"pedestrian"; "flâneur"; a "gentleman stroller of city streets"; "lounger"; "saunterer"; "loafer"; a "person who walks the city in order to experience it"; an "idle man-about-town"; a "complete philosophical way of living and thinking".
The walls are the desk against which he presses his notebooks; newsstands are his libraries and the terraces of cafés are the balconies from which he looks down on his household after his work is done. -Walter Benjamin,"The Flâneur"
BEN BRYNMOR FOWLER
Currently living in Ebisu, Tokyo. A lover of city living & city walking, cinema, music, fiction, currently writing a PhD on contemporary theatre in Britain and Germany, and developing an intense relationship with apple gadgets.
OTHER HOMES:
http://www.scoop.it/t/british-and-german-theatre-today
Instagram username: IBKHOV
Northstar, Marvel’s first openly gay character, to marry beau in upcoming comic
Wedding bells will ring this summer for Marvel Comics’ first openly gay hero, super speedster Northstar.
The New York-based publisher said Tuesday that Canadian character Jean-Paul Beaubier will marry his beau, Kyle Jinadu, in the pages of Astonishing X-Men No. 51, due out June 20.
;-)
Chris Caldwell, “Against Snoopy”:
Charlie Brown is optimistic enough to think he can earn a sense of self-worth, and his willingness to do so by exposing himself to fresh humiliations is the dramatic engine that drives the strip. The greatest of Charlie Brown’s virtues is his resilience, which is to say his courage. Charlie Brown is ambitious. He manages the baseball team. He’s the pitcher, not a scrub. He may be a loser, but he’s, strangely, a leader at the same time. This makes his mood swings truly bipolar in their magnificence: he vacillates not between being kinda happy and kinda unhappy, but between being a “hero” and being a “goat.”
The hero and the goat have and always will be one and the same.
a celebration of books
how better to mark world book day and shakespeare’s birthday than a trip to one of the largest bookstores in tokyo?! KINOKUNIYA books, tokyoshinjuku branch, is a palace of literature, sprawling over seven floors. on the top floor is a remarkable foreign language section that contains the most wonderful selection of world literature - even the german reclam titles that i loved in berlin. add to that a huge selection of japanese manga in english and i know i’m definitely going to be whiling away many hours in this place.
i just had to pick a manga book. so i went for a shojo beat manga title called OTOMEN, whose blurb particularly caught my attention. i feel a need to reproduce it in full here:
ASUKA MASAMUNE IS A GUY WHO LOVES GIRLY THINGS - SEWING, KNITTING, MAKING CUTE STUFFED ANIMALS AND READING SHOJO COMICS. BUT IN A WORLD WHERE BOYS ARE EXPECTED TO ACT MANLY, ASUKA MUST HIDE HIS BELOVED HOBBIES AND PLAY THE PART OF A MASCULINE JOCK INSTEAD. RYO MIYAKOZUKA, ON THE OTHER HAND, IS A GIRL WHO CAN’T SEW OR BAKE A CAKE TO SAVE HER LIFE. ASUKA FINDS HIMSELF DRAWN TO RYO, BUT SHE LIKES ONLY THE MANLIEST OF MEN! CAN ASUKA EVER SHOW HIS TRUE SELF TO ANYONE, MUCH LESS TO THE GIRL THAT HE’S FALLING FOR?
well, this also happens to be the first book in a series following Asuka’s adventures. i’ve got a feeling I might need to start collecting! i also used the opportunity to pick a cloth book cover from the wide variety of designs on offer. as the couple on the tube demonstrate, it’s incredibly difficult to spy on what other people are reading. everybody wraps their literature in paper or material covers - i’m told it’s to do with the love of privacy here. looking over the shoulders of certain men on the crowded journey home, i suspect these jackets might also serve to conceal some rather more saucy reading material. well, i’m kind of glad that i don’t need to display the nature of my research into shojo manga every time I take out my copy of OTOMAN on the commute…
I think i gotta make a sheet fort soon and read comic books with a flashlight. OLD SCHOOL
-sigh.-
mini theatres of the imagination…
