I was going to go to Madrid truly without a clue. Just get off the plane, get to the city, start wandering around looking for Arthur's recommended hotels.
It was going to be the perfect kicker. I'd finally do what I'd intended all along: arrive in a city with truly no information or reservations or a single clue other than the yellowed pages of my book. Of course, I've been almost doing that this whole time, with the rather glaring exception of hotels. I prefer not to spend the night under a bridge, thanks, so it has seemed prudent to try to get the accommodation situation squared away at least a day before arrival.
But I think that my kicker is being vetoed by my dwindling bank account. I just checked it online and I nearly cried, no lie. I might actually have to limit myself to five dollars a day for the remaining week. This could be . . . interesting.
I'm a budget traveler, but the nature of this journey is such that I'm in the tourist (read: pricey) areas and I'm eating at restaurants that have been around for a while (again: pricey). Arriving in Madrid without any kind of plan or clue seems like a recipe for me (a) breaking my back lugging my backpack all over town, guided only by a crappy hand-drawn, outdated map, and (b) finally giving in at midnight and booking a room in someplace way too expensive.
Quirkiness has its limits.
22 September 2009
Eau de Backpacker
As soon as I get home, I'm starting a line of fragrances: Eau de Backpacker.
A complex, bright mildewy scent with undertones of sweat and week-old pastry crumbs, and a subtle lingering finish of an unnameable yet exotic Old World train station. Perfect for those moments when you're just too comfortable at home and yearn for the spirit--and smell--of life on the road. Because "you reek" is just your friends' way of saying "I'm jealous of your far-flung journeys and general adventurous spirit."
And coming soon:
The Wandering Sole Pedicure Salon. Are your feet too pampered and healthy? Do you long for the blisters, calluses, funghi, and general grime that accumulate during long periods of travel? Come in to Wandering Sole and let us un-pamper you! By the time you leave, all of your comfort will be washed and bashed away, leaving you as achy as if you'd just climbed Kilimanjaro.
Walk in, hobble out! ... We'll even stamp and mangle your passport!*
*Extra fee applies; payable only in zloty.
A complex, bright mildewy scent with undertones of sweat and week-old pastry crumbs, and a subtle lingering finish of an unnameable yet exotic Old World train station. Perfect for those moments when you're just too comfortable at home and yearn for the spirit--and smell--of life on the road. Because "you reek" is just your friends' way of saying "I'm jealous of your far-flung journeys and general adventurous spirit."
And coming soon:
The Wandering Sole Pedicure Salon. Are your feet too pampered and healthy? Do you long for the blisters, calluses, funghi, and general grime that accumulate during long periods of travel? Come in to Wandering Sole and let us un-pamper you! By the time you leave, all of your comfort will be washed and bashed away, leaving you as achy as if you'd just climbed Kilimanjaro.
Walk in, hobble out! ... We'll even stamp and mangle your passport!*
*Extra fee applies; payable only in zloty.
The tourist as modern artist
The Goddess Serendipity arranged for me to be in Venice during the Biennale, that famous modern art exhibition that takes over the entire city for a few months every, well, two years.
I spent a few hours each day crashing different venues with my walking installation "The Tourist: Transcending and Transgressing Fronteras, Obfuscating and Obliterating Identity: a Work in Postcards, Photos, and Gelato-Stained Khakis." It got rave reviews--the critics didn't understand it at all, so of course they loved it.
On Sunday, I took my show to the main Biennale venue, way down at the southeastern tip of Venice, in the bucolic Giardini section of town. I shelled out an entrance fee of 18 euros--cultural learnin' ain't cheap--and strode in, holding my book prominently but casually at my side, careful to keep the brightly-colored title visible to passersby,
I visited several different countries' pavilions--Israel, Canada, Australia, Denmark, and various others--and learned that the hot new themes in art, the subjects on the cutting edge of cultural commentary, are (brace yourself):
What you do, see, is have multiple screens in the same room, each one showing something related to but--and this is key--different from the others. For example: show the same scene, but in different languages and with the timing offset by a few seconds (Singapore Pavilion). Or have four stacked screens, each with people spinning in some way--on stilts, on a bike, while holding a large object, breakdancing (Australia Pavilion).
Get it? Life is complex! And nuanced! And full of weird juxtapositions, contrasts that add up to something vibrant and interesting!
The most pretentious and dull of the videos was also the most hyped one. It was at the Great Britain pavilion, where there was a sign out front warning that large crowds were expected and seating was limited.
The filmmaker was one Steve McQueen, whom you may know from his acting roles in such movies as ... no, no, wrong Steve McQueen. This one, alas, is a brash young Brit who won the Camera d'Or at Cannes in 2008. His latest work, the one that we were all so eager to see, is titled "Giardini," which you may recall is the name of the area where the Biennale grounds are located.
The film took up two screens, side-by-side. It opened with several minutes of a close-up of rocks on the right screen and, on the left, a static view down a Giardini street. The only soundtrack was water dripping onto the aforementioned rocks, distorted and amped up for maximum obnoxiousness.
Eventually, the images changed: dogs foraging around the shuttered pavilions, streetlights switching on, leafless trees swaying in a winter wind. That was it. I suppose the effect was supposed to be mesmerizing; instead, it was monotonous and mercilessly mind-numbing. Snickers of disbelief started rippling through the audience.
In most cases, the two screens showed contrasting images that I'm sure were supposed to be Deeply Profound. For example, a brown spider poised on a tree trunk AND a red bug crawling on a leaf. Hidden vs. obvious! Predator vs. prey! Static vs. active! Eight legs vs. six! So much meaning!
The snickers eventually turned into a tidal wave of laughter--and bear in mind, this was a room full of people who had paid a decent amount of money to be there and who presumably had at least a passing interest in modern art.
Within ten minutes, I counted fourteen people walking out, presumably to track down Steve McQueen and throw him into a canal. By the twenty-minute mark, of a thirty-minute movie, another eleven people had given up. I'm sure more followed, but I was that eleventh person, the twenty-fifth total. I've never walked out of a movie before.
Guess what, Steve (et al.)? Idea A plus Idea B does not inherently equal Deep Thought C. Sometimes it just gives one the sensation of being kicked in the face AND the crotch simultaneously.
I can do the contrast thing, too. The Venice Biennale makes you think AND wince! You'll find both the sublime AND the moronic, the French AND the German AND the American AND the Venezuelan AND the Korean! In mediums as varied as sculpture AND video! There are disembodied heads AND crashing motorcycles AND cave paintings AND trying-too-hard-to-be-meta videos of gardens--and not just any gardens, but the very gardens that hold all these postmodern juxtapositions! Golly!
If there's one area of culture that can compete with modern art in contrast-obsession, it is, alas, travel writing. Just as in modern art, it can work. Sometimes. But usually it comes off as pseudo-intellectual hack work--there's no nuanced, analytical thought, just superficial observations paired in hopes that together they will sound insightful. See if these sound at all familiar:
- Nevada has gambling and recreation--vice and virtue!
- France has imposing, overcrowded landmarks and quiet, undiscovered bistros! It's a land of contrasts!
In the foreward to one of the recent Best American Travel Writing anthologies, series editor Jason Wilson offers a fine take-down of the "land of contrasts" trope. Alas, my book is at home, and I can't find the full text online, but I did manage to track down this bit about articles on Iceland:
The original composition of the line “Iceland is a land of fire and ice” has proved to be a seminal moment in the travel literature of Iceland. From that time on, the description has proved irresistible to travel writers — it has found its way into countless articles, guidebooks, and television documentaries.
Wilson was writing primarily about short-length travel writing--magazine and newspaper articles of the variety included in his anthology. But the criticisms can be applied just as well to travel books--not just guidebooks, which Wilson mentions, but travel memoirs as well.
Here, see if this formula sounds familiar: "I left my corporate job in the big city and moved to an idyllic [sun-dappled village/timeless mountain town]. The local people were sometimes charming, sometimes cold, always eccentric, and the whole region was a mesmerizing land of contrasts, both surprisingly modern and refreshingly traditional. The vineyard has a cell phone tower!"
Where did "land of contrasts" start? I don't know. But I can tell you that if you open your copy of E5D to page 291, the start of the Zurich chapter, you will read the following:
Imagine a boulevard lined at one end with banks and squat department stores, which suddenly opens into a lake of the brightest blue, covered with sailboats and swans. Consider a city of enormous commercial fame, where stock markets and brokers' houses stand a five-minute walk from brooding forests and mountain chateaus. ...
Zurich, the locale of these contrasts, is the city I'd choose for a first introduction to the land of contrasts, Switzerland. [Emphasis added.]
Birth of a cliché?
---
* To be fair, there were some genuinely compelling installations. And one of those multiple-video things, by an Icelandic artist with the delightfully-Viking-sounding name of Ragnar Kjartansson, was one of the most captivating and evocative pieces of art I've ever seen: five screens, each with him and another man playing music in various places in the Canadian Rockies. In each film, they play different instruments; together, it's a cohesive piece of music that sounds like otherworldy bluegrass, what a jam band on Venus might play.
I spent a few hours each day crashing different venues with my walking installation "The Tourist: Transcending and Transgressing Fronteras, Obfuscating and Obliterating Identity: a Work in Postcards, Photos, and Gelato-Stained Khakis." It got rave reviews--the critics didn't understand it at all, so of course they loved it.
On Sunday, I took my show to the main Biennale venue, way down at the southeastern tip of Venice, in the bucolic Giardini section of town. I shelled out an entrance fee of 18 euros--cultural learnin' ain't cheap--and strode in, holding my book prominently but casually at my side, careful to keep the brightly-colored title visible to passersby,
I visited several different countries' pavilions--Israel, Canada, Australia, Denmark, and various others--and learned that the hot new themes in art, the subjects on the cutting edge of cultural commentary, are (brace yourself):
- the search for meaning in life
- the futility of same
- the transience of identity
- despair
- contrasts
What you do, see, is have multiple screens in the same room, each one showing something related to but--and this is key--different from the others. For example: show the same scene, but in different languages and with the timing offset by a few seconds (Singapore Pavilion). Or have four stacked screens, each with people spinning in some way--on stilts, on a bike, while holding a large object, breakdancing (Australia Pavilion).
Get it? Life is complex! And nuanced! And full of weird juxtapositions, contrasts that add up to something vibrant and interesting!
The most pretentious and dull of the videos was also the most hyped one. It was at the Great Britain pavilion, where there was a sign out front warning that large crowds were expected and seating was limited.
The filmmaker was one Steve McQueen, whom you may know from his acting roles in such movies as ... no, no, wrong Steve McQueen. This one, alas, is a brash young Brit who won the Camera d'Or at Cannes in 2008. His latest work, the one that we were all so eager to see, is titled "Giardini," which you may recall is the name of the area where the Biennale grounds are located.
The film took up two screens, side-by-side. It opened with several minutes of a close-up of rocks on the right screen and, on the left, a static view down a Giardini street. The only soundtrack was water dripping onto the aforementioned rocks, distorted and amped up for maximum obnoxiousness.
Eventually, the images changed: dogs foraging around the shuttered pavilions, streetlights switching on, leafless trees swaying in a winter wind. That was it. I suppose the effect was supposed to be mesmerizing; instead, it was monotonous and mercilessly mind-numbing. Snickers of disbelief started rippling through the audience.
In most cases, the two screens showed contrasting images that I'm sure were supposed to be Deeply Profound. For example, a brown spider poised on a tree trunk AND a red bug crawling on a leaf. Hidden vs. obvious! Predator vs. prey! Static vs. active! Eight legs vs. six! So much meaning!
The snickers eventually turned into a tidal wave of laughter--and bear in mind, this was a room full of people who had paid a decent amount of money to be there and who presumably had at least a passing interest in modern art.
Within ten minutes, I counted fourteen people walking out, presumably to track down Steve McQueen and throw him into a canal. By the twenty-minute mark, of a thirty-minute movie, another eleven people had given up. I'm sure more followed, but I was that eleventh person, the twenty-fifth total. I've never walked out of a movie before.
Guess what, Steve (et al.)? Idea A plus Idea B does not inherently equal Deep Thought C. Sometimes it just gives one the sensation of being kicked in the face AND the crotch simultaneously.
I can do the contrast thing, too. The Venice Biennale makes you think AND wince! You'll find both the sublime AND the moronic, the French AND the German AND the American AND the Venezuelan AND the Korean! In mediums as varied as sculpture AND video! There are disembodied heads AND crashing motorcycles AND cave paintings AND trying-too-hard-to-be-meta videos of gardens--and not just any gardens, but the very gardens that hold all these postmodern juxtapositions! Golly!
If there's one area of culture that can compete with modern art in contrast-obsession, it is, alas, travel writing. Just as in modern art, it can work. Sometimes. But usually it comes off as pseudo-intellectual hack work--there's no nuanced, analytical thought, just superficial observations paired in hopes that together they will sound insightful. See if these sound at all familiar:
- Nevada has gambling and recreation--vice and virtue!
- France has imposing, overcrowded landmarks and quiet, undiscovered bistros! It's a land of contrasts!
In the foreward to one of the recent Best American Travel Writing anthologies, series editor Jason Wilson offers a fine take-down of the "land of contrasts" trope. Alas, my book is at home, and I can't find the full text online, but I did manage to track down this bit about articles on Iceland:
The original composition of the line “Iceland is a land of fire and ice” has proved to be a seminal moment in the travel literature of Iceland. From that time on, the description has proved irresistible to travel writers — it has found its way into countless articles, guidebooks, and television documentaries.
Wilson was writing primarily about short-length travel writing--magazine and newspaper articles of the variety included in his anthology. But the criticisms can be applied just as well to travel books--not just guidebooks, which Wilson mentions, but travel memoirs as well.
Here, see if this formula sounds familiar: "I left my corporate job in the big city and moved to an idyllic [sun-dappled village/timeless mountain town]. The local people were sometimes charming, sometimes cold, always eccentric, and the whole region was a mesmerizing land of contrasts, both surprisingly modern and refreshingly traditional. The vineyard has a cell phone tower!"
Where did "land of contrasts" start? I don't know. But I can tell you that if you open your copy of E5D to page 291, the start of the Zurich chapter, you will read the following:
Imagine a boulevard lined at one end with banks and squat department stores, which suddenly opens into a lake of the brightest blue, covered with sailboats and swans. Consider a city of enormous commercial fame, where stock markets and brokers' houses stand a five-minute walk from brooding forests and mountain chateaus. ...
Zurich, the locale of these contrasts, is the city I'd choose for a first introduction to the land of contrasts, Switzerland. [Emphasis added.]
Birth of a cliché?
---
* To be fair, there were some genuinely compelling installations. And one of those multiple-video things, by an Icelandic artist with the delightfully-Viking-sounding name of Ragnar Kjartansson, was one of the most captivating and evocative pieces of art I've ever seen: five screens, each with him and another man playing music in various places in the Canadian Rockies. In each film, they play different instruments; together, it's a cohesive piece of music that sounds like otherworldy bluegrass, what a jam band on Venus might play.
20 September 2009
Roman Holiday From Arthur
On Wednesday, I am going to cheat all day--I'm not going to use Arthur at all.
I'll be in Rome. Tell me where to go! You will be my substitute guidebook.
Up to now, I have been guided only by Arthur, my wits, and the Goddess Serendipity (as Lee puts it), with assists from the irresistible twin devils Kitsch and Irony. But I desperately need a mental health break (as Lee noted, this really is work . . .), and I could really go for some actually tasty Italian food; the places in my book have been, er, lackluster.
So:
Leave your tips in the comments or e-mail them to me at doug@douglasmack.net. Let's see how you measure up to Arthur.
Thanks!
I'll be in Rome. Tell me where to go! You will be my substitute guidebook.
Up to now, I have been guided only by Arthur, my wits, and the Goddess Serendipity (as Lee puts it), with assists from the irresistible twin devils Kitsch and Irony. But I desperately need a mental health break (as Lee noted, this really is work . . .), and I could really go for some actually tasty Italian food; the places in my book have been, er, lackluster.
So:
- Wednesday
- Rome
- Tell me where to go, what to eat, what to see, what to do.
Leave your tips in the comments or e-mail them to me at doug@douglasmack.net. Let's see how you measure up to Arthur.
Thanks!
19 September 2009
Postcards from my mom
(Not to be confused with Postcards From Yo Momma.)
From her 1967 trip. Note the first line: It's real! It looks like Venice is supposed to look.
Or, as some jaded American students I met last night put it, "This city is like that Disney place, with the pavilions for the different countries."
"Epcot?"
"Yeah, Epcot. It's like Epcot."
From her 1967 trip. Note the first line: It's real! It looks like Venice is supposed to look.
Or, as some jaded American students I met last night put it, "This city is like that Disney place, with the pavilions for the different countries."
"Epcot?"
"Yeah, Epcot. It's like Epcot."
Going native in the Tourist Culture
Tiny confession: That first night in Vienna, when I was feeling exhausted and coming down with a cold, and headed out into the city in hopes that Discovery and Childlike Wonder At Each New Sight and Spirit of Adventure would be my cure . . . I did not go to an authentic Austrian restaurant, as Arthur would have wanted. I did not discover at that moment that I love Germanic food but just haven't been giving it a shot.
That would be overdetermined and overdramatic and completely false.
Oh, I put in the effort. I examined the menus at several such restaurants and realized that in spite of the personal growth and growing confidence, Germanic food still scares the jeebers out of me. Culinarily speaking, I'm still a coward.
Instead, I opted to go native for the Tourist Culture. Yeah, Tourist Culture--there is one. It's a diverse society that encompasses people of all ethnicities, but only when they're away from home. They--er, we--go to the same places (Eiffel Tower, Venice), eat the same foods (kebabs, pizza), have the same rituals ("Scusi, could you ... photo, me, take? Por favor?"), the same native dress (cargo shorts, walking shoes).
It is indeed a unique culture, but one to which we belong only temporarily. It's a culture of transience and halfway points, located somewhere between our actual, native cultures and those in which we have booked ourselves for a stay and a look-see.
So I went to the Tourist Culture native hang-out: an Irish Pub (run by guys from England).
Much has been written elsewhere about the rise of the Irish pub around the world. World Hum had a great summary when it included the pubs among its signs of a Shrinking Planet; read it here. See also this Slate article about the company responsible for the phenomenon. It's called--wait for it--the Irish Pub Company, and it's as formulaic as McDonald's. When I stepped off the plane in Copenhagen, the first restaurant I saw was a place called O'Leary's. I've seen more in every city. They really are everywhere.
For my dinner, I ordered, from the English bartender in that Irish pub in Vienna, the most authentic of German--er, Irish--er, Tourist Culture meals: nachos. It seemed appropriate.
They weren't very good. Which also seemed appropriate.
That would be overdetermined and overdramatic and completely false.
Oh, I put in the effort. I examined the menus at several such restaurants and realized that in spite of the personal growth and growing confidence, Germanic food still scares the jeebers out of me. Culinarily speaking, I'm still a coward.
Instead, I opted to go native for the Tourist Culture. Yeah, Tourist Culture--there is one. It's a diverse society that encompasses people of all ethnicities, but only when they're away from home. They--er, we--go to the same places (Eiffel Tower, Venice), eat the same foods (kebabs, pizza), have the same rituals ("Scusi, could you ... photo, me, take? Por favor?"), the same native dress (cargo shorts, walking shoes).
It is indeed a unique culture, but one to which we belong only temporarily. It's a culture of transience and halfway points, located somewhere between our actual, native cultures and those in which we have booked ourselves for a stay and a look-see.
So I went to the Tourist Culture native hang-out: an Irish Pub (run by guys from England).
Much has been written elsewhere about the rise of the Irish pub around the world. World Hum had a great summary when it included the pubs among its signs of a Shrinking Planet; read it here. See also this Slate article about the company responsible for the phenomenon. It's called--wait for it--the Irish Pub Company, and it's as formulaic as McDonald's. When I stepped off the plane in Copenhagen, the first restaurant I saw was a place called O'Leary's. I've seen more in every city. They really are everywhere.
For my dinner, I ordered, from the English bartender in that Irish pub in Vienna, the most authentic of German--er, Irish--er, Tourist Culture meals: nachos. It seemed appropriate.
They weren't very good. Which also seemed appropriate.
15 September 2009
Midnight train to Venice
On to Venice tomorrow, via the late-night train. While battling a cold. Fun times. Apologies to the person sitting next to me for the orchestra of sickly noises I will be emitting--I'll at least try to moan and cough in 3/4 time, in keeping with the musical spirit of Vienna.
Here's how Arthur ends the Vienna chapter:
By this time, you've had enough of the Germanic countries. The train for Italy leaves from the Sudbanhof.
Amen.
Auf Wiedersehen, schnitzel and sauerkraut and hirn (you don't want to know).*
Buon giorno, gelato and pizza and everything delicious.
* Okay, fine: brains. What am I, a zombie?
Here's how Arthur ends the Vienna chapter:
By this time, you've had enough of the Germanic countries. The train for Italy leaves from the Sudbanhof.
Amen.
Auf Wiedersehen, schnitzel and sauerkraut and hirn (you don't want to know).*
Buon giorno, gelato and pizza and everything delicious.
* Okay, fine: brains. What am I, a zombie?
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