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| Le Flaneur |
Currently embarking on Neighborhood Relationships in Washington Park with Muneer Bahauddeen, David Baucher & Company via the introduction from the wonderfully conscious Lightworker James Godsil. This dynamic group of visionaries is a testament to the Boomer/Millennial communal precedent that we are setting by bringing The Peddling Flaneur Experiment to fruition!
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| My Spiritual/Life Guide James Godsil |
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| Muneer Bahauddeen: Founder of Ogbe Meji Studios |
The flâneur was, first of all, a literary type from 19th century France, essential to any picture of the streets of Paris. The word carried a set of rich associations: the man of leisure, the idler, the urban explorer, the connoisseur of the street.
The crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water of fishes. His passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world—impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define. The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito. The lover of life makes the whole world his family, just like the lover of the fair sex who builds up his family from all the beautiful women that he has ever found, or that are or are not—to be found; or the lover of pictures who lives in a magical society of dreams painted on canvas. Thus the lover of universal life enters into the crowd as though it were an immense reservoir of electrical energy. Or we might liken him to a mirror as vast as the crowd itself; or to a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness, responding to each one of its movements and reproducing the multiplicity of life and the flickering grace of all the elements of life.
—Charles Baudelaire, "The Painter of Modern Life", (New York: Da Capo Press, 1964). Orig. published in Le Figaro, in 1863.
"The relationships that he is building in Washington Park are making his community stronger by creating the social capital that brings community residents together to focus on opportunities and work against the isolation that poverty in the neighborhood has caused. His relationship with Muneer Bahaudeen and Dan Bieser of Tabal Chocolate has helped to stabilize the area by encouraging artistic expression in the neighborhood and focusing on small business development on Lisbon Ave."
I am looking forward to collaborating with Munner as we create Spiritual Batteries for the youth and community to hopefully invigorate and energize a robust, sustainable Washington Park environment. With these efforts, there is no doubt in my mind that we will showcase Milwaukee as the Holy City of the Sweet Water Seas.
