{"id":8435,"date":"2016-10-29T12:01:09","date_gmt":"2016-10-29T01:01:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/soundslikewish.wordpress.com\/?p=8435"},"modified":"2016-10-29T12:01:09","modified_gmt":"2016-10-29T01:01:09","slug":"flaneuse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/soundslikewish.org\/?p=8435","title":{"rendered":"Fl\u00e2neuse"},"content":{"rendered":"

A fl\u00e2neur? In a 19th-century dictionary he’s a loiterer, a lounger, an indolent man spending his time idly. In contemporary dictionaries he’s a loafer, an idler, a stroller, a dawdler, an ambler, a laggard.<\/p>\n

So many options to describe a man who has no timetable, no destination. Doing nothing, going nowhere. Apparently.<\/p>\n

Yes, a fl\u00e2neur in French is a man. But a woman, too, can loiter and lag. She’s the fl\u00e2neuse.<\/p>\n

Strolling the streets of my city, observant, detached, armed with a small camera, watching for someone who’s not like the others, I occasionally play the part of the fl\u00e2neuse, capturing a few colourful characters in this city. But their colours can distract. Here I’ve removed them.<\/p>\n

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I love hair. My trigger finger itched when I saw this man who hasn’t seen a barber for some time. I stopped and loitered as fl\u00e2neuses do. It was lunchtime and his eye was on a small charity barbecue stand while my eye was on his hair. I bet he’s an interesting bloke.<\/p>\n

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Within minutes I came across another one who avoids the barber. With his long white hair and beard and his black scarf and coat, he loses nothing in a conversion to black and white. He’d been to the sausage-sizzle stand and was sitting down for a lunch break.<\/p>\n

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Not far away I spotted another long male ponytail, plaited. Whatever he was saying, it amused his companions, the woman handing out\u00a0The Big Issue<\/em> free magazine and the bloke with a can of Mother and an attitude.<\/p>\n

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On my way home my ears were tickled by a busking guitarist who plays here frequently and brilliantly. A busker with a ponytail. His head was bent low over his guitar, eyes fixed on the strings, but when a passer-by threw a few coins into the guitar case and stopped to watch, the guitarist looked up and sort of smiled, as tickled by his one-man audience as I was by his music. I dropped some money into the guitar case. He had earned it.<\/p>\n

The Daily Post challenged us this week to become fl\u00e2neurs<\/a>. As I ambled and wandered – not aimlessly nor idly – observing people in front of me, across the street, under a tree, against a wall, I concluded that not all of us are forgettable.<\/p>\n

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A fl\u00e2neur? In a 19th-century dictionary he’s a loiterer, a lounger, an indolent man spending his time idly. In contemporary dictionaries he’s a loafer, an idler, a stroller, a dawdler, an ambler, a laggard. So many options to describe a man who has no timetable, no destination. Doing nothing, going nowhere. Apparently. Yes, a fl\u00e2neur … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Fl\u00e2neuse”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":8448,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[579,20],"tags":[6,915,916,917,918,7,8,21,270],"class_list":["post-8435","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-canberra","category-my-photos","tag-black-white","tag-busker","tag-flaneur","tag-flaneuse","tag-male-ponytail","tag-photography","tag-photos-2","tag-postaday","tag-writing"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/soundslikewish.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8435","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/soundslikewish.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/soundslikewish.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/soundslikewish.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/soundslikewish.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8435"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/soundslikewish.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8435\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/soundslikewish.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/8448"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/soundslikewish.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8435"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/soundslikewish.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8435"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/soundslikewish.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8435"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}