Travel
Bound
by Jim Gladstone
 AIRPLANE
READ OF THE MONTH
Divas Las Vegas (Cleis Press. $14.95. www.cleispress.com),
the new comic novel by Rob Rosen, is delicious deep-dish
fun. Wait. Make that shallow, dishy fun. That’s “shallow”
in the most complimentary, gay-fabulous sense of the word.
This campy caper begins with a bohemian bookstore clerk
getting a windfall fortune and ending up bouncing from
bed to bed in Sin City, leaving a drag queen Patsy Cline,
a couple of corpses, and hot buttered (literally) penises
in its wake. A snappy, door-slamming farce, Divas feels
like the gay-positive antidote to last summer’s hugely
successful and disturbingly homophobic Vegas film comedy,
The Hangover. Rosen, whose previous book, Sparkle, was
subtitled “The Queerest Book You’ll Ever Love,”
spins his yarns with unabashed, utterly buoyant flamboyance.
The unparalleled bazaar quarter of Istanbul offers one
of the world’s most immersively sensuous travel
experiences. While the pages of The Bazaars of Istanbul
(Thames & Hudson. $60. www.thamesandhudsonusa.com)
can’t deliver the mingled aroma of piles of paprika
and dried apricots, or the sound of wily merchants’
multilingual sales pitches, they do a remarkable job
of capturing the allure, and the lore, of a place where
shopping and people-watching can be taken to their kaleidoscopic
extreme. This handsome book’s text, by Laura Salm-Reifferscheidt
and Isabel Böcking, is not the superficial and
super-skipable descriptive prose of many oversized coffee
table books; its an engrossing take on the bazaar quarter’s
heritage, religious significance, and merchandise (from
a terrific mini-history of Turkish carpets, including
an explanation of many of the most common motifs in
their design, to an honest assessment of the local trade
in Louis Vuitton, Bulgari, and Dolce & Gabana counterfeits.
Moritz Stipsicz’s more than 300 color photographs
offer glimpses of the bustling alleyways, vaulted tile
ceilings, grizzled old food vendors, intently focused
craftsmen, and Bosporus-threaded cityscapes that will
instantly evoke multi-sensory memories for those who
have been lucky enough to visit Istanbul’s bazaar
quarter, while inspiring trip planning for those who
have not yet experienced its inimitable pleasures.
 Any
frequent traveler knows the practical value of a good
map: it helps you understand where you are, and leads
you from one point to another, clearly and directly.
There’s less practicality and more ambiguity afoot
in an intriguing new anti-atlas, The Map as Art:
Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography, edited
by Katharine Harmon (Princeton Architectural Press.
$45. www.papress.com).
Featuring the work of more than 100 visual explorers,
from Jasper Johns to filmmaker Lars Von Trier, Harmon
showcases maps that are political, personal, peculiar,
and often powerful. A photograph of the cleverly titled
First Strike, by artist Doug Beube, shows a conventional
desktop globe with all of the landmasses covered by
wooden matchsticks, making the earth look a bit like
a porcupine with red-tipped quills. Harmon explains
that the piece was actually set aflame, and the remains
consist of a video of the burning globe and a jar of
ashes. Dipping into pop culture, Mark Bennett
densely annotates a map of the US, narrating the zigzag
path of Richard Kimble on the old television series,
The Fugitive. Jane Solomon, of Cape Town, South Africa,
worked with HIV-positive women to create life-sized
maps of their bodies “to visualize the virus and
tell their stories.” There are maps here made out
of clothing, maps drawn on skin, maps of emotional states,
and maps etched onto the surface of the earth itself.
An ideal holiday gift for creative travel buffs, The
Map as Art offers eclectic directions for moving through
the world with fresh perspectives.
 “The
Lower East Side is a small town that’s full of
slutty bisexual people who’ve all slept with each
other.” So begins the autobiographical essay “I’ll
Never Wash This Vagina Again,” which features the
canny combination of raunch and nonchalance that makes
Live Nude Elf: The Sexperiments of Reverend Jen
(Soft Skull Press. $14.95. www.softskull.com)
an oddly sweet hoot from start to finish. Jen Miller,
a New York performance artist, chronicles the two years
she spent as a columnist for the online sex magazine
Nerve. With an uninhibited aplomb, she works as a naked
maid, explores the world of balloon fetishists, watches
a boy have sex with a jar of mayonnaise, and learns
how to have a squirting G-spot orgasm. Miller is so
cheerful and matter-of-fact about having sexual encounters
that push—well, rip right through—the envelope
of the ordinary that in addition to making you laugh,
her book may make you feel downright uptight. A merry
little provocation this is.
 Maybe,
just maybe, you’ll actually cook a dish or two
from Real Cajun: Rustic Home Cooking From Donald
Link’s Louisiana (Clarkson Potter $35. www.clarksonpotter.com).
No matter if you never happen to have pork butt, boneless
deer meat, “about six feet of sausage casings”
or other such ingredients handy, this is, as much as
anything else, a travel book; it takes you deep into
Cajun country, as foreign a place to most Americans
as many locales halfway around the world. Photographer
Chris Granger’s images of sandy salt marshes, piles
of whiskery shrimp, tented family cookouts, and folks
on all fours foraging for wild mushrooms, bring Link’s
anecdotal descriptions of local foodways to mouthwatering
life. If you’ve been to New Orleans before, this
book may just tempt you to venture further afield on
your next trip to the Crescent City.
[Published:
November, 2009]
|
