Gone for a few weeks to China on a gig for EnRoute Magazine. Spotty to nonexistent internet while I’m gone. Taking: 2 blank notebooks, 5 pens, a knapsack, and zero preparation. Returning with: 2 full notebooks, a crucially necessary new attitude, and photos of elephants. Enlightenment is an outside possibility.
Tag: EnRoute Magazine
The Accidental Local
First published EnRoute Magazine We’ve been motoring seaward for about an hour when Roberto finally cuts the diesel. Brazil is a bare pencil line on the horizon, Monte Pascoal a tiny bump, as it must have been when Portuguese explorers first came across these cobalt blue waters 500 years ago, and I’m feeling more here than I […]
They’re Everywhere
Holy stickers Batman. These things have hit Toronto, New York, Halifax… everywhere. Now they’ve reportedly crossed the pond. They’re going up in the UK now. Move over Banksy. Or whatever. I have no idea what this means.
Tokyo – Part Three: Eastern Promises
In travel, while you don’t want to rush, moments of real speed can be exhilarating. I mean those times during a trip when you can feel the globe rotating under your feet, the landscape transforming before your eyes. Liftoff out of Vancouver, on a trans-Pacific flight, is particularly evocative of this sensation for me. The […]
Tokyo – Part Two: Without a Plan
It seemed like a good idea when I woke up: a day spent hunting the perfect Tokyo cherry blossoms. Here was the plan, drawn up in the first seconds after waking, still in my bed at the Claska Hotel: I’d walk the Meguro-gawa upstream to its source, following the many kilometres of cherry trees that […]
Tokyo – Part One: Simple Pleasures
Dream City I’m having a strange moment here in Tokyo. It’s 6:30 a.m. on a Tuesday morning, and I’m doing calisthenics in the park with about 50 old ladies I’ve never met before. Bending, twisting, stretching. Following the cadences of a warbly 1920s piano tune that’s playing from a radio up front. I’m completely out […]
The Mobile Age – Part Three: Post-Globalism
The modern archetypes of mobility were the nomad and the settler, whose degree of mobility were established by preference, and the refugee and the prisoner, for whom mobility was determined by external forces. Globalization made a hybrid experience of being a settler and nomad, a seamless blending of home and away in many lives. In […]
The Mobile Age – Part Two: Globalism
We’ve become mobile in new ways, challenging conventional ideas about home and community. In the first of three essays, Timothy Taylor introduced four mobility archetypes of the modern era: the nomad and the settler, for whom the degree of movement is established by preference; and the refugee and the prisoner, for whom movement is determined […]
The Mobile Age – Part One: Modernism
The contemporary citizen is mobile in new ways, re-shaping our definitions of “home” and challenging our conventions about “community”. In three essays over the coming months, Timothy Taylor examines the evolution of human mobility in the West in three phases: Modernism, Globalism, and the dawning age of Post-Globalism. There is a slightly embarrassing story my […]
The Boutique Individual: Brand New World
PART THREE: BRAND™ NEW WORLD, December 2006 My mother took a conservative position on toys: Less was better, in part because you should be outside playing anyway. I might have preferred a different approach. But now that I have a two-year-old boy and toys are again on my radar, I see the wisdom of my […]