Recently in Arts and Culture Category

Managing Editor Scott Stuckey has just returned from Turkey and got an insider's look at Istanbul's famous Whirling Dervishes.


I first heard the term "Whirling Dervishes" as a young child and, reasonably enough, surmised that they were dervishes who loved to whirl. What a dervish was, exactly, remained a mystery to me until last Friday, when I stepped into a 500-year-old Turkish bathhouse (repurposed as the Hodjapasha Culture Center) in the Sirkeci area of old Istanbul. Here, monks of a mystical Sufi order of Muslims--known traditionally for their spirituality, self denial, and tolerance--perform a centuries-old dance ritual for the admission price of 40 Turkish lira, beverage included.

My tour group streamed into the circular brick room, and we took our seats just a few feet from the Plexiglas stage, lit from beneath with colored lights, where the dervishes would spin. A worry crossed my mind: What if a dervish got dizzy and landed in my lap? We were that close.

Soon, musicians took their place in an alcove and began playing and chanting classical Turkish music, using traditional drums and stringed instruments. In time, five dervishes appeared, walking around the perimeter of the stage. Their every movement--crossing their arms, laying a sheepskin on the floor opposite the door, bowing, saluting one another--followed established traditions lost on most of us in the audience, though we sensed there was meaning to it all.

Last week, National Geographic Traveler assistant editor Janelle Nanos got to chat with legendary actor and World War II enthusiast Tom Hanks, who has "perhaps done more than anyone in Hollywood today to help tell the stories of the war with the film Saving Private Ryan and HBO series Band of Brothers" and who just helped produce the interactive film Beyond All Boundaries for the World War II Museum in New Orleans. Hanks's goal of the film--which premiers on November 8--was to make an impression: to give the viewer a chance to look beyond the familiar black-and-white portrayal of WWII and see that these were real people, living their lives in a period that would change them forever.

A trailer of the movie can be seen here. For the complete interview and insiders look at the film, click here.

Brian Jungen is the first living Native American artist to have a solo show at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian, and his exhibit, "Strange Comfort" opened this past weekend. Jungen creates art out of recognizable everyday objects, including sports paraphernalia: a suit of armor made of catcher mitts, a skull made from baseball skins, blankets woven from jerseys, and totem poles of stacked golf bags (above). According to this interview on NPR's All Things Considered, Jungen deliberately chooses to make art "from materials belonging to an industry that has claimed names such as The Chiefs, Indians, Redskins and Braves."

"I felt that if these professional sports teams felt that they had every right to use this terminology, then I had every right to exploit their materials for my artwork," Jungen says.

Jungen also draws inspiration from the ritual aspect of American sports.

"Professional sports play a role in society that serves like a ritual and ceremony," he says. "Having experienced that within my own family -- the dancing and drumming that I participate in -- I know how important that is. So I wanted to use that -- use things that people would recognize in their everyday world."

Former Traveler staffer Christina Stockamore gets the inside scoop on One & Other, an imaginative art installation in London's Trafalgar Square.

If you've visited London in the last few months, chances are that you've stumbled across the unique art installation on display in Trafalgar Square. The project, called One & Other, was created by the British artist Antony Gormley, who was commissioned by the Mayor of London to create a sculpture atop the vacant fourth plinth in the northwest corner of London's Trafalgar Square. Instead of sculpting a statue out of bronze or marble, Gormley was moved by the idea to place real people on the plinth. The idea was to feature one performer or "Plinther" every hour for 100 days straight, and the last day of the project is October 19.

My aunt, Adrianne Foglia, was one of the 2,400 artists selected out of 34,224 applicants to perform on the plinth. At midnight one night late last month, she climbed up to the top and unfurled a huge banner that said "In Your Life, Who Do You Remember? Who Would You Thank?" I watched online as she began to recount in personal detail the long list of people who had touched her life. As she spoke, she scribbled their names on a canvas in colored markers to create an abstract mosaic next to the words: "People are the colors of our lives. Each one of us is a canvas." After she took to the plinth, I asked her to share her experience. Check our Q&A after the jump.

Contributing editor James Conaway is also our resident art buff, so we've asked him to review some of the best exhibits he visits in his travels. Today he contrasts two exhibits currently on display at the Corcoran Gallery in D.C.

Washington, D.C.'s prestigious Corcoran Gallery of Art currently has two oddly complementary exhibits of special interest to visitors and residents alike. The first is Oil, by the Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky, which opened this past weekend. It's a heroic display of wall-size photographs taken over a decade that document the influence of the world's most ubiquitous, dwindling resource upon our environment and upon ourselves. The second, Sargent and the Sea, is an antiphonal, painterly alternative to this reality by the 19th-century artist, John Singer Sargent, whose early drawings and paintings depict a still pristine, unhydro-carbonated, impossibly naive world.

Burtynsky's odyssey to some of the least lovely assemblages of post-industrial detritus can best be described as dreadfully gorgeous. "Industrial sublime" is the phrase used by the curators, and that works, although the word sublime was intended for natural phenomena of such grandeur and power that the beholder is transported to a nether space somewhere between fear and ecstasy. Well, when you're confronted with the derriere-end products and landscapes of a century of unbridled internal combustion, you too will be both afraid and aesthetically moved.

We recently received a letter from a reader asking for help finding a cruise across the southern Mediterranean along the coast of North Africa. She hopes to visit cities founded during the Roman Empire rich with remnants of the past. Here are three travel companies with excellent cruising options for exploring the region. All trips are education-oriented and feature prominent speakers and guest lecturers on relevant topics from archaeology to classical culture and language. One of the highlights of all of the tours is the magnificent Leptis Magna Theater on the coast of Libya, pictured here, and featured as one of our "50 Places of a Lifetime" in our current issue.

Food writer and Modern Spice cookbook author Monica Bhide recently returned from visiting her family in India, and we asked her to share some glimpses of contemporary life she noticed while there. You can read her first post here.

For centuries India, particularly North India, has been a country of tea drinkers, while steaming cups of coffee were loved by the folks in South India. And then something happened. Since 2000, coffeehouses like Barista and Café Coffee Day have begun to spring up in major cities by the hundreds. They offer different types of coffees, smoothies, and snacks very much like Starbucks does. The initial reaction was interesting to watch. "The affluent young Indians will love it," the media claimed, as they noted all the youngsters gathering at the coffeehouses. There was an outcry from lovers of Indian culture and tea--it was blasphemous for them to even think that coffee culture could be percolating here in India, sacrilegious that a tea-drinking nation could love drinking coffee. Culture watchers were quick to point out that people drinking in these fancy coffeehouses weren't any better than the ones who drank tea off the street stalls.  

My view is a bit different.

Silbo Gomero is a whistling language that developed on the island of La Gomera, one of Spain's Canary Islands off the northwest coast of Africa. The island is difficult to traverse due to its very steep hills and deep ravines. La Gomera's inhabitants, tired of yelling at each other, long ago invented a phonetic language based on whistling, and for centuries this form of communication worked very well. Then came telephones, and the whistling language fell into disuse.

Saving Silbo Gomera became the goal of busuu.com, an online community for learning languages, which produced this video as part of a worldwide campaign. Their efforts were successful. Yesterday UNESCO declared the language to be an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. 

Also making UNESCO's list was the sultry music and moves of the Tango. This is thanks to a bit of cooperation between Uruguay and Argentina, who have long bickered over who laid claim to its origins. The two countries put their arguments aside in order to petition UNESCO for the special status, and they now stand to receive funding to safeguard the cultural tradition. There were 76 designations made this year, and include the Chinese Dragon Boat festival, Aubusson tapestry-making in France, and the traditional Nigerian harvest festival know as the Ijele masquerade. The entire list is fascinating, be sure to take a look.

Thanks to French blogger Kirsten Winkler for the whistling tip!

No, that's not Desmond in another Lost flashback. But Henry Ian Cusick, one of our favorite actors from that crazy island family, has been cast as Charles Darwin in National Geographic Television's first scripted film, which will air next week on PBS. Darwin's Darkest Hour celebrates the famous scientist's discoveries and trials, and shines light on his personal life. The two-hour drama, presented in conjunction with NOVA, airs Tuesday, October 6 (check local listings).

If you'd prefer to see the show on the big screen, plan to attend the premiere of the film at National Geographic headquarters in Washington, D.C. on October 5. The film will be followed by a discussion with director John Bradshaw, scriptwriter John Goldsmith, and executive producer John Bredar. Watch the trailer here, and learn more about the National Geographic Live! premiere events by clicking here.

Contributing editor James Conaway is also our resident art buff, so and we always appreciate his willingness to offer us a tour of some of the new exhibits he finds during his travels.

National Gallery of Art in Washington: so-called "modern" art has ingeniously been made not just accessible, but practically participatory. We're not talking about amateurs here, but the likes of Mark Rothko, Frank Stella, Claes Oldenburg, and Jasper Johns up close and personal, at least as far as inspiration and technique are concerned.

For the gallery's latest exhibit, The Robert and Jane Meyerhoff Collection: Selected Works, curators dipped into the permanent Meyerhoff trove, came up with 126 exemplary works from the late '50s to the present, and then radically grouped them according to theme, i.e. "Scrape," "Line," "Drip," even "Stripe to Zip," as well as more conceptual categories like figure, frame, and "concentrity." The result's a riveting meander through half a century of fine painting, sculpture, drawings, and prints categorized not by year or artist, but according to the ways in which the artists themselves made the leap from idea to creation.

The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, like its namesake, has attitude. Its shows often offer sly, wry comments on the links between culture and media. In an exhibit mounted as the G-20 economic summit meets in the city, 20 outspoken cartoonists from the member nations have contributed their takes on global warming, unemployment, Carla Bruni, and the size of President Obama's ears. "Drawn to the Summit" will be on display through October 18. Closed today as G-20 spouses visit, the museum will reopen tomorrow. Click here for a slideshow of images.

--Chris O'Toole

I've already discussed how Maurice Sendak's classic children's story, Where the Wild Things Are, inspired me to travel as a kid, so I openly admit to counting down the days until the upcoming film comes out. But in the meantime, I've been entertaining myself by looking at the images submitted to director Spike Jonze's website, in a contest called "Where the Wild Things Ought to Be." Artists have placed the Wild Things in classic paintings, movie stills, Where's Waldo? drawings, and even on Fox News. One of my favorites is Max on the The Great Wave, by Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai. He really looks like he's a natural fit in the wilds of the ocean. You can see more of the submissions here.

[via Neatorama]

Travel writer Chris O'Toole sends along a dispatch from a quiet corner of Pittsburgh, where the G-20 Summit is being hosted this week.

Before they discuss firing up the world economy, leaders at the G-20 Summit, beginning today in Pittsburgh, get a chance to chill out in one of my favorite places, Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens. Tonight President Obama welcomes the A-list crowd for dinner at this classic Victorian glasshouse with a twenty-first century twist. Tweaks like geothermal heating tubes, passive cooling in its indoor tropical forest and a grass roof atop its subterranean entrance makes it one of the greenest greenhouses in the world.

So, opposable thumbs aside, we have more in common with the Japanese Snow Monkey than previously thought.

Perched high in the Japanese Alps, in the village of Jigokudani, is a tranquil retreat for anyone needing some well-deserved R&R. At the Korakukan Inn, visitors can ease into natural hot springs and let the curing waters do wonders - the benefits of which are no longer strictly limited to the human race.

The Korakukan hot springs, originally for the inn's paying guests, also have a regular following of local snow monkeys who often trek from the nearby Jigokudani Monkey Park for a delightful warm-water dip. They're seen here year-round grooming each other or carelessly sprawled out with their arms over the spring's edge. It's during the winter months that their spa rendezvous becomes a notorious habit.

[via Spot Cool Stuff Travel]

Traveler alumnus and Travel Telegraph blogger Emily Haile is spending the next several months in Taiwan, and she sent us a note from her new home.

Before I left home, I looked on Flickr for some photos of Taiwan and was immediately captivated by the photographs of John&Fish.

When I arrived in the city, I sent them a message through Flickr. A few days later, they were driving me to their home overlooking the Waishuangxi River (sometime written Waishuangsi). Fish set out a feast of sushi and sashimi that was entirely vegetarian. They are devout buddhists, and will not eat any kind of flesh. Between bites, they told me about their adventures bird watching in Taiwan.

By day, they work for a software programming company; every weekend they turn into avid birdwatchers, driving around the island and into the mountains in search of kingfishers, grebes, terns, and egrets. John shows me his camera. The lens looks about as long as an elephant's trunk.

Traveler Contributing Editor James Conaway is inspired by the New England's fall foliage, and goes looking for other inspirational art at two local museums.

The foliage factor's just beginning to radically alter the New England landscape. I wanted something thoughtful to add to the palette of fiery reds and yellows of just-turning maples as I was driving through Massachusetts, and so headed for the northwest corner, where I found what are probably the two antithetical, if captivating, art venues in the state: "The Clark," in Williamstown, and MASS MoCA in nearby North Adams.

The undeclared war between traditional, painterly views of nature, and those portraying the physical world as an unrelenting grapple with the forces of destruction and anomie, rages. You'd never know it from the air of decorum reigning at both institutions. Yet the vast arc of western artistic interpretation links them and provides the traveler with a riveting contrast, the Clark being the essence of tradition, and MASS MoCA a descent into the post-apocalyptic present. Both are provocative and, yes, fun.

The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute sits at the foot of the gentle Taconic Mountains and includes in its stunning collection some iconic New England paintings, among them Winslow Homer's Undertow, which shows ocean survivors once described as the wettest-looking people in American art. There are scads of Impressionists, among them many Renoirs, Pissarros, and Monets, some too pretty for real nature to ever equal. The collection is deep and varied, however, and can easily take up a day, particularly with the addition of Through the Seasons: Japanese Art in Nature, at the new Stone Hill Center, with Edo screens on loan from the Metropolitan Museum in New York and stunning examples of contemporary Japanese ceramics.

Leon Logothetis is just back from the Burning Man Project, an annual radical art event that takes place in Nevada's Black Rock Desert around Labor Day. Here he shares a photo essay about his trip.

I arrived at Burning Man during one of the Black Rock Desert's daily sandstorms just as the sun had set beyond the mountains that cradle the playa. After I found my way to my camp, I headed straight for the reason why thousands of people descend on this place each year: The man. In less than a week this man would be transformed into the 'burning man' and a ritual of self discovery and creativity will have come to a close for another year.

Creativity explodes in all directions along the 'streets' of Black Rock City. During a bicycle ride I stumbled across a ramshackle wooden booth with two chairs and a sign in large letters: Advice. I sat down and waited. Within the space of 60 minutes I had given advice to seven different people, from a guy who was struggling with the break up of his relationship to a young lady who wanted to know if she should tell her boyfriend that she loved him. Each person knew I wasn't qualified to answer these intimate questions; however, the fact that I listened and offered some suggestions seemed to make it a worthwhile experience for them. If you are wondering, I told the lady that telling her boyfriend of four weeks that she loved him was probably a bit premature...

IT Editor Janelle Nanos is just back from an assignment in Alaska, and is posting some of the highlights from her trip. Check out her photo gallery after the jump.


No visit to Alaska can really be called complete unless you come face-to-face with a bear. Or at least that's how I rationalized my response to coming up close and personal with Scarface, a beat-up old brown bear who came lumbering toward me during my visit to Katmai National Park. While the rest of my group stood up to make themselves appear bigger and clapped their hands to make noise, I did exactly what my guide told us not to do: I froze. Then, I instinctively grabbed my camera, right as another, smaller bear ran past me, four feet to my right. Obscured by my viewfinder, I barely saw him. My father nearly had a heart attack.

Thankfully, Dad and I were in good hands: We'd signed up for a bear-viewing trip out of Kodiak, Alaska, with Sea Hawk Air. Our pilot, Roland Ruoss, is the owner of the company and has been flying his seaplane for over 20 years; his wife Jo Murphy, a Kodiak native, was our bear-viewing guide. We left the idyllic Trident Basin, just outside of downtown Kodiak (if you can call it such a thing) and within moments we were soaring over the island in the de Havilland Beaver floatplane. I was in the co-pilot seat.

Sydney Suissa, the executive VP of content for the National Geographic Channel, joined a group of European journalists last week as they visited the beaches of Normandy where the D-Day landings took place. September 2009 marks the 70th anniversary of the start of World War II and to commemorate the event, National Geographic Channel International is launching a new series on the history of the war entitled "Apocalypse". Click through to see his photo essay.

There are 22 of us on the bus from Caen. A Tower of Babel on wheels, we speak French, English, Spanish, Greek, Turkish, Portuguese, Dutch, Estonian, Norwegian, Romanian, and Polish. The road takes us through a vast plain of rich farmland that rolls down to the sea; corn waiting for harvest, fields of wheat stubble glowing under the sun of a big sky and white gulls following tractors to feed on worms. Red poppies, the emblems of the first World War immortalized by the Canadian poet John McCrae ("In Flanders Field the poppies blow/Between the crosses row on row"), sway in the breeze along stone fences and gardens of hydrangeas, cosmos, and orange trumpet vines.

On June 6, 1944, one hundred and thirty-five thousand Allied soldiers landed on five beaches along the Normandy coast. The war that started on September 1, 1939 with Germany's invasion of Poland was now entering the endgame. The Allied beachhead in Normandy was the first step in the campaign to liberate Europe and topple Berlin. This pastoral landscape we are driving through was razed, bloodied, and gouged beyond recognition. Hundreds of lovely cobbled towns and villages like Crepon, Meuvaines, Bayeux and Creully were destroyed by artillery shelling, the march of tanks, the relentless advance of the Allies and the fierce retreat of German forces.