Sunday 10 January 2010

Hello World


So, in addition to my other blog (http://ptbdisorder.blogspot.com) and editing an online magazine (http://thefzine.com) , I've decided to set up this to document my efforts as a modern flâneur.

I'm going to take the definition set out by Charles Baudelaire. He described the flâneur as a "gentleman stroller of the city streets" and as such, observed the city from a disconnected point of view. It links in with ideas presented by Guy Debord to form the idea of Psychogeography. 

What I'll try to do in this blog is get back to an eutechnical form of transport. Many people say they're "well travelled" but all they know is the taxi to the airport, the flight, and then the taxi to a hotel. To truly explore and understand the sense of place, one must take on either full eutechnical transport in the form of walking, or a hybrid: cycling. By using various forms of controlled transport to ferry us from place to place, we alienate ourselves from our environment, and cities tend to have less meaning.

The car, so long seen as a symbol of freedom, has turned into anything but. Too much traffic and a road system that plugs us all into bottlenecks is both cloying and unforgiving. If you use your SatNav to drive, you key in your destination and you drive. But you drive solely on the SatNav. You do not know where you are. We seem to be evolving entirely into this micro-world where no one knows where they are anymore.

On a more base level, we spend so much time exercising in sterile environments like gyms that we forget we have our own natural gymnasium at our disposal every day. There are no membership fees, just some of the finest scenery and architecture in the world.

So that's a brief introduction, I've got a feeling that this blog will be more sporadic than my other one, but nonetheless we'll see if this works. Hope you all give it a read once in a while.