Travel
On the Road, Again
by Malcolm Parker on January 22, 2011
It´s 3am in Madrid. I´m lagged. There are tango lessons going on in the hostel meaning no reading. The woman next to me isn´t from GZ but makes all the hawking sounds of an old GZ woman without following through on the spitting and it´s just horrible without relief. I´m in the netherworld of the early morning net session, sitting before the computer in my sleeping clothes, a pair of …
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Scotch Odds – Part Four
by Nick Glossop on January 21, 2011
On the march to Robert Burns Day, we celebrate Scottish oddness. In Rubber Toy, Ivor Cutler has some fun with his Russian/Jewish background, he also switches gender mid-song as he is occasionally wont to do.
One visible manifestation of gender equality you’ll find on the high streets of Glasgow (on a weekend night), is the right of women to get just as completely legless, plastered as the men. They …
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Scotch Odds – Part Three
by Nick Glossop on January 20, 2011
As we march towards Robert Burns Day, we celebrate Scottish oddness:
One of my office-mates was Peter Lentini (pronounced pee-dhu) from Rhode Island – black leather jacket, hiking boots, thick black mullet, and an accent straight out of Italian-American caricatures. A perfectly likeable man, perfectly unaware of how strange he seemed outside of his element, let alone in Scotland.
Kelvingrove Park bounds the University of Glasgow – where we were …
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Scotch Odds – Part Two
by Nick Glossop on January 19, 2011
On the march to Robert Burns Day, we celebrate Scottish oddness.
Ivor Cutler has a gift – so says Billy Connolly – for capturing the dreich of Scotland, the dismal gray skies and the relentless, miserable wet that “seeps into you like a rumor.” It holds you in its clammy grip as closely indoors as out.
I did two years in the lowland dreich. As a young man from …
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Scotch Odds – Part One
by Nick Glossop on January 18, 2011
There should be an annual celebration of Scottish oddness running from January 15th to the 25th. It would end with the usual Burns Supper Bacchanalia of dubious cuisine, impenetrable verse and bellicose tea towels, but it would begin with a more modest acknowledgment of the birthday of Glasgow’s most lovable wordsmith Ivor Cutler (15 January 1923 – 3 March 2006). Cutler’s poems, stories and songs (typically played on his bizarre …
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Soviet Manholes – Epilogue
by Nick Glossop on January 15, 2011
This photograph was taken in Moscow three years after my misadventure with the manhole in Kiev. The location is behind Dom Khudozhniki (Artists House) across the way from Gorky Park. Lena was an American from San Francisco working for a student exchange service. Misha worked for the same service and was visiting from Kiev. I had only just met him.
The three of us were sitting around drinking tea when …
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Soviet Manholes ~ Redux
by Nick Glossop on January 13, 2011
My travelogue story of how I came to plummet down a soviet manhole in Kiev, 1991, originally posted at Thee Ipso Factory, has been re-posted by a Russian language blog written by Tatiana Ezhova, the very woman who helped extract me from the jaws of that gaping manhole those many years ago. Only in our weird wired age would a reunion of this peculiar type be possible. Hi …
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I Would Drift
by Malcolm Parker on January 11, 2011
The flaneur, passed by tortoises in the alleyways of Paris, head down, philosophically shuffling about the city, making a new geography. The Cities are for exploring and with today’s smartphones and their GPS abilities there’s no fear of remaining lost once the derive is finished but how do you ensure that you aren’t guiding your voyage in some way? You can always use dice or spin sticks or you can …
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Far into the maddening crowd
by Malcolm Parker on December 28, 2010
Christmas is a subdued affair here in China. Most expats vamoose for whatever country they left. I don’t.
One year I spent Christmas day in Borneo; this year I decided to spend a day a little south in Macau, ex-Portugese colony, and gambling capital of the world (in dollars). We stayed in Zhuhai, a Chinese city that borders Macau, and where hotels are about 25% the cost (Macau’s casino hotels are not Vegas priced). …
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Swedish Ice Hotel Creates a Tron Room
by Tony Longworth on December 9, 2010
One of the 19 suites in this year’s ICE HOTEL in Jukkasjärvi, Sweden is a room inspired by the movie, ‘Tron’. The team details the creation over two weeks through their blog, Extreme Design, that includes a description of their side-trip to Sweden’s Space Centre. Which brings up a more important question: Sweden has a Space Centre? When did this happen, and exactly how many allen keys do you …
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