Travel Blog: News and Briefs
R.I.P. Chelsea Hotel
by Eva Holland | 08.22.11 | 11:02 AM ET
The Daily Mail reports that the iconic New York City hotel is no longer accepting new guests, and that its remaining long-term residents are “resigned to being bought out to make way for a run-of-the-mill boutique hotel” now that a new developer has taken control of the site. It’s a sad end for a notorious building. Tom Leonard looks back on the Chelsea’s more than 100 years:
Surely no other single building can lay claim to so much creativity, destruction and sheer scandal as the Chelsea Hotel in New York. For decades it was a byword for Bohemian eccentricity and hellraising excess, an imposing but squalid sanctuary for writers and artists too penniless or troublesome to live anywhere else.
Jack Kerouac wrote his Beat Generation bible On The Road there, in one drug-fuelled, three-week marathon. Arthur C. Clarke wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey there, too, training his telescope not into space but at the apartment windows opposite… From writers such as Mark Twain, Tennessee Williams and Eugene O’Neill, through the hippies and on to the nihilist punks of the 1970s and beyond, ‘the Chelsea’ has more than lived up to its understated description of itself as a ‘rest stop for rare individuals’.
(Via Sophia Dembling)
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Yahoo! BuzzTravel Movie Watch: ‘The Loneliest Planet’
by Eva Holland | 08.17.11 | 7:01 AM ET
The Loneliest Planet premiered at the Locarno Film Festival last week. It’s an adaptation of a travel-themed short story, “Expensive Trips Nowhere,” by World Hum contributor Tom Bissell, and it stars Gael Garcia Bernal of “The Motorcycle Diaries” fame. The story follows a pair of young backpackers on a guided hiking expedition in the Caucasus Mountains, and judging from this Variety review, it’s a must-see:
Much of the pic’s first hour unspools through continuous handheld shots of the threesome trudging along with backpacks, telling stories when they’re not silently concentrating on navigating treacherous terrain. At regular interludes, long-distance shots observe them dwarfed by the landscape as Richard Skelton’s haunting, rhythmic, ethnically inflected score intones in the background.
An encounter on the trail turns into a near-life-threatening test of manhood that Alex [Bernal] arguably fails. Thereafter, none of the characters discuss what happened, but it casts a profound pall over the adventure, shifting allegiances and sympathies among the threesome. ...[V]iewers may recognize a core emotional truth about how deeply travel tests relationships, how a single instinctive action can shift the ground irrevocably between people, and how no words can make things right.
The Unknown World vs. GPS
by Michael Yessis | 08.15.11 | 2:24 PM ET
Ari N. Schulman asks what “the greatest revolution in navigation since the map and compass” means for how we move through the world.
When driving down the highway, you can now expect to see, in a sizable portion of the cars around you, GPS screens glowing on dashboards and windshields. What these devices promise, like the opening of the Western frontier, and like the automobile and the open road, is a greater freedom—although the freedom promised by GPS is of a very strange new sort.
Toward the end of the piece, Schulman tackles the Kerouac question: “How, then, would the new technology of location affect an ‘On the Road’ today?”
Can we imagine its characters, and by extension ourselves, escaping into the Western night, navigating by GPS and choosing where to go with Yelp, supplied with surrounding-relevant multimedia by GeoTour, encountering city streets with their iPhones held up and overlaying the view, and still having the same adventure? Something about this image is absurd. To better appreciate what and why that might be, it is helpful to step back and consider On The Road‘s forerunner in American wayfaring legend, the classic Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
(Via Andrew Sullivan)
An Argument Against the Summer Vacation
by Eva Holland | 08.15.11 | 8:55 AM ET
At Front Porch Republic, Jason Peters goes there:
There’s no paucity of smiling children, or of aching muscles after you’ve rough-housed the kids and cousins in the lake or pool, but then you can almost see the seeds of greater expectations germinating in the soils of their little brains. The danger is that they’ll grow up to live for their two weeks’ worth of vacation each year and hate the other fifty. And that is no way to live a life.
In fine, there is the sense that you have fully arrived: at long last you are all consumer, endlessly provided for and endlessly entertained. But if, deep down, you have reconciled yourself to your condition, which is not to play but to work, you know that without work you cannot fully inhabit your humanity. Or: all play and no work makes daddy a dull boy.
(Via Andrew Sullivan)
What Does it Mean to be a Nomad?
by Michael Yessis | 08.12.11 | 11:26 AM ET
Venkatesh Rao calls herself an “illegible person.” She explains:
My temporary nomadic state is just one aspect of a broader fog of illegibility that is starting to descend on my social identity. And I am not alone. I seem to run into more illegible people every year. And we are not just illegible to the IRS and to regular people whose social identities can be accurately summarized on business cards. We are also illegible to each other. Unlike nomads from previous ages, who wandered in groups within which individuals at least enjoyed mutual legibility, we seem to wander through life as largely solitary creatures. Our scripts and situations are mostly incomprehensible to others.
“Wanderlust” author Elisabeth Eaves calls Rao’s essay the “best thing I’ve read on nomadism since Bruce Chatwin.”
Rao means something else too: As nomads, we become illegible to a system that can’t pin us down by income, residence, or occupation. Governments and corporations begin to see us as either irrelevant or suspicious. I like to think I’ve contributed a little to this subject in “Wanderlust,” when I talk about stationary peoples’ mistrust of the nomad. The great work on this theme is Chatwin’s “The Songlines.”
(Via @ElisabethEaves)
Endless Travel Writing Ethics Debate Gets Kindle Singled
by Michael Yessis | 08.09.11 | 12:41 PM ET
Mike Albo, the freelancer who mused about feeling like a “guppy who is being eaten by his mother” after being outed as a taker of press trips, has fictionalized his experience and put it up for sale as a Kindle Single.
“I was perilously close to exposing a secret underground economy of promotion: favors and junkets and banquets and gifts that keeps the city in motion, and keeps underpaid writers at work,” Albo writes. “Basically, I became the Silkwood of Swag.”
Does Travel Change Us? The Debate Goes On.
by Eva Holland | 08.09.11 | 8:21 AM ET
A few months back, we blogged about a provocative essay by Caitlin Rolls that argued against travel as a life-changing force. Now The Smart Set’s Jessa Crispin has weighed in too, touching on everything from Rolls’ essay to Tony Hiss’ concept of “deep travel” to Crispin’s own early travels.
Videos You Must See: Move, Learn, Eat
by Eva Holland | 08.06.11 | 9:56 AM ET
Edith Zimmerman from The Hairpin summarizes these three gorgeous travel shorts thusly: “Three beautiful, infuriating young men had enough time and money to go everywhere, eat everything, and turn it into three little movies. Go to hell, beautiful young men!”
“Move” is my favorite. “Learn” and “Eat” are below the jump.
MOVE from Rick Mereki on Vimeo.
‘So Everyone You See Here That’s Over 35 Lived Through the War?’
by Eva Holland | 08.04.11 | 8:58 AM ET
Over at Matador, World Hum contributor Lauren Quinn wrote a long, layered story about a visit to the Killing Fields in Phnom Penh, her childhood friendship with the daughter of expat Cambodian survivors in Oakland, and the silence that seems to linger over the war.
Here’s a taste:
Our tuk-tuk rattled along the unsteady pavement, taking us closer to the mass-grave execution site that is one of Phnom Penh’s two main tourist attractions. The other is the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, the former S-21 torture prison under the Khmer Rouge. All the travel agencies along the riverside advertise for tours of the two, sometimes combined with a trip to a shooting range where travelers can fire AK-47s left over from the war (ammunition costs not included).
Most travelers stayed in Phnom Penh only long enough to see S-21 and the Killing Fields, then scattered from the city. It was what Cindy was doing, and what I, if I hadn’t come for my particular project, would have done as well. I’d been putting off visiting the Killing Fields, not wanting, I’d rationalized, to spend the $12 tuk-tuk fare venturing out solo. Cindy offered an opportunity to split the cost—but more than that, she offered a buffer, a companion.
The wind grew stronger without buildings to block it, and I blinked bits of dust and debris from my contact lenses. By the time we pulled into the dirt lot in front of the Killing Fields, stinging tears blurred my vision.
“This happens every day here,” I laughed, and dabbed my eyes.
Debating ‘The Lost Art of Postcard Writing’
by Michael Yessis | 08.03.11 | 2:16 PM ET
Charles Simic laments the dwindling number of postcards arriving in his mailbox this summer.
Until a few years ago, hardly a day would go by in the summer without the mailman bringing a postcard from a vacationing friend or acquaintance. Nowadays, you’re bound to get an email enclosing a photograph, or, if your grandchildren are the ones doing the traveling, a brief message telling you that their flight has been delayed or that they have arrived. The terrific thing about postcards was their immense variety. It wasn’t just the Eiffel Tower or the Taj Mahal, or some other famous tourist attraction you were likely to receive in the mail, but also a card with a picture of a roadside diner in Iowa, the biggest hog at some state fair in the South, and even a funeral parlor touting the professional excellence that their customers have come to expect over a hundred years. Almost every business in this country, from a dog photographer to a fancy resort and spa, had a card. In my experience, people in the habit of sending cards could be divided into those who go for the conventional images of famous places and those who delight in sending images whose bad taste guarantees a shock or a laugh.
He ends his New York Review of Books piece with something World Hum contributor, Mad Libs-style postcard-template maker and campaigner to make handwritten postcards and letters cool again Doug Mack finds off-putting.
That generalization that people who write postcards are, in some nebulous-but-important sense Older—well, it’s probably correct. Almost certainly. And yet there’s also something so reductive about that artfully-drawn scene and its insistence on corralling the postcard-writers into some dusty museum display of a bygone era, as though to write a postcard is to put down one’s shuffleboard stick and scribble some comments about how Truman sure was a good president, gee whiz, before pushing the walker down the hall to the activity room for the 2pm ragtime sing-along.
Come on. Don’t consign the very act of postcard-writing to the nursing home for lost-cause, nearly-dead communication, along with Morse code and the Pony Express. Don’t take pity on postcard writers. To ask for pity, to claim that this is the domain of only the “problem”-ridden “older people”—this isn’t going to do much to make anyone else want to write postcards, either. Lament the decline, sure, but spare me the elegies.
The Downsides of Digital Nomadism
by Jim Benning | 08.02.11 | 5:49 PM ET
While a life of perpetual travel has its advantages, traveling attorney Paul Karl Lukacs thinks would-be vagabonds should know the drawbacks, too.
He’s published “five facts about being a digitial nomad that the more ardent boosters won’t tell you.”
Among them:
I completely disagree with Nomadic Matt and others who claim that a vagabonding stint increases your chances of being hired because it displays your versatility, skills and globalism. Horse hockey. In a sluggish economy, employers can be as choosy as they want, and they are hiring the candidates with the most traditionally impressive resumes. One of the issues currently percolating in the United States is the (completely legal) refusal of many employers to hire anybody who is not already employed. That includes you, nomad.
Meet Heathrow Airport’s New Writer in Residence
by Eva Holland | 08.02.11 | 2:58 PM ET
Novelist Tony Parsons is the latest writer to sign up for a week at Heathrow. According to the Evening Standard, Parsons will “roam around the airport, among passengers and staff, as inspiration for his 13th book which will be a collection of short stories based on his experiences there.”
“The Art of Travel” author Alain de Botton was the airport’s first writer-in-residence back in 2009. We interviewed him about the experience.
(Via @johnleewriter)
The Return of Bulwer-Lytton and More Bad Travel Writing
by Michael Yessis | 08.01.11 | 11:34 AM ET
Love this annual contest, where writers compose an intentionally awful opening sentence of a novel. This year’s winners were announced last week and, as usual, the honorees have given us some dreadful yet hilarious travel writing. My two favorites come from the purple prose category. Mike Pedersen took the top spot with this clunker:
As his small boat scudded before a brisk breeze under a sapphire sky dappled with cerulean clouds with indigo bases, through cobalt seas that deepened to navy nearer the boat and faded to azure at the horizon, Ian was at a loss as to why he felt blue.
Jack Barry’s vision of Los Angeles was runner-up:
The Los Angeles morning was heavy with smog, the word being a portmanteau of smoke and fog, though in LA the pollutants are typically vehicular emissions as opposed to actual smoke and fog, unlike 19th-century London where the smoke from countless small coal fires often combined with fog off the Thames to produce true smog, though back then they were not clever enough to call it that.
Clever, Jack. Clever.
Do you yearn to write bad travel writing? We can help.
Mariachi El Bronx, Metalachi and the Rise of Mariachi Fusion
by Jim Benning | 07.29.11 | 11:17 AM ET
Is it just me or is mariachi-rock fusion a thing these days?
There’s Metalachi, which, as its name suggests, mixes heavy metal and mariachi. The combo has resulted in some intriguing songs, including an unlikely cover of Judas Priest’s “Breaking the Law.”
There’s Tucson-based Calexico, whose mariachi-infused rock is so evocative of the American southwest.
And now there’s Mariachi El Bronx, a side project of the Los Angeles punk band The Bronx. The group’s second mariachi album will be released Aug. 2, and it just earned a rave review from NPR.
Mariachi El Bronx sings in English and plays with more abandon than the typical buttoned-down folkloric mariachi ensemble. But its songs follow the strict conventions of the form to the letter.
When I heard the first Mariachi El Bronx record in 2009, it struck me as a bit of a clever gimmick—you know, dress a punk up in an elaborate charro suit and watch what happens. On II, inside the tales of lost love and other tragedies, there’s plenty of tradition balanced by shots of pure joy and irreverence. And that makes all the difference.
It sounds pretty good to my ear. Here’s a taste:
Rebuilding the Bamiyan Buddhas
by Eva Holland | 07.27.11 | 5:16 PM ET
The famous Afghan statues were demolished by the Taliban in 2001. World Hum contributor Joanna Kakissis reports on the painstaking rebuilding process for NPR:
Up to half of the Buddha pieces can be recovered, according to Bert Praxenthaler, a German art historian and sculptor, who has been working at the site for the past eight years. He and his crew have sifted through 400 tons of rubble and have recovered many parts of the statues along with shrapnel, land mines and explosives that were used in their demolition.
But how do you rebuild the Buddhas from the rubble?
“The archaeological term is ‘anastylosis,’ but most people think it’s some kind of strange disease,” said Praxenthaler.
For those in the archaeology world, “anastylosis” is actually a familiar term. It was the process used to restore the Parthenon of Athens. It involves combining the monument’s original pieces with modern material.
(Via @juliaindc)
