Category: Film

After the Flâneur

How Platforms and Cities Unmade a Way of Thinking

Years ago I left academia – more specifically Asian studies. I had colleagues in Anthropology, History, Critical Theory, Comparative Literature, and Art History. It’s hard to express how much I miss these conversations. In the years since, working in Library Science, in tech, having friendships with artists and musicians…while adjacent, it hasn’t been the same. This is not intended to sound snooty or dismissive – there’s just a discourse that I’ve become estranged from. Book clubs come close, but they also cannot replicate it – for everyone arrives from different academic trajectories. They’ve read different histories, followed different canons. There was once a shared scaffolding that’s harder now to find. If I referenced Bourdieu or Debord there used to be an acknowledgement of that work and a shared understanding. Don’t get me wrong – our book club conversations are rich, varied, and deeply engaging, yet I sometimes I just miss discussions with people who shared the same class or curriculum.

When I follow academic blogs or accounts on Bluesky, I sometimes catch glimpses of these lost worlds. But they arrive as fragments: compressed, pithy, and often submerged beneath the urgency of current politics—which, while crucial, tend to flatten everything exhaustively.

While going through old files in preparation for our move, I’ve been finding printed correspondences with professors, colleagues, and others in my field from years ago. Reading them now, I’m struck by how many of those relationships were never continued. I pivoted from Japanese studies into Information Science, and then into tech, and my local circles became even further removed from that earlier intellectual life. I boxed that part of myself up. Revisiting it now feels bittersweet. This is not because the work was unfinished (I completed my degree, published in journals, published my thesis), but because the conversations were. I lost touch with that community and fell out of the loop. While my inbox still receives messages from a shared humanities listerv, lacking academic affiliations, I am no longer an active participant.

Substack promised a return to slower, more sustained thinking, but its design quietly undermines this possibility. Without robust ways to organize, label, or browse subscriptions by theme, the experience collapses into noise. Attention that wants to settle into deep focus is constantly disrupted by unrelated content. I used to rely on Feedly for precisely this reason: Asian Studies in one place, Digital Humanities in another, Information Architecture in another. These separations weren’t arbitrary, they were cognitive, they allowed immersion. On Substack, dozens of updates arrive daily in a single undifferentiated stream, making it impossible to read with care. The result isn’t abundance; it’s overwhelm.

Algorithmic platforms like YouTube or Instagram at least acknowledge how attention works, even if they exploit it. They detect patterns and narrow the field. Substack offers neither meaningful curation nor intelligent filtering – only a flattened feed that treats all content as equally urgent. Faced with that, I find myself reading less, not more.

This mirrors, uncomfortably, the disappearance of the physical and social conditions that once made intellectual wandering possible at all. Walter Benjamin’s flâneur – the figure who roams city streets absorbing culture, ideas, and chance encounters – depended on an urban fabric that allowed for slowness, permeability, and unscripted exchange. Cafés near UC Berkeley once functioned this way: you overheard conversations about theory, politics, or art; sometimes you joined in; sometimes a single remark sent you down rabbit holes. A conversation about quantum mechanics might lead to a comic book touching on chaos theory and mythology, then to a used book on Jungian psychology at Moe’s Books, then to a European New Wave film at the U.C. Theatre. These experiences formed a chain – thinking unfolded across bodies, books, streets, and time.

Now that chain has been broken. Cafés became laptop farms, bookstores vanished or relocated to areas with less foot traffic, movie theaters became unaffordable or inaccessible. Online spaces, meanwhile, atomize experience into monetized fragments, interrupted by ads, paywalls, and notifications. Add to all this the inflated cost of American cafés – spaces where lingering without purchase is discouraged and conversation with strangers feels socially and economically improbable; the experience of a flâneur has been rendered structurally impossible.

What I’m grieving, ultimately, isn’t nostalgia or youth. It’s the loss of the environments – both digital and physical – that once made deep, meandering, non-instrumental thinking possible, and with them the quiet disappearance of the flâneur as a way of being in the world.

Notes:

If this piece resonated with you and you’d like to explore related work, here are a few places where I’m continuing these conversations:

  • 💡 On Patreon, I share additional writing, behind-the-scenes notes, and works-in-progress that don’t always fit here. You can find it here.
  • 📖 I also self-published my MA thesis on Butoh, which looks at performance, embodiment, and cultural history. If those threads interest you, it’s available here.
  • 💸 And if a smaller, one-time gesture feels more your speed, you can leave a $3 tip via Ko-fi here. It’s always appreciated.

Austin artist – Alyssa Taylor Wendt: HAINT

Recently in early 2019, at the UT Visual Art Center (VAC), Austin-based artist and curator Alyssa Taylor Wendt showed her video exhibition HAINT. A cinematic tryptic filmed in Detroit, Croatia and Texas over a three year span, Wendt shared a surreal reflection on multi-generational memory and the effects of the war.

One of the leaders of the Surrealist movement, Andre Breton, was deeply affected as a young wartime psychological medic working with soldiers suffering from shell-shock, or trauma. As an aspiring poet, he found their use of language fascinating, their “distant, often illogical, verbal relationships”.   Around the same time he was becoming exposed to the work of Freud, concepts like the unconscious and its links to dreams.

HAINT is a testament to how the memories of families, conveyed across generations can become intertwined with dreams and nightmares. Drawing in part upon her family’s wartime tales and experiences yet overlapping with current locations it’s unclear where her family’s history ends and her own inner landscape begins.


Alyssa Taylor Wendt, “Baphomet,” 2014. Digital chromogenic print.

The tryptic features different scenes, stitched together with an inner logic, overlaid with drone music, Eastern European folk songs and opera. HAINT takes place within industrial ruins, open fields and abandoned homes. There we see a cast of mysterious characters interacting, singing and performing what resembles Butoh dance. There are dramatic and surreal reflections of violence, but we cannot know if these represents her own internal conflicts or are references to her family’s stories. What could be more apt for communicating the dance between memory and trauma?

Colonial Hong Kong influenced Cyberpunk Dystopia

kawasaki-warehouse

When asked to imagine a post-industrial, urban dystopia, Westerners may summon images from Bladerunner, Neuromancer, Akira, Neo-Tokyo, or Ghost in a Shell. Backdrops of crumbling hyper-density, juxtapositions of poverty and neon, advanced technology and decaying urban infrastructure.

We may imagine humans living like colonies of ants within anarchic, decentralized structures covered in graffiti, filled with crime and the smells of laundry and street food. If asked to point to exact cultural locations, we would  think of Tokyo or Hong Kong based upon the films, anime and books mentioned above.

What is it about those cities that brought those qualities to mind, especially as these are already historicized, locked away in 1980’s cyberpunk nostalgia? These cities are now likely cleaner, filled with high rises instead of slums, Still, these images persist due to the powerful work of artists, writers, photographers and filmmakers. Where did it all come from? What were the roots of this post-industrial dystopia and why does it still touch people? What meaning does it all hold for us now in the 21st century…a time of luxury condos and sterile interiors?

Liam Wong, a graphic designer in the video game industry has come to enjoy fame with his photographs of Tokyo on Instagram. Citing influence from Ridley Scott‘s Bladerunner he tells of how he fell in love with Tokyo as his romantically filtered nighttime neon photographs attest. 

While looking at his work I reflect on my favorite post-war Japanese photographers who also photographed Tokyo at night, capturing this urban, dreamlike underbelly.

Photographers like Daido Moriyama, or the terribly under-rated Osamu Kanemura whose disjointed, black and white images of post-industrial, post-war Tokyo couldn’t embody the dystopic imagination more. With rare collections with names like Shockhammer or Spider’s Strategy, they capture the darker, industrial aesthetic that is so different than works on Paris for example.

Tokyo emerged from devastation after the war and built itself up in a hyper-modernizing pace as an amalgamation of both industry and pre-modern, Japanese culture. What we in the west see as an exotic juxtaposition actually carries deeper resonance for those in Asia.

This brings us to another city, navigating between modernization and cultural retention:  Kowloon City in Hong Kong.  Japanese photographer Ryuji Miyamoto captured this infamous locale in his works from 1987.  Renowned for his photographs of demolished buildings he carried his expertise at capturing in black and white the detailed layering and texture of industrial decay. Kowloon City, as seen in this footage or Japanese explorers is really interesting  as the creative team highlights attitudes urban Japanese have toward space, density and collections that differ from those in the West who might focus primarily on blight, neglect, and code violations.

A longer documentary explains the history of Kowloon City, as one rooted in Chinese resistance to British rule, of creating a self-sufficient city of sorts, albeit one lacking in first world amenities. However, Kowloon City holds powerfully nostalgic value for many 20th century East Asians, as their worlds underwent changes from Colonialism and growing Capitalism. It was an incubator in many ways, a place of liminal transitions, a blurring of post-war ‘village’ with the dark underbelly of industrial urbanism.

When Hong Kong gained its independence and became prosperous, Kowloon City became a blemish from its past, and the government soon set upon demolishing it over a period of many years. Prior to its erasure many architectural and design students from Japan as well as New York rushed to document what they could of this unique walled city. Its impact upon the modern imagination persisted, soon providing a backdrop from everything from kung fu crime movies to science fiction and video games.

The anime artist Mamoru Oshii cites it as the basis for his imaginative backdrop in Ghost in a Shell.   The Japanese were so intrigued by Kowloon City that they created a three-story theme park in Tokyo replicating everything they could to preserve its cultural and architectural trace. The documentary footage linked here contains interviews with former residents, historians, artists and designers, all testifying to impact that city had upon post-colonial consciousness and memory.

Laurie Anderson, Slavoj Zizek, Guillermo del Toro, Wim Wenders pick film faves from Criterion

One of the things I miss the most from my jobs in the 90’s – working in cafes next door to bookstores, working at the UC and Elmwood Theatres in Berkeley, working at Tower Records and Virgin stores in multiple cities – was how close I was to books, music, films.  Daily I would receive recommendations from co-workers and customers. I had a finger on a cultural pulse and it was three-dimensional and organic. This was an experience that Amazon and Netflix’s algorithms have not been able to replicate.

Something that Criterion Collection has started comes close and I really hope they continue. They’ve brought in famous film directors (Wim Wenders, Guillermo del Toro), artists (Laurie Anderson) and popular philosophers (Slavoj Zizek) to go through their vaults (Laurie Anderson is absolutely delightful, she’s like a kid in a candy store), select and describe their favorite films.

Their enthusiasm is contagious – I’ve done my best to compile a list of their recommendations under the clips. Enjoy!