EnRoute Magazine

Articles from a series on consumer culture that has been published three times annually in EnRoute Magazine since 2004.

They're Everywhere

 

Holy stickers Batman. These things have hit Toronto, New York, Halifax... everywhere.

Now they've reportedly crossed the pond. They're going up in the UK now.

Move over Banksy. Or whatever. I have no idea what this means.

Posted: Thursday, Jan. 19, 2012 9:47am
Tags:

Tokyo: Eastern Promises

In travel, while you don’t want to rush, moments of real speed can be exhilarating. I mean those times during a trip when you can feel the globe rotating under your feet, the landscape transforming before your eyes. Liftoff out of Vancouver, on a trans-Pacific flight, is particularly evocative of this sen­sation for me. The ground melts away behind, the scenery blurring and morphing. The sea opens up under the wheels, and there is a sudden sense of transference, of life moving from the known to the possible. And when the landing gear folds home, with that light but comforting thud, a point is sealed: We’re all in transit, in physical suspension, mid-teleportation. When the flight is over – I feel this every time, with a sudden and intense certainty – a new world of unpredictable possibilities will begin to make itself known.

Posted: Tuesday, Nov. 10, 2009 10:00pm
Tags:

Tokyo: Without a Plan

It seemed like a good idea when I woke up: a day spent hunting the perfect Tokyo cherry blossoms. Here was the plan, drawn up in the first seconds after waking, still in my bed at the Claska Hotel: I’d walk the Meguro-gawa upstream to its source, following the many kilometres of cherry trees that line the banks of the old canal, which links the ocean to Shinagawa and Meguro and which only disappears underground – according to my Tokyo street atlas – north of the Ikejiri-Ohashi train station.

Posted: Friday, Oct. 9, 2009 9:00pm
Tags:

Tokyo: Simple Pleasures

Dream City

I’m having a strange moment here in Tokyo. It’s 6:30 a.m. on a Tuesday morning, and I’m doing calisthenics in the park with about 50 old ladies I’ve never met before. Bending, twisting, stretching. Following the cadences of a warbly 1920s piano tune that’s playing from a radio up front. I’m completely out of place. I’m completely lost, might as well face it. But while the old ladies hide their smiles and the sun eases up over the ginkgo trees, a cool wind riffles the leaves and I feel paradoxically at home.

Posted: Tuesday, Sep. 8, 2009 9:00pm
Tags:

The Mobile Age - Part Three: Post-Globalism

The modern archetypes of mobility were the nomad and the settler, whose degree of mobility were established by preference, and the refugee and the prisoner, for whom mobility was determined by external forces. Globalization made a hybrid experience of being a settler and nomad, a seamless blending of home and away in many lives. In this third essay on mobility, Timothy Taylor journeys to the crossroads of Shanghai to peer into the future, exploring and imagining what happens to human experience when the sense of place begins to disappear altogether.
**
Azul Viva Tapas Lounge is down in the French Concession on Donping Lu. And while I’ve only been in the city 24 groggy hours, Shanghai delivers a moment of insight here.
The mix of people contributes to the effect. Our host, Peruvian/Canadian Eduardo Vargas, has invited a dozen of us this evening to taste-test new Azul Viva dishes, and the Conde Naste Shanghai Restaurateur of Year in 2006 is quizzing us after each bite: frogs legs with chili mayo, thin sliced beef filet with horseradish and crisp onion, foccacio with dipping oils, another beef dish with chimichurri.
Posted: Tuesday, Oct. 9, 2007 9:00pm
Tags:

The Mobile Age - Part Two: Globalism

We’ve become mobile in new ways, challenging conventional ideas about home and community. In the first of three essays, Timothy Taylor introduced four mobility archetypes of the modern era: the nomad and the settler, for whom the degree of movement is established by preference; and the refugee and the prisoner, for whom movement is determined by forces beyond their control. In this second essay, he explores how these archetypes have evolved and hybridized.
I move around a fair bit with my work. And while I love encountering new places and, especially, meeting the people who make up those places and have been shaped by them in turn, I can’t deny that I generally also dislike leaving home. As a result, my attitude towards travel is conflicted. Indeed, it often gives rise to moments of inner turbulence.
On one level, this is the joint cultural inheritance I received from my parents. I’m the product of a mother and a father who had very different modern-era experiences of mobility, and who then adapted to these experiences with equivalently different survival techniques.
Posted: Monday, Aug. 6, 2007 9:00pm
Tags:

The Mobile Age - Part One: Modernism

The contemporary citizen is mobile in new ways, re-shaping our definitions of “home” and challenging our conventions about “community”. In three essays over the coming months, Timothy Taylor examines the evolution of human mobility in the West in three phases: Modernism, Globalism, and the dawning age of Post-Globalism.
There is a slightly embarrassing story my mother used to like to tell about me. It dates from 1965 when I was not yet two. That was the year my nomadic family moved back to Canada after years abroad to settle in West Vancouver. We’d lived in Venezuela prior to that point, where I’d been born in the town of San Tome, the last of five kids. Oil brats, as they used to say, since my father was an engineer with the Mene Grande Oil Company.
Posted: Tuesday, Jun. 5, 2007 9:00pm
Tags:

The Boutique Individual: Brand New World

PART THREE: BRAND™ NEW WORLD, December 2006
 
My mother took a conservative position on toys: Less was better, in part because you should be outside playing anyway. I might have preferred a different approach. But now that I have a two-year-old boy and toys are again on my radar, I see the wisdom of my mother’s old-world view.
 
It’s partly a matter of self-preservation. Toy marketing has grown devious. Television tie-ins are standard. There are strategic alliances between toys (Duplo and Bob the Builder, for example), which try to create complex multi-toy-group dependencies. But my larger concern is for my son.
Posted: Monday, Dec. 11, 2006 10:00pm
Tags:

The Boutique Individual: Personal Branding

PART TWO: PERSONAL BRANDING, Sep 2006
Everywhere I look in Sketch – Mourad Mazouz’s ultrafabulous London restaurant – I find whimsical, innovative ideas. Ever-changing video wallpaper in the bistro. Unisex bathrooms with individual pod enclosures. And on the plate too, where a typical chef Pierre Gagnaire menu experiments to the tune of Smoked Fish with Coco Bean Chantilly and Tuna Jelly.
 
But if you wish to experience Sketch in this way, as a nexus of creative surprise, you might want to stop reading here because, as it is with sausages, sometimes knowing how things are made diminishes the pleasure of consumption. Take the neon light sculpture on the landing of the staircase: If I move my head from side to side, the neon ghosts out the word “Love.” Which would indeed be creative and surprising but somehow isn’t because I happen to know that it and every other detail in this place has been planned in advance to reflect Mazouz’s Personal Brand.
Posted: Friday, Sep. 8, 2006 9:00pm
Tags:

The Boutique Individual: Corporate Storytelling

PART ONE: CORPORATE STORYTELLING, June 2006
 
When I was six years old, I went with an older cousin to look at sailboats in Fisherman’s Cove in West Vancouver. At the gas station opposite the marina, he parked his 1969 Dodge Charger and offered to buy sodas. What about one of these? He indicated his favourite: Orange Crush. I declined, although I wanted the drink. But I’d been so indoctrinated on the evils of fast food and soft drinks that I didn’t dare indulge.
 
A few decades later, I understand the whole incident in terms of the microeconomics of branding. That summer day – seagulls gliding in the salty air currents above a thicket of swaying sailboat masts – Orange Crush made me a “brand promise,” an offer of membership in a tribe of guys like my cousin: Dodge Charger enthusiasts with girlfriends, puka shell necklaces and brown corduroy boot-cut Levi’s. This was my incentive to buy.
Posted: Monday, Jun. 5, 2006 9:00pm
Tags:
Syndicate content