Travelling with Art

 

roaming river

Imagine traveling the world, staying someplace entirely new every few weeks.

Or you could actually do it. Glenn the Bad Dahli Lama does that.

Most people I meet really aren’t comfortable with the idea of traveling. There’s so many things to go wrong. Breakdowns, break-ins, murdered in your sleep! There are so many reasons for not traveling.

So we watched this movie called Art of Travel. It’s about some kid from Malcolm in the Middle graduating from high school and having his wedding blow up in his face so he goes on his honeymoon anyway all alone. And he never comes home again! Scary, huh? Sounds like a horror film.

It’s a fun movie. There’s some nudity, but nothing that’ll frighten off too many people. They actually went to Machu Pichu with the actors and shot footage from more than that one point of view that shows up in all the other pictures. And it wasn’t rainy or otherwise blurry or super wide-angly. There’s a train ride or something that looks like green-screen work, but mostly it really looks like they really went to all the places they talk about. How refreshing.

Travel, of course, is a metaphor for life. That’s why so many people are afraid of it.

In these travel movies lately (I guess I’m thinking Southbounders here), when people go someplace else, they get naked. It’s like “What’s the use of being there with your clothes on?” I guess you really haven’t been someplace till you’ve been someplace naked. Someplace. If you think about it, no matter where you go, you’re always naked under your clothes. Someplace.

At Amazon and IMDB, people complain that he’s running away from his life. Metaphorically, that’s not possible. He’s actually running headlong into it.

And they often find the whole movie to be unlikely and implausible. They ask, “Where’d the money come from?”(Parents, college fund, odd jobs. He might be an undocumented alien worker!) “Why would the European girls seduce him?” (After hearing his sob story, maybe they felt sorry for him.)  “Why didn’t the FARC folks blow them all away?” (Because they had been travelers too!)

Unlikely things happen when you travel. Happenstance happens. Most people treat travelers better than they treat their own family. And besides, if the FARC had killed them all, it would have been a very short movie.

So now I’m even more inspired to take a trip. I can feel it in my teeth. Or maybe I’ll just imagine it like everyone else.

Where do you imagine going to?

 

 

About Lyle Verbilion

I'm just wanderin' around lookin' at things. Wow.
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