Fraternal greetings and welcome to The Flâneur, official website of La Société des Flâneurs Sans Frontières (Liverpool chapter).
An Open Forum for Anarcho-Absurdists, Revolutionary Sybarites, Alchemical Hazardistas and Urban Arcadians everywhere.
We hope you enjoy the site, and feel moved to contribute to it.
All articles, letters and other contributions may be addressed to the.flaneur@yahoo.co.uk.
New on the Flâneur: (Last update: 1st July 2009)
Many thanks to all our fellow flaneurs who have joined our page on 'Farcebook': www.facebook.com/home.php?#/pages/The-Flaneur/57111574557?ref=mf We hope to see the rest of you there soon. (Please scroll down for our explanation of this extraordinary turn of events. Of course, this kind of thing would never have happened in my day....)
New Baudelaire translations: Au Lecteur (To the Reader) and Femmes Damnées (Woman Damned) by de Vouvray.
Dedalus Books needs our help! Dedalus Books, purveyors of the finest translations, original fiction, and above all, jewels of decadence (for our review of their Decadent Handbook, click here, is in dashed dire straits. Will we flaneurs stand idly by while one of the most imaginative independent publishers in these islands - the nearest Britain ever came to the ineffable Olympia Press of Paris - goes to the wall? With one voice let us cry 'Nay!' and rally to the cause! For the full text of their epistle, click here.
Even at his most lackadaisical, the flâneur never forgets he is a citizen of the world, and, in his own way, a tireless (if bone idle) campaigner against injustice. Dreams of world revolution may be fading, but www.avaaz.org gives us a chance to put our shoulders to the wheel (without even leaving the snug).
New Writing: The Flâneur is pleased to lend its mighty, international (if somewhat languid) weight in support of ground-breaking new publishing houses L'OYS Press and Democritus, our answers to Olympia Press. Visit Library and Quincey Riddle's webular site to find out more. Stop Press: new novel by Democritus Minumus Natu, yclept The Doors of Perception, just released.
Degree in the arts of Flânerie enters its fourth triumphant year! Click here and here.
'The Flâneur Reads', by that altogether spiffing Liverpolitan Chap Around Town, Dominic Newton Esq.
Duelling Cards Stop press: Flaneur calling-cum-duelling cards circumnavigating the globe! See Clustermap below. Huge prizes to be won!
Free Tibet The Flâneur offers its heartiest support to all organisations and movements committed to liberating Tibet from Chinese domination.
Time goes on, and even flâneurs have to move with it (well, at least twitch the odd muscle and languidly glance at one's fob-watch every now and then), and so, here we are, four years after our launch, making a modification to our presence in this electronic webular world . But despair not, the modification is by no means serious surgery. The Flâneur website that you are now perusing will continue its meanderings as the repository of the cultural, the aesthetic ,the literary, the peculiar and the downright unintelligable as it has always done. But from now on, our (always rather haphazard) coverage of what is afoot, hitherto to be found in 'Places and Events', will be replanted on (dare I say it?) 'Facebook': www.facebook.com/home.php?#/pages/The-Flaneur/57111574557?ref=mf [Should this link not work, then you will recognise our page on 'Farcebook' easily enough, despite the plethora of paltry imitations, by the noble profile of Baron Robert de Montesquieu who has graced our website since its inception.] Much to our regret, we find that we must invite you to become 'fans' (such vulgar language! - We can think of many more dignified terms) of The Flâneur on 'Farcebook' , but once the deed is done, then you will be party to a site on which all that is truly worthy of the attention of the cultured connoisseur, locally in Liverpool, but also nationally, internationally and beyond, is on display, and to which you are cordially invited to contribute.
The webular presence of the Central Organ of Anarcho-Dandyism. Irrefutable filmed evidence of derring-do and goings-on at the 2007 Chap Olympics, click here and here.
Liverpolitan music writer, founding editor of Mojo, co-founder of Q, Heat and The Word, author of Liverpool, Wondrous City (Virgin) [more than a history of Liverpool music, this is one of the great texts about the city itself, capturing it in all its amazing maddening glory] and all round good egg.
Albion is an unforgettable sight at The Chap Olympics (see also their cinematic masterclass in top hole caddishness) Albion opens emporium: click here and here.
Lord Shuteye and his comrades at the 18th Century Society, committed against all the odds to face ”the tedious banality of the post-modern condition with the vigour and elegance of half-pay Victorian colonels" (a particularly impressive feat in the 18th century).
By now the idea of the flâneur is well enough known in the English speaking world. The 19th century Parisian boulevardier, the bohemian, strolling the city, frequenting the cafés, digesting the urban spectacle, exemplified by Baudelaire (whose exquisite prose poem, Les Foules - The Crowds - is included, in a new translation, on this site), defined by Walter Benjamin as 'he who botanises upon the asphalt', has at last gained a foothold in Anglo-Saxon awareness.
No more need be said in explaining le flâneur and la flâneuse in themselves. However, perhaps a few words are required to explain this specific project.
In 1961, Maurice Gerodias of Olympia Press in Paris, bold publisher of such masterpieces as Tropic of Capricorn, Lolita, The Ginger Man, Story of O, Candy, Our Lady of the Flowers and many others, launched a literary magazine entitled Olympia, a monthly publication which managed an awe-inspiring total of four issues in two years and then packed up.
Inspired by this, a group of us gathered in Liverpool in early 1995, determined to launch our own organ, yclept The Flâneur, and to match or, if possible, even surpass Olympia's heroic record. We succeeded beyond our wildest dreams. In ten years not a single issue of our publication saw the light of day.
Realising we were onto something, a small gathering in Arles, Provence, in August 2003, formally constituted itself as La Société des Flâneurs Sans Frontières (SFSF). In keeping with the bohemian spirit of flânerie, we then did absolutely nothing about it for another two years, until finally, in April 2005, incarnated as a webular site, The Flâneur finally made its entrance, its top hat at a rakish angle, its goatee trimmed to perfection, plucking off its white gloves with an insouciant air.
Our stated intention was to provide an idiosyncratic guide to the cultural and artistic side of life in north west England, events, people, places and things in and around Merseyside, as Liverpool approached its year as Capital of Culture 2008. We certainly succeeded in providing a thoroughly idiosyncratic guide to something, but no-one seems entirely sure of what. Despite our interest in things Liverpolitan, it was always our intention to avoid being a merely 'local' site. In this, we seem to have been successful. If anything, the establishment of sister chapters around the world has ensured that The Flâneur has avoided any stifling provincial flavour, and has flourished rather as an arena of gratuitous twaddle on a truly international scale.
We continue to offer free advertising to anyone and anything interesting, and welcome contributions - news, reviews, letters, original writing and art-work, objets trouvés, gossip, scandal, japes and wheezes, strange tales, home-made jam, etc.
Membership of this illustrious Société, which would doubtless by now run to lots and lots (if we'd bothered to keep count), continues to be determined by quality of contribution(s).
Once again, the address for any articles and contributions:
the.flaneur@yahoo.co.uk
De Vouvray,
on behalf of La Société des Flâneurs Sans Frontières (SFSF)
