Street photography and the Flaneuse in the Zeitgeist..
“ I never had a “project.” I would go out and shoot, follow my eyes—what they noticed, I tried to capture with my camera, for others to see.” Helen Levitt, an American photographer who was particularly noted for street photography around New York City, and who has been called “the most celebrated and least known photographer of her time”, was born on August 31, 1913.
Interesting variety of styles.
I have been reading about a Canadian reporter visiting Hungary in 1956 and thinking about visiting the city myself. This is a useful and informative posting-thanks!
Are you planning a trip to Europe? I’m sure, your top destinations would be Paris, Italy and Spain. Hungary wont even cross your mind, that’s because it’s never much talked about. But it is definitely one hidden gem of Europe and you are soon going to know why.
1. It’s very very inexpensive: You can live like a king in Budapest. Since, 1 Euro = 315 Hungarian Forint, so it may feel like you’re spending a wodge of a cash but in reality it’s, as they say “peanuts”. Everything in Budapest from food to hotels are quite inexpensive but that doesn’t mean it’s not good. So that’s No.1 reason why you must visit Budapest. (Taxi’s are still a rip off so beware about spending on that). The shopping is even crazier here.
2.Party on a Bridge: Yes you read that right. I’m sure you’ve attended a lot of parties in…
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I like these studies and have been working at something similar myself.
I have been reading of the influence of French Poetry in London,1945…..
‘Le Cimetiere marin’ is about mortality and immortality, body and soul, life and death, the inexorable passage of time. It was published in 1920, when Paul Valery was nearly 50, although he had started work on it some years before after revisiting the graveyard by the sea at Sete, a town on the Mediterranean coast, where he had been born and brought up and was later to be buried. It begins on a note of supreme tranquillity as Valéry gazes out between the pine trees and the tombs over the calm, roof-like expanse of the sea, stretching away into infinity, with what seem to be doves moving slowly and peacefully across it:
Ce toit tranquille, où marchent des colombes,
Entre les pins palpite, entre les tombes.
(Quiet that roof, where the doves are walking,
Quivers between the pines, between the tombs.)
He has the impression of looking down…
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I have a neat little book called ~” Poems of Cornwall” withdrawn from the County Library Service. The preface is by W.Herbert Thomas and is dated, “Penzance July !892”. A couple of months before the last down train from Paddington on Brunel’s broad gauge had run. It is a collection of some 30 poets of whom photographs of 18 appear inside the front cover. There is a poem by Sir Humphry Davy beneath an engraving of his statue.
St Michael’s Mount
Majestic Michael rises – he whose brow
Is crown’d with castles; and whose rocky sides
Are clad with dusky ivy: he whose base,
Beat by the storm of ages, stands unmov’d
Amidst the wreck of things-the change of time.
That base, encircled by the azure waves,
Was once with verdure clad; the towering oaks
Here waved their branches green: the sacred oaks ,
Whose awful shades among the Druids stay’d
To cut the hallowed mistletoe, and hold
High converse with their gods.
Interesting this connection that early scientists felt for poetry and nature. Most obviously found in Goethe perhaps. Davy enjoyed angling and travelled widely across Europe to fish, I believe on the Dalmatian coast-Shakespeare’s Illyria from Twelfth Night. Which information I seem to recall from that fascinating book,”The Age of Wonder” by Richard Holmes. Count Orsino’s castle became the Mount in that great production of Twelfth Night by Trevor Nunn in 1996. Returning to Davy’s poem, I suppose some of the vocabulary now sounds antiquated, although the original “awful” sounds like that recent commonly used word,”awesome”. I rather like the line -“Amidst the wreck of things-the change of time.” which reminds me somehow of that biography of Malcom Muggeridge which he entitled “Chronicles of Wasted Time”. A title which comes from the lovely sonnet 106 of Shakespeare:-
According to the Web Museum in Paris,”He had only modest success early in his career (when a private income enabled him to work for little payment), but he went on to achieve an enormous reputation, and he was universally respected even by artists of very different aims and outlook from his own. Gauguin, Seurat, and Toulouse-Lautrec were among his professed admirers. His reputation has since declined, his idealized depictions of antiquity or allegorical representations of abstract themes now often seeming rather anaemic. He remains important, however, because of his influence on younger artists. He influenced, for instance, the German artist Ludvig von Hoffman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_von_Hofmann and perhaps the Cornish based artist Thomas Cooper Gotch.
His simplified forms, respect for the flatness of the picture surface, rhythmic line, and use of non-naturalistic color to evoke the mood of the painting appealed to both the Post-Impressionists and the Symbolists.” 
Although perhaps reminiscent of Caliban in The Tempest, the quote comes from Gregor Samsa in Kafka’s “Die Verwandandlung”-or Metamorphosis as it is known in English translation. However I found the quote on an interesting and intriguing video about Nietzsche’s categories of the Apollonian and the Dionysian by Claudia Simone Dorchain.
My interest in Nietzsche has been re-awakened by seeing the new film about “Lou Andreas Salome” in Berlin-actually at Eva Lichtspiele at Blissestraße 18-which is a great old-fashioned cinema. It reminds me of another old filmhouse in Vienna-(The Bellaria Kino) which is situated behind the Volkstheatre and in turn years ago to “The Scala” in the High Street in St Ives -which is where Boots Chemist is situated today. Anyway, for those who are interested this is what it says on the Eva Lichtspiele website:-
Die ‘Eva Lichtspiele’ gelten mit der Eröffnung 1913 unter dem Namen ‘Roland Lichtspiele’ als ältestes Filmtheater im Bezirk Wilmersdorf. In den 20er Jahren, nach einem Umbau und der gleichzeitigen Umbenennung des Kinos in den heutigen Namen, wurden hier die Filme auf Vorschlag des Betreibers mit Musikbegleitung präsentiert – zuerst durch eine Violinistin und später durch ein ganzes Orchester, das durch den Einbau eines zweiten Vorführapparates pausenlos im Einsatz war. Glücklicherweise blieb das Kino während des Zweiten Weltkrieges nahezu unbeschadet, so dass der Kinobetrieb durchgehend aufrechterhalten werden konnte und noch heute viele Einzelheiten des Gebäudes (wie z.B. der schöne elegante Neonschriftzug an der Fassade) auf die lange Kinogeschichte der ‘Eva Lichtspiele’ hinweisen.
Nietzsche I find difficult to come to grips with. Probably, I have read about him rather than reading him directly. Steeped in German classical studies and Schopenhauer, he has had a huge influence on his time but like Heidegger no friend of rationalism or socialist thinking. Although both not only raised interesting questions but demonstrate the continuity of philosophical history. Neo-Thomism and Catholicism in the case of the latter, Plato and Schopenhauer-and both of course were influenced by the Jena poet, Hölderlin.
As to Salome’s influence on Rilke; here is one view relating to her Russian origin:-
“In 1899 Rilke made the first of two pivotal trips to Russia with Salome, discovering what he termed his “spiritual fatherland” in both the people and the landscape. There Rilke met Leo Tolstoy, L. O. Pasternak (father of Boris Pasternak), and the peasant poet Spiridon Droschin, whose works Rilke translated into German. These trips provided Rilke with the poetic material and inspiration essential to his developing philosophy of existential materialism and art as religion. Inspired by the lives of the Russian people, whom the poet considered more devoutly spiritual than other Europeans, Rilke’s work during this period often featured traditional Christian imagery and concepts, but presented art as the sole redeemer of humanity.” This comes from https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/rainer-maria-rilke
In any event this film-not the first on her -see the link below to Calvini’s version- is visually appealling making fascinating use of old picture postcards and raises questions over the many radical ideas, poetry music and of course, psychoanalysis. There is a very revealing chapter on her in Lisa Appignanesi and John Forrester’s “Freud’s Women”. I do hope this becomes available soon on DVD with English subtitles just like the Stefan Zweig film currently also playing in Berlin. Zweig too has written interestingly on Nietzsche-the book below is available in English translation. Reading about her and her circle, their poetry and music certainly has a calming effect on me.
The following clip is also revealing:-
As most of Schoenefeld prepared for a huge Rainbow Festival, I ventured out into the neighbouring streets through Massenstrasse to the good-humoured crowd in Winterfeld Market. There was some comical exchanges between the punters and the stall holders. Myself, I was looking for a new and cheap hat to relieve the heat from the powerful Sun. There were plenty of hats on sale; I had lost a lovely hat that my daughter had given me in a windy day at Wansee when my beautiful, smart and I thought English looking hat was taken by a Windstoß or Böe blew my hat into a gated secluded villa. In the market there was a variety of hats for sale and yet more expensive at around 15 Euros than I wanted to pay-for just a few days. I thought I found what I was looking for only to discover it was fuer Kinder-and didn’t fit meine klein Kopf!
The variety of stalls with delicious cool fruit drinks, summer dresses, wurst stalls and varieties of olives, kebabs and much pickled cabbage on sale. The market is dominated by the lovely neo-Gothic St Matthias Church. In the heat, the smells from cooked meat and fish aded to the atmosphere. More details are at http://blog.sofitel-berlin-kurfurstendamm.com/unmissable-food-market-at-winterfeldtplatz/
Interesting too was the multi-culti feel of the area. Finding Buddhas in a row outside the Catholic Church was a thought-provoking experience. After turning the corner, there was a great trio of singers who sang in an interesting accent-one sounded Liverpudlian.
When they sang, “Bei Mir bist du Schoene”, a tune with a lot of personal feeling for me, I could not resist a few mostly joyful tears. The music in the open air was beautiful and another couple of ladies sang more songs which had a Klezmer feel. It appears that there is a lovely community theatre here under threat from more capitalist development. Community cultural developments like this are so important for people’s development and expression. What a really lovely day!
Spiel mir ein kleines Leid auf Jiddisch
penwithlit