My life changed in 1994 when a friend jammed Chocolate and Cheese into the tape deck of my boxy, baby-blue colored Ford Fairmont. By the time Gene Ween’s last high-pitched falsetto of “Freedom of ‘76” gave way to the sultry swagger of “I Can’t Put My Finger on It”, I had become a cassette-carrying member of the band’s growing legion of nerdy, fiercely dedicated fans, and soon found myself making pilgrimages to see Ween in corners of the country I’d otherwise have no real reason to visit.

In those high-school days of homework, curfews, and 5pm – 9pm jobs, my Ween travels were mostly limited to drives down I-275, from Michigan’s sprawling suburbia, onto I-96 for the straight shot into downtown Detroit to catch the band at dingy St. Andrew’s Hall, my teenage cathedral of music appreciation and discovery. Since then, my somewhat-obsessive fandom has driven me to nine different states and two different countries, some destinations more noteworthy than others.

Like Birmingham, Alabama, where the band was headlining at Sloss Furnaces, a National Historic Landmark and former pig iron-producing blast furnace from 1882 – 1971. As we drove southbound through the state from Memphis, where we’d seen the band perform the night before in a cramped, sweaty club near Beale Street, the backwoods B-horror movie vibe was palpable everywhere we went, especially during quick stops at the gas station or a local Taco Bell; the malevolent stares were unnerving.

After the show (which also included a then-newly formed, and still listenable, Queens of the Stone Age as the opener), I asked somebody in the parking lot what Birmingham was all about: “Hoses and dogs, man, hoses and dogs,” he said between sips from a tall can of Budweiser. To this day I’m still trying to decipher the meaning of his obtuse response, but do recall swerving to avoid both an errant hose and a stray dog as we headed back to Tennessee late that night.

There’s no getting around it: Alabama was a seriously creepy place, the perfect retirement destination for Captain Spaulding and Otis Driftwood.

From Nashville to Norway

Ween has led me to Asheville and Louisville, to Atlanta and Cincinnati. In Nashville, my sort-of adopted hometown during college—I lived and studied 30 miles down the road in Murfreesboro—the band was memorably joined by Bobby Ogdin and other session musicians who contributed to the brilliant, criminally underrated 12 Golden Country Greats. New Hope, PA, was the site of a casual, barefoot performance in a small downtown park; this liberal Pennsylvanian town is, of course, the hometown of the band’s founding members, Mickey Melchiondo (Deaner) and Aaron Freeman (Gener).

Seven years ago I traveled to Oslo, Norway, for four days of early-winter sightseeing in one of the world’s most expensive cities. During my stay Ween was playing at the Rockefeller, and before the show I hooked up with a typically hearty Norwegian named Stig, whom I’d met online on the band’s forum.

The late-November weather in Norway was dreary, gray, and cold, but the hospitality was genuinely warm. Stig and company treated me like an old friend from the moment we met, springing for drinks at their favorite haunts all night, cheerily pointing out places of note in their neighborhood, and leading me to a greasy (and, lo, affordable!) late-night falafel joint to sop up the beer after our alcohol-drenched evening on the town.

Ween wasn’t the reason I visited Oslo, but their presence alone enriched my time by way of indirect introduction to this group of fun-loving folks and a locals-only scene I wouldn’t have otherwise tapped into.

On September 17 I’ll head to Central Park for Ween’s late-summer shindig at Rumsey Playfield. I’ve now seen the band perform either under the official Ween banner or as an offshoot at least 25 times, probably more; after all these years, I still want more. After all these years, I still cycle through the band’s two-decade strong catalogue; after all these years, I still look to those random road trips to those random cities, like Birmingham and Louisville, as my earliest tastes of life on the road as an adult.

And I still have that cassette, too.

Photo courtesy of Buck Lewis on Flickr

I’ve just gotten back from Marrakech, where the temps reached into the 100s, F.  I spent quite a lot of time lounging around the rather fabulous pool of the distinctly fabulous hotel, La Mamounia. I watched many a well-preserved European bikini’d body arch their backs towards the sun in order to tan.

Of course, the western vogue for toasting is not shared universally.  When I was in Shanghai last summer, the analogous well-preserved woman was obsessed with keeping her skin far from the sun’s rays. Protection included a colorful parades of parasols,  what I can only describe as “forearm cozies” – handmade fabric coverings protecting the skin from the elbow to the wrist — and for bicycle riders, what looked like a welding mask. (Although I think that also defended against road debris.)

In Asia, white is beautiful, and a seemingly without controversy.

From what I gather, this is a class or status-based issue than one that’s tainted with skin color-based racism that  stains history here in the New World. (People of high castes were not manual laborers, ergo, not in the sun’s rays, ergo, tan=poor.) But it’s still startling nonetheless to encounter ads for Avon ClearWhite Supreme,  Yves Saint Laurent’s White Mode line,  Dior’s DiorSnowPure.  And it’s startling to learn, as I did from Foreign Policy’s blog the other day, that Vaseline has just launched a Facebook app targeted at the Indian market that lets you lighten your skin on your profile picture.

It was also eye-opening when I visited  downtown Melbourne, and stumbled across a display of blackface dolls, in the Block Arcade. They’re called “Golliwoggs”, and although a local I spoke to assured me that they were noncontroversial among Australians, a little digging revealed that they’re not completely benign there either. This shopkeeper evidently moved this display out of the window after a 2009 controversial blackface performance on an Australian variety show.

That backlash had its own backlash, as discomfort with these dolls was also seen as projection of American morals, history and shame on a land far far away. It’s an odd twist on the old argument against US cultural imperialism, although I wonder whether discomfort over racial stereotypes is really in the same category as, say, Hollywood’s global dominance.

In any event, the controversy faded as fast as a suntan in winter — when I visited in March 2010, the Golliwoggs were restored to full window display.

In this digital age, when it takes but a second to take a photograph and freeze a moment of time, it’s hard to remember that this wasn’t always the case.

In the early days of photography, taking a single photograph could take minutes, if not hours. It involved a  having subjects stay motionless while the photographer huddled under a black cover of an enormous camera, manually adjusting the lens to get the right amount of light through. And even before the subject was posed,  photographers who used the ‘wet collodion process’ for preparing the photographic plate had to handle powerful chemicals, many of which had potentially life-threatening side-effects.

I’d forgotten all this until a recent visit to the Isle of Wight where I chanced upon Dimbola Museum, the restored home of the Victorian era photographer Julia Margaret Cameron.

Julia only became a photographer by chance, at the age of 48, after her daughter gave her a camera for Christmas thinking it might just cheer her up. It not only cheered her up, it turned Julia into possibly the world’s very first celebrity photographer.

 She was, you could say, in the right place at the right time. With Queen Victoria and Albert in residence at Osborne House, the Isle of Wight was one of the most fashionable places to live, attracting thinkers, writers, artists, and scientists like a magnet.

And Julia was in the thick of it, photographing them all, whether they liked it or not, including Poet Laureate Alfred Lord Tennyson, the superstar of the Victorian age, who was her next door neighbor. Charles Darwin, Lewis Carroll, John Keats, Robert Browning, actress Ellen Terry, and Alice Liddell (the inspiration for Lewis Carroll’s ’Alice in Wonderland’) were just a few of the visitors that Julia captured on camera.

But instead of just taking a straight forward portrait, Julia insisted on staging her subjects in many diverse and creative ways, fading and blurring images, often dressing them up in ways that illustrated classical themes and subjects from Tennyson’s poems. It caused some criticism in the photographic establishment of the time, but still her work won her a ‘gold medal’ in Berlin and in 1867 she was awarded an ‘honourable mention’ at the Paris Exposition, no mean feat in the male dominated profession.

Wandering around Dimbola , looking at the photographs of all the famous people that Julia photographed, offers a fascinating glimpse of a bygone era.

But I’d have to say my favorite is the photograph of astronomer and scientist John Herschel, a long time friend of Julia’s who helped introduce her to the new science of photography.

They are celebrating in Derry tonight, and most likely will be for some time to come. Word comes that this sometimes troubled city by the mouth of the River Foyle in Northern Ireland has been named the United Kingdom’s City of Culture for 2013.

It’s a well deserved honor. Though the city’s best known reputation has to do with the political divisions that have rocked the island of Ireland through recent years and a divided political history that goes back centuries, Derry also has long traditions of excellence and innovation in the arts, from theater to to poetry to music.

Singer and songwriter Cara Dillon is from Dungiven, a small town to the east of Derry. It was her ‘big town’ while she was growing up, and she plays to packed out crowds when she returns to the city.

“Derry has seen so much, it’s like the walls can speak, you know,” she said of the place which has been the site of important historical events from earliest times up through the Troubles of the 1970s, and which is known as much for its walls dating from the 1600s as its murals dating from the the 1970s. “It’s one of those places that’s quite magical, when you start to read and hear about all that’s happened there,” she said. “But the most wonderful thing about a town like Derry is that people are so proud of their culture, because it’s been threatened for such a long time, so now there’s this lovely tradition where people have passed songs along with great passion.”

Dillon is one of those who passes such songs along. So is Paul Brady, a legendary song writer and singer whose music spans rock, folk, and country. Eamon Friel has been called Ireland’s answer to Bob Dylan. Composer Phil Coulter is from Derry, as are several members of the popular group Celtic Thunder. Poet Seamus Heaney is from Derry as well. There is music in his words, as there is music in the acting of another Derry native, Roma Downey.

Walking the streets of Derry, standing in the shadow of its walls, seeing the murals on both sides of political and religious divides, on both sides of how that history is understood, touching the emigration statues in Waterloo Place, seeing the Guildhall in lights at Christmas, raising a glass at Peadar O’Donnell’s or Bound for Boston, you cannot help but feel the history, and hear it in the cadence of speech, and in the words of song. For me, it is a bit of personal history, too. Part of my family comes from that at times uneasy country along the border, the few miles which lie between Derry in Northern Ireland and Letterkenny in the Republic. When I am in Derry, the music of the language sounds like home.

We are writing a new story, the authors of the city of culture proposal say, beyond the history and the troubles. It does seem as though the divisions of history may be weaving into a new strand, perhaps a strand of renewal and reconciliation other troubled places may learn from. Perhaps a strand that may make the promise of the statue at Craigavon Bridge, where two figures reach out and are almost touching hands, ring true at last.

There was somebody drowning in the middle of the Indian Ocean. The circumstances called for action.

I was swimming at isolated Goyambokka Beach in southern Sri Lanka, the kind of undeveloped, mostly untouched beach you read about and dream about, free of volleyball nets, vendors, and squawking package tourists. There was nobody there except the two of us, and there was absolutely nothing to do.

Cracked coconut shells were scattered across the creamy brown sand, nervous sea crabs scuttled into and out of and back into their tiny hideouts in the turf, and palm trees—clusters upon clusters of skinny, lilting palm trees—helped keep the beating subtropical sun, a veritable melanoma microwave here in equatorial South Asia, from melting away the sunscreen.

We shared this magical space with a sociable gang of local beach dogs, who couldn’t figure out why their playful shows of friendship were met with friendly, but firm, indifference. How do you tell a dog that it’s adorable, but that you want nothing to do with its unfortunate case of mange?

Also, I had skipped the optional (but recommended, and very expensive) pre-trip rabies vaccination, and was already mildly terrified about the prospect of frothing at the mouth, on an agonizing march to certain death in central Sri Lanka, after the house dog at our guesthouse in Kandy had licked my shin, just once, a few days earlier. For the record, I don’t think I contracted rabies.

All guests at the Palm Paradise Cabanas, a heavenly little beach-bungalow resort located just outside “downtown” Tangalle, are warned about the unpredictable undercurrent in the swimming beach waters. Swim, by all means, but don’t go too far out, we were told. The middle of the cove should be fine, but stay away from the rocks on either side.

It was here at check-in that I first introduced to a loosey-goosey, middle-aged Frenchman, who along with his wife had that morning moved from our bungalow to the one furthest away from reception. They did this, he later confessed, so that they could have extreme New Age tantric sex all afternoon and night without disturbing the other guests. Just kidding.

He was dressed in loose-fitting linens covered in pan-Asian designs, the kind tourists buy in Southeast Asia to blend in, only to stand out as the only folks in town dressed in loose-fitting linens covered in pan-Asian designs. Aside from his silly outfit we didn’t think much of him; he had apparently lost a pair of shoes and was convinced they were still in our bungalow, but we looked, and a member of the cleaning staff looked, and they weren’t there, so that was that…

… until we saw him drowning.

.

Or, at least we thought that was somebody drowning way out there. It can’t be… right? Is that just a large bird repeatedly flapping its wings, or is that a body bouncing up and down in the waves, like a buoy in a thunderstorm, flailing its arms in the international sign of “Help me, I’m fucking drowning out here!”

Squinting from shore, we weren’t entirely sure; we’d been at the beach for at least 45 minutes and thought we were the only ones there. But… wait… yes, my god, that is somebody! He must be a mile from shore! What do we do, what do we do, what do we do?!

I pictured myself frantically sprinting through the sleepy resort grounds to summon assistance, then trucking back to the beach and into the water, where I’d power my way out to sea with breaststrokes of lightening and drag the poor bastard to shore. By then, a small crowd would have gathered on the beach to witness the American’s herculean rescue. They’d cheer as tears of admiration trickled down their smiling faces; the mangy dogs would keep a respectful distance in honor of my heroics.

Later, I’d pose with the grateful swimmer and talk with reporters. “Just doing what anybody would do,” I’d say with casual coolness. Our picture would be plastered across the front page of Sri Lanka’s Daily News. I’d meet President Rajapaksa and be given a ceremonial key to the country.

Oh, the glory!

Meanwhile, four fisherman in a weathered rowboat had shoved off from a neighboring cove and were headed in the direction of the human buoy. And as I peered back out to sea, I noticed that it wasn’t just arms we were seeing, but legs too. They seemed to be flipping in cadence: first the arms were sticking straight up, then the legs, then the arms, then the legs. The boat was nearer now, almost on top of the person, and just as quickly as they arrived, they changed direction and began prepping their fishing poles: the guy wasn’t drowning at all, but, strangely, enjoying a casual swim.

We stood there knee deep on the beach, confused, as the daft Frenchman slowly made his way back towards shore, flipping, kicking, flailing, flipping, kicking, flailing, fully unaware of the scare he’d given us, on a day when the waves were particularly feral, after we’d all been told it wasn’t wise to swim too far out.

The Frenchman and his skinny wife seemed to magically appear every morning between 8am – 9am for one of these suicidally adventurous swims, after which they’d disappear into their cabana for long stretches of the afternoon before jumping back in the water to tempt fate once more before dinner.

They may have sandwiched their swims around extreme New Age tantric sex sessions in that remote bungalow, with Sting’s Sacred Love on loop, but I can’t say for certain.