Posts tagged urban enigmas
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
December Newsletter: Cold
Hello Trazzlers—
If you’re in the northern hemisphere, you must be starting to feel the cold, creeping effects of winter. Here in Madrid, the darkness and chill fail to deter the buoyant mobs from flooding the streets, floating under the lights, and reveling in the communal spirit (and dare I say kitsch) of the holidays. While it’s tempting to dream about summer, why not live by the words of the poet Wallace Stevens”One must have a mind of winter”and rush headlong into icy endeavors…
December Contest Theme: Cold
Award: A $250 Contract to Write 10 Trips
http://trazzler.com/trips/tags/cold
We’re going conceptual here. Feel free to riff off the idea of “cold” however you see fit. Snow, ice, skiing, winter sports…but also ice cream, popsicles, caves, frigid water… To enter, just add the tag “cold” to any new trips that you write. We’ll be tweeting about our favorites all month long, so follow us on Twitter and let us know what you think (@trazzler).
To kick things off, we wooed Powder Magazine to contribute a series of ski trips with spectacular photos and plenty of ski-geek insider info.
November Contest Winner(s): Urban Enigmas
Awards: Two $250 Contracts to Write 10 Trips
We were so torn this month that we decided to give out two prizes:
Amanda Scotese
Amanda’s two trips were spot-on urban enigmas. They captured the undeniable truth that, despite the valiant efforts of urban planners, we city dwellers tend to interact with the urban landscape in unintended and enigmatic ways… whether it’s praying under an interstate underpass to an impressionistic stain or hiking the abandoned railroad tracks in Chicago’s inner city.
Gareth Thornton
So many of Gareth’s trips had an enigma at their core, whether he was pondering the unlikelihood of meeting Frank Zappa in Vilnius, finding freedom and graffiti on the very spot where David Hasselhoff once sang, coping with the last-man-on-earth, small-town streetscape during a Mediterranean siesta, grooving to the Swedish take on grungy underpasses, or searching for the point of the timeless drive to build phallic spires in our major cities.
Works in Progress
Follow along on Twitter or our blog for details on this month’s big plans to expand the social capabilities and the tools for writers on trazzler.com. Learn about how to find an interesting mix of trips (or “How to work the Trazzler system”) while we get our new bionic recommendation engine up and running in early 2009. Read the quirky, eclectic work of our new freelancers.
Meet Mr. & Mrs. Smith
Last but not least, we would like to announce our first content partner, the independently owned Mr. & Mrs. Smith. Hotel reviews are a tough genre. We never want to post trips on Trazzler that smack of shilling, bad writing, or propaganda. That’s why we were instantly smitten when we discovered these well-written, clever, conscientious, and oh-so-British boutique hotel reviews. We have a new community manager working on getting their trips “trazzlerized”, so you can look forward to wishlisting hundreds of swank hotels by end of the year.
Trazzlers, can you spare a dime?
Lest you forget that we’re a scrappy mom and pop here, now we’re going to put out the hat… Trazzler gets a cut if you use our version of Kayak (by clicking on the Kayak ad on the site or by going to http://kayak.71miles.com/). More funding = more writers…
Happy Trazzling,
Megan Cytron and the Trazzler Team
