Amid our Vienna sojourn a few months ago, Kiki and I saw all manner of kitschy Mozart and Freud and Klimt socks for sale — and at the Leopold Museum Kiki splurged on a pair of socks depicting Egon Schiele’s 1910 “Self-Portrait with Striped Shirt.” I have a weakness for these socks myself. While visiting…
1) Solitude is a condition for acquiring a sense of immensity Solitude is a condition for acquiring a sense of immensity. Alone one’s thoughts wander freely over space. In the presence of others they are pulled back by an awareness of other personalities who project their own worlds onto the same area. 2) Place is…
“When we don’t foster local filmmaking traditions, we end up making movies about what we think life is like in the cities we do see movies about.” – Jason Bailey In this episode of Deviate, Rolf and Jason talk about how being from Kansas influenced their careers as travel writers and film critics, and the long cultural…
This week I appeared on Yonder Radio, an hour-long audio show and podcast produced by the Center for Rural Strategies, to talk about my feature-length found-footage video essay Kansas Never Plays Itself, which draws on a century of film to analyze how cinematic shorthand shapes the public’s imagination of places. What’s the name of this…
I’ve noted here before that I’m regularly interviewed by traditional news outlets seeking my perspective, as a veteran travel writer, about various aspects of travel and tourism. Sometimes my quotes don’t make it into those articles. One of the more interesting such articles in recent years was Laura Gottesdiener’s Reuter’s article, “For migrants, the Darien…
1) Capturing an experience while you are having it alters the way you experience it Capturing an experience while you are having it alters the way you experience it, as Wendell Berry’s poem “The Vacation” describes. It tells the story of a man who films his entire vacation with an older technology, the video camera.…
“I asked everyone if they were lonely. All the guys my age said ‘no, I’m too busy; too much going on.’ When I answer that quickly I’m either lying or it’s something I’m afraid of.” – Andrew McCarthy In this episode of Deviate, Rolf and Andrew talk about why Andrew took a USA road trip to reconnect…
1. Never open a book with weather. If it’s only to create atmosphere, and not a character’s reaction to the weather, you don’t want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead looking for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways than an…
“I think you have to pick your battles when you’re collaborating with people.” – Kim Krizan Kim Krizan (@kimkrizan) is the Oscar-nominated cowriter of the Before Sunrise movies, and the author of Spy in the House of Anaïs Nin. Notable Links:
1) Confessing and confiding are overlapping concepts Confessing and confiding are overlapping concepts, like envy and jealousy, often used interchangeably, but distinct at their cores. The fundamental difference between them is that a confession, in the word’s historical, nonliterary sense, is addressed to some entity—God, the court, the public, a person one has wronged. That…
My Deviate podcast has been, since its inception, a pretext to explore topics I don’t typically cover as a travel writer. Granted, a majority of my episodes have nonetheless been about travel (or travel writing), but by its very name, Deviate gives me the opportunity to veer away from what I’m supposed to write about as…
