November 02, 2007

I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks,—who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering: which word is beautifully derived from “idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretence of going à la Sainte Terre,” to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, “There goes a Sainte-Terrer,” a Saunterer, a Holy-Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean.

--Henry David Thoreau, Walking(1862)

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The Last Clown, 2000, is an endless animated loop by the Belgian Francis Alÿs. Set to the music of Charles Mingus, a man strolls along a path, lost in his thoughts. A pratfall and a glance over his shoulder elicit laughter, after which he returns to his private world.

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"There was the pedestrian who wedged himself into the crowd, but there was also the flâneur who demanded elbow room and was unwilling to forego the life of the gentleman of leisure. His leisurely appearance as a personality is his protest against the division of labour which makes people into specialists. it was also his protest against their industriousness. Around 1840 it was briefly fashionable to take turtles for a walk in the arcades. the flâneurs liked to have the turtles set the pace for them."

-- Walter Benjamin

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One of the basic situationist practices is the dérive [literally: “drifting”], a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances. Dérives involve playful-constructive behavior and awareness of psychogeographical effects, and are thus quite different from the classic notions of journey or stroll.

In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there. Chance is a less important factor in this activity than one might think: from a dérive point of view cities have psychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones.

--Guy Debord

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November 01, 2007

To provoke, or sustain, a reverie in a bar, you have to drink English gin, especially in the form of the dry martini. To be frank, given the primordial role played in my life by the dry martini, I think I really ought to give it at least a page. Like all cocktails, the martini, composed essentially of gin and a few drops of Noilly Prat, seems to have been an American invention. Connoisseurs who like their martinis very dry suggest simply allowing a ray of sunlight to shine through a bottle of Noilly Prat before it hits the bottle of gin. At a certain period in America it was said that the making of a dry martini should resemble the Immaculate Conception, for, as Saint Thomas Aquinas once noted, the generative power of the Holy Ghost pierced the Virgin's hymen "like a ray of sunlight through a window — leaving it unbroken."

--Luis Buñuel's autobiography, My Last Sigh

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Erte, Cocktail party

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August 22, 2007

Nectar vina cibus vestis doctrina facultas -- Venantius Fortunatus

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January 26, 2005

Saber mirar

Saber mirar es un sistema completamente nuevo de agrimensura espiritual. Saber mirar es un modo de inventar. E no existe invención tan pura como aquella que ha creado la mirada anestésica de ojo limpíssimo, ausente de pestañas, del Zeiss: destilado e atento, imposible a la floración rosada de la conjuntivitis.

La fotografia, como pura creación del espíritu (1927), Salvador Dalí

Knowing how to look is a completely new system of spiritual surveying. Knowing how to look is a way of inventing. And there isn’t a purer invention as the one created by the anesthetic glance of the most clean eye, absent of eyelashes, that is the Zeiss: distilled and attentive, impossible to the pink flowering of the conjuntivitis.

Photography, as a pure creation of the spirit (1927), Salvador Dalí

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