“Stocking up on a few classics, eh?” asked the young cashier at Borders. “Yup,” said I. I have bought: The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemmingway, Voltaire’s Candide, Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, Dick’s Valis, Card’s Ender’s Game, Satrapi’s Persepolis, Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, and three volumes of Ellis’s Transmetropolitan from an authentically New York-feeling [...]

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To paraphrase Juvenal: the wrath of New Yorkers may be great, but they certainly are slow. One day crowd-dodging will be up there with parkour as a sport for the easily annoyed. Gah! Slow people are the bane of modern society: if we all walked a little faster, so much more could get done. In [...]

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…and the humidity’s so bad I can barely use the touchpad. I can’t even come up with a workable analogy for New York, so I’ll just say: it’s dirty, dangerous, frequently bad-smelling, unpleasant, aggressive, nasty - but all these things pale into insignificance because it is the most exciting city in the whole damn world. [...]

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It was a little like attending a secret meeting of the Illuminati, or some underground organisation à la Fight Club. I had an address and directions and a vague idea of what the Neo-Futurists were going to do in their work Too Much Light Makes The Baby Go Blind, but little else. The subway ride was quite [...]

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So I caught a train up to Grand and walked down to Navy Pier reasonably in time for the 11:30am architecture tour departure. Our guide was Kevin, a guy who talked veeerrry quickly and also sang for us at the end. And played the harmonica.
The Pier itself, a trendy riverside development of shops and amusements, located [...]

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Aaarrgggh. Yesterday morning I discovered a pretty 10 cm split in the bottom of my bag. Now it’s totally open at the bottom, and bales of duct tape can only do so much. Except it’s Sunday and nowhere’s open until 11am. Grrr.
Anyway, yesterday I had lunch with the Mayor of Chicago’s transportation advisor, Charles “Chuck” [...]

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I think it should be the Golden Rule of travelling. The less popular, less visited, quieter destination will always be n times nicer than the famous, touristy, commercialised places. Hence, Chicago is a lot quieter, a lot less crowded, a lot more laid-back, and a lot more enjoyable than the hustle and bustle of New [...]

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My god, I think everybody at this hostel has a Mac.
Anyway,  this bit was written at Newark Airport.
“Please keep bags and packages with you at all times, until they are checked.” Oh, thanks for that last bit. I mean, I did say to the woman at the check-in counter that I couldn’t give her my [...]

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An impromptu Japanese fashion shoot takes place on Times Square.

Socrates prepares to drink his hemlock. I’ve always liked this painting because I want to go like Socrates: surrounded by my weeping fans, sticking one last finger up at society.

Vincent van Gogh, Wheat Field with Cypresses (Oil on canvas, 1889)

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I got a train up to 74th Street and wandered over to Central Park, where eventually I located the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Spent a pleasant two and a quarter hours taking in Roman sculptures and European masterpieces, including the requisite van Goghs, Manets, Monets, and Seurats (including a study for La Grande Jette, which [...]

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