2011年6月26日
Why go anywhere. Thinking about Coyote, Part 2
When I discovered Coyote for the first time, I read the
title with curiosity, but it was the subtitle that was most attractive to me, a
"Magazine for New Travelers". Who were they, what are they doing, and
where do they like to go?
Subtitles like these bring with them a promise. Perhaps, it's a promise
that offers to connect us to a group, or rescue us by way of attaching a cool
label to the things we enjoy.
Nonetheless, when I opened Coyote for the first time, it seemed
distinctly different from anything I had ever read (I still feel that way).
Over the years, I became an intrigued follower and in reading, sought to
satisfy the question "Who is the New Traveler?". I developed my own
take on this question and I suppose it's not far from the general theme of
"post tourist" travel writing.
My sense of what travel had become meant that the New Traveler would
have a distinctly different approach to the world. The New Traveler might, in
fact, be a very different kind of person. I mean, if the majestic alpine vistas
and the intimate small cafés had all fallen victim to something like CNN's
"the best tea in Hong Kong", then the grand tourist was also lost.
Who comes in his/her place?
At that time (2004), popular culture and popular travel magazines
alleged that today's traveler was just someone with a fat wallet, a good nose
for value and enough free time to exploit both. I didn't have either of the
first two qualities. What I did have was time to explore, the context of travel
as a daily practice, or a "way of life". I surmised, after a careful
reading, that Coyote was about something closer to my life.
That first issue was full of a sense
of the "here and now" blended by a talent for identifying intimacy
that continues to be the magazine's editorial gift. It seemed to offer an
openness that extended beyond limits of pop travel chatter. Coyote turned away
from the kind of travel conversation that arrives, sooner or later, at
"What's in and What's out". It presents, instead, pictures and stories
of living that are at once richly textured and, as I said, intimate. It is this
closeness to the reader and the subject that is one of Coyote's distinctive
features.
Through the Talk Show and Café at Club Q2, I learned to see Coyote as a
network. It is a social network of writers, photographers, travelers, readers
and just people. As a work, it reminds us that the world turns not on dynamic
individuals (Stars) but rather on close, quiet relationships that become
dynamic because of their liveliness. As contributors have told me, Coyote is
all about relationships.
Paul Venet
