Los Angeles Maps

by Erik Olsen on

I have a rather bittersweet relationship with Los Angeles. On the one had, having lived there for most of my life, I feel like I know what the city has to offer culturally/historically, and I have always felt the town comes up wanting. To me, LA is a one industry town: TV/Film and if you are only mildly interested in these two things…or haven’t dedicated your lief to them…then you might not find LA the most inspiring place. That’s how I feel. But then again, living here in New York, I’m always hearing people bash the city, and more often than not this comes from people who either haven’t visited it, or have gone, but only saw Hollywood Boulevard, Disneyland (not even in LA!) and other tourist hot spots. To these people, I vigorously defend LA and protest that there’s much there to see and experience. See, I’m kinda mixed up?

All this is to direct you for the moment to an interesting resource I stumbled upon that shows lovely old historical maps of the City of Angels. I spent some time gazing at these beauties and found that they reveal much about how the city has developed and matured. Maps are often a great way to understand a place: how it was settled, how it developed, how people might have thought differently about it. these maps, if even in a small way, accomplish that. Kinda cool to check out if you’re from there (like Neil and myself) or not.

Helsinki Festival

by Erik Olsen on

We’re always eager here to alert you to great events that are happening around the globe. If you’re luckier than we are and happen to be heading to Europe…or perhaps you live there…you might consider the wold-famous Helsinki Festival. The festival actually started a few days ago, but is gong strong and offers opportunities to listen to fabulous music. The Helsinki Festival is a broad-based international arts festival, featuring music, dance, theater, art, cinema, circus performers and more. The focus is somewhat on on Finnish talent but there is a definitive international reach. The festival emerged from the Sibelius Week celebrations of the 50’s and the 60’s, that celebrated the music of Finnish composer Sibelius. Since then, they’ve really expanded though, and this year they will even feature a series of films. Myself, I’d probably find a good pub somewhere and enjoy a little Finnish food.

Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis, Missouri

by Adrienne Wilson on

I’ve been hanging around the outskirts and city limits of St. Louis the last few days and doing some touristy type things. Nothing wrong with that – I’ve never had a good opportunity to really poke around the town, even when I breezed through on my walking tour of America. There was a lot of land to cover so I had to keep it moving, but for the next few days it’s all about St. Louis.

One attraction any visitor might want to swing by is the Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis. It’s a well-known monument not to mention it’s incredibly breath-taking. Building of the Cathedral started taking place in 1907 and was fully completed by 1988, when the last mosaic tiles were set in place. The mosaic collection is said to be the largest in the world created by 20 different artists and covering 83,000 square feet. The installation contains 41.5 million pieces of glass tesserae in over 7,000 various colors. So what happens is this – you look up at the ceiling and your jaw-drops. Plus, there’s that energy that just seems to flow through religious establishments that gets you.

Check it out.

Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis is located at 4431Lindell Blvd., St. Louis, MO 63108. Ph. (314) 533-2824.

Boldtype on Travel

by Erik Olsen on

For those who have never heard of it, the site Boldtype is one of the finer book-related Web sites on the Web. I’ve gotten the Boldtype newsletter for a long time now, and it never fails to alert me to great new reading opportunities. And what’s great is that this month, the folks at Boldtype are all about travel. This month they celebrate what they term the “art of absconding”, and thus provide a selection of books all about hitting the road, experiencing new places and faces.

Among the books cited are Daniel Kalder’s Lost Cosmonaut and Tony Perrottet’s Pagan Holiday: On the Trail of Ancient Roman Tourists, fine new books to be sure, but they also call out one travel book at the top of my own reading list right now: Rory Stewart’s memoir of walking across Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban, The Places In Between.

Our Plastic Seas and Nauru

by Erik Olsen on

Neil beat me to the punch on this wonderfully bizarre article on these massive floating islands of trash in the Pacific. I saw it earlier and thought it was a marvelously morbid tale. But I’d heard something about these islands a long time ago on a great edition of This American Life, and so I thought I’d post about it. The story takes us there, to these Texas-sized mid-oceanic dumps, but the second story here is the one I also think you should hear because it is one of the best radio stories I’ve ever heard.

The story is by the writer Jack Hitt and tells the tale of the island of Nauru. Nauru is one of those places that is literally in the Middle of Nowhere, but even though it is far away and hardly anyone has ever heard of it, the island’s story touches us all, in a way. The island was a key source of guano in the early century, when the Germans and others used the guano for phosphates in order to make gunpowder and other products. During a short spell, the island became awash in guano wealth, or guano dollars. But once bird turds were no longer used for this purpose because other synthetic and otherwise sources of phosphates were developed, the island went into serious decline.

Now it is a wasteland with yet another story attached: the story of Afghan refugees. I believe the story of the refugees has been resolved, but the way it is told here and the deeper history if Nauru just described makes this a fabulous Friday listening experience.