Travelling alone
When online destinations transport you instead
Remember (12 months ago) when the commentators were lamenting the lost golden age of travel in the 60s and 70s when people got dressed up, smoked cigarettes and had silver service meals and hard liquor on their flights. By 2020 travel had become so grim and commoditised.
We should be so lucky.
Last week for New Year’s Eve, the country singer Jason Isbell and his band streamed a show from a silent venue in Nashville. He included his melancholy on-the-road song Travelling Alone – "I’ve grown tired of travelling alone. Won’t you ride with me?” Yeah right, he said to the empty seats afterwards, travelling around the backyard. The idea of checking onto a flight and landing somewhere new seems impossible for most of us.
Instead we have the Internet. You can waste your life online, but you can also find a lot that’s endearing, enlightening, fun or even occasionally sublime. So here’s a list, not in much order, of 10 virtual places I’ve been hammering during COVID.
1 ActionKid, YouTube
Walking around a city, or anywhere, with your phone or GoPro streaming, is apparently a thing. This young New Yorker’s YouTube channel has close to quarter of a million subscribers and his walks around the city are addictive. There are some insights into the disruptions of COVID; and they help on treadmill runs.
2 Vino Farm, mainly YouTube and Instagram
The owner of 18 acres of fields and forest in North Quabbin Woods, Massachusetts, posts on YouTube about all his activities including house renovating, barn-building and fending off bears, but it is his new interest in beekeeping that has really taken off. Relentless enthusiasm, honesty about mistakes, and passion go a long way, even with bees.
3 Choir!Choir!Choir!, https://choirchoirchoir.com This Toronto based choir assembles big crowds of strangers and, in what seems like a few minutes, preps them to perform mass renditions of popular classics. Even Leonard Cohen’s battered old Hallelujah seems fresh and powerful, and there’s a lot more where it came from.
4 iNaturalist, https://apps.apple.com/nz/app/inaturalist/id421397028 This one’s an app. Take a picture of a flower, a tree, a charging rhino, post it online and within minutes, in theory, someone will tell you what it is and the state of the species, endangered or otherwise. There are online communities about particular flora, fauna and issues.
5 Far From Me, John Prine & Justin Townes Earle
John Prine and Justin Townes Earle both died in 2020, Prine from complications due to COVID and Earle from an accidental drug overdose. There are plenty of better performances by both of them on YouTube. But this one, of a beautiful little song from Prine’s first album in 1971, brings them together in an imaginary afterlife.
6 How Was Your Run Today?, https://podcasts.apple.com/nz/podcast/how-was-your-run-today-the-podcast/id1056763715 If you’re going to listen to a running podcast while you’re actually running, it needs to be upbeat, funny and inspiring without being corny, which is harder to pull off than it sounds. This one manages it most of the time, and throughout 2020 it was incidentally also a diary of COVID’s march, as it shut down the Boston and New York marathons and turned a suburban run into a potential hazard of social distancing.
7 It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry, Bob Dylan with Susan Tedeschi
It’s a pretty shaky audience video from a concert in 1999 but you’d have to have a heart of steel not to warm to this. You don’t often see old Bob obviously having such a good time. It needs to be played loud.
8 Crazy Little Thing Called Love, Josh Turner
This Josh Turner, not the old one, does a lot of amazing covers which show an awesome musical talent. I think he started off with Paul Simon songs, but this Queen cover takes a lot to beat.
9 Messiah/Complex, Against the Grain Theatre
This Canadian outfit has been streaming their take on Handel’s Messiah over the Christmas holiday period. After that it might take a bit to track it down. Featuring performances by Canada’s indigenous people, several languages, dirty cityscapes and icy wilds of the north, it’s blasphemy to purists, but it reaches soaring heights.
10 Sunday Morning, by Wallace Stevens, read by Dan Chiasson
In March last year the poet Dan Chiasson sat down in his kitchen to read the last section of Wallace Stevens’ sublime poem Sunday Morning. The reading was part of an initiative spreading hope through poetry in the time of COVID. We’re not talking Make America Great Again. But this is one of the great American poems. Words don’t get arranged this well very often. If you want to see them on a page, here they are:
She hears, upon that water without sound,
A voice that cries, “The tomb in Palestine
Is not the porch of spirits lingering.
It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay.”
We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.
Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;
And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.