A Day in California from Ryan Killackey on Vimeo.
Beautiful. The backstory from the video’s creator: “I worked on this project on and off for over a year and a half. It is composed of over 10,000 photos shot in California by my wife and I.” I love the tilt-shift sequences, among others. Be sure to click on the little arrows to blow the video up to full screen. (Via LAObserved)
My summer kicked off with a great weekend at the TBEX travel blogging conference in Vancouver. In addition to hanging out with a fun group of writers and sampling a surprisingly tasty seaweed-topped hot dog (thanks, Japadog), I taught narrative travel writing with San Francisco Chronicle Travel Editor Spud Hilton and New York Times contributor David Farley. (That’s Farley on the left and me on the right.) Next year’s conference will be held in Keystone, Colorado.
I’m looking forward to a couple of other travel writing events this summer. I’ll be a guest speaker at a one-day travel writing seminar led by Orange County Register Travel Editor Gary Warner at UCLA Extension July 23.
And Aug. 11-14, I’ll be back on the faculty at the excellent Travel & Food Writing & Photography Conference at Book Passage in Corte Madera, California, just north of the Golden Gate Bridge. I’ll be co-teaching an online travel writing and blogging track with Pam Mandel. The conference is evolving in the digital age, but at its heart is a celebration of storytelling. You’d be hard-pressed to find a more knowledgeable, passionate and nurturing group of teachers. They include conference co-chair Don George; Outside magazine founding editor Tim Cahill; “An Irreverent Curiosity” author David Farley; San Francisco Chronicle Travel Editor Spud Hilton; Afar magazine Executive Editor Julia Cosgrove; Los Angeles Times Travel Editor Catherine Hamm; Travelers’ Tales co-founder Larry Habegge; and many others.
Photo: Andrew Evans
Aurelio is a Honduran musician and member of the Garifuna community. This song is from his new album, Laru Beya. It makes me happy.
London Independent columnist Johann Hari makes the case for books and reading in the digital age — a nice counter-balance, of sorts, to the post just below this about the appeal of short stories:
That’s why we need books, and why I believe they will survive. Because most humans have a desire to engage in deep thought and deep concentration. Those muscles are necessary for deep feeling and deep engagement. Most humans don’t just want mental snacks forever; they also want meals. The twenty hours it takes to read a book require a sustained concentration that’s hard to get anywhere else. Sure, you can do that with a DVD boxset too — but your relationship to TV will always ultimately be that of a passive spectator. With any book, you are the co-creator, imagining it as you go. As Kurt Vonnegut put it, literature is the only art form in which the audience plays the score.
I’m not against e-books in principle — I’m tempted by the Kindle — but the more they become interactive and linked, the more they multitask and offer a hundred different functions, the less they will be able to preserve the aspects of the book that we actually need. An e-book reader that does a lot will not, in the end, be a book. The object needs to remain dull so the words — offering you the most electric sensation of all: insight into another person’s internal life — can sing.
So how do we preserve the mental space for the book? We are the first generation to ever use the internet, and when I look at how we are reacting to it, I keep thinking of the Inuit communities I met in the Arctic, who were given alcohol and sugar for the first time a generation ago, and guzzled them so rapidly they were now sunk in obesity and alcoholism. Sugar, alcohol and the web are all amazing pleasures and joys — but we need to know how to handle them without letting them addle us.
Photo by seo_gun via flickr, (Creative Commons)
Novelist and short story writer Jim Shephard was just featured in a half-hour interview on NPR’s Fresh Air. I liked what he said about the appeal of writing short stories.
I’m getting more and more impatient with what I call the ‘furniture moving’ involved novels, you know, that sense you have, when you’re reading early on, that enormous forces are being deployed and all sorts of stuff is being laid out so that it will be developed later, and we’re moving at a stately pace. I mean, I recognize that all novels don’t do that. But I’m drawn more to the sort of guerrilla warfare nature of short stories where you have a very small force and you get in quickly and do what you need to do and get out again.
I’m happy to report that the online travel magazine I co-founded in 2001 is back firing on all cylinders after several months of light posting. This post explains it all.
The Underwater Project from Mark Tipple on Vimeo.
I’ve spent a fair amount of time diving under waves, and the view from below can be beautiful. But you rarely see it captured in photographs as stunning as these. Be sure to click on the little arrows to blow the video up to full screen. (Via Adventure Journal)
From Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel White Noise, as relevant today as ever:
Several days later Murray asked me about a tourist attraction known as the most photographed barn in America. We drove 22 miles into the country around Farmington. There were meadows and apple orchards. White fences trailed through the rolling fields. Soon the signs started appearing. THE MOST PHOTOGRAPHED BARN IN AMERICA. We counted five signs before we reached the site. There were 40 cars and a tour bus in the makeshift lot. We walked along a cowpath to the slightly elevated spot set aside for viewing and photographing. All the people had cameras; some had tripods, telephoto lenses, filter kits. A man in a booth sold postcards and slides — pictures of the barn taken from the elevated spot. We stood near a grove of trees and watched the photographers. Murray maintained a prolonged silence, occasionally scrawling some notes in a little book.
“No one sees the barn,” he said finally.
A long silence followed.
“Once you’ve seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn.”
He fell silent once more. People with cameras left the elevated site, replaced by others.
“We’re not here to capture an image, we’re here to maintain one. Every photograph reinforces the aura. Can you feel it, Jack? An accumulation of nameless energies.”
There was an extended silence. The man in the booth sold postcards and slides.
“Being here is a kind of spiritual surrender. We see only what the others see. The thousands who were here in the past, those who will come in the future. We’ve agreed to be part of a collective perception. It literally colors our vision. A religious experience in a way, like all tourism.”
Another silence ensued.
“They are taking pictures of taking pictures,” he said.
He did not speak for a while. We listened to the incessant clicking of shutter release buttons, the rustling crank of levers that advanced the film.
“What was the barn like before it was photographed?” he said. “What did it look like, how was it different from the other barns, how was it similar to other barns?”
This crate held an awful lot of promise. I snapped this at the Convention Center while getting a preview of the Los Angeles Times Travel & Adventure Show.
Ukulele phenom Jake Shimabukuro covers The Beatles’ “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” working his way into a pretty killer ukulele crescendo.