It was a revelation that was supposed to empty the underworlds, put them to supersonic flight and make us unearthly, disembodied and graveless: wireless listening stations widely dispersed through an inscrutably folded universe of signals and noise. Text and photo by Keefjnak
You could say that, unbeknownst to us, some sort of kismetic spirt is colluding with our lives, telling us when to go when we don’t exactly know the direction or telling us what to say when the words aren’t quite there. You could also say that a certain sense of wanderlust is innate and inexorable–the eternal wondering about magical, faraway places that seem entirely painted by daydreams and travel writers before us. And when you combine these two forces, one more corporeal and the other a tad more phantasmagorical–two forces conceivably as tightly wound as the double helix of our genetic code–it is a catalyst for something else altogether. Tarrah Krajnak, a documentary photographer who was born in Peru in 1979 in an orphanage run by the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart and grew up in Ohio, and Alexander Keefe, an ex-professor who studied Sanskrit and Indian Studies at Harvard Universities, and a freelance writer for publications such as Artforum and Bidoun magazine, crossed paths in Burlington, Vermont and the rest, as they say, was history. Their online travel diary, called Keefjnak–an amalgam of their surnames–is a collaborative effort to document the world around them on their journey in the great tradition of travel documentation. A great travel writer such as Ernest Hemingway and any scholar of his would admit that his fantastical stories of seafaring adventures and bullfighting would not hold the same weight without his extensive real life adventures. On Keefjnak, Tarrah Krajnak’s somber, yet liberating photographs of a dream-like South America are supplanted with Alexander Keefe’s brilliant, poetic text and historical minutia to paint a portrait of the same kind seething wanderlust that all great adventurers share in order to remind us that life is happening to us whether we like it or not. Read an interview after the jump. [SEE MORE...]
An overview of the work of traveler, journalist, writer, photographer, Annemarie Scharzenbach, is set to be released as a collaboration publication with the French journal La Quinzaine Littéraire and Louis Vuitton. (MORE…)
Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria (21 August 1858 – 30 January 1889) clashed with his father Emperor Franz Joseph I. Amongst his many gripes, the Prince felt as though he were born at the at the wrong time. In a typically royal way, The Prince was repulsed by any sort of foul laundry that his father dished to the country. Prince Rudolf found refuge from his father in a loveless marriage to Princess Stéphanie and also by taking a mistress, Baroness Maria Vetsera. The two lovers, The Prince and the Baroness’, untimely deaths at the imperial family’s hunting lodge was ruled a combined suicide, yet some are still convinced of foul play. One year prior to this, in March of 1888, Count Sámuel Teleki de Szék of Hungary, whilst on a safari across East Africa, discovered a lake and named it Lake Rudolf, in honor of the Crown Prince. Years later in 1972, Richard Leakey, during an anthropological dig around the lake discovered a two-million-year-old hominid skull. In 1986 a nearly complete skeleton of a homo erectus boy was discovered. And more recently, another skull was discovered and estimated at being 3.5 million years dead. These fossil findings coined the nickname for the area “Cradle of Mankind” or “Cradle of Humankind,” as it has now be called for the sake, no doubt, of political correctness.
After my return from a once in a lifetime safari to Lake Rudolf (now referred to as Lake Turkana or The Jade Sea) in 2005 with fellow artist Fernando Apodaca, I met with Peter Beard at Bungalow in New York City. Before and after the safari to Lake Turkana I stayed on Peter Beard’s Hog Ranch in the ‘knuckle hills’ outside of Nairobi. At that time Peter had I think been banned from Kenya for five years due to numerous, miscellaneous arrests and spats with neighbors – mostly concerning the malnutrition of their animals or his partying. Back in New York with Peter Beard I described the safari, yelling over the club music, ”WE CAMPED AT LAKE TURKANA FOR OVER A WEEK!” Peter forcefully yells back, ”RUDOLF! ITS LAKE RUDOLF!” As if to say, “HOW DARE YOU!?”
Text and photography (excluding the post-mortem image of the Crown Prince) by Dustin Lynn
Photo by Abbey Meaker
Poppa Neutrino was one of those real life characters that, if you heard even one his stories, you’d simply believe was a protagonist in some Great American Novel. Poppa was the living embodiment of that anti-american spirit of material abandonment and freedom….a great wanderer and a true vagabond. He was the first person to sail from the Atlantic Coast to Europe on a raft made entirely of refuse – with his wife Betsy at the helm. Poppa’s journey and life was examined by the New Yorker in 2005. In March 2007 Random House released a biography of his life entitled The Happiest Man in the World. Inspired by a documentary he saw when he was a child, of Australian Aborigines who burn their homes and walk away naked, never looking back without a soupcon of regret, Poppa’s fate was sealed – he decided to spend his entire life with just that ethos in mind: to live life on the raft on your own free will, leaving all your stepping stones behind you, and never looking back. I was in Vermont recently, just after New Years, visiting a friend – one night we were sitting in a booth at a restaurant when an old man came through the door and sat next to us. We were strangely drawn to this old man’s presence. My friend took photographs of him in the darkened room, as a band played and a tango lesson was in progression on the dance floor, trying not to disrupt this old man with the flash of the camera. Turns out this man was none other than Poppa Neutrino. Real name: William David Pearlman – who had a life full of adventure, was a friend of the beat poets, and became an unsung legend through it all. Poppa passed away yesterday in New Orleans on January 23rd. He was 78. After the jump is a fascinating, beautiful, and touching memorial piece written after his death by someone very close to him named Kimberley Hannaman-Taylor of Burlington, Vermont……
Intro Text by Oliver Maxwell Kupper
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The idea came to Marc Marmel whilst vacationing in the French Riviera: “There was a time in history when travel was about the journey, not the destination. A time when custom made luggage was a privilege only afforded by the wealthy. A time when luggage traveled to exotic locations by steamship, railroad, and horse drawn carriage.” So Marmel, based in Los Angeles, began to design and construct, by hand, one of kind luggage. Beautiful leather bags that undoubtably stand out in large contrast to the ubiquitous and ever so homogeneous black rolling suitcase: the exact opposite of unique. What with rolling sidewalks and flight attendants with an ever changing job title and muffin tops who serve bad coffee, I think soon we’ll see a small revolution in the way we travel. Oh lord that blows the wild wind: bring back a time that hearkens back to Pan-Am, luxury ocean liners, and the great discovery of mysterious flora and fauna; all with a gorgeous blond at our sides, a ridiculously tiny unsafe car that reeks of leather and petrol, and a Marc Marmel bag in the trunk. www.marcmarmel.com
