Occasionally in mes flâneries, I meet the image of myself, bemisted in the palimpsest of signs.  I turn a corner at random in that grey hedgemaze of clouds which is our labyrinthine reality and find an uncanny anachronistic icon reared high against the sky, holding itself aloof above the fog of everyday ways we stumble and blunder through.

I love the statuary that old architecture makes, these dépassé neoclassical deities mutilated by time.  I remember seeing a painting by Russell Drysdale once—Hill End, painted in 1948, the portrait of a dilapidated bâtiment abandonné.  Two storeys of wounded brickwork, a peeling plaster peau, two doors to nowhere and a wroughtiron balcon, like a jetty projecting into air, presented the proud proue of its profile to the pitiless chastisement des éléments australiens, a fulgurant hellciel of merdescent orange grimacing under the bloodmauve nuages.

Such is le flâneur, heir apparent to a vanished patrimony, un visionnaire de l’invisible.  Rimbaudian dreamer in search of his bohemia, he goes, battered bateau ivre, réfugié de la modernité, holding the holes of his tattered dignity together, this aristocrat of the gutter, as he stumbles parmi les épaves, le nez en l’air, his eye anchored in the stars.

Undulant Ulysse, I port my only arm, la rame de la caméra, à l’épaule.  Avec ça je peins l’image blême—à peine visible—de moi-même que je vois dressé dans le bleu brumeux.  And like Albert Ryder, pale cavalier and blue pilot across many a dark, moonlit bar, je vois—là-haut! là-haut!—my eternal home, au-delà des nuages qui passent, marvellous vagabonds like myself.

I remember being affected by the vermiculated detail of the end brickwork of the façade, abutting nothing, in the Drysdale, as though a whole row of these hôtels had formed un rue-mur parisien, a barricade against the barren Australian hellscape, and now only this last brick existed in that invisible wall, fort of imported European sophistication and tradition, an antique stumblingblock, a toe of that colossus, les restes melted into airy ruins.

C’est moi, la dernière pierre d’un passé dépassé.

—Dean Kyte, “Ma Bohème”

The annual mountain of administrivia associated with running a small enterprise surmounted, I warmly welcome you back, chers lecteurs, to another financial year of splenetic, prose-poetic rants, rambles and ruminations on French literature, film, and the æsthetic philosophy of flânerie in an Australian context here on The Melbourne Flâneur vlog.

And I commence to cudgel your eyes and ears anew with my Baudelairean clairvisions of Spleen and the Ideal down under by humbly submitting as Exhibit A in my literary crimes against English, seeking to rebridge la Manche and reconcile it with French, the cinepoem above, hybridgeously digital and co-written in the colourful light and movement of Kodak Super 8 film.

“Ma Bohème”, an entry in The Spleen of Melbourne project, explores the intersection of art, the shiftless rôle of the dandy-flâneur drifting amidst the ruins of modernity, and the pastoral extension of Melbourne beyond itself into country Victoria—all themes I recently shared with The Hague-based Romanian flâneuse Patricia Hurducas in an interview on her Substack blog The Flâneurs Project.

In “Walking in Melbourne with Dean Kyte”, we discuss these and other topics, including my own history with the notion of flânerie, my relationship with Charles Baudelaire, my love of Bellingen, and what, in capsule form, my æsthetic lifestyle philosophy of flânerie contains and entails.

I heartily recommend you to check out not only Patricia’s interview with me, but her interviews with other flâneurs from Amsterdam to Vilnius, from Austin to Vienna, and even from exotic Kuwait-City.

For regular readers, viewers and auditors of The Melbourne Flâneur, I think you will find The Flâneurs Project a refreshing complement to this vlog: Whereas I deal with French language and literature and Parisian culture in these pages, and my name has become linked with Baudelaire’s as a translator and interpreter of his work, Patricia speaks German and is versed in the Berlin current of flânerie represented by Walter Benjamin.

She also completed a Masters of American Studies at Humboldt University of Berlin, looking at those Amerloque authors within what I call the ‘flâneurial corpus’ of literature.

In the small world where certain men and women walk about their cities in sousveillance of the Balzacian comédie humaine, Patricia has been a post of observation in the field long tracked by my flâneurial radar.

I have been aware of her work for some years now, and as one of the leading feminine entrants into the field of psychogeographic urban exploration, I have looked seriously at her work as a potential source for an article I intend to write one day when the subject is a little less politically fraught; viz.—Is female flânerie even conceptually—let alone practically—possible?

We touched tantalizingly on this delicate issue in a recent Zoom call I had with her, and in the half-hour or so where time zones in two hemispheres happily, conveniently collided, I felt an interesting shift inside myself as I listened to Patricia relate to me her own history and experience of flânerie as a young woman from post-Communist Romania ambling about the cities of Western Europe.

I knew that Patricia would be a good source to cite and refer to when the furore around what a woman actually is dies down a little and I can diplomatically put what I still expect to be a controversial argument a little more piano piano.

So allow me, dear readers, to earnestly buttonhole you and urge you to show some support to Patricia at Substack, where you can subscribe to follow The Flâneurs Project.

And as we commence our sixth year of exploring French literature and flâneurial cinema together on The Melbourne Flâneur, batting steadily towards a century of posts on this vlog, if you want to show some support to me in my ongoing work, today is the best possible day to do it—for today is Bandcamp Friday!

Bandcamp Friday was an initiative started by BC in March 2020 to support artists on the platform during the pandemic. It’s been so successful that they have kept it going, with $120 million being given directly to artists and labels by their fans to date.

For today only, you can download the soundtrack of “Ma Bohème” in your choice of format for $A2.00 using the link below—or you can name your own price at the checkout—and Bandcamp will waive their share of the revenue and pass all the pognon directly on to your Melbourne Flâneur.