two flaneurs in barcelona

Sydney

Several months ago, before it was everyone's patriotic duty, I bought a plasma television.  Like almost all acts of shopping, the purchase was tinged with mortification, and not just because plasma screens have become a global symbol of Consumption (a word increasingly tinged with its older meaning, that of a wasting disease). 

Shopping is mortifying because shopping is war.  Stores are not meant to sell me what I want, but to make me want what they have.  Often I feel like Frodo in Mordor: I'm deep in enemy territory, and the easiest thing to do is put on the ring, surrender.  Just buy something, the store tells me, and you'll be happy.  In fact, you'll be one of us.

When it comes to electronics, the act of buying is also a roll of the dice, or if you prefer, an act of faith.  On average, these products do about 80% of what they're advertised to do, and the obstacles to returning them ensure that those responsible never find out how defective their products are.  Remote controls elevate the defect to a design principle.  My television's remote has 58 buttons.  Four of them seem to do something, but only if I shake the remote firmly while pressing them, as though I were an angry old man with Parkinson's disease.

And yet I bought a plasma screen.  I'm looking at it now, from two meters away on the couch.  I never connected it to a television signal, of course; I get all the broadcast television I need at the gym.  Rarely, I use it for movies.  Mostly it's my computer screen for writing.  But its highest use, as it turns out, is Google Earth.

Today, for example, my friend and mentor Alan Greiner wrote to me about his recent trip to Barcelona, so I opened up Google Earth and followed along:

A comfortable little hotel near Placa Catalunya and La Rambla set me in the center of things

Yes, that's Plaza de Catalunya right in the centre, on the seam that separates the old city (lower right) from the perfectly gridded 19th-century Eixample district in the upper left.  Of the latter my friend writes:

All streets within the grid arrive at crossings, of course, but these are filled with light, space, and air, for at each crossing the corners of the buildings have been cut off!

... and rather than waiting for him to describe what he means, I just go look.  Sure enough ...

... so when I return to his explanation, my aerial view can dance with my friend's street-level eye ...

Not just a bit of corner is cut; there's enough diagonal space for large, ornate apartment house doorways with windows and balconies to each side. Walking in L'Eixample means long distances, as the crosswalks are on the parallels, not the diagonal cuts, and the roundabouts out there really hum.

... and I end up with a richer impression than either perspective would have on its own. 

What I can't show you, with screen-shots in a blog, is the freedom and lightness with which I move about in Google Earth, zooming or panning to follow the lightest breezes of curiosity. (What's that?  Well, let's look ... wait a minute, where is the water? ... zoom out .. oh, there it is, so it's facing the water, see? ... but what's that over there? ...).  It is, in short, the fundamental sensation of the flaneur, the aimless pedestrian free to follow the slightest impulses.  I've written as a flaneur of Sydney and Delhi, and my friend is another of the species:

You would be challenged and have fun writing about Barcelona, a city that sputtered and splashed up from its sea-port long ago, grew extraordinarily wealthy, gambled on Catalan blood, shed the same in battles and purges, fell into dire poverty and slowly pulled itself together and up, bootstrap by halyard. ...  Architecturally one can, in the space of a day's amble, walk through its entire history, and in some places find at an intersection the whole of it in the facades of buildings and houses.

... and reading this I let my eye wander over the city on Google Earth, zooming in for detail or out for context, until I find examples of the jumble he describes.  There's actually a block called Illa de la Discòrdia, the "block of discord," where houses by three famous architects, working in different styles, sit clashingly side by side, like enemies consigned for eternity to the same pit of hell.  Zoom into it on Google Earth, and of course there's a link to a photo, actually a beautiful 1906 rendering.

I didn't mean to lead you far into that distraction, but for the flaneur, distraction itself is the point. Gaze at almost any city on Google Earth, and something will arouse your curiosity.  Zoom in, poke around.  In one optional layer, little blue dots on the aerial image are links to photographs that various travelers have posted.  Looking at Barcelona, then, I can immediately identify the main tourist attractions, such as the Sagrada Familia, from the mass of blue dots buzzing around them like flies.

In some countries, of course, there's also Street View, photos taken at regular intervals by Google camera-cars driving along each street.  They are the opposite of tourist photos:  pure records of whatever is there, important or not.

Street View might appear to let us be flaneurs worldwide from our livingrooms.  But while Street View arouses this desire it fails to satify it.  For one thing, the photos are static, and at street-level the real life and texture of the city can't be seen in a static image.  Someday, perhaps there will be Street View video, with sounds and smells and maybe even virtual experiences -- young people of your preferred sex hailing you seductively in cafes etc.  That, finally, may be the solution to the carbon footprint problem of air travel.

But more important, Street View is obviously the view of a dead mechanical eye.  Even the most amateur photographer would not have taken the Street View photograph above; there is no subject, no point of view, no figure and ground -- in short, there is no desire. Nobody cares, so when I look at Street View I usually don't care either.  Once I'm on the street, or inside a building, I defer to good writing by a real flaneur, such as my friend Alan:

To emerge from hours within Casa Batllo upon the busy avenues of the city is a shock, akin to shaking off the droplets of that clear water to discover, suddenly, a surrounding, fairly well-organized, wild animal zoo. People, vespas, cabs, cars, flashing lights, a headless mannequin in a store window, each main street shouting with its own Christmas lighting display, gigantic computer-controlled snowflakes falling down the curved steel-and-glass facade of the big department store, the tapas bars full, and one's stomach not. On the third night I found a favorite little place, though, where the kitchen was simple, hot, inexpensive, and excellent -- to me, at least, after walking all day, often much farther than I'd have planned. But who plans, yes?

Yes, by definition, the flaneur never plans, and in this respect I'm like a flaneur when I follow along.  At home in Sydney with my plasma TV and Google Earth, I can soar and dive over Barcelona like an obnoxious daredevil pilot, whose darkest secret is that he'd rather be a pedestrian.

Comments

[dale]

(Yes, I've found it remarkable how un-compelling the "street views" usually are, too. "The attraction of random views" turns out actually to be "the attraction of a random selection of views that have arrested other people's eyes.")

Wonderful meditation on shopping!

[Denis Wilson]

Hi Jarrett

You certainly have assessed the function of the market well.

As for this comment: "young people of your preferred sex hailing you seductively in cafes etc." - that would do more than lower our carbon footprints. You would have Google Earth replace all those video shops renting out nasty little videos. If someone at Google reads this, it will only be a matter of time till it happens.

I hope 2009 is good for you.

Denis

[Teresa]

Frodo in Mordor. That's exactly it. I get a wave of nausea going into most stores. Especially 3rd circle of Hell, glitz-stained overly-filled-with-stuff-we-don't-need or want "grocery" stores.

And the street views on Google Earth, the cut off corners in Barcelona, a couple of flaneurs on the loose, enjoying what can't be named exactly.... filled my head up with ideas right to the brim.

Thanks, Jarrett. And happy new year.

T.

[Daniel Otero]

HOla, i see you like flaunerism and cities, so i leave you our video blog of cities in 2min15,

2min15.blogspot.com

saludos

Daniel Otero