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Thursday, November 05, 2009

The Travelers Guide to Being 22 Years Old, and other states

The Words Without Borders blog has a post on a series of books published by Whereabouts Press, the Traveler Literary Companion series. These are guides to countries (mostly) and some cities containing stories set in those places. To their credit, an examination of the Table of Contents for some of the books suggests that their contents were all written by natives to those countries; the India guide has no E.M. Forester or even V.S. Naipaul, the Spain no Hemingway or Orwell.

A splendid idea. But what if the definition of travel guide were extended to states of being, or stages of life? Thus a Travelers Guide to Being 22 Years Old might contain selections from Goodbye, Columbus, The Graduate, and All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers. The Travelers Guide to Homelessness would contain stories written only by people who had been (and maybe were still) homeless (voluntary homeless people need not apply -- again, no Orwell). The emphasis on authenticity might get a little dicey with, for example, The Travelers Guide to Mars -- but who could exclude Ray Bradbury from that collection?

technorati: travel books, books, youth

Labels: books, short stories, travel

Sunday, October 11, 2009

Space tourists becoming boring

The founder of the Cirque du Soleil company -- formerly a charming group of European and North American hippies, now a multi-billion dollar corporation with simultaneous nightly productions in cities around the world -- was shot into space as one of those "space tourists" (in other words, he paid $10 billion for the privilege) -- and almost no one noticed, despite the fact that he reportedly spent most of the trip wearing a clown nose. I'm sure the dedicated scientists and pilots who worked for twenty or thirty years to get the same privilege really appreciated that.

technorati: space tourists, Laliberte

Labels: astronaut, Bad Behavior, travel

Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Bourgeois abroad

I've really enjoyed reading n+1, the lit mag, so I was disappointed to read this interview with Benjamin Kunkel, its editor and founder, because he ends up sounding like a complete douchebag.

He moved to Buenos Aires just because he was "tired of being in New York. I felt I was a bit too close to the publishing industry." He is "drifting a bit right now, in terms of my domicile."
Asked about "the expat scene," he protests, "I'm not really a seeker out of scenes" but adds, "I don't mind taking some relatively inexpensive flights down to South America."
He recently finished writing a play, but professes not to care much about what happens next. "I'm just waiting to see what, if anything, happens with it. But I've been working on that, working on another book, and doing a lot of journalism..."
Finally, he is asked: "What do you think the role of the intellectual is in society?" and responds: "On this, I kind of have a Maoist view."

Oh, clearly. Because those Maoists were famous for jet-setting to international capitals, hanging around writing plays for no reason, and moving to another country just because they were a little bit tired of where they were at.

What a douche!!

Labels: Beat writers, travel

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Dept. of Do I Have To?

Jet Non-Stop to Fort Lauderdale!
-- Subject line of email from an airline

If I did have to fly to Florida, I'm not sure I wouldn't want to make as many stops as possible, the better to delay arriving in Florida.

Labels: travel

Friday, September 04, 2009

Quick! Into the toilet!

A strange font for use in airport signage has the most sinister glyphs ever, including a suitcase filled with gasoline, an all-seeing surveillance camera, and a man running into a toilet.

technorati: fonts, security, airports

Labels: surveillance, travel

Saturday, August 15, 2009

Triumph of the Bourgeoisie: a sturdy railing between you and the jungle

I was struck by this banner ad, which I saw on the site of the San Jose Mercury News:

Nice clean white people separated from the jungle by a sturdy wooden railing. They aren't sweating. They aren't in the sun. Their L.L. Bean sportswear is still perfectly pressed, dry and free of stains from grease, sunscreen or bug repellent. In fact, they might as well be watching a DVD of the Panamanian jungle from their condominium -- and why didn't they, instead of contributing to global warming by flying down there just so they can stay as far away from the jungle as possible?

Yes, I went to India two years ago -- and I stayed in the city, as opposed to a friend of mine who went a year later. He was never in the city, he boasted, but always out in the countryside, seeing the sites, whatever they are. I did not say: and every step of the way, your whole presence was an insult to the bitterly poor populace (and they are much poorer in the country than in the city), reminding them of the hopelessness of their lives.

I can't imagine traveling to a third world country just to lord it over the locals, who would be able to size me up at a glimpse and tell that my annual income is 10000% of theirs. So I don't understand the appeal of such trips to the American bourgeoisie (of which I am definitely a member; make no mistake, it's not like I'm trying to say that I'm not). What is it that they're going for? Scenery they can't see in the US? Cheap prices? To practice their language skills? I really don't get it. I hate the fucking jungle, I hate getting hot and sunburned, I hate sweating, I understand completely. My point is, why go at all?

So I won't be going to Panama (or anywhere else where the standard of living is below that of, say, Argentina) anytime if I can help it.

technorati: travel, third world

Labels: advertising, Bangalore trip, travel

Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Post 3501

Earlier this month Cris and I went to visit our friends down in the desert near the town of Twentynine Palms [location], and we made the mandatory trip up into "the monument," as locals still refer to Joshua Tree National Park (which gained national park status only in the 1990s). I took a few pictures up in the park -- see my Flickr set -- but I'm not nearly as good a photographer as this guy, so take a look at his blog if you want to see some really beautiful pictures that capture something of what the park is really like.

technorati: desert, Joshua Tree National Park, cacti

Labels: desert, travel

Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Their minds are filled with big ideas, images and distorted facts

Forty years later, in a 2004 interview, Dylan talked about the kind of interaction that keeps him from going out in public if he can avoid it. "People will say, 'Are you who I think you are?'" Dylan said. "And you'll say, Ahh, I don't know. And they'll say, 'You're, you're him,' and you'll say, 'Okay, yes?' And then the next thing is, 'Oh, no. Are you really him? I don't think you're him.' And that can go on and on."

Susan Strasberg used to tell a story about walking around New York with an incognito-in-plain-sight Marilyn Monroe. "Do you want to see me be her?" Monroe would say, and Strasberg describes the star turning on some imperceptible inner switch, then beginning to glow. Within moments the people who had been passing right by were stopping in their tracks, scrambling for pen and paper.

From an essay by Michelle Orange on mistaken identity in The Rumpus.

Labels: identity, travel, zeitgeist

Saturday, March 21, 2009

Oregon trip

I'm visiting my mother in suburban Portland, Ore., and today we went to nearby Oregon City where there is a cool waterfall and even cooler "municipal elevator" that looks like something left over from a 1950s Worlds Fair. Click the picture to go to a photoset.

On the way back we recrossed the Willamette River via Canby Ferry, a little six-car ferry that crosses the river in a couple of minutes. Here's a map of the location. I used my digital camera to take this video:

technorati: Oregon, Willamette River, ferry

Labels: travel, uploaded videos

Saturday, August 30, 2008

Klamath Falls to SF

I've been out of town for a week, driving up to see my mother in suburban Portland. There, in addition to family duties, I worked for a day out of my company's downtown Portland office, and went to lunch with co-workers. That gave me the opportunity to discover the lunch trucks of downtown Portland. Anyplace there's a parking lot, two or three or eight trucks, trailers and carts are set up to serve a variety of foods, everything from Thai to Mexican. It had been several years since I'd been to downtown Portland during a workday, so this was a pleasant surprise to me.

While we were standing on the sidewalk waiting for our orders and talking in loud voices about new features of the next software release, a couple of hippie punks walked by, the boy intentionally brushing my shoulder and arm as he went past as if to tell me we were taking up too much room on the sidewalk. Being a cluster of four men, we probably were taking up too much room, frankly. I looked up in surprise at the glancing blow but it wasn't enough for me to make an issue of. If it had been enough to jar me off-balance, maybe. Anyway, I was amused by the fact that I am now a fat middle-aged businessman in a polo shirt being twitted by the same kind of hippie punk I was thirty years ago.

The next day, having posted on Twitter about being in an office building in downtown Portland, I was contacted by my friends Chris and Debora, who live in the southern California high desert but happened to be sub-letting in Portland for the month. Cris and I got together with them, had lunch, and went to the Portland Japanese Garden. What a nice break from family stuff!

In between breaks from family stuff, we spent time with my mother and her husband Tom. He is a typical old-man grouchy Republican who loves to bait me with lines like "Ya know, illegal aliens run California." Since the Democratic Convention was on all week long, he had to sit and watch it. The best moment was when Obama was speaking and Tom intoned, "'Change, change!' Change from what? He never says what change" and Obama promptly said, "Now let me tell you exactly what change I am talking about."

Now we're in Klamath Falls, where a cool wind is blowing. We missed a heat wave in the San Francisco Bay Area and we'll be back there tonight. Thanks, Katia, for the cat sitting!

technorati: Klamath Falls

Labels: family, Portland, travel

Tuesday, July 22, 2008

NASA needs whiz kids

Courtesy Good Morning Silicon Valley, enjoy this NASA press release soliciting urine samples from "All Houston-SLS Associates, employees at 2200 Space Park, and any visitors to the building" at the Johnson Space Center in suburban Houston, Tex. -- just up the road from the subdivision I lived in during my high school years. The "urine collection study," for the purpose of testing some tubing meant to be used in space toilets, started yesterday and will collect several gallons of piss a day through next week.

technorati: NASA, pissing

Labels: travel

Friday, May 09, 2008

Dept. of It Could Be A Story In The Onion

I was agog at this headline:

Platonic ideal of a cheese sandwich realised in Britain

No, it's not from The Onion, it's an actual news story about a real reaction to an actual sandwich. A food critic went to London and:

The food across all levels is fantastic in London. There has been an enormous change. But the one highlight I remember the most is this cheese sandwich. I was walking through Borough market with my 15-year-old son Nick and we bought one from the stall.

I was knocked out by it. It was so delicious that we had to have another one. It meant I was more full than I should have been for lunch but it was worth it. It was so good.

The £3 toasted cheese and onion sandwich was "the creation of Bill Oglethorpe, an expert in cheese who works for the specialist suppliers Neal's Yard Dairy." So, not just something thrown together by some slob. Still a good story. But the headline makes it sublime.

Labels: travel

Sunday, December 23, 2007

Worker-owned Thai brothel

In Chaing Mai there is a worker-owned bar/brothel where the women are not subject to the depredations of all the other bar girls in Thailand. Toward the end of the story there is a bit about how workers from local NGOs patronize the place to "study" how it works -- a no-win situation, as they must prove themselves either hypocrites or cheapskates.

A message from one of the latter is said to be written in a message posted on the wall: "I love you more than I can pay." That says it all about the supposedly enlightened and gone-native Western tourist who winds up being more of a drag on the locals than the classic camera-and-Panama-hat type. I once read an article about backpackers in Nepal and Tibet who, under the delusion that they are somehow like penniless monks, wind up imposing on the hospitality of natives and are looked on not as enlightened travelers but as parasites.

technorati: sex work, prostitution,

Labels: prostitution, sex work, travel

Saturday, October 06, 2007

Train ride

Thursday I drove with Cris down to Ojai, a little resort town in the mountains near Santa Barbara. Friday I came home, leaving her there with the car, by means of a taxi to Ventura, one train from Ventura to Santa Barbara, Amtrak's main line Coast Starlight to Oakland, the Amtrak bus from the remote Oakland train station to San Francisco's Ferry Building, and a short walk to a final taxi ride home. Total time in transit, about 14 hours. But it was a sparkling clear day and a beautiful ride, at least until the sun set. Then the slow poking through the South Bay and up to Oakland got a little interminable. I can imagine how much nicer it would have been in a sleeper car "suite," which is probably about the size of a handicap stall of a restroom but would have allowed some privacy from people's incessant cell phone calls. Even the seat-to-seat conversation got to be a little much. But on the plus side, you do see some gorgeous seaside views and then some absolutely beautiful coastal hills around San Luis Obispo when the train cuts inland. (See Google map and notice the twisty railroad.)

Today, instead of going to my office to write, I'll stay at home to write, because Cris isn't here to distract me, I'm going out this evening, and it's just easier.

technorati: Amtrak, train

Labels: travel

Wednesday, October 03, 2007

Today's peak experience not so isolated

Today's NYT has a prominent feature on one of the dwindling corps of human (as opposed to robot) fire lookouts. It carefully catalogues the firewatch tower, one of thousands built in the 1930s by WPA workers, and name-checks the most famous fire watchman ever, Jack Kerouac.

Kerouac chronicled his summer of 1956 atop Desolation Peak in his novel Desolation Angels, which has become my favorite of his books. (He published a shorter description in "The Dharma Bums," a more widely read book.) A few years ago, an absolutely beautiful companion book, Poets on the Peaks by John Suiter, revisited Kerouac's outpost, along with those of fellow Beat writers Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen, who also served as fire watchers during the 1950s and whose understanding of Zen Buddhism was greatly enhanced by their experience of solitude.

One of the most vivid passages in "Desolation Angels" is the anxious scene in which Kerouac, whose only pair of shoes had fallen to pieces during the summer, hastily descends the mountain with bleeding feet to a lake cove where a Forest Service boat would pick him up. The sequence makes clear how isolated the Desolation Peak outpost was -- reachable only on foot by a steep trail after a boat ride up a lake. (The trip to the isolated Holden Village retreat center, where I spent six weeks in 2003, is somewhat comparable, though you don't have to hike into it on foot.)

The writer of the Times article seems to suggest the lookout he visited is similarly isolated:

One travels back in time, road-wise, going from asphalt to dirt to a treacherous stone-filled path that acts as the lookout's driveway. And then you hike. Up past an outhouse, up past the spot where rattlesnakes like to sun themselves and up two flights of metal stairs...

But a close look at the photograph published with the NYT piece shows a truck parked only a couple hundred yards away:

The article doesn't say, but I'd bet that's one reason that particular lookout cabin has survived as a human-staffed lookout: its accessibility.

Labels: Beat writers, travel, writers, writing techniques

Wednesday, July 11, 2007

Dept. of self-screwing

I was supposed to take a business trip next week, but it's been cancelled. Most of it was made through company websites and the cancellation is fairly straightforward, but in an effort to save the company -- a 10 billion dollar company -- money, I made my car reservation through HotWired. Well, I can read, so I knew that if you make a reservation on HotWired and cancel the trip, you're screwed. So I'm out $270 for a car and $120 for a hotel room.

But this happens to thousands of dopes every day. The funny thing is that when you call HotWired to beg them to refund your money anyway, they put you on hold for about ten minutes with the most soporific, calming piano music you ever heard. It's like what they play in the nursing home to make people realize it's time for bed. By the time you've listened to that for ten minutes, you can't possibly be angry at the lady who recites the rules to you -- the same rules you agree to when you make the purchase -- and tells you you're screwed. In fact, I felt sorry for her -- what a crappy job she has, telling people all day long that they're screwed. I'll bet she listens to that calming piano music all the time.

Labels: travel

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