Blah

I can’t believe it. I’ve waited five long days for this moment and I’m spoiling it. It’s Saturday, and I’m bored. This should be concidered a crime, but obviously I can’t help it.  

Waking up

I know that this blog has been deserted and I take full responsibility for this. I’ve been busy enjoying a few weeks of peace, away from everything that makes life oppressive at times. Working, studying, thinking, writing, talking and even dressing up. In fact, nothing really productive. 

Free from its daily obligations and worries, the mind wanders. After a few days away, you stop being an employee, a student, the intellectual you pretend to be, the person the others want you to be.  You stop being anything else but yourself. With nothing more important to do than picking up the next movie or pizza toppings, you enjoy your free time with a nonchalance and an unconcern that maybe only childs can have. 

But tomorrow, the vacation ends and I’ll be back into my old habit, with the pressure to perform in one pocket, and the obligation to work hard in the other. Can’t say I’m happy, can’t say I wouldn’t have taken more of these days of escape, but there is nothing I can do about it except to think that wearing something else than a pyjama will be nice, for a change.

Modern questions for flexible workers

So you graduated a few years ago. Did a few boring jobs that were more or less related to what you had studied for. The odds are that you probably joined the proportion of the workforce engaged in precarious labour, counting on irregular hours and short-term contracts to pay the rent. Join the club.

Maybe you don’t like your job. Maybe you feel over qualified for the tasks you have to perform every day. Or maybe this just isn’t how you imagined your work-life to be. Discussing precarity with a bunch of friends who find themselves in the same situation made you realise how your life will be different from the life of your parents, how the flexibilisation of working conditions, a consequence of post-fordism, will condemn you to temporary jobs and instability. Maybe you are dreaming of the day you’ll get the security and the stability of a permanent job, where you’ll be able to start thinking about a future and make plans, where you will be proud of the work you’re doing, where money problems and job hunting won’t be part of the daily agenda.

Somehow, you’ll get there. And strangely, you’ll maybe wonder if this is what you really want, if you are ready to “settle down”, if this is not the end of some of your dreams, if this comfortable stability won’t prevent you from taking some risks or try new things in the future.

I hate to admit it, but flexibility has some good sides. The constant hope for something better to come, the possibility to quit your crappy job or your second-hand apartment for some other project, that long trip you’ve decided to take this year, the opportunity to change environment and meet new people and colleagues, the network you’re building by complaining about your precarious condition with other workers or students, the way it forces you to get intellectual and social stimulation outside work and to keep an open mind for all the possibilities which might come across. But of course, to stay in such state of instability is tiresome, frightening, and often uncomfortable.

Neither side is perfect. It perhaps depends on how you see it and what you want with your life. If you know what that is.

The truth about Salvo.

The title is not an answer, but a question. Who the hell is Giovanni Salvo, and what is he doing in my drawer?

I found yesterday one of those small papers from another time, the kind of note you find folded in a book you haven’t read a long time ago, which brings you a few years back, to the time when you wrote it. But this time, the piece of paper remains a mystery. I know I wrote it, but I can’t make any sense out of it.

“25,5 Giovanni Salvo” “Dr Ghali”

I’ve looked them up, and although I’ve found some info about Ghali (though no explanation as to why I wrote his name down), there is not that much written about Giovanni. Does it refer to Giovanni Salvo D’Antonio, the italian painter? Since when am I into that kind of old thing anyway?

Oh well Giovanni dear, if you happen to google your name one of these days, and find your way to this post, tell me who you are.

The modern walker

Fall has officially begun, although I prefer my autumns chillier and darker. Despite this somewhat warm October, the colder evenings remind me that the weather will soon be perfect to stroll the streets.  

The concept of the flâneur, although very romantic, is a symptom of modernity. As a matter of fact, it is the Industrial Revolution which made the phenomenon possible, reshaping cities, constructing boulevards and arcades, allowing passersby to walk around boutiques and under covered passages. Under the 19^thcentury, Haussmann renovation of Paris, the expansion of the railway system as well as the development of industries changed the face of the city forever. The new commodity culture organized the public space, turned the streets into interiors, creating more places for commercial exchanges and for customers to wander. Many poets and artists were seduced by these comfortable arcades. Nerval, Réda, Constantin Guy and Baudelaire are some of them.  

This industrial era is a period of high mobility, as capitalism changed what was still and somehow predictable into something that changed constantly. Everything, from the quick assembly lines of factories that turn a few pieces of material into a product of mass production, to the speed of modern transportation, started to move constantly. Even the poet left his living room to observe the buildings, the signs and the crowd that has now become the subject of his reverie. Baudelaire once pointed out that beauty both had an eternal and a circumstantial side. The flâneur is without a doubt an observer of the transitory and fugitive nature of the city.  

The flânerie also changes our relation to the Other. The depersonalization of the crowd allows the flâneur to experience solitude surrounded by dozens. The city is anonymous and its passersby are impossible to seize. Who is this strange man that I just saw? It is easy, and often pleasant, for the flâneur to imagine the lives of those he sees on the street, to act like a physiognomist. But his reflections are nothing but illusions and dreams, and soon the different individuals merge into one another, as otherness becomes repetitive and undefinable, but also distant and inaccessible. Somehow, one can say that these anonymous passersby become the commodity they produce, wear, buy or sell. The machine-like city becomes the reflection of the new industrialized world.  

Jacques Réda adapted the flânerie to post-modernity. While Baudelaire’s arcades were a transposition of the comfortable living rooms around which the walker could gravitate, Reda’s streets never led to a center. The poet is in fact attracted by its periphery, walking towards the center while never being able to approach it. Like Derrida, Reda’s poetry rejects the idea of the Object, of the Ideal. His poetry is torn between the fracture and the quest for unity and order, between the crowd and the solitude, between the search for a center and the call of the periphery. Reda’s walks are therefore never linear, almost rhizomatic, like an air of jazz, and the changing city is never captured.    

As suggested by Deleuze (after all, can’t we read about the “ligne de fuite des nuages” in one of Réda’s poem “Le détour”?), the poet doesn’t want to fix what he sees into words or frames but let each being and thing express their full potential without being limited to any definition. Similarly, the post-modern flâneur becomes an observer of the becoming city, of its perpetual movements and of its eternal escape from the center.  

but more about that later.

Les ruines de Paris (Réda, 1977) Le Spleen de Paris (Baudelaire, 1862) Das Passagenwerk (Walter Benjamin)

For a minute there…

I’m always the last one informed. In the meantime, Fugazi’s Ian Mackaye died and resurrected for the moment of a [bad] joke. I’m truly relieved to see he’s fine, but amazed that some people have that much time to waste on lame pranks.

On another note, I’m starting this blog today. Gotta spend more time on the settings, but in a few days, I’ll be good to go.