60 Writers/60 Places is a fim by Luca Dipiero and Michael Kimball featuring sixty writers in New York City. The writers each read an excerpt from their work in an unlikely location. Rick Moody reads on a baseball diamond. Blake Butler reads on the subway. Tao Lin reads at a typical New York hotdog cart. And Gary Lutz is found in a botanical garden.
The entire film will be screened next week at the Literary Film Festival in Brooklyn. You can get an inside preview of the film on Youtube.
Jeff Friesen is an award-winning Canadian photographer based in Halifax, Nova Scotia. His imaginative work has been published in National Geographic, American Photo, Popular Photography and Canadian Geographic. His amazing project, “Beyond Here”, started on a whim, but evolved as Friesen abandoned traditional landscape methods and began fiddling with long exposures and other manipulations.
You can see more of “Beyond Here” on Friesen’s website and even purchase prints of these beautiful images.
I really love this short film shot by freelance photographer and video editor Andrew Clancy. The video is based on one year of random filming around New York City. It’s not flashy or artsy, but simply a heartfelt slice of life take on America’s greatest urban center. You can find out more about Clancy at his website The Clancy Connection. And by the way, the accompanying song, “We Don’t Eat”, is by Irish singer James Vincent McMorrow.
This week marks the annual period of the Hajj, one of the most important pillars of the Islamic religion. Each year millions of Muslims travel to the ancient city of Mecca, Saudi Arabia to fulfill their sacred obligation. The pilgrimage is comprised of several rites, including the ritual stoning of Shaitan, circling the sacred Kaaba and kissing the Black Stone.
Vice Magazine founder Surooh Alvi accompanied his parents on the Hajj and surreptitiously recorded The Mecca Diaries, with a smuggled-in minicam. The extraordinary 14-minute documentary is an eye-opening experience for non-Muslims.
You won’t find any of these marvelous one-of-a-kind maps in your typical travel guidebook, but they make exceedingly clever ways to interact with geographic places. Some of the very talented creators of these diverse and idiosyncratic maps are professional illustrators and artists, while others are passionate amateurs. But they all share a mad love for maps and for travel. Check-out their websites to see more of these amazing works of art.
Amineh Moghadas
Supriya Ramlu
Silvia Sponza
Svetlana Ermakova
Tini Malitius
Jessica Pollack
Isabella Costerman
To celebrate the 75th anniversary of the publication of The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien, HarperCollins has just released The Art of The Hobbit edited by Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull. The sumptuous art book contains a complete collection of 110 
drawings, paintings, sketches, maps and illustrations by Tolkien never published together before. In fact, many of the works were hidden away in an archive at the Bodleian Library in Oxford since Tolkien’s death.
The beautiful slipcase edition includes the original sketches for the first edition covers by the author. Tolkien was an accomplished amateur artist whose admiration for the illustrator Arthur Rackham clearly shows in the art work for The Hobbit.
Although The Hobbit was actually published in September, 1937, HarperCollins is kicking-off the 75th anniversary celebrations a wee bit early to capitalize on the upcoming release of the Peter jackson film of The Hobbit.
Lit Drift is a website with the daunting mission of making literature fun and accessible in the digital age. Run by writers, the site offers free e-books, articles, recommendations, writing tools, games and a series of sixty-second video versions of classic novels. The ever increasing series includes: The Catcher in the Rye, Romeo and Juliet, The World According to Garp, the Heart of Darkness and The Lord of the Rings trilogy.
LA-based photographer and cinematographer Joe Capra spent seventeen days during the month of June this year traveling alone around Iceland. During his 2,900 mile solo adventure he shot an astounding 38,000 + photographs. The result is this stunningly beautiful film of one of the world’s most amazing landscapes.
You can see more of Capra’s work, and purchase prints, at his website Scientifantastic.
Let’s face it, when we travel we all become tourists. But are we all destined to become tacky tourists, who take tacky tourist photos ? The hilarious website Tacky Tourist Photos, curated by Darren Garnick and Peter Koziell, seems to suggest that we are all at the very least vulnerable to the temptations of tacky tourism.
The site, which has photos from more than a dozen countries and twice as many U.S. states, is dedicated to tacky tourist photographs, tacky tourist poses, tacky tourist attractions and just plain tacky behavior by travelers.
Travel Between The Pages 