Of course you are obsessed with death.

Everyone alive is, we all know it’s out there, waiting for us.  The only thing that varies between people is the depth and degree of repression of this knowledge.

Travel, of course, is not about death.

Travelers don’t like to think about demise, as a topic — except for the legions who visit cemeteries, concentration camps battlefields, memorials, slums and sites of natural disasters. And anything to do with the Titanic.

A theory: travelers have a preference for death by war or natural disaster, which seem avoidable by dint of geography and luck, rather than by illness, which after all  may be lurking within those Bermuda shorts at that very moment. Which may be why, despite a penchant for “living like a local” when on vacation,  tours of hospitals, clinics and doctor’s offices have never really caught on.

Part of the reason why “authentic local” itineraries often avoid medical facilities is the problem of turning human struggle or suffering into spectacle. This was an issue of concern when I visited Kalaupapa National Historic Park on Molokai, the quarantine site for people with Hansen’s Disease.

In other words, a leper colony.

Yes, the setting is beautiful. But from 1866-1949, this was also a very effective prison — bounded by the Pacific Ocean on one side, and beneath highest sea cliffs in the world on the other. There was only one road to “topside” Molokai, an arduous three mile trail with 26 switchbacks, and a guard at the top.

Today, the trail remains the only way to visit the settlement and the park from the rest of Molokai, without an airplane. And although Hansen’s Disease is now very manageable as a chronic illness, there are still patients living there — they chose to stay after the quarantine was lifted.

For that reason, although it is a national park, visitors are only allowed access on a guided tour. Also for that reason, tour does not include the Post Office and the grocery story, and other places that a resident would be likely to go in their daily lives.  One exception is the Catholic church. And you can see the mixed feelings that tourism creates for its residents:

In case you can’t read it, it says: “Do not touch or steal anything from this church pew!! This means you…tourist!!”

These are thorny issues. Less complicated, although perhaps no less unsettling, is to visit a museum of medical history. Oh, do we have some good ones in this country. More on that next week.

Have you ever been on a photowalk?

I first heard someone talking about one during a tech conference …. a bunch of photography enthusiasts who were also conference attendees went out exploring as a group for an hour or two, usually in the morning or evening for best light.

The walk was at CES (the Consumer Electronics Show) in Las Vegas, so the eye candy was all around.

In Los Angeles, the tourism office knows how important visuals are to the LA visitor experience, and their Los Angeles Photo of the Day blog is hugely popular. They also periodically host photowalks with local photographers.

One event used the standard hop-on, hop-off LA tourist bus tour – a great way to visit a lot of iconic, interesting places in a short period of time.

Enjoy the video below (direct link on YouTube) and see if your own local tourism office would like to host a photowalk.

They’ll probably want participants to sign over rights to the photos taken – so they can use them in marketing your town – but if you’re OK with that, it should be a fun experience.

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When I visited Palm Springs, California, I had no trouble remembering where I was. I had trouble placing when I was.

The city is well known for its impressive array of  Mid-Century Modern buildings — many of which have been preserved, some of which have been tragically lost.

The sleek aesthetic of the middle 20th century has always struck me as incredibly futuristic, which is what creates that “wobbling in time” feeling — don’t ask me to tell you what year it is when I’m looking at fifty year old building that seems like it belongs to an era that won’t happen for another fifty years.

Adding to this time travel effect were my Palm Springs accommodations. I stayed at the Riviera, which takes its design mission very seriously — there were lots of “oh my” moments, from the lobby’s curved orange wall, lit up, with a floral metal lattice work dwarfing small check-in desks in the lobby, to the swank Rat Pack pool, to the never-ending collision of patterns in the hotel’s labyrinthine hallways –  but not so many clues about what year tops the current calendar.

I will now confess that my estimate of fifty years of temporal flux in either direction was no rough estimate.  I’m not too proud to say that my earliest impression of Mid Century Modern came from watching The Jetsons, and they “lived” in 2062. Exactly fifty years from 2012.

Anyway, the best way to get to know Palm Spring’s Mid-Century Modern architecture, also known as “desert modernism”, is to head there for Modernism Week, February 16th to the 26th, 2012.  There are tours by foot and tours by bus, parties, lectures, films. Check out the full event schedule here.  And if you’re heading to Palm Springs another time, be sure to get your mid-century bearings at the Palm Springs Visitors Center, pictured above left, which started its life as a fabulous gas station, constructed in 1965.

There were riots, there were army troops in the streets, there was death. The state defied the president; the president defied the state. Old wounds were opened, new ones were made. To watchers on television, it seemed as though Mississippi had become another country, and to people in Mississippi on both sides of the line about integration, it sometimes seemed that way, too. It was 1962. In Oxford, Mississippi, James Meredith was enrolling as the first African American undergraduate student at the University of Mississippi.

Things were quieter a few hundred miles away, in the Florida panhandle. In Tallahassee, Florida’s capital city, Maxwell Courtney was accepted to Florida State University. With an interest in math and high grades, he could have chosen to go elsewhere. He could have done that and chosen to stay in his hometown of Tallahassee: historically black Florida A&M University is just across town from the FSU campus. Courtney made another choice. He became the first African American undergraduate student to enroll at Florida State University. In his class he was the only black.

John Marks, who has served as mayor of Tallahassee, was one of nine African Americans who were part of the freshman class four years later. He has recalled that while some greeted them with kindness, in his words to an alumni publication, “ the welcome mat wasn’t exactly out. But we had each other.” Maxwell Courtney, however, had no black classmates to share his experience.

There’s a statue of Maxwell Courtney on the Florida Sate University campus these days. It shows a young man with a determined expression, a book in his hand, and his head held high. During his time as an undergraduate, civil rights issues were front page news almost every day across the American south, and elsewhere. People died, people disappeared, riots flared, churches were bombed, hard words were hurled, and so were rocks. Those things, too, were just what made it into news reports. With all this going on around him, Maxwell Courtney earned a degree in mathematics with honors, and with minors in French and English.

In the Florida Memory project archive, there’s a photograph of a slightly older Maxwell Courtney than the man in the statue, a man caught looking up and smiling, as though he’s just about to say hello to someone he likes. Those two images, the resolute face in the statue and the open face in the photograph, stand as vivid memory of the courage and perspective he must have had to take the risks and face the challenges he did. The statue, by renown sculptor Sandy Proctor, has been in place since the 1980s, but Maxwell Courtney never got to see it. After graduating from FSU, he moved to the Washington DC area, where he earned a master’s degree from the University of Maryland and did consulting work for the Smithsonian. He died in a boating accident in the 1970s.

1962. Part of history, and yet close enough to touch as part of living memory as well. Take a look at this UPI newsreel about integration at the University of Mississippi, and this excerpt from a documentary with archival footage and interviews. James Meredith and Maxwell Courtney both took actions of great courage in hard circumstances, and both walked a sometimes lonely path to open the way for generations to come.

Along with Maxwell Courtney, Fred Flowers and Doby Lee Flowers are honored in the FSU Integration statue. Thoughts on their legacies to come.

photograph by Kerry Dexter

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The group had good intentions, but the brightly colored $10 cocktails just weren’t big enough.

They were gathered shoulder to shoulder around a few small wooden tables that, shoved together, formed one long place setting of awkward silences sandwiched between awkward getting-to-know-you-but-I-need-to-have-a-few-more-drinks-before-I’m-ready-to-really-get-to-know-you pleasantries. There were about 12 or 13 twenty/thirtysomethings in all, the girls sharply dressed and the guys wearing sharp attention for the girls. I think they’d gathered here at bāśik as part of some sort of cocktail or bar-hopping tour. My brother-in-law and I watched from a cushioned bench near the entrance, sharing $6 pints of Captain Lawrence Pale Ale and a mutual appreciation of being onlookers, not participants.

bāśik is another newish Williamsburg bar with that specific type of clean, minimalist, industrialized vintage character that area hipster and hipsterettes fawn over. The walls like white-washed jeans, the floors cold cement, the tables candlelit, the beer menu simple, the cocktails obtusely named And How, Love Makes You Feel Ten Feet Tall, longitude / latitude. There’s a wood-paneled patio in the back, like a giant sauna with tables and chairs, and the bar itself is, according to their website, “perhaps the most impressive element… [a] long 19th century butcher block bar, salvaged from an abandoned packaging plant.” Wood and cement. Wood and cement.

More impressive, I think, are the two stark closet-like doors, painted metallic-grey, facing that old butcher block bar. One has “Restroom” neatly painted in black across the top; the other, nothing. Where oh where could it lead? Perhaps it’s the entrance to Pandora’s box, a portal to a mind-bending imaginarium of fantastical wonders and shadowy horrors. It may also lead into the mind of John Malkovich, the actor best known for his captivating performances as Bruce Brazos in Transformers: Dark of the Moon and Quentin Turnbull in Jonah Hex. Open at your own risk.

There are, of course, no happy hour specials, but there are, of course, $3 cans of Budweiser.

Once upon a time this space was home to Phoebe’s Cafe, which was favored by area scenesters when I first moved to Williamsburg some 9 years ago. I tried it once on the recommendation of a flaky-cool editor who worked at a hip downtown magazine I was interning for at the time. I also tried the fish sandwich at the nearby White Castle on the corner of Humboldt and Metropolitan once–it was delicious. bāśik tips its hat to its predecessors with the phoebe’s sandwich (oven-roasted squash, eggplant and portobello, naan, sriracha mayo, $8), as part of a modest 13-item menu that also includes mac and cheese ($8), deviled duck egg ($4), and two types of hot dogs ($4 each).

Through the tall looking glass windows on bāśik’s Graham Avenue-facing facade, a view of C-Town, the neighborhood grocery, the “SuperMarkets for Savings”. Here the teenage cashiers, all girls, snack on potato chips and mini-donuts kept in drawers underneath their registers, carrying on fascinating conversations amongst themselves that tend to start with an impassioned “No, that stupid muthafuckah…” and end with a “… so fuck that bitch” finality. Once in awhile they say “you’re welcome” after thanking them for the attentive services they have kindly provided. C-Town’s piss-yellow lighting illuminates bright futures.

My brother-in-law’s paperback copy of The Way We Die Now, by Charles Willeford, lay on our low wooden table near the cushioned bench at the entrance, in front of the tall glass windows, across from the 19th-century butcher block bar, near the two closet-like doors painted metallic grey on the walls like white-washed jeans. We each choked down a small oatmeal cookie and washed away the blandness with the last of our pints of Captain Lawrence Pale Ale. One of bāśik’s proprietors was introduced to the cocktail group, which was still mired in fits and spurts of awkward silence.

Everybody at those tables had good intentions; I can appreciate that. bāśik itself has good intentions, and I can appreciate that too.

bāśik is located at 323 Graham Avenue, just off the Graham Avenue stop on the L train, between Metropolitan Avenue and Devoe Street. M-W 4p-2a; Thu-Fri 4p-4a; Sat-Sun 12p-4a. 347-889-7597.