highway landscapes of run-down motels and neon-lit gas stations to carnival scenes of small-town sideshows. —http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Brouws [Oct 2006]

Synopsis
Like many Americans who grew up during the spread of sprawl – with its predictable landscape of housing developments, shopping malls, interstate highways and big-box construction – acclaimed photographer Jeff Brouws is drawn to places that still embody the vernacular past as well as to those that starkly portray the soulless, franchised American landscape. This collection of evocative images of buildings and places seen from the American road began as a cultural geography of Main Streets and became a visual critique of the myth of upward mobility that created this car-centred, paved-over universe. Some images look outward to the edges of suburbia where sprawl is encroaching upon nature. Others turn inward, documenting the devastated inner cities. All of them reflect the complex beauty and desolation of visual life in America today.