Wandering down the stairs of my Northbridge apartment, I pat down my pockets for the essentials: ‘keys – check; wallet – check; mobile – check; iPod – always…’
It’s 3pm. My stomach is full with the Golden Duck House’s lunchtime special, and I can’t be bothered working. I have very little money and even less purpose, but set out on a quest for nothing in particular anyways, my mind open to the urban delights that may await.
It never takes long in Northbridge to find some intricate detail that wasn’t there yesterday, such as a street artist’s newfound canvas at a construction site on Newcastle on William. Perth may be a town whose mayor is waging a ‘War on Graffiti’ (the very thing that gives cities like Melbourne and Berlin their unique character), but even in a city obsessed with maintaining the status quo, such intricacies are there for those who seek them.
Half an hour into my stroll, I make eye contact with a guy in a hoodie – camera in hand. Is he wandering the city with the same purpose? We’re in the cultural centre, and a black and white stencil of an office worker sits collapsed against the wall in front of us. I give him a nod, and head off in search of new laneways, new construction sites, and new mysteries.
As I wander, I feel like a tourist at home. Not content to brush over the familiar streets, I strive to search deeper. But as unique as I would like to think my quest of curiosity is, I’m around 200 years late in making the claim…
In 1880s Paris – that city of laneways, bridges, and shop-fronts – a new archetype of the urban male intellectual emerged in the form of the flâneur. A self-critical city wanderer, the flâneur looked for the extraordinary in the ordinariness of urban space. He became a detached enthusiast for the individualistic, consumer-driven society that was evolving in Paris at the time.
Both critical of, and consumed by the growing pace of the world; the flâneur spent his time engrossed in the arcades that displayed the latest consumer goods, while playfully slowing down the pace by taking turtles out for a walk on the boulevards.
The flâneur was a poet, a writer, and an artist, often stuck in poverty through his sheer inability to commit to a job when ‘there was all this culture to be explored’. To the flâneur, the lampposts and doorways more than substituted for a couch or a bedside… the street was the flâneur’s living room.
Looking over my stark apartment, I take stock of my possessions. What do I actually need? Perhaps only the clothes on my back, my Crumpler bag and MacBook. And while that isn’t necessarily as ‘ideologically sound’ as the flâneur’s commitment to turtle walking, I remind myself that I am a child of the Facebook generation.
Cultural critics have placed the flâneur, and the more superficially-minded dandy at the centre of the development of modern gay identity. As households shrink, and members of ‘the general population’ move back to the cities, it is little wonder that the ‘gay ghettos’ of Prahan, Newtown, and Mount Lawley have developed in response to the suburban ideal of the nuclear family.
The figure of the flâneur is tied to the conversation between interior and exterior life – the (often) dual life of the closet queer, and the interface between public and private space that the flâneur calls into question. In place of the contact of a ‘community’, the flâneur finds day-to-day comfort in the crowd.
Making my way through the malls of Carillion, I stop past an expansive white shop selling the latest products for my iLife.
‘Ahh’ I sigh, ‘home…’
