How do you accurately reflect American music (related to the polyglot United States) in one collection of tunes?

Not very easily….

Starting in about 1981, I used to homebrew audio cassette “mixtapes” with different songs that I liked, usually grouped by theme.  They were similar to today’s iTunes or other digital playlists, but I could make as many as I wanted, wherever I wanted.  (*cough* digital rights management *cough*)

When CDs came out, I did the same thing, but my magnum opus was a seven-CD set of American music that I created to play at the “US booth” for a Culture Day at my daughter’s International School a few years ago.

Since representing American culture on one 6-foot long table in a gym was challenging enough, you can imagine the gyrations I went through to put together a set of music that covered most musical traditions in the United States.  I wanted music that represented regions, ethnic traditions, certain places, an era of music and/or were evocative of what I saw as the American spirit of adventure and individualism.  There was also a zero budget, so I depended a great deal on my own music collection (the biases are rather obvious in the final result, plus it had to “play well” for middle school kids in a noisy gym.)

My efforts are below, and I’d love to hear what you think down in the comments. Not every version of every song was available to me (I was doing all of this in the Netherlands) but I tried to find the ones closest to the “classic” or original versions where possible.

We still play these CDs today, after many years, so I hope that means I picked music that stands the test of time.

American Music CD One
1. Great Grampah’s Banjo  –  Pura Fe’
2. Cuban Pete  –  Tito Puente
3. Wouldn’t It Be Nice  –  Beach Boys
4. Hound Dog  –  Elvis Presley
5. America  –  Simon & Garfunkel
6. Big Rock Candy Mountain  –  Harry McClintock
7. Leaving on a Jet Plane  –  Peter, Paul and Mary
8. Appalachian Spring 2nd mv.  –  Aaron Copland
9. You’ve Lost that Lovin’ Feeling  –  Righteous Brothers
10. Georgia On My Mind  –  Willie Nelson
11. Respect  –  Aretha Franklin
12. The Beat Goes On  –  Patricia Barber
13 For Once In My Life  –  Dionne Farris
14. It Don’t Mean a Thing (…. That Swing)  –  Duke Ellington
15. Fortunate Son  –  Creedence Clearwater Revival
16. Summertime  –  Miles Davis
17. Sweet Home Alabama  –  Lynyrd Skynyrd
18. Miami  –  Will Smith
19. Dubuque  –  George Winston
20. My Prerogative  –  Bobby Brown
21. American Girl  –  Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers
22. Time of the Preacher  –  Willie Nelson
23. Amazing Grace  –  Dean Shostak

American Music CD Two
1. Go  –  Hiroshima
2. La Feria de las Flores  –  Flaco Jimenez
3. Sloop John B  –  Beach Boys
4. Fly Like an Eagle  –  Steve Miller Band
5. Homeward Bound  –  Simon & Garfunkel
6. I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow  –  The Soggy Bottom Boys
7. All Shook Up  –  Elvis Presley
8. XXX’s & OOO’s (American Girl)  –  Trisha Yearwood

(more…)

It was with much regret at the beginning of the month that I had to inform my editor, the fearless and stupendous Tim Leffel, that it was time for me to leave the Perceptive Travel blog.

I have been writing for the blog for almost four years, and have had an absolutely wonderful time working with Sheila Scarborough, Liz Lewis, former contributor Steve Davey, and new wordsmith/wanderlustian Alison Stein Wellner. Tim has given all of us a free hand with subject matter and interests, and you can’t ask for more from an editor than that. It’s part of what makes the blog and its parent magazine, Perceptive Travel, so unique: an editor who trusts his writers.

With another baby due in June, my family demands are increasing while my ‘free’ time and ability to travel are shrinking. And, as I have whined to many of my friends, I’ve got several novels begging to be written, including a half-done mystery novel that’s been lurking for over two years. It’s time for me to devote my family-free moments to these other ‘children.’

I would like to thank all of our wonderful readers and followers for helping to support great writing and a community of free ideas. I hope that all of you keep reading, keep writing journals or blogs or books, keep connecting, but most of all, keep traveling. Because there is nothing more crucial to the future and open-mindedness of this planet than the humanism that our travels bring to our own minds. We all want peace and beauty and good food, even if we disagree on politics or policies. You cannot have peace if there is war in your heart, and you cannot have war in your heart if you see the world from another’s point of view.

No matter how much you’ve seen, go out right now and see something new. Hit the road!

It’s the dead of winter in upstate New York, with freezing rain and dreary skies. So what do we do? Spend the weekend with friends in Hershey, Pennsylvania, chocolate capital of America. We needed a place to meet up halfway between where we live and Washington, D.C., where they’d be coming from, and all the cute B&Bs featuring breakfasts rooted out of their own organic gardens were closed at this time of year.

It seemed like a cheesy choice, both of us a little afraid to admit we were interested in seeing The Sweetest Place on Earth. But hey, we might move away someday and then wouldn’t we wish we’d done it?

(A reason, I keep telling myself, why I should also drive up and see Niagara Falls. Even my relatives from Russia did that, for goodness’ sake.)

Since it was wintertime, Hershey’s huge amusement park was closed. The roller coaster rides snaked empty and silent over the back of the tidy, municipal looking little company town like some sort of futuristic spaceport. But Chocolate World was open, and what more could you ask for when going to Hershey?

Well, a fair bit. The streetlights, for example, really are shaped like Hershey’s Kisses, a cute little detail in a cute little town. And the Chocolate World tour wasn’t some ho-hum walk through a working factory. Instead, it was a fun and rather funny ride in big wheely carts through a fictional factory that detailed the laborious process needed to turn cocoa beans, sugar, and milk into a chocolate bar or Kiss or covering for Reese’s peanut butter cups.

The big draw? Singing cows. Now, I get my family’s milk direct from a raw milk farm, and I’ve never seen those cows sing while they were being milked. I’m going to have to tell the farmer to go to Hershey and get some pointers. Talk about happy moos!

[Many apologies for the lack of photos of said singing cows. The curse of the traveler struck, and my camera turned out to have a dead battery that day.]

The tour was in fact both educational and fun. But I was less inspired by the making of chocolate itself than I was by the background and history of the Hershey company and founder, Milton Hershey. That’s where the real meat (or cocoa nib) of the story lies. Because poor-man-makes-good Milton S. Hershey was one of those patrician company owners just chock-full of noblesse oblige. Not only did his employees enjoy relatively fair wages and good working conditions, Hershey built the entire company town to serve their welfare with schools, churches, and clean places to live (‘company town’ usually refers to mining or gold rush towns where the economy is designed to sap all wages from the workers and siphon them straight back to the controlling company through high prices and lack of competition).

He and his wife also founded a school for underprivileged young people, the Hershey Industrial School that is still going strong today (renamed the Milton Hershey School). And not only that, but, unable to have children of their own, they left their not inconsiderable fortune of 60 million dollars to that school, an institution that still enjoys a controlling share of the Hershey company.

Now, I might not like Hershey chocolate that much (except, of course, Reese’s peanut butter cups; there’s something special about them), but knowing what’s behind the company, and seeing the model town that functions around it, I’m much more inclined to buy their products. Milton Hershey is someone I can admire, which I wouldn’t have known if I hadn’t gone there.

Even at a dead time of year, a party that included 2 pregnant chicks, their spouses, and a 2 1/2-year-old boy found plenty to do. Perhaps more enticing than Chocolate World was the Harrisburg Science Museum (Whitaker Center for Science and the Arts). Although it’s small, it’s packed with the kind of hands-on experiential displays that have made science museums so popular across the country. You can try to build a working dam and see how long it holds together, or construct a building with mini bricks and sticks and then see how earthquake-proof it is, and of course see an electricity show. That’s all aside from the actual Kidspace section, which includes a water play area where kids can experiment with rearranging dams, locks, pipes, and the flow of an entire watercourse.

Popping over to Hershey for the weekend reminded me once again that sometimes the destinations outside your own back door are just as rewarding as the ones requiring a plane ticket, passport, crash language course, and inoculations. Next time, though, I bet we’ll aim for the roller coasters.

During the China 2.0 tech tour, our group had a chance to spend a little time inside the famous Forbidden City in Beijing.

Using my trusty Flip pocket video camera, I tried to capture a sense of the grandeur and enormity of the place (while grossly over-using the words “elaborate,” “enormous” and the phrase “pollution, unfortunately.”) Sorry about the lapse in my mental thesaurus.

I think you’ll be equally impressed with this fantastic cultural heritage destination (and if this whets your appetite, don’t miss a visit to the virtual Forbidden City – here’s a video about what it’s like to see it while inside the real thing.)

For those who can’t see the embedded video box below, here is the direct link to the video on YouTube.

When I was a teenager, my favorite television series was Star Trek: The Next Generation. I still love it, and I’m thrilled whenever it plays on television. One of my single most favorite moments in Las Vegas came during my first visit, when in my first free moment, I beelined for the Star Trek Experience.  (I only hesitate to call myself a Trekkie since I have never once donned Vulcan ears, cannot arrange my fingers into the “live long and prosper” salute, have never attempted to speak Klingon, and own no Star Fleet memorabilia.)

“Space opera”, this genre of sci fi is called, and it’s always struck me as a subset of fictional travel writing. My favorite parts of these stories aren’t the technological gee gaws, or the intergalactic politics, but the part where you get to “explore strange new worlds”. I love the idea of looking up into the sky and seeing four or five moons instead of just one.

James Cameron’s movie Avatar falls into this category, which at its best is a travelogue to the planet of Pandora.  In fact, I’d argue that it would have been better without the silly plot and God help us, the infantile dialogue, better if it was simply that: a travelogue.

If you haven’t seen this new 3D technology, it’s pretty amazing. Things don’t really jump out at you, it’s more like the screen has a depth of field that’s similar to what you see when you’re looking out of the window. And so in the beginning, as the characters first explore Pandora, I thought, wow, this is a lot like my life — traveling around and seeing new, beautiful, amazing and sometimes disturbing things.  I wondered whether it would inspire travel here in the real world.

I’m not sure that it will though — first of all, some people are apparently crashingly depressed that they can’t actually go visit Pandora.  So okay, they’re carried away by the fantasy, but it’s not only this fantastic place that they want to visit, it’s the way that the characters in the movie travle that I think is also very compelling, and taps into a fantasy that people have about real-world travels on earth: that you can travel with any real personal involvement or risk.

In case you’re unfamiliar with the movie’s conceit, humans are somehow mentally joined with Avatars, essentially alien mannequins, so while the human lies asleep in a special chamber, they’re out cavorting in Pandora in their alien puppet costume.  In other words, the part of you that’s real slumbers safely, while your traveling persona is out learning about a new environment, culture, way of life.  (Bonus: in Avatar, your travel persona is taller, better looking, and more physically skilled.)

Of course, that safe remove is a fiction — even in the movie, the characters really begin to care about Pandora and its people, in the same way that travelers who really immerse begin to care about the places they visit and its people.  But that creates a conflict for the characters in the movie, whose allegiances are now divided, as it does for actual travelers.

The movie solves this neatly — the characters move to Pandora and through some magic are able to abandon their human form. (The movies is filled with pat solutions like this.) And it should be said,  it happens with some travelers too — they fall in love with a place and a way of life, and they never come home again. But most of us do return home, and want to, and the conflicting allegiances that travel can create are not at all easy to deal with. It’s an interesting conundrum, and not one that the movie takes up at all.  (Star Trek, in all its many movies and series, often does, ahem.)

But should Avatar inspire deep real-world , on Earth travels, it will be an issue the inspired will certainly have to consider.