Archive for the “travel” Category

Recent tropical weather - by which I mean steamy torrents of rain, not sunny skies - always puts me in the mood to go spelunking in the photo back catalog.

I found this in the “meh” bin from a trip to Hong Kong a couple of years ago. It’s Victoria Harbor reflecting the skyline that everybody else was shooting. You can get a better idea of the total scene from this shot. I could get lost in these negatives for days.

Neon towers write
shimmering calligraphy
on Hong Kong harbor.

I needed a drink Friday night, and despite the best efforts of the MBTA, I made my way to Casablanca restaurant in Harvard Square for small plates and wine. I spied a familiar name on the list and ordered up a 2006 Napa Fume Blanc from Grgich Hills. It hit the spot, crisp and dry, pineapply and cold, and took me back on a peculiar journey of oenophilic synchronicity.

Back In 2004, I took a summer vacation to Italy and Croatia. Two weeks of incredible eating and drinking. Towards the end of the trip, I was in Split, from where I took a ferry trip to several Dalmatian islands, including Vis, which was billed as, “vineyard island Vis.” How cool an idea is that? On Vis, I tasted several local wines with names I could neither pronounce or remember, which is a shame. Back in Split, I popped into a wine shop to find something to bring back. The shopkeeper pointed me towards a bottle of Grgić Pošip 2002 with the instruction that it was good with fish. It was from Korčula, an island I did not visit, but it was dry and delicious. With fish.

Flash forward a couple of years, and I’m in San Francisco on business. Which of course means I’m dragging my hapless but not unwilling colleague to Napa for an afternoon. We visited a handful of wineries, large and small, and then happened upon Grgich Hills. Could it be the same as Grgić? How could it be, but on the other hand, how could it not? (I didn’t notice it then, but the red and white checkered shield of Croatia is on the Grgich HIlls label) They didn’t have any Pošip, but my colleague brought back some of their famous Chardonnay. It turns out that the two winemakers are connected, but not in the way I would have guessed.

The Grgic(h) story starts in Croatia (Yugoslavia, actually), with Miljenko Grgich born into a winemaking family and fleeing communism in the ’50s for West Germany, Canada and then California. Later known as Mike, Grgich worked with several illustrious California winemakers and eventually partnered with Austin Hills to form Grgich Hills Cellar in 1977. It’s not a place, it’s two names. The story returns to Croatia only in 1996 when Mike goes back to set up Grgić Vina to combine local Croatian grapes (which Mike has proven are the ancestors of modern California Zinfandel) and high-tech techniques learned in Napa. You can read the full story at the Grgich Hills Estate web site, it’s quite a capsule history of California Chardonnay.

I still don’t know much about the spelling disparity or where to get more Grgić Pošip, but I’m happy to be reconnected with the Grgich family, and will definitely be stocking more Grgich Fume Blanc if I can get my hands on it.

As I contemplate driving 500 miles or so this weekend - more than I’ve driven in a month so far this year, I believe - my mind meanders back to cartographic matters. A random roundup of mappy clippings:

I. The Globe Corner Bookstore has a Blog.
I’ve been an unrepentant fan of GCB for as long as I’ve known about it. One of my first luxury purchases after a period of difficult cashflow was a globe from Globe Corner. When they closed I mourned, when they reopened, I rejoiced. The Globe Corner Blog delivers book reviews, travel tips, and news on a near-daily basis. It’s not as marvelous and awesome as Strange Maps, but it’s pretty cool.

IIa. WBUR’s Charles River flickr Group
I picked up this item via the ever-alert crew at Universalhub: WBUR’s Boston Radio is doing a show on the Charles River, and set up a flickr group for people to post their river pics and geocode them. That’s my kind of thing, so I dusted off some Charles-y pics from last month and uploaded and tagged them. Listen to the podcast and check out the photo map.

I continue to wonder if there’s a way to handle geotagging for pictures that are of a line rather than a point in space.  For example, my Acela collages.  I wonder if I can rig up a useful way to take similar photos as I drive this weekend without being too much of a traffic hazard.

IIb. On Point Radio: How the States Got Their Shapes
For a double dose of WBUR, I was listening in the background as I often do, and suddenly I was hearing a caller ask about an event in the early ’90s when Connecticut Governor John Rowland made an April fools day joke of annexing the small bit of Massachusetts that pokes down into Connecticut so that Mass might then be free to slide into the sea. I was in college in Connecticut at the time and thought that was pretty funny. On Point was doing an entire show on the origins of the peculiarities of the borders of the states. Good stuff. Here’s a pic from wikipedia showing the Southwick Jog aka Granby Notch.

IV. Liminal Spaces Between Cambridge and Somerville
This weekend I was hanging out with LKB and BEM at their Cambridge lair swilling excellent margaritas, and they asked me if I had ever resolved my Somerville parking ticket. I had in fact, not yet heard from the parking authorities of Somerville, but that didn’t stop us from speculating about various kinds of installation art that might be done if we could locate a strip of land claimed by neither Cambridge nor Somerville. I’ll summarize the discussion with “Smallest. Casino. Ever.”

I’ve been wanting to write a post or do something with that title for a while.  I just like the sound of it.  Almost any comparison of the high speed trains in Asia, Europe and the USA leaves the Americans looking like amateurs, but the Acela Express has cut the NYC-Boston run down by more than half an hour, and that’s with pretty much the same tracks. 200+ miles in 3 and a half hours isn’t bad. The average speed of almost 60 miles an hour including stops means that it must be going over 70 in some stretches.

Taking the train between Boston and New York City - South Station and Penn Station - usually provides for some needed downtime for thinking and relaxing. This time it brought a minor creative breakthrough. I was playing around with the intervalometer and continuous shooting modes on my new digital camera (I’m sure it’ll get a whole post of its own soon enough) and started shooting out the window. I like the variable motion blur and the general randomness of the scenes. This collage is not in chronological order but is arranged vaguely thematically. I sat on the inland side of the train (usually I prefer the coastal side for the scenery) which also meant that arranging the photos in chronological order would put them in reverse journey order. Maybe I’ll get it right on the return trip.

In other news, I posted this image to the PRC’s new Flickr Pool, New England Survey, which coincides with the gallery show of the same name.  Check them both out at your earliest convenience.

On my last day in London, I dropped in at the Tate Modern. Like many London museums, the Tate does not charge an admission fee, so it’s perfectly reasonable to just pop in to check out one exhibition or even just to get out of the rain. I stumbled upon Doris Salcedo’s installation, Shibboleth. Almost literally. Salcedo’s work is a crack in the gallery floor that widens to a small chasm and branches once or twice as it runs the length of the turbine hall.

The work is entirely negative space. It certainly makes you wonder how it was “installed” and how it’s going to be “removed” at the end of its run. Except for the handy warning signs, it’s an act of subtraction, and an engaging one, too. People were getting down on the floor to take pictures or stick their hands down into the crack. I was pleasantly surprised to see no litter in there.

In case you are not a professional logophile or a biblical scholar, a shibboleth is a shared idea, a buzzword or even a joke that helps people identify members of their in group. Wikipedia has the whole story, which begins with ancient Gileadites killing 42,000 Ephraimites as they tried to cross the Jordan river. The Ephraimites were distringuishable by their inability to pronounce “shibboleth” to the exacting standards of Gileadite diction.

I suppose this bloody bit of history is recalled in Salcedo’s use of a chasm, a crack that looks like it will cleave the gallery in two, as a stand-in for the river Jordan. Those who don’t know the password - or those who don’t get the joke - might be killed crossing it.