Posts tagged salon
Slideshow: Visionary Recycling
Quirky places where artists and dreamers turn trash into structural works of art
“Some people say this is sculpture but I didn’t go to no expensive school to get these crazy notions,” observes John Milkovisch, a retired upholsterer for a railroad who saved and collected over 50,000 aluminum receptacles to create his shiny Houston masterpiece, the “Beer Can House.” Creative reuse of scavenged materials is nothing new—in fact it seems to be a human instinct that, for some, can border on obsession. While there are trained artists—perhaps inspired by Gaudí’s early 20th-century mosaics or Marcel Duchamp’s readymades—who sculpt and construct large-scale artworks made from repurposed cast offs, many more are dreamers with ordinary day jobs who abhor waste, have a penchant for collecting, and seize upon an unstoppable urge to create something beautiful from the flotsam and jetsam modern life.
Some, like the beer can guy, hold onto their own trash until it reaches a critical mass of building material. Others seek out and collect bits and pieces that catch their eye on their daily meanderings (mailmen and those in the construction industry seem particularly susceptible). Unlike the hoarders portrayed on A&E, these visionary artists transform their trash stash into something much greater than the sum of its parts (though it makes you wonder if many of the compulsive hoarders are similar creatively motivated folks with grandiose, unrealized plans for their treasured cache of objects).
America is littered (in a good way) with art yards, trash houses, and found-object sculptures. A sense of whimsy and ingenuity pervades these 13 places, among them a sound sculpture made from demolished cemetery marble, a 10-story children’s wonderland built from salvaged industrial waste, houses made of wine bottles, a desert mountain of discarded tires…
Image courtesy of the City Museum
J.R.R. Tolkien drank here: Literary watering holes
While a visit to the home of a famous literary figure offers a peek at an eerie, lifeless space suspended in time, seeking out the public places where a writer wrote, drank and caroused tends to be a messier proposition. Life marches on in bars and cafes. Regimes fall. Neighborhoods change. New people take over. If you are lucky enough to find the place still in operation, you can never be sure what to expect.
It’s true that many of the world’s great literary haunts have been reduced to a tourist-trap cliché — just consider the countless European bars with dubious “Hemingway drank here” signs propped up outside. Some venerable salons were disbanded and commandeered for decades for some other use (like the communist occupation of Kafka’s coffeehouses in Prague). Others managed to stay afloat but couldn’t keep the intellectual spark alive or the market forces at bay. It’s enough to make a sentimental literature nerd somewhat despondent. Nostalgia aside, reading about these temples of debauchery and creativity and then making a pilgrimage to their present-day incarnations is sure to reveal a fascinating intersection of history, homage, mythology, memory and marketing.
And then there are the places that haven’t given up the ghost: like the creaking boozer on the edge of Hampstead Heath where Keats morbidly pondered his nightingale; the Oxford pub where J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis plotted their modern-day take on mythology; or the Madrid coffeehouse where starving postwar writers ran up tabs and sipped free soda water while plotting their next act of literary subversion. Time has passed, writers have changed, but the gathering places still feel relevant.
Here are 13 that run the gamut. Papa Hemingway only appears once, so it’s obviously an incomplete list. Have you ever gone on a literary bender? In 50 or 100 years, where will the hallowed writer hangouts from the early 2000s be? Tell us
— Megan Cytron
Here’s the list:
Eating a highwayman’s feast at a historic pub in Hampstead, London
Raging with dead poets in the West Village, New York City
Imbibing with the spirits of sotted Spanish writers in Madrid
Drinking in the history of al-Fishawy coffee shop in Cairo
Quaffing ale With J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis in Oxford, England
Downing bourbons with Gatsby’s ghost in Louisville, Ky.
Hanging out with Henrik Ibsen in Oslo, Norway
Downing a pint at the Old Country’s oldest pub in Dublin
More:
http://www.trazzler.com/trips/cafe-savoy-in-prague-5-hlavn-msto-praha-cz
http://www.trazzler.com/trips/le-mouton-blanc-in-paris
http://www.trazzler.com/trips/bowery-poetry-club-in-new-york-ny
http://www.trazzler.com/trips/ye-olde-cheshire-cheese-in-city-of-london-greater-london-ec4a-3-gb
http://www.trazzler.com/trips/harrys-bar-bellini-in-venice-italy
Unraveling the Real World of Sci-Fi Film Locations
The best sci fi landscapes are those that don’t seem to be anywhere at all—and yet there they are, fully plottable on a google map. Some day soon, these imagined places will likely be pure computer-generated fantasy, but for now, the Earth’s emptiest places still do the trick: A far-flung stretch of Utah desert is the home planet of Mr. Spock, Tunisia the stand-in for Tatooine, the Hawaiian jungle the basis for lush Pandora, and the center of the earth lies just 700 feet down in a California cave.
There’s something about visiting any film location that brings about a sort of cognitive dissonance. You are at once in a real place and a fictional one. Science fiction movies go one step further, imposing an added layer of alternate reality on the places where they were shot. Filmmakers face a quandary: they must rely on real world exteriors to tell stories about imagined or physically inaccessible places. For this reason, they tend to seek out backdrops that are empty enough to fill up with exotic fiction and alienated protagonists. There are the vaguely futuristic dystopian worlds of films like Fahrenheit 451, 12 Monkeys, Omega Man, Blade Runner, and Planet of the Apes. Or ordinary urban landscapes that serve as a jumping off point for a tumble down a time-space rabbit hole—like The Matrix or this weekend’s Tron. In fact, it’s interesting to note that the original Tron had almost no physical location at all—just a handful of brief shots of a boring office building in downtown Los Angeles, the sci-fi city par excellence. Not only is L.A. Ray Bradbury’s town, it’s nondescript enough to feel universal and lacks recognizable landmarks that might pull the viewer out of the fantasy. And that’s the key: for the necessary suspension of disbelief to take root in the sci fi audience, time and place are rendered nebulous. Which is why pulling back the curtain and actually visiting these odd places is such nerdy fun.
1. Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 1977 (Steven Spielberg)
http://www.trazzler.com/trips/devils-tower-national-monument-in-devils-tower-wy
2. Star Wars: Episode IV, A New Hope, 1977 (George Lucas)
http://www.trazzler.com/trips/sidi-jemour-a-k-a-mos-eisley-entrance-in-djerba-madaniyin-tunisia
3. Blade Runner, 1982 (Ridley Scott)
http://www.trazzler.com/trips/bradbury-building-in-los-angeles-ca-90013
4. Star Trek, 2009 (J.J. Abrams)
http://www.trazzler.com/trips/san-rafael-swell-in-ut
5. Star Wars: Episode VI, Return of the Jedi, 1983 (George Lucas)
http://www.trazzler.com/trips/roy-s-redwoods-in-lagunitas-ca-94938
6. Ghostbusters, 1984 (Ivan Reitman)
http://www.trazzler.com/trips/55-central-park-west-in-new-york-ny-10023
7. Journey to the Center of the Earth, 1959 (Henry Levin)
http://www.trazzler.com/trips/the-big-room-in-carlsbad-nm
8. 12 Monkeys, 1995 (Terry Gilliam)
http://www.trazzler.com/trips/eastern-state-penitentiary-historic-site-in-philadelphia-pa
9. Dune, 1984 (David Lynch)
http://www.trazzler.com/trips/dune-film-location-in-samalayuca-chih-mx
10. Fahrenheit 451, 1966 (François Truffaut)
http://www.trazzler.com/trips/black-park-in-slough-buckinghamshire-gb
11. 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968 (Stanley Kubrick)
http://www.trazzler.com/trips/monument-valley-in-az-ut-1
12. Star Wars: Episode I, The Phantom Menace, 1999 and Star Wars: Episode II, Attack of the Clones, 2002 (George Lucas)
http://www.trazzler.com/trips/royal-palace-of-caserta-in-caserta-campania-81100-it-21668
13. The Planet of the Apes, 1968 (Franklin J. Schaffner)
http://www.trazzler.com/trips/point-dume-state-beach-in-malibu-ca
Off the Grid: a Thanksgiving Fantasy Slideshow
Off the Grid: 17 places where no one can find you
What is a vacation? The word comes from the Latin verb vacare, an etymology that hints at emptiness—both physically vacating the premises and mentally clearing out the cluttered cupboards of your mind. The excesses of Thanksgiving—the airport groping, delayed overpriced flights, comfort food orgies, cataclysmic shopping days, intense rekindling of familial feelings (for better or for worse)—accomplish quite the opposite. It’s no wonder that the aftermath of America’s favorite long weekend inspires dreams of deserted islands, far-flung mountain villages, and quiet starry nights of contemplation.
Something to be thankful for: there are still countless places in the world that feel remote and removed. This weekend, they will be more vacant than ever. Some are closer than you might think, while reaching others requires time and dedication that few manage to muster. Enjoy these 17 escapist, off-the-grid spots (Not sated? You can find plenty more on Trazzler.com.)
View the slides on Salon.com:
http://www.salon.com/life/feature/2010/11/28/trazzler_off_the_grid_slide_show
—Megan Cytron
Trazzler on Salon: Urban Enigmas
As an avid (nearly fanatical) reader of Salon for over a decade, I am very excited to announce that we’ll be putting together weekly slideshows of our favorite Trazzler writing on Salon.com in the upcoming weeks. Over the years (really, it’s been years already?) as Trazzler’s editor, I’ve noticed many themes, leitmotifs, and odd commonalities among the thousands of Trazzler trips submitted. Be it the obsessions that drive us to travel and explore, cultural manifestations that are constants across the globe, or the earth’s repeating geological phenomena, there are so many interesting ways to read about travel and the way we experience it. We often tweet these @trazzler, but now you can follow along on Salon, too.
This slideshow “Urban Enigmas” was based on one of our very first writing contests. Since then we’ve collected many more of these quirky conundrums.
Urban Enigmas
A good, productive city is often depicted as a hive of people zipping from one place to the next with purpose and determination. As any urban dweller knows, there’s not much fun in that — few of us move to the big city to sleepwalk through it. Situationist hero Guy Debord called this state of mesmerism the “petrified life” and urged urbanites to interact with the landscape in a deeper (and weirder) way. To notice what is hidden in plain sight, you have to be in the right frame of mind, which is to say, you have to be looking. Proto-slackers like Baudelaire paved the way, drifting through the streets riffing off the endless possibilities and moods, discovering poetry and mystery in the smallest details. Others, like today’s street artists, take a more active role, altering the urban terrain in ways that provoke and entertain passersby.
The enigmatic, inscrutable corners of cities get short shrift in guidebooks and travel sections, because they aren’t landmarks or must-see-before-you-die kinds of spots. The intersection of art, literature, history and mythology imbues these 13 places with meaning.
See the Trazzler Slideshow on Salon:
http://www.salon.com/life/feature/2010/11/21/urban_enigmas
—Megan Cytron
