Sidenotes: Facts and Thoughts Beyond Travel

Published irregularly and difficult to find, Flaneur Magazine focuses each time on a small microcosm to tell universal stories with a refined visual and literary approach. The pleasure of street-by-street exploration must be savored slowly.

The First Few Covers of the Magazine – Photo Courtesy: Flaneur Magazine

[…] This city is an accumulation of completely unrelated artifacts. We delve into their beauty and try to reorder them anew. In this land of our time, the logic of the linear is replaced by the logic of fragments, the desire for fragments. The beyond begins here, the absolute deceleration, our own lack of knowledge as the only indicator of existence.

Well, artistic ambitions aside, vivisecting a street every now and then seems like a good idea to keep your adventurous spirit alive in times of noise and frenzy.

The pond turned into a latrine is the perfect metaphor for today’s mass tourism. Thoreau’s Walden Pond, which is only half an hour’s drive from Boston, MA, is invaded every year by half a million “incontinent tourists”, more than double those visiting Guyana or Bermuda… and apparently, things get really wild…

More than half of the summer phosphorus budget of Walden Pond may now be attributable to urine released by swimmers, while a footpath to Thoreau’s cabin caused large amounts of soil to wash into the lake.

Despite all this, the site has a high rating on Google Maps and, judging by the reviews, the real issues are elsewhere. According to most visitors, Walden Pond Reservation remains “a true transcendental experience” and “a must visit if you are an American Literature fan”, but there are no showers, parking sucks, the staff is unfriendly, and well “ice mocha has way too much mocha syrup”.

Not exactly what Thoreau had in mind when he wrote “Walden” in 1854…

American filmmaker Bill Morrison, known for the award-winning Dawson City: Frozen Time, is a keen visual archaeologist and time traveler. In this 2005 short film commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, he manages to unearth a “rarefied view” on the Brooklyn Bridge we can no longer experience.

[…] The unique central perspective lends itself to abstraction and time travel: the journey from one side of the East River to the other becoming a unit of both time and space, increasingly compressible and distributable.

The obsessive repetition in split screen view of the trolley trip from Manhattan to Brooklyn combined with T. Reynolds‘ original score creates a hypnotic effect which is likely to stay in our minds. Thanks to Aeon for letting us spot this gem.

If you have 5 spare minutes, NASA can fly you to the Moon with unprecedented realism thanks to data gathered by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft over the course of the last 6 years. The tour includes a visit to South Pole-Aitken basin, Tycho crater’s central peak, and the Taurus–Littrow valley, that served as the landing site for the last Apollo mission to our nearest neighbor in space.

Not in the mood for guided tours? Try a more spontaneous exploration of the Moon with Quickmap, a virtual tool to smoothly dive into the lunar surface.

Remember Catalonia, the land of yellow ribbons? The long-coveted Republic has turned into a “State of Catatonia” and continues to be ruled by an avatar in Madrid. The politicians who sacrificed the Community’s autonomy at the altar of independence are touring Europe and no new government is on the horizon.

Yet things work out, so to speak. The economy is back on track and tourism grows more than in the rest of Spain while pro-independence fervor fades. So you know what, dear Catalans? Pass the wine, fuck the government, I love you…

A restaurant in Tokyo, Japan offers a VR (virtual reality) trip to New York, Paris, Rome, or Hawaii enhanced by “in-flight meals” themed around the destination.

With FIRST AIRLINES you can taste the experiences of aviation and world travel while on the ground.

Although sold as “real air experience”, it is indeed a great example of “authentic fakeness”, just while everybody seems to be looking for a much more digestible “fake authenticity”. Perhaps that is why a “virtual airline facility” disguised as a restaurant (…or is it the other way around?) appears almost revolutionary in its flamboyant and extravagant excess. But what about “authentic authenticity”? Well, nobody can make a profit, so there’s no point in talking about it.