After his stints writing for the L.A. Weekly and editing at L.A. CityBeat, Matthew Fleischer has gone Baudelaire on us. Specifically, he's become a flaneur, an absinthie, Parisian bohemian term applied to one who wanders the street in search of illumination. As in, to quote Fleischer quoting Charles Baudelaire, “a person who walks the city in order to experience it.”

Fleischer isn't keeping his discoveries and musings to himself, luckily, and since last week has been at True/Slant.com under the appropriate hat, L.A. Flaneur. As befitting a wanderer afoot in Los Angeles, Fleischer is acutely concerned with the preservation of public space in L.A. Early peripatetic observations have included the Urban Rangers' invasion of “private” Malibu beaches and the possible sale of Rio de Los Angeles State Park, a 40-acre pocket of green that opened two years ago on part of the old Taylor train yard. Says L.A. Flaneur Fleischer: “The construction of the Rio de Los Angeles State Park was American democracy at its best. The park's closure would show it at its worst.”

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