All stories about "Guides"

I received a review copy of Thomas Kohnstamm's Do Travel Writers Go to Hell? last week. You may recall that Kohnstamm's wild & woolly memoir concerns his questionable practices and enjoyably self-abusive lifestyle as a Lonely Planet guidebook writer. I fully intended to join the fray of the indignant travel-industrial complex, though of course my review would have been particularly witty, incisive, cutting, and revelatory. More importantly, I'd focus on the book itself, not on the lathered-up controversy regarding Kohnstamm's fictionalizing or plagiarizing his travel guide facts. Unfortunately, I lost my review copy on the train, so instead I'm just going to make it all up.

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Six Masai warriors from Tanzania will be running in the London Marathon on April 13th. They're being flown over by the "non-profit adventure specialists" at Greenforce to help raise money for water back home. In what reads a little like a Monty Python skit, the Masai will be given the tailor-made travel guide called "Visiting England: A Cultural Briefing for the Warriors". In this four-page work, a slight lack of cultural diversity seems present, such as in the claim that some Brits "may look like they have a frown on their face, [but] they are very friendly people -- many of them just work in offices, [at] jobs they don't enjoy, and so they do not smile as much as they should." Makes you wonder how things are over at Greenforce. (tompagenet/flickr)

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Yesterday Sydney got the Telegraph City Guide treatment, with a look at nightlife, restaurants, and all the other essentials. The writer, Mark Chippenfield, argues that most Sydney citizens "happen to believe that most good things in life should be accompanied by a water view, a plate of Sydney rock oysters, and a chilled glass of white wine." Hard to argue with that. For our own Sydney coverage, start here. (photo: mugley/flickr)

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Inexplicable new guidesite Urbaneer is like a scavenger hunt without the reward. Choose an "adventure" and find yourself touring your hometown like a tourist, taking on "challenges" that mostly involve going someplace and seeing something. In New York, for example, one can finally know "what 137th Street looks like, or 3rd Avenue!" Or, pick a challenge like Freezing Grand Central, now that those other people did it so well. No idea too trivial or overdone! [Urbaneer]

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The little bundles of red joy known as the Zagat guides are surveying the masses for upcoming Washington DC/Baltimore guides. Complete the online survey by February 24 and you'll get a free copy of the guide when it comes out. Atlanta and Chicago on deck as well. [Zagat]

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Buenos Aires blogger Jeff Barry has been compiling impressions, recommendations, and history at Buenos Aires, City of Faded Elegance since his March 2005 arrival from Miami. He's now done what all prolific bloggers should do and winnowed his posts into a free 57-page e-book and guide to Buenos Aires.

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There was some minor amusement a few weeks back when the secret star ratings for the new Michelin dining guides to Los Angeles and Las Vegas were accidentally leaked. Some LA foodocrats in particular are still smarting from the fact that despite the overall predictable spread of one- and two-star reviews, not a single Los Angeles restaurant was deemed worthy of three stars. By contrast, Las Vegas got a three-star, that being Joel Robuchon's joint at the MGM Grand. The guides came out two weeks ago and have largely been perused and digested to death. Of more interest is what happened last week -- the Michelin Guide Tokyo came out, and the Japanese city apparently rates as the most culinarily dominant town on the planet.

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When I bring up Tyler Brûlé's Monocle magazine in conversation, I seem to get two basic responses. People either love it -- and I am firmly included in that camp -- or think that the mix of topics somehow doesn't work (although everyone seems to love the design). Whether you love it or hate it, it has to be said that the web component has slowly been creating a separate if complimentary experience, adding a lot of great original content. One of the latest features on the site has been the creation of a "Quality of Life Index," which is mostly an excuse to highlight some great spots from around the world. As you'd probably expect, I take particular interest in their Tokyo selections, and certainly agree with a lot of what's been covered.

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I've mentioned before how much I like the Hedonist's Guide series -- compact, stylish, pretty, selective, and generally cool. It was only last year that the British series started getting US releases, and only this year that their full backlist became fully available. And they've also begun releasing guides to US cities, with A Hedonist's Guide to New York among the first.

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Bikini model Claudia Verala is the proud owner of a startlingly fake but nonetheless impressive rack, which makes her the odds-on favorite narrator for the Audissey line of iPod city tours. Claudia handles Miami Beach, with various other less pneumatic luminaries (DJs, slam poets, authors, etc.) doing the deed for Boston, Chicago, Seattle, and New Orleans. Claudia herself is bursting with tips as well as silicone implants; for example, I did not know that the filming location for the chainsaw scene from Scarface is above a contemporary Johnny Rocket's. So that's how they make those Streamliner burgers.

Audissey Guides [Official site]

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In 2004, former Faith Popcorn protégé Fiona Caulfield chucked her job to move to India and start Love Travel Guides: "handbooks for the luxury vagabond". The first title, Love Bangalore, came out this past Valentine's Day. Its 108 elegant pages are a quick trot through town, with an emphasis on art galleries, fancy restaurants, and even fancier boutiques.

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Ontheinside.info is a nifty New York webguide that calls itself "personality-driven," as all the picks are presented by various New Yorkers -- some famous (Gretchen Mol, Will Forte, Amy Sedaris), some not so much. In addition to photos and audio of the personality in question, you also get a few nice pics and audio for each of the person's favorite places. You can browse or search the listings by personality or venue type, making for pleasant idea-spelunking. Check their blog for more details and angles on the personalities involved.

Ontheinside.info [Official site]

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This little booklet's been around for years, but the kind folk at Superlocal just reminded me. Point It is subtitled as a "traveller's language kit," but in reality it circumvents language altogether -- the svelte little thing contains 1,200 photos of various foods, transport, household items, facilities, services, and tons of other stuff for pointing out to those rude hosts too inconsiderate to learn your dialect. You want the lobster? Just remember what page the toilet's on too. Utilitarian vision or sly commentary on postmodern effluvia? Both of course, but I'm wondering why this concept hasn't been applied to, say, prostitute fetish selection or narcotics.

Point It [via Superlocal]

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For city dwellers living in sprawling areas like Los Angeles or for those of you stuck in affordable yet underpopulated neighborhoods devoid of corner delis and street cafes, the new service Walk Score is here to help. The site uses Google business listings to create a map of your neighborhood populated with icons for every bar, store, restaurant, or park within walking distance. Then it rates your hood's "walkability" (ease of completing everyday tasks without jumping in your junk Camaro, accessibility to parks, central shopping districts) on a scale of 1-100.

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Our understanding of the process by which food comes out of the ground, gets processed, and ends up on a plate goes something like this: We put down a plastic card and people bring us food on a plate. "Home cooking" is when the same kind of food comes to our front door in pint-sized boxes. Pros: An elegant and robust understanding of international agrarian and nonagrarian political economy. Cons: Totally fucks with our eating disorders. Solution: Mindful Menus, the brainchild of Foodtrainers gurus Lauren Slayton and Caren Tishfield. Having failed to wean their NYC clients off delivery menus, they decided to go the other route and try to make delivery healthier. They took menus from 20 restaurants of various cuisines from several neighborhoods -- UES and UWS are already available, downtown and Chelsea are next up -- and pared them down into the options that best tread the line between decadent and fattie. The results are packaged inside individual Mindful Menus books, each for $21.99. When you factor in the money saved on pharmaceutical speedballs and self-loathing coke binges -- these little things pay for themselves in days.

Mindful Menus [Official site]

-- Omri Ceren

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Minneapolis indie rock band The Hold Steady are known for their rabid fanbase. One local music website, More Cowbell, put together the pleasantly obsessive Hold Steady Guide to the Twin Cities, which is exactly what it sounds like: An interactive map to (nearly) every local spot referenced in the band's lyrics. For a city of its size, Minneapolis has a notable musical history -- it's also home to, among others, Prince, Husker Du, and the Replacements. It's the kind of town where the nostalgia buffs at the Minnesota Historical Society are proud owners of Prince's Purple Rain costume.

The Hold Steady Guide to the Twin Cities [More Cowbell]

-- Neal Ungerleider

[Photo: More Cowbell]

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We recently came across an interesting piece on Las Vegas in, of all places, the music magazine Blender. Their guide to the city lists all the usual suspects (the oversized Sapphire Gentleman's Club, Texas Hold 'Em at the Bellagio) but also mixes in some interesting out-of-left-field Vegas diversions. Their suggestions range from the highbrow (a "secret" restaurant at the Venetian hotel) to the midbrow (UNLV-area record store Hiphopsite) to the thoroughly lowbrow (the 175 playable pinball games at the Pinball Hall of Fame). The saddest news? It appears the cupcake trend has migrated to Las Vegas too, in the form of the Cupcakery.

Essential Las Vegas [Blender]

-- Neal Ungerleider

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Let me leave my Tokyo beat for one post in order to shine the spotlight on that other area of Japan that gets its fair share of tourist attraction, and that would be Kansai, grouping the cities of Osaka, Kyoto, and Kobe. The reason I look at Kansai today is because last month saw the launch of a spinoff to the indispensable online art and design guide that is Tokyo Art Beat, the appropriately named Kansai Art Beat. As with TAB, Kansai Art Beat is run as a nonprofit organization and staffed by its own editors from the region. Expect the same great coverage and service that TAB has been offering since it launched a couple of years back -- I personally base pretty much all my gallery outings on what gets listed there. This is your absolute best resource for art-related listings in English, bar none.

Kansai Art Beat [Official site]

-- Jean Snow

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The city of Tokyo, despite being an ultra-modern metropolis, is notoriously difficult to navigate because of its many obscure or nameless streets. In comes the Ubiquitous Network Project, which plans to embed RFID tags all over the city that will allow any PDA-wielding perambulator to see detailed, contextual information about their current Tokyo location. Tests are already underway, with help for both the city streets and tangled subway system as top priorities. Contextual advertising based on who and where you are will be the logical next step, and the baby network already has hackers -- someone embedded their own RFID on a Ginza lamppost that redirected local traffic to a porn site.

Tagging Tokyo's streets with no name [Guardian via Gadling]

-- Chris Mohney

[Photo: /\ltus]

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New York's Taxi and Limousine Commission has approved a plan to require touchscreen info-monitors in all taxis by October 2007. The screens will ostensibly allow payment by credit card and consulting a map of the area one's cabbing through. I've encountered several cabs armed with test versions of these screens over the past few weeks, and I have no idea if they're worth a damn. That's because I, like everyone I know, immediately stabs the screen's "off" button upon entering the cab, thus killing the blast of advertising that provides the real justification for the screens. Amusingly, the screengrab at right -- from the above-linked AP story -- earlier showed a different screen with a prominent ad from Lukos Oil, the Russian petro-behemoth. Guess that seemed a little too on-the-nose.

Taxi rides in NYC going high-tech [AP]

-- Chris Mohney

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Roaming the streets of Tokyo -- particularly youth-oriented districts such as Harajuku or Shibuya -- can often cause acute fashion shock. Can you tell your yamamba (literally mountain witch, or those girls in blackface with the white hair) from your gyaru-o? In comes your otaku guide to all things fashion: Mr. Patrick "I live and breath Japanese trash culture" Macias, with his just-released Japanese Schoolgirl Inferno: Tokyo Teen Fashion Subculture Handbook. The cover-to-cover illustrative guide (see some scans from the interior here) runs through pretty much every teen trend you could imagine, from pink maids to black lolitas, with some you probably never dared conceive. Be ready, be prepared, and above all, don't be afraid.

Japanese Schoolgirl Inferno [Amazon]

-- Jean Snow

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The best thing about this New York Post article -- a grumbling complaint about how restaurants mass-email their customers to vote for them in the annual Zagat survey -- is the laughably squishy response from Nina Zagat. Unwilling to alienate the restaurants who are all likely to get inflated ratings anyway, Zagat doesn't think there's anything wrong with restos flogging customers to the survey. Why, they might be inspired to vote against the restaurant! "People get on mailing lists for a variety of reasons, and I don't think you can make an assumption," they'll vote positively, she says. Who knew Zagat even had rules, but apparently they don't allow "encouragement of surveyors to vote a certain way, offering incentives or rewards for surveyors to vote for an establishment." Now matter how many overt, obvious examples of this she's shown, Nina doesn't really object. Her worst threat? Zagat will send a "warning" to Smith & Wollensky. I've said it before and I'll say it again: Zagat guides are next to useless as critical resources. They update frequently and comprehensively, which puts them on the level of a good phonebook. But the reviews and ratings are absolute bunk.

Cheating Out [NYP]

-- Chris Mohney

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Sure, there a tons of great guidebooks out there, and they all do what they do quite well. But some of us need more than just listings to find inspiration on where to visit, and that's just what Hitotoki -- "a new literary site collecting stories of personal, singular experiences in Tokyo" -- hopes to accomplish. Launched this week, it aims to provide an emotional roadmap -- Google Maps-enabled, even -- to this city of ours, providing some new perspectives, and of course a few new sightseeing ideas slightly off the beaten path. Tokyo is more than just cool shops and cafe. Behold the badminton-playing sailor suit-clad girls!

Hitotoki [Official site]

-- Jean Snow

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International coolchasers Le Cool have a great Barcelona guidebook, The Weird and Wonderful Guide to Barcelona. We've been reading it compulsively, and it's one of those rare cases where the guidebook both gets you stoked about the destination and is enjoyable on its own as a literary artifact. The little red book is packed full of recommendations for offbeat bars, clubs, shops, spas, restaurants, and hotels, in addition to sex clubs, open spaces, and places to score drugs. After digging through the entire colorful and dizzying tome, we've picked out our favorite possibilities, annotated after the jump.

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The current issue of online travel mag Pology has a cautionary tale regarding guidebook shock. The author describes his group's reliance on Lonely Planet Portugal, and how they sought out some authentic cheap eats in Lisbon. So they hit a sad little fish-stew cafeteria "recommended' by readers. However, they found themselves dining in a crap joint alongside no one but other Lonely Planet rubes. "They hold familiar blue paperbacks, clutching them to their rain coats. They are sheep like us, and it is actually possible to see their lunch dreams being crushed." Tony Wheeler, what hath thou wrought?

Lisbon: A Sheepish Attempt at Lunch [Pology]

-- Chris Mohney

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The extremely Yelp-like Tupalo is too new to have much content, with users and user reviews extremely thin on the ground for the handful of cities it covers so far. Assembled by four wacky pals (two of which come from Rockstar Games), Tupalo rolls in user reviews of restaurants, shops, hotels, bars, etc. with social toys like messaging and friending and all that folderol. However, it does have two advantages over Yelp as currently presented -- Tupalo covers international cities, and its maps are much more prominent. The map implementation is in fact among the best I've seen on any guide site; it's smooth, simple, intuitive, quick, and even aesthetically pleasing. The Tupalo maps will need extensive content infill (not to mention more tagging) to be truly useful, but it's a promising start.

Tupalo [Official site]

-- Chris Mohney

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Most international shopping experts will be quite familiar with the Superfuture site ("urban cartography for global shopping experts"). Now, things have gotten even better with the intro of their Superfuture Superguides. These PDF guides include 30 pages of intensive retail dissection, updated monthly, all for a decent $20. The idea came from the reports the site has long been producing for private clients. Only two cities are currently covered -- Tokyo and New York -- but plenty more are planned, with Shanghai and Beijing next.

Superfuture Superguides [Official site]

-- Jean Snow

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SXSW isn't just some good-natured gathering of indie outfits, though it is that too. Now, SXSW is the Sundance of music, an aural feeding frenzy for the N.B.T. In addition to the music festival, SXSW this year also includes an interactive festival and a film festival. Because the events are as numerous as raindrops and as gnomic as grains of sand, we've decided to roundup some coverage for you so you won't be lost among the long-haired hipsters, the zitty web geeks (except our tech guys down there who are uniformly handsome), and the tumbleweed.

After the jump, where to find what to do and what to do where you find it.

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We're all for DIY urban shorts. We applaud the likes of Turnhere, a site that invites young filmmakers to film their neighborhood. Who cares if most of the time it seems like there's a tourism board shilling the endeavor. And NYCFilms.org has the snazzy new feature of Google mapping each of the point mentioned in the video but c'mon. The buck has to stop somewhere. Face it, artistes, don't feel bad that your 'rents paid nearly $100,000 for film school. You're not going to break into the market by producing and directing trifling Nouvelle Vague homages to the East Village.

East Village by Alex Kaleina

After the jump, read the Craigslist posting that scored this actress (extrapolated from the film)

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