The Perceptive Travel website, of which this blog is an offshoot, just picked up a Silver for ‘Best Travel Journalism Website’ at the 2011 North American Travel Journalists Association (NATJA) awards announced earlier this week.

But that’s not all.
Many of the stories published on Perceptive Travel website throughout the year also garnered awards:

* Amy Rosen, “Can a Croissant Change Your Life?” (Gold, Cultural, Educational, Self-Improvement Travel category)

* Tim  Leffel, “Side Saddle Girls at a Mexican Rodeo”   (Gold – Special Focus Travel Articles category)

* Lisa Te Sonne, “Voices & Choices When a Human Flies”  (Sliver, Leisure Activity category)

* Tim Leffel, “The Dreams of Man in Stone and Concrete”  (Bronze, Personality and Profiles category)

* Amy Rosen, “My Life & Times with the CN Tower” (Silver, Historical or Hobby Travel category)

Congratulations to Tim Leffel and all the great PT writers.

Congratulations are also in order for the other two travel websites in the the ‘Best Travel Journalism Website’ – USA Today Travel (Veronica Stoddart) picked up the Gold and Travel with Lisa Online (Lisa Codianne Fowler) picked up the Bronze.

In the Travel Blog Category, our editor Tim Leffel also picked up a Gold for his Cheapest Destinations Blog, with Gary Arndt’s Everything-Everywhere picking up Silver and The Vacation Gals (Jennifer Miner, Beth Blair, and Kara Williams) picking up Bronze.

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.

According to influential global magazine Foreign Policy, Christchurch is destined to become one of the world’s best cities.

But those of us who live there already think it is.

Sure, the city might have the shakes and look a little worse for wear.

Despite this, Christchurch has maintained its character and grace and sense of humor.

Lonely Planet writer Brett Atkinson, in town for a couple of weeks to update the Christchurch chapter of Lonely Planet’s New Zealand guide, discovered that a lot had changed since his last visit to the city.

The bars, cafes, and restaurants that he had written about for the 2010 edition of Lonely Planet New Zealand were no longer open. The February earthquake had made sure of that, as well as destroying many of the hotels listed in that guide.

Instead, Atkinson found a city that was reinventing itself.

Bars and cafes were popping up in unexpected places.

A whole new social hub, dubbed SoMo (south of Moorhouse Ave), has risen from the ruins and is now home to Christchurch’s iconic Court Theater (usually housed in the Art Center) and numerous cafes and bars.

Highlighting innovative actions such as the ‘gap filler’ and the container mall projects, Atkinson has labeled Christchurch one of New Zealand’s most exciting cities (a statement that warms the hearts of die-hard Cantabrians who have always felt a little like the ‘poor cousin’ to capital city Wellington and super-city Auckland).

To find out more, have a read of Atkinson’s 48 page post-quake Christchurch and Canterbury chapter that Lonely Planet is offering as a free download.

The chapter will eventually be inserted into the 16^th edition of the New Zealand guidebook (to be published in September).

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.