The team over at Coudal.com are back at it with the launch of the 2008 edition of Field Tested Books, a collection of book reviews by a variety writers, each with an interesting twist. As Jim explains:
“We had this notion that somehow through experimentation we could identify how our perception of a book is affected by the place where we read it. Or maybe the other way around. Maybe it’s possible to determine how a book colors the way we feel about the place where we experience it.”
This year, the …

The sunset that night does not spread itself out like a stain across the sky; it does not explode into great symphonies of crimson and mango but remains strangely minimalist, like a Japanese flag, a simple red disk descending beyond the Pacific. Our boat captain signals its primal retreat with the call of a conch shell and on its note we prepare our own descent into the waters below.
On our journey out to this spot, earlier that afternoon, just off the black lava cliffs that edge the Kona airport, a …

Just ducked into the London Apple Store on Regent Street. We are heading to Italy tomorrow, spending a couple of days in Venice, then on to Bologna and then finally meeting up with our friends Jen and Adam for seven days in the Tuscan countryside. I will be back online on the 17th with a full account of the adventures. Until then, ciao!

There are people wandering along the side of the freeway.
This is my first impression upon our arrival in Beijing. It strikes a deep set horror in me. Caught in the headlights, choked on the edge of the 10 lanes that spew out an air that you wear like another layer of skin, they look displaced, lost, left behind.
My god, I think to myself, 1.3 billion is too many; China’s population is supersaturated; the levee has broken; people are spilling out everywhere.

China/Japan: the photos.

We are in the final hours before our flight to Beijing. Plans to blog while on the trip are foggy at best. I may try to fire off a few quick impressions of the digital skylines and cybernetic crowds but I will have to see how it all plays out. As a last blog entry, I leave you with photographer Michael Wolf’s website, a series of photographs and collected posters that best represent the contents of my dreams over these last days before my imminent departure. Mata ne.

If anyone has any recommendations for restaurants that we should be checking out while in Shanghai, it would be great to hear from you. At the moment, the plan is to check out Cloud Nine for the view at the very least. The other restaurant that caught my eye is Tou Ming Si Kao which looks like something straight out of a Wong Kar Wai movie. As for Beijing, we will probably take most of our meals at the night market. Mmmm…deep fried scorpion.

Climbing into the back of the pickup truck on the dusty street, a trio of tribes women surround us wearing clothes of bright yellows, magentas and cyans, and black hats decorated with jingling tokens and coins. Their smiles are stained red with bettlenut juice and they thrust toward me their handfuls of bracelets and scarves all the while whispering under their breath the mantra on their true intent: “Opium….o..p..i..u..m..”
We were leaving Muang Xing in the north of Laos, thirteen miles south of the Chinese border. This was one of the …