Wow, I realized there’s been a blog famine. I’ve been busy catching up on my business during a brief window between returning from a two-month European-research trip and vanishing for 20 days — which I hope to do in a day or two to finish a new book of essays about how travel shapes your world view (to be published sometime in 2010). Before I knew it, ten days have passed without an entry, and people are wondering if I fell into one of those Mount Rainier crevasses I wrote about in my last entry.
I love my work because it is a hailstorm of variety. In the last week, I gave a talk at the Adventure Travel show in Seattle (whose attendance was murdered by a sunny weekend). I do travel show talks on the condition that I can give my political talk. Many people gather fun ideas for their upcoming trips at these shows. But sometimes at these shows I feel like I’m in a huge exhibition hall noisy with crass tourism come-ons. It’s a poignant environment for a talk that challenges people to travel for more than gaining calories and a tan.
(By the way, when I call cruising more hedonistic than travel, I don’t say that in a judgemental way. Why do people think hedonism is in itself bad. Cruising is a great passtime and full of fun. It’s… hedonistic.)
Last week I also gave a talk at a fund-raiser for a great group called Global Visionaries which sends Seattle high-school students (whose families can’t afford to give them the luxury of foreign travel) to Guatemala for a chance to connect with a developing world culture and see our country from that vantage point. A 16-year-old girl fresh from her Global Visionaries experience — brimming with passion and hungry for a chance to put her new perspective into action — inspired us all (and was a very tough act to follow).
Just yesterday in Los Angeles, I gave a talk to the German Marshall Fund organization which is a subversive (to ethnocentrism) European organization that funds worthy young American professionals on international educational tours so they can come home and infect their workmates with a global perspective. There were many Europeans at the event and I even got invited by EU parliamentarians to give my talk in Brussels at the EU headquarters. (They figured Europeans are too hard on themselves and could benefit from a Euro-phile American like me, charmed by the Continent’s earnest efforts to grapple smartly with its problems.)
I was actually in Los Angeles to attend the Public Radio Program Directors (PRPD) Convention. The program directors of the nation’s public radio stations gather annually to network, share notes, and work to get the very best lineup of programs. I was there, like many radio producers, to convince those who don’t already air my weekly hour to get on board. (My show is three years old and is now aired by 99 stations. Many checked it out at the start — when I was pretty bad — and said no way. Now, 150 hours of shows later, we’re worth another look.)
I forgot my business cards — but thank goodness, rather than spend our promotional money on a booth, we had opted to buy an ad on the lanyards that held attendees’ convention tags. When someone asked for my Web address, I just pointed to the printing on the strip of cloth around their neck.
It was an oddly different schedule from being at other programs where I usually give talks. When there were workshops, I got to relax, but then during each break, meal, and social event, I worked — meeting all the program directors who needed to know more about my show.
Many of the big NPR personalities were there. The man who wrote this week’s Time magazine feature on our financial crises gave a talk and taught me nothing — other than the realization that I don’t like pundits and experts that try to be humorous as they tell me that no one knows why we’re in this economic mess or where it’s taking us. (My hunch is that the people whose mantra is “get the government off our backs” succeeded. Greed greased the skids — and voila. I wish I understood the whole mess but my gut knows that the money didn’t just vanish. While a tax-paid bail-out may be necessary, I bet it’s just another trickle-up transfer of wealth in disguise. And, while government regulations may be depressing to some, they’re depressing to all when employed only after the abuse they are designed to prevent takes its toll.)
A highlight of my LA visit was a trip to the Getty Center. Wow. Perched above the city, this art museum is as impressive as any museum I’ve seen in Europe. And the city views at sunset are enough to get you started. Architecturally, it’s like walking through a vast computer-generated vision. While there were few famous masterpieces, there were exquisite works by top artists throughout European art history — brilliantly lit and displayed and described as well as any I’ve seen. Oil money put to fine use…thank you Mr. Getty.
The current buzz in radio, as in the newspaper industry, is how to embrace the Web and stay viable. I came out of the PRPD convention committed to making Web-based interactive support for my radio show which each station can host to drive listeners to their websites. And back in my office, I’m in discussions with my newspaper syndicate as they see newspapers readying for the day then they are primarily Web-based news services.
My publisher came to town, took me out to dinner, and tried to convince me to join the move to “pocket-sized full-color” short versions of guidebooks. It’s true that the “top ten” type distillations are out-selling the full-fledged real guidebooks. But I don’t want to enable my travelers to just get everything in bullet points. However, one proposal I jumped at was my publisher’s offer to do a tenth-anniversary edition of my Postcards from Europe book with a 16-page color-photo insert. This book (which I’m busy assembling now — to be published April 2009), with a new intro and “outtro,” or epilogue, commenting on how European travel has changed since its first printing, will make a handsome new version of a book that I think should have done better than it did when produced back in 1999.
In a couple of weeks, we’ll release our new TV series (two years in the making). We currently have 10 shows finished and three more in the works, and it’s exciting to have stations all over the country start airing the new series before we’re done producing all the shows. We are committed to finishing shows 11, 12, and 13 before the first ten weeks of shows go on the air. Because of our shooting schedule, each season we always have this nail-biter finish, but we always deliver in time.