ATD: Re: AtD and Chicago as "urban utopia" #2

[pynchonoid]

"window shopping in the exposition's department store
of exotic cultures"

Don't need a world's fair for this sort of thing which
is everyday culture in the US now - got a pile of
garishly-colored newspaper advertising inserts (came
with this morning's paper - flyers from Pier 1, Cost
Plus & etc.) that invite the US consumptionist to pick
and choose from among dozens of postcolonial shopping
experiences that are turning homes and apartments into
little museums of Empire all over the US - cheap
"Oriental" rugs, bright colored glassware, exotic
textiles, & etc. Give dorm rooms and suburban kitchens
and downtown loft studios the look - as they did in
the 60s - of a busy Third World tourist bazaar.


--- Paul Nightingale <isread at btopenworld.com> wrote:

> Curtis M. Hinsley (1996) "Strolling through the
> Colonies" in Michael P.
> Steinberg ed Walter Benjamin and the Demands of
> History, Cornell University
> Press
> 
> Hinsley's reading of the Chicago Fair is based, in
> particular, on Benjamin's
> description of the flâneur:
> 
> "The effect is one of linear equivalences, as
> successive image experiences
> move film-like past the stroller. The fairgoer does
> not stop to inquire
> deeply but, rather, strolls, window shopping in the
> exposition's department
> store of exotic cultures. The White City's Midway
> was originally intended to
> be a covered arcade, an attempt to combine the
> interiority of the department
> store and the exteriority of the street, inviting
> Benjamin's flâneur to
> stroll through the colonies: 'The bazaar is the last
> hangout of the flâneur.
> In the beginning the street had become an interieur
> for him, now this
> interieur turned into a street, and he roamed
> through the labyrinth as he
> had once roamed through the labyrinth of the city.'
> In the labyrinthine side
> streets of the Midway the exotic and the forbidden
> erotic finally emerge as
> commodity." (127-128, Benjamin quotation from
> Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric
> Poet in the Ear of High Capitalism)
> 
> Also interesting, given that Loell notes the absence
> of the Ferris Wheel
> from painterly representation, is the role of the
> "panoptic" Wheel as a
> vantage point (139).
> 
>


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