Destination: United States
93 Years of the New York Subway, in Photos
by Eva Holland | 10.25.10 | 11:46 AM ET
The New York Times compliled a gorgeous slideshow that spans from 1917 to the present. (Via Kottke)
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Yahoo! BuzzSpiritual Tourism Struggling in Sedona
by Eva Holland | 10.22.10 | 12:39 PM ET
The New York Times’ Mark Lacey reports from Sedona—“Arizona’s New Age mecca,” as World Hum contributor Laurie Gough calls it—where visitors numbers are way down. Here’s Lacey:
Nobody is sure exactly what is keeping people away from Sedona’s four vortexes, swirling energy sources emanating from the earth, but the effects are clear: far fewer crystals are being bought, spiritual tours taken and treatments ordered, from aura cleansings to chakra balancings.
That an earthly power—the economy—is a culprit is not in doubt. But some do not discount the effects of an awful incident from a year ago that put Sedona’s New Age community in a bad light and that, to some degree, still lingers, despite efforts by metaphysical people to cast it away.
The rest of the story delves into the impact of that incident last year, when three tourists died in a sweat lodge ceremony. It’s a chilling read.
Missou-rah or Missou-ree? Trillin Weighs In.
by Eva Holland | 10.18.10 | 3:53 PM ET
NPR’s Weekend Edition tapped writer (and Missourian) Calvin Trillin to tackle the longstanding pronunciation debate. According to Trillin, the confusion results from a geographical divide:
I think Missou-rah(ph) is particularly prevalent—I’ve read this, I didn’t know this of my own accord—in the northwest part of the state and a majority in Kansas City. And Missou-ree(ph) I’ve always thought of as a St. Louis and therefore eastern pronunciation.
There you go, travelers. Problem solved. (Via The Book Bench)
Pacific Coast Highway: ‘Easily the Best in America’
by Eva Holland | 10.18.10 | 12:39 PM ET
Over at The American Scene, Conor Friedersdorf waxes nostalgic about PCH:
Few things satisfy me as much as driving on certain stretches of Pacific Coast Highway, a road that is easily the best in America, and that I can’t imagine being equaled elsewhere. There is a mile or two in south Laguna Beach that I associate with summer days at age sixteen, driving with Feel Flow or Scarlet Begonias blaring on the stereo, sand on my feet, surf wax beneath my fingernails, and windows down to achieve that singular sensation of evaporated saltwater on skin dried by a warm 55 MPH breeze. Call it beach feel, which usually also involves a slight sunburn, muscles tired from fighting currents all day, and the kind of hunger that makes an In’N'Out burger even better than usual.
Travel Movie Watch Update: ‘127 Hours’
by Eva Holland | 10.11.10 | 1:54 PM ET
Just under a year ago we noted that “Slumdog Millionaire” director Danny Boyle would soon be starting work on “127 Hours,” the true story of Aron Ralston‘s canyoneering accident and escape. The trailer is here, and—among other things—it makes me want to book a flight to Utah as soon as possible. The movie’s due out November 5.
(Via Gawker)
Thoughts From the Amerika Section of a German Grocery Store
by Terry Ward | 10.11.10 | 11:01 AM ET
By Terry Ward Amid the Cheese Zip and the Marshmallow Fluff, Terry Ward remembers what it means to be American
The Sounds of Zion
by Michael Yessis | 10.11.10 | 9:16 AM ET
Interesting plans afoot at Zion National Park to protect the park’s natural soundscape. The “Soundscape Management Plan,” according to the Salt Lake Tribune, is the first of its kind.
Frank Turina, of Fort Collins, Colo., a planner with the natural sounds program for the National Park Service and project manager for the Zion document, said an area’s soundscape is as valuable as air quality and watershed although, unlike those resources, it is intangible.
“Sound has an inherent value to the park that we want to preserve and protect for the future,” Turina said in a telephone interview.
He said the new plan uses the science of acoustics to specify conditions under which park managers would need to act to protect and preserve the soundscape of Zion. That science gives the plan objectivity and credibility.
“It is a very interesting and new application of old science to protect natural areas in the park,” he said. “This (project) is on the cutting edge.”
What was the World’s Tallest Building in 1884?
by Eva Holland | 10.08.10 | 3:09 PM ET
The Washington Monument. Kottke has a lovely graphic contrasting the monument with its 1880s competition. We’ve come a long way from the Mall to the Burj, huh?
76-Second Travel Show: The Monopoly Travel Guide to Atlantic City
by Robert Reid | 10.06.10 | 4:01 PM ET
With help from the world-famous game, Robert Reid gets beyond the boardwalk
‘Is Civil War Tourism Fun?’
by Eva Holland | 10.05.10 | 1:41 PM ET
This coming spring marks the 150th anniversary of the onset of the Civil War. John Swansburg, anticipating an upsurge in Civil War tourism as a result, is getting out ahead of the pack—and he’s documenting his jam-packed ten-day Civil War road trip in a series of dispatches for Slate. He begins the trip with a series of questions:
Over the next four years, scores of fathers will use the sesquicentennial celebration as an excuse to don their safari shirts and trundle forbearing wives and irritable children off to Gettysburg or Spotsylvania or Chickamauga. What will they see? Will they learn something they couldn’t have picked up from watching Ken Burns or reading Battle Cry of Freedom? Can visiting these places turn a layman into a buff? Is Civil War tourism fun?
David Byrne: ‘Don’t Forget the Motor City’
by Eva Holland | 10.05.10 | 10:13 AM ET
The musician and World Hum contributor recently spent a week in Detroit, and he’s posted a lengthy, thoughtful item about the visit on his blog. Much of it focuses on the origins of Detroit’s infamous urban decay:
This is a city that still has an infrastructure, or some of it, for 2 million people, and now only 800,000 remain. One rides down majestic boulevards with only a few cars on them, past towering (often empty) skyscrapers. A few weeks ago I watched a documentary called Requiem For Detroit by British director Julian Temple, who used to be associated with the Sex Pistols. It’s a great film, available to watch on YouTube, that gives a context and history for the devastation one sees all around here. This process didn’t happen overnight, as with Katrina, but over many many decades. However the devastation is just as profound, and just as much concentrated on the lower echelons of society. Both disasters were man-made.
(Via The Daily Dish)
Las Vegas Cowers at ‘Death Ray’
by Michael Yessis | 09.30.10 | 11:13 AM ET
It singes hair! It melts plastic cups! It inspires funny leads on blogs!
The “Vdara Death Ray,” as it’s known to some pool employees at the Vdara Hotel & Spa at the Las Vegas CityCenter, is apparently a result of the design of the building. The sun reflects off one of the hotel’s towers in a way that targets a section of the hotel’s pool area with extreme temperatures for short periods of time. From the Las Vegas Review-Journal:
Viewed from above, the Vdara tower resembles a crescent. The crescent’s southern-facing side is concave. There is no tall building farther south to block the sun’s hot afternoon rays, so Vdara receives the full brunt. Its pool lies at the center of this southern-facing wall, on top of a low-rise building that is three stories tall.
How hot is the “Death Ray”? If it can melt plastic cups, as reported, it’s pretty hot. According to the Review-Journal, plastic cups melt at around 160 degrees.
After the Nashville Flood: Grand Ole Opry House Reopens
by Eva Holland | 09.28.10 | 2:15 PM ET
USA Today has video from the restored venue, which opens its doors again tonight for the first time since Nashville’s disastrous spring flooding. The Grand Ole Opry itself stayed on the airwaves—as it has since 1925—broadcasting from other, undamaged locations around the city while its home received a $20 million renovation. Says longtime Opry member Marty Stuart: “It was time for a freshening up, so on the silver side of the flood, it’s like, ‘Thanks, God, for the flood and the insurance check.’”
World Hum columnist Tom Swick made it to one of those relocated Opry broadcasts, at the Ryman Auditorium, this summer. He wrote:
There was still the homey banter and the chummy words from sponsors, the easy mixing of newcomers and old-timers. A student at the New England Conservatory (playing fiddle and singing) followed Jack Greene (singing “Statue of a Fool”). As natural as this assemblage of young and old seemed—conscious preservation of the unbroken circle—it constituted something rarely seen in popular music today.
A Tourist Goes to Church in Harlem
by Eva Holland | 09.27.10 | 2:50 PM ET
Slate writer Jeremy Stahl set aside his discomfort “at the prospect of joining other underdressed white gawkers observing how ‘locals’ pray” and headed north of 96th St. in Manhattan on a Sunday morning. The resulting dispatch is a thought-provoking read. Here’s Stahl setting the scene at Greater Highway Deliverance Temple:
When the music started, the usher who had greeted us began dancing up and down the aisle. The congregation stood up and started to clap and sway. One tourist pantomimed the drumming and imitated the dancing in what looked like an attempt to impress two female friends. The choir performed “I Came To Praise the Lord,” and the lyrics—“I don’t know what you came to do, I came to kneel and pray”—stung almost like a collective rebuke. At one point, a church leader declared the “visitor” count for the day’s service at 147, listed the represented countries, and told us “thank God for each and every one of you”—even, I suppose, the dozing Japanese woman to my left.
When we were back on the bus, our tour guide, Sheila, asked if anyone had any questions. There was just one: “They weren’t offended?”
Las Vegas Bets on ‘Real’ Architecture
by Michael Yessis | 09.27.10 | 11:34 AM ET
Las Vegas, Paul Goldberger notes in the New Yorker, “has started to feel a little uncomfortable about its reputation as a place where developers spend billions of dollars on funny buildings.” That feeling helped inspire the latest over-the-top Vegas production. Goldberger writes:
The complex is called CityCenter, and it is the biggest construction project in the history of Las Vegas. It has three hotels, two condominium towers, a shopping mall, a convention center, a couple of dozen restaurants, a private monorail, and a casino. There was to have been a fourth hotel, whose opening has been delayed indefinitely. But even without it the project contains nearly eighteen million square feet of space, the equivalent of roughly six Empire State Buildings. “We wanted to create an urban space that would expand our center of gravity,” Jim Murren, the chairman of the company, told me. Murren, an art and architecture buff who studied urban planning in college and wrote his undergraduate thesis on the design of small urban parks, oversaw the selection of architects, and the result is a kind of gated community of glittering starchitect ambition. There are major buildings by Daniel Libeskind, Rafael Viñoly, Helmut Jahn, Pelli Clarke Pelli, Kohn Pedersen Fox, and Norman Foster; and interiors by Peter Marino, Lewis Tsurumaki Lewis, Bentel and Bentel, and AvroKO. There are also prominent sculptures by Maya Lin, Nancy Rubins, and Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen. “The idea I wanted to convey was to bring smarter planning to the development process in Las Vegas, to expand our boundaries of knowledge,” Murren told me. “Las Vegas is always looked down upon. CityCenter is a counterpoint to the kitschiness.”
Goldberger doesn’t believe the project succeeds.