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."