I was recently pointed to the most amazing thing, a music / fire / street performance called Glissendo, conceived by one “Ulik, the Machanical Clown” and executed by French art group Le Snob. They’re playing “Lightning” by Phillip Glass on a Dixieland band, riding Segways under the robes, and of course the band leader has [...]
After ascending and descending the tower of the Jama Masjid (attendant wanted backsheesh as I was 5 minutes after closing, damn him) I wandered into the Muslim quarter of the city, tight noisy always as usual, and here I was rewarded.
Because it was a neighborhood. People sitting in their shops cross legged. Kids lounging against [...]
I’m writing this from a cave. There is wifi in the cave. I am sitting on a pink Hannah Montana bedspread. All of the beds are pink. This is a dorm in a cave. That’s Capadocia tourism for you.
The view out the little front lounge of this “pensian” is a landscape of huge limestone [...]
This is San Francisco International Airport and I can’t understand a single word the people ahead of me are saying. It’s very reassuring. I’m tired of living in a monoculture. White Americans end up all looking the same. Compared to everyone else.
I think the ones in front of me are speaking Dutch. They’re tall and [...]
What I do in my Wednesday and Friday morning aerial class is mostly sucking. These are the sort of classes you take if you want to be an aerialist, a trapeze artist or something. Accordingly, my Russian instructor has made me hurt. She’s thoroughly professional, but isn’t known for being warmhearted or encouraging.
This would be easier if I wasn’t usually good at things. In fact, it was many years before I got bad at anything. When I went to university, I even made the lucky decision to study something I already knew something about. There were always these kids in the back of the class going, “wait… what??” but I was never one of them. In fact I didn’t even understand such people. I mean, how could you sit through class after class and never, you know, bother to work out what the fuck we were all talking about?
I know better now. In circus school I sit at the back of the class.
Varanasi is perhaps what I thought I might find in India. The ghats (wharves) are all painted faces and temples and cows and signs painted on the narrow alleyways, and elaborate lacy architecture, and stone streets, and everywhere filth and garbage and exuberance. Walking along the ghats in the evening, reveling in the busy and [...]
As far as I can tell, most Russian scientists do not believe in global warming. This was a shock to me. It’s one of those things that is obvious when you’re on the ground in a country, yet surprisingly little known elsewhere. I discovered this during an after-dinner discussion with my Russian host. I don’t even remember how the topic came up, except that I half-jokingly proposed a tour of all the great beaches of the world before rising sea levels swallowed them up.
I believe that humans are changing the climate, while Dmitri does not. Both of us can cite references and argue our positions fluently. How did each of us form our opinions, and which one of us is using a more reliable method to find the truth?
There are myths to travel. There are mythic voyages of the ones who went before. A long time ago, somebody rode a motorcycle all through Indonesia, and then spent four months in a crumbling room in Jakarta penning the very first Lonely Planet. We all want to be that person, every last backpacking one of [...]
St. Petersburg is gray and opulent. It’s splendid and magnificent, a beautiful imperial city that even 80 years of communism and eight months of sunless winter can’t completely disguise. It’s also falling apart, slightly shabby, and strangely ordinary at street level. It wants to be grand, but it isn’t, not quite. Something isn’t quite [...]
Enter YouTube. Enter MySpace, Facebook, and all the others. Enter blogs, cheap DV cameras, cheap professional-grade software, cheap everything. If the point of Web 2.0 is to blur the distinction between information producer and consumer, then surely that shift applies also to art. Just as the journalism establishment has been forced to rethink itself after the advent of blogs, the Art Establishment may very soon find itself forced to reconsider all aspects of not only the creation and distribution of art, but what it means to be an artist.
