January 1, 2012

Mark’s Best of 2011

2011 was a great year for me in travel and reading. Here are some of my personal favorites.

Travel

Damascus, Syria. Walking the old city to find all eight extant gates.
Cairo. I fell in love with this big, dirty town.
Istanbul. Walking the old city walls, taking the ferry to the Black Sea and eating at Çiya Sofrasi and exploring Kadiköy afterwards were highlights of my second trip to Istanbul.
Aleppo, Syria. The ruins of St. Simeon of Stylites just outside of Aleppo were a treat.
Lake Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. I go to Idaho every summer with friends, but driving highway 2 across central Washington was a new twist.
Walla Walla, Washington. Again, taking the back roads to Walla Walla for a weekend of wine was an interesting way to discover my own state.
Luxor, Egypt. Riding a felucca on the lazy Nile was one of my favorite parts. Not to mention Karnak temple and 3,000 years of history.
9/11 Memorial, New York City. I go to New York a lot, but this year I visited the newly opened 9/11 Memorial.
Lake Quinault. I got to enjoy the lake twice this year–once with Mom in July and again in December when it was wet.

Reading

Out of Egypt. André Aciman. The story of a Jewish family’s life and exile from Egypt.
Mani: Travels in the southern Peloponnese. Patrick Leigh-Fermor. My new favorite travel writer, who is no longer alive, wrote about Greece in the 50s.
The Tiger’s Wife. Téa Obreht. A multi-layered story woven throughout 50 years of Balkan conflict.
Comedy in a Minor Key. Hans Keilson. A Jewish man is harbored by a Dutch couple during WWII.
The Wrecking Light. Robin Robertson. Blow-you-over poetry.
To a Mountain in Tibet. Colin Thubron. One of my favorite travel writers travels to Mt Kailash in Tibet.
Under the Sun: The Letters of Bruce Chatwin. Previously unpublished letters of Chatwin’s.
Atlas of Remote Islands. Judith Schalansky. Her sub-title “Fifty islands I have never set foot on and never will” kind of sums it up.
The Trouble with Poetry. Billy Collins. Who doesn’t like Billy Collins?
The Tao of Travel. Paul Theroux. A book of travel quotes from Theroux’s favorite authors.

Music

We are the Tide. Blind Pilot
Pickin’ Up the Pieces. Fitz and the Tantrums
I Am Love Soundtrack
Biutiful Soundtrack
Cairo Time Soundtrack
Arco Iris. Amina Alaoui
Monqaliba. Natacha Atlas
Sentir. Yasmin Levy
Fados Soundtrack.
Sunyata. VAS.

Movies

I am Love. Tilda Swinton at her best playing a Russian wife of an Italian industrialist. Think: Unhappy marriage, passionate affair.
Bill Cunningham New York. I always look forward to Bill Cunningham’s spreads in the Sunday NYTimes style section. This is a great documentary about this octogenarian who chronicles city life.
Incendies. Intense story of two grown children of a Lebanese political prisoner who return to Lebanon after their mother’s death to discover what her story was.
Cairo Time. Beautiful, lyric (if a bit romanticized) meditation on the city through the eyes of an American woman.
Biutiful. Rough, intense—one of those movies you only need to see once in life.
Mother of Mine. Story of a Finnish man who, as an adult, attempts to unravel his childhood experience living in Sweden during the war. Themes of loss and abandonment prevail.
The Sheltering Sky. Technically I’d seen this before when it came out but I had forgotten how great it is. John Malkovich at his best.
SherryBaby. Story of a chemically dependent ex-con who is paroled from prison and tries to rekindle a relationship with her child.
Red Road. Scottish thriller set in Glasgow.
Helvetica. I’ll never think about font the same way again.

October 24, 2011

New York and the 9/11 Memorial

I visited New York as well as the 9/11 Memorial a week or so after the ten year anniversary last September. The timing was coincidental–I was in New York to celebrate a birthday, not commemorate. The New Yorkers I know who were there on 9/11/01 would rather forget those dark days. Many New Yorkers I talked to mentioned the fighting and political maneuvering that went on around what to build at Ground Zero. Nonetheless I wanted to see the memorial and try to figure out what it, and 9/11, meant to me. I’ve had difficulty trying to write anything about the experience, since nothing profound that I could say would adequately convey what I saw. So I decided to let my photos tell the story instead.

Memorial to fallen firefighters not far from Ground Zero. O’Hara’s pub–hangout for local firefighters–is right around the corner.

Our hotel room at the W in the Financial District looked right down into “The Pit” as I started calling it. Of course as soon as I walked into the room the crimson rays of sunset light up the new One World Trade Center which is directly opposite. The 9/11 Memorial is immediately in front of it.

I’m not one for gratutious flag waving, but the flag on One World Trade Center with the sun’s final rays was pretty dramatic.

The award winning design of the inverted fountains — in the footprints of each tower – is supposed to represent “The presence of absence” It seems to do that very dramatically at night.

Having no personal loss to mourn at Ground Zero leaves one with the burden of trying to fathom the totality of the loss, which is infinitely more difficult. Scenes of personal tenderness such as this made the experience easier to contextualize.

Again, flag waving is not my favorite–it leads you to believe that Americans were the only people to suffer because of this tragedy–but this one was well appointed and sufficiently dramatic.

Another example of the personal and the poignant.

We did other more light-hearted sight-seeing too–like walking the Brooklyn Bridge.

Trinity Church, the oldest in New York.

Chelsea coolness from The Highline. My favorite new addition to New York.