("N [On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress]" 456). But for the brief moment

while it is in our frame of vision, the nickel distracts attention from the thunderous roll of

Classic Hollywood cinema. It encourages Stahr's idler to stroll off the track.

 On a Walking Tour of Hollywood

 The original idler, of course, is Benjamin's flaneur, the stroller of nineteenth-

century Paris, for whom, "the fruits of idleness are more precious than the fruits of labor"

(AP, "M [The Flaneur]" 453). He wanders about the city streets leisurely, "to be able to

catch the scent of a threshold or to recognize a paving stone by touch" (AP, "M [The

Flaneur]" 427). He is what Charles Baudelaire called the impassioned observer of

modernity, who is "solitary [sic] gifted with an active imagination, and always travels]

across the great human desert" (36). When invoking the flaneur, however, one needs to

be careful about the various incarnations of this well-known character. For he has been

known as the consumer and the detective; the urban dandy and the capitalist spy; one

who "feels himself viewed by all and sundry as a true suspect," but also "is utterly

undiscoverable, the hidden man" (AP, "M [The Flaneur]" 420). In recent years, he has

become the kind of figure who represents the modern condition in general. Or, as Chris

Jenks observes, "though grounded in everyday life, [he has become] an analytic form, a

narrative device, an attitude toward knowledge and its social context" (148). At the same

time, he is on occasion "identified with a certain kind of fluid, aestheticized sensibility

that implies the abdication of political, moral or cognitive control over the world" (Gluck

53).16 While all of these depictions are interrelated, and therefore remain significant for a

full understanding of his role, in this essay I am particularly interested in the flaneur who

traverses the city, pausing wherever an ordinary object catches his eye, in order to