Vive le flâneur - et la flâneuse!

 

Mariateresa Aiello: The Flâneur

(Ink on paper, 2011)

sketchbloom.com 

 

"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

 

I. 

 

In comparison to the concept of dandyism, which has often been referred to on Torpedo the Ark [1],  the idea of  flânerie - as embodied by the figure of le flâneur - has, rather mysteriously been overlooked.

 

I don't know why that is, particularly as this blog is essentially a form of strolling amongst literary leftovers, philosophical fragments, and the ruins of contemporary culture; coolly observing what passes for (and remains of) the real world whilst collecting images and ideas as I go, thereby making me a kind of postmodern flâneur in all but name.

 

For although the term flâneur threatens to transport us back to the arcades of 19th-century Paris and the musings of Baudelaire and Benjamin [2], that needn't be the case. For the concept of the flâneur - and flânerie as a practice - has been brought into the 21st-century by those who are more interested in moving through virtual spaces and exploiting the opportunities afforded by mobile technologies than actually standing on street corners. 

 

 

II. 

 

Having said that, as someone who has concerns with the question of technology, I'm not averse to physically still drifting through Soho; gazing in the windows of shops and restaurants; observing the street life whilst sipping coffee on Old Compton Street; jotting down notes for future blog posts; vaguely hoping someone I know will pass by, or that I might encounter the ghost of Sebastian Horsely; essentially just idling time away (much as I have the last forty years) [3].

 

Paradoxically, as a flâneur one is both an essential part of urban life and yet detached or set apart from it - which kind of suits me as I want to belong, but only on the margins or fringes of society; Johnny Rotten may want to destroy the passer-by, but I'm happy to be a non-participant who is not caught up in events or overcome with enthusiasm (for one thing, this provides a certain degree of immunity from infection by political or religious fanaticism).

 

 

III. 

 

Of course, it isn't easy to be a flâneur in the poetic-philosophical sense today.

 

Some (perhaps overly pessimistic) commentators suggest that the flâneur has been supplanted by the badaud - an open-mouthed bystander who simply gawks without intelligence or aesthetically attuned appreciation for what he sees; one who is enchanted by the Spectacle and is a representative of das Man [4].

 

Way back in 1867, before Debord and Heidegger were even born, the French journalist and author Victor Fournel wrote this:

 

"The flâneur must not be confused with the badaud; a nuance should be observed here. […] The simple flâneur […] is always in full possession of his individuality. By contrast, the individuality of the badaud disappears, absorbed by the outside world, which ravishes him, which moves him to drunkenness and ecstasy. Under the influence of the spectacle that presents itself to him, the badaud becomes an impersonal creature; he is no longer a man, he is the public, he is the crowd." [5]

 

However, just as I believe in fairies, so too do I believe there are flâneurs still amongst us today; just much rarer in number and harder to spot. And I was reinforced in this by a chance meeting a couple of weeks ago at the National Poetry Library with an astonishing young woman called Tamara who gaily confessed herself to be a flâneuse ... [6]

Notes

 

[1] Click here for several posts on TTA which have mentioned dandyism over the years.  

[2] Developing the work of Charles Baudelaire, who described the flâneur both in his poetry and the seminal essay Le Peintre de la vie moderne (1863), Walter Benjamin spurred artistic and theoretical interest in the flâneur as a key figure of the modern world; see The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Harvard University Press, 1999). And for a short discussion of this work by Benjamin - and my convoluted relationship with him - see the post dated 21 October 2024: click here. 

 

[3] Readers will doubtless understand that this is a form of active idleness; as one French literary critic noted, flâneurie is tout le contraire de ne rien faire. 

     

[4] The badaud is essentially the anti-flâneur; more bystander than passer-by; the sort of person who today films events on their mobile phone, bartering away the sheer intensity and joy of experience for mere representation. This includes filming those terrible sights from which any decent person would look away; the mangled remains of some poor devil who jumps from the platform in front of a train, for example. 

      In contrast, the flâneur takes single snaps that are technically imperfect and full of flaws, but never obscene or sensational; images that give a fleeting glimpse without exposing objects or making them strike a pose (thereby allowing objects to retain their allure). 

 

[5] Victor Fournel, Ce qu'on voit dans les rues de Paris [What One Sees in the Streets of Paris] (1867), p. 263. The (uncredited) English translation is cited on the Wikipedia entry for the subject of badaud: click here.  

      Walter Benjamin essentially adopts this distinction between the two figures of flâneur contra badaud in his work. 

 

[6] The feminine term flâneuse was born of recent feminist lit-crit and gender studies scholarship; previously, the term passante was used to describe the somewhat elusive modern woman who liked to wander round the city, experiencing public spaces in her own manner. Proust famously favoured this term.  

      Readers who are interested, might like to see Lauren Elkin's book: Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London (Chatto & Windus, 2016), in which she discusses a number of flâneuses, including George Sand, Virginia Woolf, Agnès Varda, Sophie Calle, and Martha Gellhorn.    

 

Punk's Dead Knot: Reflections on an Essay by Ian Trowell - Part 2: On Big Flavour Wraps and Vicious Burgers

You pays your money and you takes your choice ...

 McDonald's Big Flavour Wraps (2016) [a]

Vs Jamie Reid's Vicious Burger (1979) [b]

 

 

I. 

 

In the second part of Ian Trowell's dead knot essay, he discusses a 2016 TV ad by the "multinational fast-food franchise" [c] McDonald's for a new summer range of Big Flavour Wraps:

 

"Whilst not all of my observations and suggestions will be intentional on the part of the creative teams associated with the instigation and production of the commercial, my own intentions are to examine the ubiquitous, neutralized and atemporal representations of punk that resonate within the images and actions." [189]

 

Having established that, let's go ...

 

 

II. 

 

Via a detailed, imaginative, and theoretically-informed analysis of each scene, Trowell is very good at relaying the anachronistic tension present in an ad that seems designed to appeal to old punks on the one hand and disorientate them on the other: 

 

"How are we meant to feel, how did we used to feel, what has changed?" [190] 

 

Of course, the assimilation of punk began a long, long time before 2016: what is The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (1980) if not a brutal exposure of the way in which big business indecently exploits young flesh and rapidly co-opts, commodifies, and mythologises groups like the Sex Pistols? 

 

Anyone who felt genuinely shocked and outraged by "such an unholy alliance between McDonald's and punk" [195] - or by Virgin Money's issuing of Never Mind the Bollocks and 'Anarchy in the UK' credit cards the year before [d] - clearly wasn't paying attention to what McLaren and Reid were warning about in the Swindle and clearly hadn't read their Guy Debord [e].

 

Punk - and the very word is already a misunderstanding - may have initially wished to "disrupt cultural, social and historical forms and habits through a multitude of methods" [195], but it didn't take long before the majority of punk performers were looking to build long-lasting careers in the music business. 

 

If rock 'n' roll died when Elvis joined the US Army in 1958, then perhaps we can say punk died when John Lydon decided to trust a hippie and sign an eight album deal with Virgin. McLaren and Reid fought a kind of resistance campaign operating behind enemy lines in those months following the breakup of the group - and, personally, I think the work produced in 1978-79 is some of the most provocative and amusing - but the game was basically up.         

Ultimately, no matter how much some of us wish it were otherwise, the majority of Brits like their Big Flavour Wraps [f]. And, as Trowell rightly notes, for all the faux outrage expressed from some quarters when the McDonald's 2016 campaign was launched, what we didn't hear were the voices of "disgruntled and disgusted [...] customers outraged at the linking of punk and the safe, normative environment of McDonald's" [195].

 

 

Notes

 

[a] The McDonald's Big Flavour Wraps campaign (2016) was devised by the American advertising company Leo Burnett - the home of so-called populist creativity. It featured ersatz punk imagery and also incorporated the Buzzcocks' 1978 single 'What Do I Get?', written by Pete Shelley, into a TV ad. Morrissey, like many other old punks, was not best pleased. 

      To watch the 30 second TV ad, dir. Jason Lowe, click here. For further details of the people who worked on the campaign, please click here. 

 

[b] Jamie Reid's promotional poster for the Sex Pistols' single 'C'mon Everybody', released from the soundtrack of The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (Virgin Records, 1979), featuring a photo of vocalist Sid Vicious by Bob Gruen. For more details see the V&A Jamie Reid Archive: click here. 

      The Vicious Burger was just one of many imaginary products featured in a fake cinema ad in The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (dir. Julien Temple, 1980): "Feeling uptight, violent, or tense? Why not take it out on a sizzling Vicious Burger; the gristle ball that gives as good as it gets!"

 

[c] Ian Trowell, 'Punk's dead knot: Constructing the temporal and spatial in commercial punk imagery', Punk & Post-Punk, Volume 5, Number 2 (2016), pp. 181-199. Page references given in the post refer to the essay as published here. 

 

[d] See the post of 12 June 2015: click here. 

[e] Debord used the term récupération to refer to a process by which politically radical ideas and subversive art works are defused, incorporated, and commodified within mainstream culture (usually with the full collaboration of the media). See the post of 26 June 2023, in which I discuss this idea: click here. 

 

[f] According to statista.com, 96% of Brits were aware of McDonald's as a brand in 2023 and 60% not only liked to eat there, but expressed loyalty to the company.

 

  

Musical bonus: Buzzcocks, 'What Do I Get?', (United Artists, 1978): click here for the remastered 2001 version that appears on Singles Going Steady (Domino Recording Co., 2003). And for the official video, which Trowell provides a nice reading of in his essay (pp. 191-92), click here.

To read part one of this post, click here. 

On Recuperation and Karaoke Culture: Welcome to Glastonbury 2023

Steve Jones, Billy Idol, Tony James, and Paul Cook demonstrating 

the spectacular nature of punk rock at Glastonbury 2023 [1]

 

 

I. 

 

 

I hate - and have always hated - the Glastonbury Festival. 

 

And so, whilst 'Smash It Up' may not be my favourite track by The Damned, it contains one of my favourite verses of any song and I fully endorse the vitriol aimed at those zen fascists who continue to insist we all wear a happy face and share their vision of unity in diversity: You can keep your Krishna burgers and your Glastonbury hippies [2].  

 

Glastonbury may have started out in 1970 as a counter-cultural event rooted in the free-festival movement, but that's not what it is today, over fifty years on. Now it has become the coldest of all cold monsters, feeding on everything and everyone, and from whose mouth comes the monstrous lie: Art can make you happy and music set you free! 

 

Glastonbury, basically, is a means of establishing the total control and coordination of all aspects of what was once known as pop culture, or youth culture. 

 

The Nazis had a term for such a process: Gleichschaltung. Some translate this as bringing-into-line, but it more accurately means that everything is placed on a single circuit or network, so that it only requires one master switch that can be flicked on or off at the will of a single governing body or individual: Michael Eavis Über alles.   

 

 

II. 

 

For those who think this comparison with Nazi Germany is a bit over the top and who are uncomfortable with the use of the word Gleichschaltung, let's try another term - this time one that is recognisable in English, even though it's French in origin: Récupération ...

 

This term, often associated with the Situationist Guy Debord, refers us to a process by which politically radical ideas and subversive art works are defused, incorporated, and commodified within mainstream culture (usually with the full collaboration of the media) [3].  

 

Glastonbury is a huge recuperative machine making a spectacle out of aged rockers who were once the voice of teen rebellion; gleefully castrating the Sex Pistols, for example, and even managing to strip the songs of the Smiths of all negativity (their dark humour, their melancholy, their pain) by hiring the smiling anti-punk Rick Astley to show that Morrissey really isn't needed any longer. 

 

The audience sing along and wave their arms, or passively stand and watch the reified spectacle. It's an amusing irony that the festival takes place in fields where usually there are a large number of dairy cows grazing, because that is what these audience members essentially constitute - a human herd consuming pop fodder.     

 

Shortly before he died in April 2010, Malcolm McLaren bemoaned the fact that genuine creativity (which is a chaotic phenomenon that often ends in failure) was increasingly becoming impossible within what he described as a karaoke world - i.e., an ersatz society, that only provides us with an opportunity to safely revel in our own stupidity and the achievements of others; a life lived by proxy [4].

 

And, whilst I'm a little uneasy with his use of words like authenticity, he was making an important (though hardly original) point. Britain's got talent: but it's lost its soul.          

 

Notes

 

[1] I am grateful to Roadent for suggesting that Generation Sex are best understood in terms of the Spectacle (i.e. from the theoretical perspective of Situationism).

 

[2] The Damned, 'Smash It Up', single release from the album Machine Gun Etiquette (Chiswick Records, 1979): click here for the official video. 

      Alternatively, you can click here, for a live performance of the song on The Old Grey Whistle Test (6 November 1979), followed by a (curtailed) performance of another track released as a single from the above album, 'I Just Can't Be Happy Today'. 

 

[3] See Debord's seminal text La société du spectacle (1967). It was first published in English in 1970, trans. Fredy Perlman and friends.  

[4] Readers who are interested can click here to watch McLaren deliver his final public talk at the Handheld Learning Conference (2009). Originally entitled 'Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Txt Pistols', the talk is now better known by the title it appears under on ted.com - 'Authentic creativity vs. karaoke culture'.  

 

From Harold Hill to Hampstead Heath: Walking in the Footsteps of D. H. Lawrence with Catherine Brown

 

Ceramic Blue Plaque erected in 1969 by Greater London Council 

at 1 Byron Villas, Vale of Health, Hampstead, London, NW3 

englishheritage.org.uk

 

 

Hampstead is an affluent residential community in northwest London, long favoured by an assortment of artists, intellectuals, millionaires, and Marxists (i.e., the posh, the privileged, the often pretentious, and the politically radical). 

 

It's not an area I'm familiar with or particularly comfortable in; for whilst it's certainly very lovely, it's a long way from Harold Hill and I don't wanna go to where, where the rich are living.      

 

Nevertheless, putting aside my prejudices as a Clash City Rocker [1], I recently agreed to join a walking tour of Hampstead, led by Dr Catherine Brown; Vice President of the D. H. Lawrence Society, Founder of the Lawrence London Group, and unofficial Queen of the wider Lawrence collective [2].

 

Because Lawrence - a red-bearded poet and novelist who was deeply proud of his working-class roots in an East Midlands mining community - was once, briefly, a resident of Hampstead, there's even an English Heritage blue plaque celebrating the fact. 

 

We might see this as a good thing; a sign of nascent social mobility in the twentieth-century, or the classless nature of the art world; a meritocratic community in which anyone with genius [3] is welcome. Or we might view it as just one more attempt to neutralise Lawrence by assimilating him and his work into the dominant culture that he did so much to counter [4].       

 

Still, the blue plaque was just one of many things to stop and gawp at and hear about on the walking tour. Other highlights included:

 

(i) Hampstead Underground Station, which Lawrence used (but didn't like). Whether he knew it was (and still is) London's deepest tube stop - 192 feet beneath the surface - (or whether he would've cared), I don't know. Designed by architect Leslie Green, it opened in June 1907, just a few months before Lawrence first visited the area.    

 

(ii) Whitestone Pond, close to where Lawrence saw a German airship over London, in September 1915, an event that obviously captured his imagination. This is how Lawrence describes the incident in a letter: 

 

"Last night when we were coming home the guns broke out, and there was a noise of bombs. Then we saw the Zeppelin above us, just ahead, amid a gleaming of clouds; high up, like a bright golden finger, quite small, among a fragile incandescence of clouds. And underneath it were splashes of fire as the shells fired from earth burst. Then there were flashes near the ground - and the shaking noise. It was like Milton - then there was a war in heaven. But it was not angels. It was that small golden Zeppelin, like a long oval world, high up. It seemed as if the cosmic order were gone, as if there had come a new order, a new heavens above us: and as if the world in anger were trying to revoke it. Then the small long-ovate luminary, the new world in the heavens, disappeared again. 

      I cannot get over it, that the moon is not Queen of the sky by night, and the stars the lesser lights. It seems the Zeppelin is in the zenith of the night, golden like a moon, having taken control of the sky; and the bursting shells are the lesser lights. 

      So it seems our cosmos is burst, burst at last, the stars and moon blown away, the envelope of the sky burst out, and a new cosmos appeared, with a long-ovate, gleaming central luminary, calm and drifting in a glow of light, like a new moon, with its light bursting in flashes on the earth, to burst away the earth also. So it is the end - our world is gone, and we are like dust in the air." [5] 

 

(iii) Various places associated with the short story 'The Last Laugh' (1924), a tale in which Pan appears in Hampstead, with predictably tragic consequences. The story is  an example of what might be termed sardonic paganism; a mocking and malevolent form of queer gothic fiction directed towards a dark god who is always coming, but who never quite arrives or reveals himself. 

      By setting the story in a leafy north London suburb, Lawrence relates his onto-theological vision to everyday experience, whilst, at the same time, demonstrating how the latter unfolds within a wider, inhuman context that is resistant to any kind of moral-rational codification. He thereby attempts to loosen the aura of necessity surrounding categories of the present and restore a little primordial wonder to NW3 [6].

 

(iv) Several houses belonging to Lawrence's swell friends, who often provided him and Frieda with refuge when needed. These didn't particularly interest, but Hampstead Heath certainly did and one can see why Lawrence - who mostly hated London and its damp gloom - loved this ancient area of woodland, meadows, and ponds spanning 790 acres. 

Anyway, in closing I'd like to thank Catherine for all her hard work and kindness; I'm sure the handful of Lawrence devotees who turned up on the day - including Nottingham's favourite son and digital pilgrim, James Walker - enjoyed the tour and learnt something new. 

Members of the London Lawrence Group 

   

Notes

 

[1] I'm referring here to (and paraphrasing a line from) a song by The Clash called 'Garageland', the final track to be found on their eponymous debut album (CBS Records, 1977): click here. The song was written in response to a snide remark by middle-class music critic Charles Shaar Murray - precisely the kind of person who lives in Hampstead.  

 

[2] Catherine Brown, 'Lawrence's Hampstead: A Walking Tour'. Full details (and illustrations) can be found on Catherine's excellent website: click here. 

 

[3] Lawrence was deeply suspicious of how the term genius was used by certain people to excuse his lack of finesse and the more problematic aspects of writing. In a short piece written towards the very end of his life, he recounts, for example, Ford Maddox Hueffer's reaction to the manuscript of The White Peacock: "'It's got every fault that an English novel can have. But, you've got GENIUS.'"

      Lawrence notes: "In the early days, they were always telling me I had got genius, as if to console me for not having their incomparable advantages." See 'Myself Revealed', Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 178-79. 

[4] Guy Debord famously describes this process of recuperation in La société du spectacle (1967). In brief: all politically radical ideas and/or subversive works of art are eventually defused and then safely incorporated back into mainstream culture, where they can be successfully exploited.   

 

[5] See The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. II, ed. George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press,1981), pp. 389-90. The letter was sent to Lady Ottoline Morrell (9 Sept 1915).

      One suspects that, Lawrence being Lawrence, he also found the phallic shape of the Zepplin particularly striking ... This same event was also described in his 1923 novel Kangaroo; see pp. 215-16 of the Cambridge Edition, ed. Bruce Steele, (1994).

 

[6] See the post dated 15 May 2017 - 'Pan Comes to Hampstead' - click here.

 

 

Evolution as a Vaudeville of Forms: Notes on Genetic Drift and Ontological Seasickness

Peter Sloterdijk by Martin Sjardijn 

Oil on canvas (21.7 x 23.6 inches) 

saatchiart.com

  

 

I.

 

Say the word drift to me and, being a child of '68, I automatically think of Guy Debord's revolutionary theory of la dérive (1956) - defined by him as a mode of experimental behaviour linked to the conditions of urban society. 

 

Basically, it's a random stroll through city streets, with no point or purpose and no fixed or final destination, leading to chance discoveries and encounters with strangers. The hope is that situations will arise from out of these encounters and from one's own disorientation and that one will also be able to slowly build up a new psychogeographical map of an otherwise alienating environment. 

 

For Debord and friends, the dérive was a necessary technique to combat the increasingly predetermined and boring experience of life lived within the world of capitalism and consumer culture, or what he termed the société du spectacle. 

 

But say the word drift to a biologist, however, and they think of something entirely different ...

 

 

II.

 

Genetic drift - in the simplest of all possible nutshells - is a change in the gene pool due to a random event (or series of events) rather than natural (non-random) selection. 

 

For some biologists, it plays a relatively minor role in evolution compared to the latter. But others, such as the Japanese biologist Motoo Kimura, argue that most evolutionary changes at the molecular level - and most of the variation within and between species - are due to genetic drift acting on neutral mutations.

 

I suppose the concept of genetic drift excites philosophically for much the same reason as punctuated equilibrium (contra phyletic gradualism) excites; namely, because it is about contingency and chance rather than a slowly unfolding form of deterministic logic. This may not make it true - but it makes it sexier and more seductive to people like me. 

 

 

III.

 

Peter Sloterdijk is also excited by the thought of genetic drift, as we can see in the following passage:

 

"We can't really imagine today how shocking the idea once was that God did not conceive the species, and that neither the archetypal content of a species nor its physical appearance are fixed once and for all. That is the real shock of the nineteenth century: the genetic drift, the idea that the original images of humans and beasts, of plants and everything that grows and blossoms, are not permanently fixed but drift in evolution, as we say today. That is worse than the worst seasickness because it affects ontological forms, as it were. When the species drift we become ontologically seasick - suddenly we have to watch fish becoming amphibians and the latter becming terrestrial animals; we witness a mammoth transforming into an elephant, and wolves turning into dogs - and all sorts of other monstrosities."

 

This is not just evolution as a kind of freak show, as Thomas Macho suggests, but as a vaudeville of forms, and evolutionary drift puts an end to all ontological security and comfort - God is dead, "because he is no longer any good as a guarantor of the species". 

 

Sloterdijk continues:  

 

"No Catholic defence front can change that, and humanism can only offer a weak alternative in this respect. We can see this quite clearly in the current genetics debate, with Catholics and old-fashioned humanists very heavily over-represented. They think it is a good idea to erect a corral round the human gene and shoot at everybody who tries to change it in some way. The unfortunate thing about this issue is that normal reproduction has long since been exposed for contributing to species drift, and every normal sexual act among humans infinitesimally advances this drifting. We must finally realise that the potential of the genus per se is monstrous. In fact, anthropology is only possibe now as a branch of general monstrology."    

 

This, it seems to me, is a vital issue, as we flow with the movement of our culture towards an age in which biology will have ever-greater importance; allowing us not only to eat from the Tree of Knowledge, but prune and shape the Tree of Life itself. In future, evolutionary drift will increasingly be subject to bio-technology and human intervention, turning existence into an experimental field.

 

Of course, this will lead to endless ethical debates, but let's not give too much time to those reactionaries living in a hothouse of moral overexcitement. For it's difficult "to stay in such hyper-moral hothouses for long without getting breathless. If you're interested in a cultured style of living, you should protect the house of being from overheating" - if you catch my drift.  

 

 

Notes

 

Guy Debord, 'Theory of the Dérive' (1956): click here to read on Situationist International Online. 

 

Peter Sloterdijk, 'Raising Our Heads: Pampering Spaces and Time Drifts', a conversation with Thomas Macho, in Selected Exaggerations, ed. Bernhard Klein, trans. Karen Margolis, (Polity Press, 2016), pp. 82-105. Lines quoted are on pp. 97, 98, and 105. 

 

This post is for Andy Greenfield, who kindly advised me on it.  

A Sex Pistol in Paris

One of the more amusing scenes in The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle features Sid Vicious wandering the streets of Paris in the spring of '78, confronting locals including a policeman, a prostitute, and a young female fan working in a pâtisserie.

One is tempted to describe it as a provocative form of punk dérive - a mode of experimental behavior, theorised by Guy Debord, in which individuals aimlessly stroll through the city and allow themselves to be seduced by the attractions of urban society and random encounters with strangers. 

I'm not saying that Sid gave a shit about psychogeography - or that he needed lessons from anyone on emotional disorientation - but, as a Sex Pistol, he was well-versed by Malcolm in the art of creating situations that challenge the predictable and monotonous character of everyday life and he cuts an undeniably unique figure as a spiky-haired flâneur, beer bottle in hand, and wearing his favourite swastika emblazoned red t-shirt ...

See: The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle, dir. Julien Temple, 1980: click here to watch the scenes of Sid drifting round Paris as discussed above. 

For a related post to this one on Sid's performance of 'My Way', click here. 

In Praise of Inna Schevchenko: La Nouvelle Marianne

Photo of Inna Schevchenko (Reuters, 2013)  

Femen (Фемен) is a radical feminist movement that has recently gained international notoriety due to its topless protests against sexism and the phallocratic authority of church, state, and industry.

Originally founded in the Ukraine, in 2008, by Anna Hutsol and others, the group is now based in Paris but has members and supporters in several other countries, including the UK, where it is currently recruiting activists who are encouraged to paint their naked bodies with various slogans in order to promote an aggressive gender politics termed sextremism.

Now, whether turning your breasts into weapons is or is not an effective tactic in the war against patriarchy is debatable. But I must confess to having a soft-spot for the very vocal (and very beautiful) spokesperson for Femen, Inna Schevchenko, who resembles an illegitimate love-child born of Guy Debord and Ilona Staller.

But then any woman who cuts down a large wooden Cross in Kiev with a chainsaw is always going to capture my attention, affection, and admiration - even when said action was condemned by Maria Alyokhina of Pussy Riot and even when Miss Schevchenko is accused by opponents of being a self-promoting wannabe and a mere puppet under the control of the Femen Svengali-figure, Victor Svyatski.

Bare breasts do not an amazon make - that's certainly true. However, anyone prepared to take on a public role that invites ridicule and abuse - as well as very real threats of rape, kidnap, and murder - deserves respect and support in my eyes.