Posts tagged oasis

[Editor’s note: Steve Bramucci, our #NYCGO Writing Contest Grand Prize winner is guest blogging.]

Even before the dates are set, I have to admit that I’m ridiculously excited for my two-week writing residency in New York City. It’ll be my first trip back since teaching high school in Queens and living in Brooklyn in 2001-2002.

My I-pod now features a playlist titled “Empire State of Mind” that I’ve been running on repeat for the past week. In its own way, each song leaves me eager to explore the nooks and crannies of the five boroughs during my trip.

Here’s the list as it stands— post a few of your favorites in the comments so I can give them a spin:

1. Empire State of Mind (Jay-Z w/Alicia Keys): If you even remotely like rap music and have at least the slightest affection for New York, you’ll love this track. East Coast rappers supply us with a steady stream of songs about New York but in my mind this one towers over them all. Every time I hear it, I think back on when I taught in Queens and had my students write a persuasive essay on a topic of their choice. On the day the papers were due I found that not one, not two but five different students had decided to write their essay on “Why Jay-Z is the King of New York” Obviously, they convinced me.
2. New York, New York (Frank Sinatra): This pick might seem a little too easy but you can’t make a New York playlist without Frank. Part of my love for this song comes for the fact that it’s so popular in karaoke bars around the world. By my count, I’ve heard it belted out in Mexico, Kenya, Thailand, Australia and Fiji. It’s not the amateur karaoke singers who take on Old Blue Eyes either, it’s always the regulars.
3. Chelsea Hotel #2 (Leonard Cohen): This song is delicate and honest and beautiful. Out here in California we love our sensitive songwriters, full of hope and longing— but the edges of their songs sometimes end up softened by sunshine and excellent avocados. With a song like this everything is sharp and direct and cuts to the bone. I’ve never been to the Chelsea Hotel but having a drink in the lobby is definitely on my list.
4. Rhapsody in Blue (George Gershwin): On the theme of this piece Gershwin said, “I heard it as a sort of musical kaleidoscope of America, of our vast melting pot, of our unduplicated national pep, of our blues, our metropolitan madness.” From my experience in New York during the aftermath of September 11th, I would offer that the those phrases could be used to describe the city itself.
5. Autumn in New York (Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Armstrong): Every time I hear Louis’s voice come rumbling in after the Ella’s first verse (which is pure honey), I start clicking away on the computer to look for flight deals to New York between September and November. The song makes me want to get lost in Central Park watching the leaves turn burnt orange.
6. Me & Julio Down by the Schoolyard (Paul Simon): Paul Simon once did a music video for this song featuring Biz Markee and Spud Webb (seriously)— but for me the images associated with the music always come from the movie The Royal Tennebaums. New York always feels exciting— but this song (and Wes Anderson’s movie) make it seem exciting in a whimsical, fresh way that I can’t get enough of.
7. People Who Died (Jim Carroll): My introduction to New York City came from a book by Jim Carroll called The Basketball Diaries. It’s still one of my favorite books and I’m a big fan of the movie too. The movie featured a scene with this song written and performed by the author himself. I could elaborate on what the song is about, but better to just say that it rocks and leave it at that.
8. Lua (Bright Eyes).
9. Rockaway Beach (The Ramones).
10. Coney Island Baby (Lou Reed).
11. Hello Brooklyn (The Beastie Boys).
12. New York- Ya Out There? (Rakim).

Hello Trazzlers—
Happy first day of fall! Thank you to all who participated in our #NYCGO Oasis Contest by writing trips or voting for your favorites. Many of you are new to Trazzler—welcome!
>Read the entries

Why Trazzler is Different
So many other travel sites are essentially reworded reference material with logistical information, tourist bureau propaganda, or an unedited, overwhelming morass of useful and useless information. Trazzlers meander through a world of trips—hand-picked, concise, compellingly written slices of life that pull the reader into a real experience: a hotel stay, walk, adventure, spa, restaurant, ice cream stand, pony ride… really anywhere that travel can take you. The more you use the site, the better our recommendations get.

Now, on to the big announcement…

#NYCGO Summer Writing Contest: Oasis
Winner: Stephen Bramucci, Laguna Beach, California
Winning Trip: Walking in the Footsteps of Pirates in Ambodifototra, Madagascar

Grand Prize: $10,000 contract to be a two-week writer-in-residence in New York City and write 30 Trazzler trips covering the five boroughs of NYC. Hotel accommodations (14 nights) provided by AKA luxury hotel residences. Round-trip airfare provided by JetBlue.

An island is a reverse-oasis for those who live at sea. Stephen invites us to imagine the world of the 17th- and 18th-century pirates who terrorized the trade routes and occasionally took a break by setting foot on dry land. All of the judges agreed that this trip was well-crafted and loaded with intriguing details. In just 140 words, Stephen was able to conjure up the weight of the past at the resting place of these rogues—a peaceful cemetery overlooking the sea.

9 Runners Up: Courtney Scott, Alex Dweezy Dwyer, Sandra Foster Lovas, Paul Justin Cox III, Kate Sommers, Marie Elena Martinez, Stephanie Fine Sasse, Paul Koning, and Traci Hui
Prizes: $250 freelance contracts to write 10 Trazzler trips

One of our objectives at Trazzler is to create a writing medium that captures the subjective and diverse nature of travel. We think the top ten trips illustrate how smart, adventurous travelers can experience the world in different ways. About the social-media savvy and creativity of all ten finalists (and those who came so close)—you far surpassed our expectations—thank you for making the contest such a success.

4 Editors’ Choice Award Winners: Craig Bridger, Ethan Gelber, Thalia Kwok, and Karen Dion
Prizes: $500 freelance contracts to write 15 Trazzler trips

It was no easy task to narrow it down to just four trips—a teahouse, a moderately seedy Class A baseball game, the world’s oldest sand dunes, and a nonexistent and poorly signed micronation. Each an oasis in its own way, these trips stuck with us, even after reading hundreds and hundreds of entries. For these awards, we didn’t take the wishlisting votes into account at all—we realize that not everyone is a social-media expert and we always want to find a way to reward writers who embrace the idea of Trazzler.

About Our Sponsors
nycgo.com—New York City’s official marketing, tourism and partnership organization—has very generously sponsored the grand prize: a $10,000 contract to write 30 Trazzler trips with free airfare and hotel for two weeks. Our grand prize winner will stay in the heart of New York City’s own urban oasis, and enjoy the attentiveness worthy a celebrity VIP at the AKA luxury hotel residences. Think insanely great location (one block off 5th Avenue and Central Park) and swanky in-suite spa services. JetBlue will be providing flight to NYC. JetBlue offers flights to more than 50 destinations, with free TV and the most legroom in coach.

Upcoming Contests and Giveaways
We have big plans for more writing contests this fall. For details, follow us on Twitter @trazzler or keep an eye out for our next newsletter (we send one per month). We will also be doing more travel giveaways on Twitter. (We just gave away a two-night stay at the Jupiter Hotel in Portland, Oregon.)

Happy Trazzling…


Megan Cytron
Executive Editor


P.S. If you have any questions or feedback, you can find us @trazzler on Twitter or on Get Satisfaction.

After two weeks of nonstop reading, we are excited to announce our #NYCGO Oasis Contest Semifinalists: http://www.trazzler.com/contests/nyc/semifinals

Judging writing contests is never easy—we often have to eliminate entries that are very well-written, but don’t adhere to the contest rules or don’t quite belong on Trazzler. Our trips are different from what you will find on other travel sites. From the start, we decided to put certain limitations on the form and style of our writing to make the experience of skipping from one place to the next more enjoyable. As a writer, I also strongly believe that limitations lead to spontaneity and spark creativity.

We often get asked why one entry is chosen over another. As I was reading the entries for this contest, I took these notes (from the mundane to the philosophical—and admittedly a bit jumbled):

• Trip was created prior to the contest start date
  
• Self promotion—writing about your own business.
  
• Too long (Our limit was 160 words—we gave a little leeway, but many trips were much longer.)
  
• Misspellings, typos, lack of proper syntax, missing punctuation, missing spaces, abbreviation, or lack of capitalization
  
• Written in verse, not narrative, or otherwise not in keeping with the Trazzler trip page form
  
• Not about an experience that others can have or a place that others can visit (We had some very well written trips in this category.)
  
• Choice of place is too broad (We don’t publish trips on entire cities, our focus is much narrower.)
  
• No discernible place, more about a state of mind than a physical place or discrete experience
  
• Too personal—more about the person who wrote it than the place itself
  
• Too abstract or nebulous—no concrete information about the place (Trips about sunsets and sunrises are especially prone to this one.)
  
• Stylistically or lexically repetitive (in 65-120 words, repeated words or ideas stick out like a sore thumb)
  
• Syntactically repetitive; repetitive sentence structure (trips in which every sentence starts the same way: go here, do this, then do another thing, etc.)
  
• Too many cliched adjectives or verbal crutches… stunning, breathtaking, amazing, incredible, etc… (It’s best to do away with these words and evoke the idea of them in your description of the place.)
  
• Platitudes: X is the place to be. There’s something for everyone in X. You can’t miss X. X is the best. X is a definite can’t-miss, etc.
  
• Metawriting—writing about the act of writing (This is perfectly fine in a blog, but it doesn’t work in the context of our site, where we want each trip to be a microcosm.)
  
• Many exclamation points
  
• Not in keeping with the “oasis” contest theme
  
• Not travel writing; not appropriate for a travel site (Though I have to confess, we loved reading some of these slices of life and sociological sketches.)
  
• Too tied to one moment in time; not a reproducible experience
  
• Well-written, but the specifics or concrete details about the place slip through the cracks, making it hard to understand the significance of the experience without having been there.