What We Loved This Week: Discarded Neon, Hemingway in Idaho and ‘The Places in Between’

Pam Mandel
The Neon Boneyard: Two fenced lots north of the Las Vegas strip hold an amazing collection of decaying giant typography. The Neon Museum has big plans to restore a Googie-style clamshell building as their visitor’s center, but for now, the signs sit gathering dust and frustrating camera happy modernists for whom the one hour tour is way too short.

David Frey
I’m in beautiful Ketchum, Idaho.  A few people around still remember when Hemingway lived—and died—here. One woman told me she answered the doorbell in her red ski longjohns and found Hemingway at the door. “I slammed the door in his face,” she said. You gotta love that.

Jim Benning
Lila Downs performing last night at San Diego’s House of Blues. Among the highlights, she sang the classic “La Llorona.” Chavela Vargas’s version is my favorite, but here’s a taste of Downs’s rendition. Dig the harp:

Frank Bures
I finally got around to reading Rory Stewart’s “The Places In Between” and all I can say is “Wow.”  It must be some sort of high water mark for travel writing.

Eva Holland
I loved playing tour guide for my parents on a visit to New York City. Over the last few years, when I’ve visited them during expat stints in Malaysia and Barbados, they’ve been the ones showing me around, and the role reversal this time was a lot of fun.

Michael Yessis
Artificial, a video about the atmospheric conditions in the London Underground. Kevin Fay posted this on the World Hum blog earlier this week, and I’ve watched it three times. It’s beautifully done.

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