Boots: Take 1

I bought these boots when I lived in New York. I worked in a grey cubicle on the 30th floor of a building on 3rd Avenue. My cubicle wasn’t next to a window, but I considered myself lucky because I could see the window from my desk. Just a little bit. I could see sky and the 30th floor of some other buildings.
I’d been looking for boots for months and must have tried on hundreds of pairs. I wanted some that didn’t wrinkle at the ankles and were tight on my calves. These ones fit the ankle requirement pretty well, but there was a gap at the top between the boot and my calf. So, I paid the $200 and then took them to a cobbler in Astoria. It was a long walk from the part of Astoria where I lived. I had never been to that area before and, it was dark out when I got to the cobbler’s. He was an old man with a thick accent. He seemed not only from another place, but another time. His whole shop was like stepping into a Greenfield Village exhibit, but finding it full of soul. Anyway, I left my boots there for a week to get the tops taken in and an extra layer put on the bottom to protect the soles. I can’t remember what those are called, but the women in my office told me I should get them so that my boots would last longer.
Once I picked up my boots from the cobbler, the tops were tight and as a result the ankles wrinkled. I was so upset. Why aren’t there any boots that fit right?! Are my legs that weird of a shape? God!
I never wore the boots with skirts because I was so self-conscious about the wrinkly ankles. They reminded me of 80’s slouch socks with clunky heels awkwardly hanging off the bottom. Or of my mom’s ancient riding boots that she had kept in her closet with rolls of yellowed and frayed newspaper in them since she went to college before I was born. But I did wear the boots with my grey or black slacks (I had a brown pair of ankle boots for my navy slacks). My legs looked so much longer. They made me taller than all the women in my office, except Kimberly, and I was eye-level with my boss. I found excuses to escape my cubicle to go downstairs and walk the long marble corridor that connected the 3rd avenue building to the Lexington avenue building. No one was ever in that corridor, just the clunk-pat, clunk-pat, clunk-pat, clunk-pat of my heels. At lunchtime, I walked on the street between the buildings, past construction workers sitting on the sidewalk, backs against the cement wall below the Dress Barn shop window. I felt like my grandmother walking past whistling construction workers on her lunch break from the Dublin uniform factory in the 1940’s.
Now that extra layer on the bottom has long since worn through and I haven’t replaced it since I don’t wear the boots anymore. I tried wearing them twice when I lived in Berlin, but walking on well-worn cobblestones was difficult and the distances were too long for heels. Now, the square toes are sooo not cool and who wears heels that high in Ann Arbor anyway?

I read Goffman's "The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life" for my performance studies seminar. Although dated, the book makes the point that we are all performing all the time. In the "Communication Out of Character" chapter, he talks about people switching from front stage to backstage activity, and refers to the backstage as the place where people are out of character. If we are performing all the time, perhaps we are simply performing different characters, none being either in or out of character. If the out of character person is also a performance, is there a true self? Perhaps our true natures are expressed when we most believe in our performance.

Poe - The Man of the Crowd
Benjamin - The Arcades Project
Baudelaire - The Painter of Modern Life: The Artist, Man of the World, Man of the Crowd and Child
Jenks - Watching Your Step: The history and practice of the flâneur

Phantasmagoria
a: a constantly shifting complex succession of things seen or imagined b: a scene that constantly changes
http://www.merriam-webster.com

The Flâneur
A man who strolls around a city observing the phantasmagoria. He sees himself as other, separate from the goings on that surround him. Baudelaire's painter is a flâneur. Jenks mentions "Baudrillard tied the flâneur to the armchair in front of the TV set." Perhaps the equivalent now is the Internet surfer.
I appreciate Jenks' observation that the flâneur is inherently male and that the position of women in public is quite different than that of men. He maintains that women only go out in public with a function, they do not stroll. I disagree with this statement because women do stroll as much as men (at least during daylight hours). However, at this point no one does much strolling at all in the USA. Everyone is busy and walks with a purpose, if they walk at all. There is no time for strolling. Rather than move our bodies and observe the world around us, we sit and consume a mediated version of the outside world through TV and Internet.
In Poe's story the narrative voice is the flâneur. He appears to have very little interaction with the people around him. The flâneur exists in the space between the office and the dwelling. Benjamin discusses the development of private individual places of dwelling that serve as refuges from the work space. The dwelling contains objects evoke nostalgia for a better, past world. He observes traces of individuality in the public realm. Now iPods and cell phones prohibit aural observation and create more distance between the stroller and his/her surroundings. Public space is becoming ever more privatized. Portable music devices perform a similar function to the collections Benjamin mentions serving as refuges in the time of Louis Philippe. Listening to one's personal music collection, while on the street creates and interior space that evokes feelings, memories and a sense of identity.

Over the past semester I sought to incorporate a sense of play into my art practice. Some of the artists I most admire (e.g. Alexander Calder, Tim Hawkinson, Vik Muniz and Ann Hamilton) walk a fine line between work and play with the art they produce/d. I believe that this sense of play creates a magical quality, which in combination with intellectual investigation, generates the best art. Baudelaire writes, "But genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will - a childhood now equipped for self-expression with manhood's capacities and a power of analysis which enables it to order the mass of raw material which it has involuntarily accumulated."