Former Black Flag front-man Henry Rollins has, over the course of his career, achieved notoriety as a punk-rock pioneer and prolific spoken-word performer – but in recent years he’s also become an advocate of slow, humble, close-to-the ground international travel. Though Rollins’ 1994 band-tour memoir Get in the Van contained hints of his shoestring-travel instincts,…
From Paul Fussell’s Abroad (1980) As I have said, it is hard to be a snob and a tourist at the same time. A way to combine both roles is to become an anti-tourist. Despite the suffering he undergoes, the anti-tourist is not to be confused with the traveler: his motive is not inquiry but…
A little more than seven years ago, I wrote “travel stunt” essay — “Around the World in 80 Hours (of Travel TV)” — that recounted the experience of holing up in a Las Vegas hotel room for one week and spending all of my waking hours watching the Travel Channel. The experience was uniformly awful,…
Literary criticism: Travel writing has long been a part of our serious literary fabric, and perhaps more than ever, the power of travel writing to create a dialogue across cultures is crucial.
(An excerpt) Every explorer names his island Formosa, “beautiful.” To him it is beautiful because, being first, he has access to it and can see it for what it is. But to no one else is it ever as beautiful — except the rare man who manages to recover it, who knows that it has…
By Bob Shacochis Go among strangers in strange lands. Sniff, lick, and swallow the mysteries. Learn to say clearly in an unpronounceable language, ‘Please, I very much need a toilet. A doctor. Change for a 500,000 note. I very much need a friend.’ If you want to know a man, the proverb goes, travel with…
“Araki was the only drink on offer, and the owner sloshed it into a plastic bottle from an unwieldy jerrycan before moving around the room to refill clients’ glasses for ten cents a shot.”
“Whatever Johnny Wadie Red Tabel was, it wasn’t whisky; its flavor was a medicinal blend of anise, vanilla, and laundry detergent, and its buzz arrived in tandem with its hangover.”
Cultural criticism: Dennis O’Rourke’s 1988 documentary “Cannibal Tours”, which probed the absurdities of global tourism, was as brilliant and cringe-inducing as any episode of “The Office” or “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” Twenty-five years after its initial debut, the rise of social media self-documentation has made the film feel more relevant than ever.
Cultural criticism: When, two generations ago, Susan Sontag wrote how “needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted,” she very well could have been making a prophetic observation about “selfies.”
Commentary: A Chinese teenager defaced the Luxor Temple. That’s bad, but scribbling on Egyptian antiquity is as old as tourism itself.
