Caution: reading any of the books on this list might really make you want to leave the safety of your home and get into the car.

Books on this list, on the other hand, might save you the trouble. You can just be an armchair driver. (Some books might overlap.)

Alternatively, you can just read today’s blog and get your fill of the beauty (or insanity) of some slices of Americana.

For this road trip I flew into Los Angeles Airport where I met my oldest friend from Germany and picked up a sardine can of a rental car. We somehow managed to find our way to Palm Springs without a GPS or map from LAX and spent some day in that strange, artificial world there.

I still can’t wrap my head around all those lawns, even on median strips, and golf-courses, watered on a regular basis in the middle of a desert (the water levels of the aquifer feeding the valley have dropped to dangerous levels now.) Or the ratio of the wealthy to the hanger-ons. Or the tourists in flip-flops hiking Indian Canyon.

Or popping a seven-story Kimpton Rowan Palm Springs Hotel right into hills above the movie-set town. As the Wall Street Journal cited author Sidney Sheldon: “the average age in Palm Springs is deceased.” That same article offers you options for spending a long weekend there. Don’t faint at the price range.

Anything goes to amuse the tourist. Aging Ninja turtles included.

Hikes and excursions included the stunning Joshua Tree National Park which blew my mind.

Off we went North-bound, taking the long way, contorted and sweating in our little vehicle that barely managed to keep the air conditioning running. We found lodging by luck, every evening, just stopping where it looked promising. Only once was it a debacle – the overpriced, run down, not very clean and noisy motel at Death Valley made for a sleepless night.

On our way, we passed through Calico, a ghost town in the San Bernardino Valley. Located in the Calico Mountains of the Mojave Desert region of Southern California, it was founded in 1881 as a silver mining town. Today it is a large tourist attraction, decked out with Kitsch, but nothing can ultimately distract from the beauty of the setting and the character of the remaining structures.

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Nothing had prepared me for the sights over the next couple of days, the various parts of Death Valley. I happen to be a tourist with autodidact tendencies, as Alex Ross puts it so perfectly in this New Yorker essay about the region, but I always go unprepared and then inform myself after the fact. That way I have few expectations that would steer my own perceptions and thoughts about what I see. Later I will put it all into context when I start reading up on it.

The best source of information was Richard Lingenfelter’s 1986 book, Death Valley and the Amargosa: A Land of Illusion. It covers many aspects, from the geology to the history of this 2nd hottest place on earth, and supplies a good number of tidbits about the stupidity and greed of the White Men coming in.

When you think things in your viewfinder cannot get any more beautiful, you round a corner and there is something else. The colors alone are breathtaking. The heat, the salt, and the dry air are not to be underestimated, though. You really need to be careful on your walks.

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Eventually we drove through Nevada and picked up some lunch in Austin, NV, population 192. They DO like cars, though….

I’ll save the rest of the trip, arriving in the Steens Mountains in Oregon, visiting the Malheur National Park, for another time, when birds are on the agenda again.

Music today is a bit unusual for me – but perfect for Western Road trips….

Here is another one by them.

Italy is on my mind, center of a still unfolding European tragedy, although it looks like they are finally seeing a flattened curve of new infections after strict lock-down measures. Today I will return to the beauty of Venice, as experienced alone some years ago before meeting up with friends in Tuscany, the focus of tomorrow’s blog.

My room under the roof held a bed, a microwave, a shower and a view ….. stairs up to the 5th floor only helped to control pasta calories….

Downstairs exit to the Grand Canal

I stayed in an attic room with a view, in an old, run-down Palazzo at the Grand Canal, a stone’s throw away from where Richard Wager lived and died during his Italian sojourns. That building is now a casino, but there is a small museum where people can explore Wagner’s past. All closed now, of course. Here is a cool documentary, using his own words from collected writings with clips filmed in the city, set to his music. It is languid and slow, and a perfect window into the vanity and self-preoccupation of that man, but also his powers of observation. Never mind his genius for composing.

Every day I explored the city, neighborhood by neighborhood, taking my main meal at the middle of the day in restaurants that were quite accommodating to a solo woman traveler (something that I cannot say for Paris, for example, where they always try to stash you in the back next to the kitchen….)

At night I would go home, climb the 100000 stairs, feast on bread and cheese and Pinot Grigio, watch the sunset, upload the photo harvest of the day and soak in gratitude for the richness of my life.

Boat trips to the cemetery island and Burano (not shown today, and all the churches I visited neither) alternated with my ambling through Venice proper. I was as interested in taking in the history and sights of the city as all the art I’d come to see at the Venice Biennale. Photographs today are the touristy kind, unavoidable even if you wanted to.

Rich public buildings, churches and private palazzos displaying the wealth of Venice

They certainly also convey the dilapidated charm of the place and the fact that it is a working city using the canals for traffic.

For more boats (and music history of Venice) you can re-read an earlier blog here.)

(These days, photos of dolphins frolicking in the suddenly clean canals, the city emptied of the hordes of tourists, can be found on the web – beware, they are fake! Just an expression of our eagerness to hear good news.)

Plenty of quiet corners to be found when I was there that September.

The reading list below has a fun cross section of types of work – besides the classics I can recommend the Dyer book – it opens different worlds.

Music, how can I not, is the Rhinemaidens’ lament from Das Rheingold. Woglinde, Wellgunde and Flosshilde, the three water nymphs, beseech the immortals to give back the gold stolen from them, to no avail. Doesn’t end well for the latter…. Fitting for our times where gold rules and disaster- inducing greed is celebrated until it’s too late, no?

Wagner is supposed to have played this on the piano the night before he died of a heart attack, a warped man, rabid anti-Semite, ingenious composer. Here is the full opera in a very traditional version.

And here a more modern iteration (sarcastically skewering American oil culture) which had the Bayreuth booing brigades on their feet by all reports, but sounds intensely beautiful to me.

Even people who are not particularly fond of travel are all of sudden lusting to go places. Such is the psychological reactance to being told not to. The longing lasts, of course, but for a minute, since the idea of being marooned somewhere unfamiliar in these times is not exactly appealing.

Your Daily Picture to the rescue! This week offers vicarious travel. Photographs and all, but also recommendations for truly interesting books by daring and/or perceptive travelers. Some books will be covering places I have not been to but always thought they should be explored at some point. Just my luck.

One of those is today’s pick, Rory Stewart’s The Places in Between. The book describes the Scottish author’s 2002 trek on foot across Afghanistan from Herat to Kabul, just month after the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center in New York City and shortly after the Taliban lost official power (and look where we are now – much happens in 18 years, doesn’t it?). It was part of an insane hike that also took him into Iran, Nepal, Pakistan, and India. The narrative has stayed with me for a long time (here is the raving NYT book review from 2006) – he is a gifted writer, incredible adventurer and – well, not the kind of guy I’d seek out as a friend.

Sounds like he was an agent for M16; later he had a stunning career with the Conservatives, various prominent governmental posts, cut short when he opposed the rise of Boris Johnson. Now he stands as an Independent for the 2021 mayoral election of London. He seems to be invested in environmental protection, fighting conditions of poverty and improving prison conditions, but is clearly enmeshed with the conservative political elite and its goals, close friends with the Royal family. Here is a witty if effusive summary of the man from The Tatler.

Do read the book, it provides food for thought way beyond a travelogue. Particularly now where our disastrous war and withdrawal in Afghanistan has fully put the Taliban back into power. Pray for the women.

Photomontages today are of various modes of travel, experienced or imagined.

Music today comes from a different continent, more specifically: Argentina. It is one of the countries where I visited for a short time in the mid-70s and always felt I wanted to go back. Who knows, a woman can dream.

Chango Spasiuk was born there, but you can hear some Eastern-European influences in his music – his grandparents had migrated from Ukraine.

When you walk through the streets and alleys of San Francisco’s China Town you are engulfed in a riot of colors, sounds and smells. Much to see that is vivid and enticing, beckoning exploration.

You would never know how divided the community is in these parts by just looking at all this beauty; a chasm separates many local merchants and their organizations from those who are mere members of the community and community organizers.

Point in case was a fight over the potential name for a new subway station that is supposed to open next January. The new line is designed to replace the Embarcadero Freeway that sent tourists from the waterfront into North Beach and Chinatown until it was closed and eventually torn down following damage in the wake of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. It will connect Union Square directly to China Town, supposed to bring tourists and tourist $$ in droves to the businesses on Grant St. and surrounds.

Business owners and their allies in the community (including Falun Gong) were opposed to naming the station for an activist, now deceased, who was instrumental in making the $ 1.6 billion subway line a reality: Rosa Pak. The controversy is rooted in a general division: some in the Chinese community see China Town basically as a tourist attraction designed to shore up sales. Others see Chinatown as a community hub for all Chinese Americans, a place where they live and work and want to engage in local politics, instead of still being directed by generations of overseas politics in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.

As this opinion piece put it: (opponents to naming the station Rosa Pak)… see Chinatown as they would a fortune cookie: it looks Chinese, but it only exists in the United States and it is mostly a way to either profit by and sell to non-Chinese or grab their attention to showcase political propaganda — sometimes both. They wanted to name the station simply China Town, officially in keeping with MUNI’s practice to appoint geographical locations only.

The article linked above describes much of what the community activist accomplished and the still ongoing, underlying political conflict between those who seek profit and those who want to allot city funding to primarily community-based causes like permanent affordable housing, kindergartens and senior residencies and renovation funding for Portsmouth Square, which is known as the living room for the families crammed into nearby Single Room Occupancy (SRO) buildings.

Spoiler alert: The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency narrowly voted to name the city’s newest Muni station after the late Rose Pak on August 21st. I’m sure there were some celebratory dinners.

“I now find that I could have landed in no other part of the United States, where I should have found a more striking and gratifying contrast to the condition of the free people of color in Baltimore, than I found here in New Bedford….Here in New Bedford, it was my good fortune to see a pretty near approach to freedom on the part of the colored people.”

FREDERICK DOUGLASS, MY BONDAGE AND MY FREEDOM (1855)

I spent the very last day of my East Coast trip in New Bedford, completely clueless, as so often, about the city, its role in the economy of the 19th century and its importance as a stop on the Underground Railroad.

I learned about all of it in the context of a visit to the National Park Service there which has an educational movie about the whaling industry and its role in employing run away slaves, as well as bringing members of far flung communities along the whaling routes back to settle in New Bedford. The original protestant English and Dutch settlers were soon joined first by Polish contemporaries, then a large Portuguese population that came with the return of the whaling ships from the Azores. Former slaves arrived, helped by Quakers soothing their conscience over the riches they had amassed (on the back of the whaling crews.)

For more detailed information, here is a good site of the New Bedford historical society.

Eventually I visited the Whaling museum, which is a candy store for photographers, a gem for historians, and an overall thrill to explore for the sheer variety of things, crafts and art presented. (Any of the linked sites have numerous terrific photographs from days gone by.)

The building was erected over 100 years ago by a wealthy patron; it is large enough to house a half-size complete whaling ship, everything scaled to size, that you can enter and explore. The various halls around it display the history of the industry, the tools and fates of the various populations affected by whaling.

And unquenchable thirst for the oil (derived from whale blubber) that burns bright and smokeless led to ever farther exploration and overfishing, from the Atlantic, to the Pacific, to the Arctic. Industry barons made a fortune, the sailors a pittance, often being on one of the boats for 3 or 4 years at a time, seeing a whale only every 3 months or so.

While the supply of whales was dwindling, in the 1860s, Pennsylvania oil field exploration started to provide kerosine to the market. It has always been argued that market forces – increasingly expensive whale oil vs. cheap kerosine and changes in technology – led to the switch over. In truth there was government intervention favoring the newly booming oil industry: before 1860 the distribution looked like this:

Camphene or “burning fluid” — 50 cents/gallon (combinations of alcohol, turpentine and camphor oil – bright, sweet smelling)
* whale oil — $1.30 to $2.50/gallon
* lard oil — 90 cents (low quality, smelly)
* coal oil — 50 cents (sooty, smelly, low quality) (the original “kerosene”)
* kerosene from petroleum — 60 cents (introduced in early 1860

Camphene was by far the most used agent given its price until the government introduced a high tax on alcohol, which forced it off the market, now open for kerosine. “The Civil War cut off Southern pine forest turpentine supplies. The IRS was established to pay for the Civil War, and their first tax was on alcohol (initially beverage[s] but it applied to all fuel uses of alcohol). Some people saw the end of one industry and the beginning of another and accelerated the process while buying stock to profit from the transition.” Details here.

Nonetheless, greed had led to overfishing. In the meantime, illness, accidents and the dangers of sitting in a rowboat being dragged on a rope by an angry, hurting whale with a harpoon in its side across the ocean away from the large ship, cost innumerable lives. But for people of color it was a possible escape, better than what awaited them on US soil.

When the whaling shut down ( officially the US stopped commercial whaling in 1972), places like New Bedford in the late 1800s developed new industries: cotton mills, iron rolling plants and the production of art glass: “The tremendous demand for managers, skilled labor, and ordinary factory-workers that these industries required exceeded the region’s indigenous capacity. Immigration from abroad, migration from other parts of the United States, and the recruitment of specialist technicians contributed to a dramatic increase in the city’s population, from 15,000 to 60,000 in two generations.” (Source)

The museum educates about whale biology and the history of their plight.

Check out the bones of many a Moby Dick’s cousin yourself!

It also offers huge displays of the scrimshaw carvings and macrame knotting that were a pastime of these men caught on a ship for years. You can wander among replicas of the captains’ salons, and admire the silver and porcelain that spoke of their wealth.

And if you are lucky – as I was – you can catch an exhibit of 15th and 16th century Dutch paintings all devoted to seascapes and whaling expeditions.

A highly recommended outing if you are in those parts of the world!

And here is the appropriate music: sea chanties.

Care to go for a little walk – or, in truth, a rather long one? Let’s start as far uptown as I ventured on my recent stay in Harlem – at the Riverbank State Park near 145^thSt, flanked by the Hudson on one side and rather large apartment buildings on the other.

It is an extensive space made for strolls, picnics, swimming in one of the Aquatic centers, admiring the beautiful view of the George Washington Bridge or taking a ride on a carousel. That carousel was what lured me to the park in the first place, I had heard that an artist had designed the creatures on it based on drawings by grade school children and that it was altogether enchanting. Wouldn’t you know it, it was closed and shuttered, the day I walked by. 

I went slowly back South, walking along the elevated tracks of the subway, still in all its original glory, and noisily shaking the street every time a train comes by.

Along the street trucks are parked that deliver the fruit and vegetables for the vendors on the side walk.

Schools have names that remind of the community’s heritage

and window displays as well as murals remind us of recent history.

Close to the corner of 132^ndSt and Malcolm X Ave you can hang out at the Revolution Books store, formerly located in the Village (when I lived there in the early 80s) until displaced by skyrocketing rents.  

If you cross over to the East to 127^thSt you can visit the brownstone that Langston Hughes occupied in his lifetime. Now a small museum and mostly a space run and utilized by the I, too Arts Collective, it features readings and other cultural events. 

Here is MLK Jr. reciting one of Hughes’ poems:

Not far away are the famous Apollo and the National Black Theatre, respectively.

If you head down to 116^thSt you can see the mosque on your way,

and in general admire action on the street, from advertisements to interesting footwear. 

Having worked up an appetite you can make it all the way down to 109^thSt, crossing over back West to Amsterdam Av and have a splendid dinner at Atlas Kitchen, where dead fish rule.  

Bon appetit!  (Pack sneakers!)

And here is Hughes himself reciting: