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Category / How to start a subculture

The Town where Unwanted Architecture Found a Home

If you were to take photographs of the most charming villages from around the world and make a collage of their most picture-perfect views, you’d get a pretty good representation of what Portmeirion looks like. An enchanted technicolor mish mash of architecture, built in the 1920s by one wizard of a man, let’s take a…

The Forgotten Cafés where the British Beats Used To Meet

We have all heard of the Beat Generation, but have you been keeping up with the Kardomahs? Across the pond from Ginsberg’s gang and a couple of decades earlier, there was a group of bohemian artists and writers who beat them to it. The Kardomah Gang are Wales’ and the world’s forgotten intellectual boyband, who…

Let’s Window Shop for French Fairytale Homes

Chateaux hunting is a veritable mood right now – the idea of quitting urban life, recruiting your best friends to go all in on the adventure and living out the rest of your days fixing up your French fortress with an endless supply of wine & cheese. There is certainly no shortage of chateaux in…

The Merriest Cemetery in the World

They say everyone has their own way of grieving, and in the village of Săpânţa in Romania, this couldn’t be more true. In this rural farming commune lies a cemetery, known as the “merry cemetery”, that looks unlike any other you’ve ever seen. Here, you won’t find the usual dark and doomful gravestones, but instead, a…

Victorians at the Gym

Her raw enthusiasm is what really sells it for me. This photo comes from the exercise bible that was Dr. G. Zander’s Medico-mechanische Gymnastik, published in 1892. While it seemed almost certain that the gym craze was born in the 1980s along with the exercise videos of Jane Fonda and Richard Simmons, alas, it looks like our enthusiasm…

Let’s Check in with Alaska’s Strangest Town Living under One Roof

If you thought life in times of Corona couldn’t get any stranger, try living out 2020 in the town where the majority of the residents all live in one single building. Whittier, Alaska was founded in the mid 1950s, built as a military port and barracks for the US Army during the Cold War. When…

Who Remembers the “Studio 54” of Texas?

Coming of age in Dallas in the 1980s was synonymous with two words: Starck Club. The notorious nightclub brought scandal to the bible belt with an injection of European excess at the hands of a then-unknown French designer named Philippe Starck. In an abandoned concrete warehouse in the old part of town, past some forgotten…

How to Celebrate Native Americans this Thanksgiving

It’s 2020, which means it’s as good a time as any to recalibrate Thanksgiving. Not just by taking precautions to socially distance ourselves with loved ones at risk during these Strange and Uncertain Times, but also, by giving more thought about what we’re celebrating – and more importantly, who we’re giving thanks to. In lieu…

The Travelling Troupe of Giant Marionnettes

It’s the biggest show on earth– literally. No theatre is big enough for the troupe that transforms entire towns and cities into its stage. From the South of France to Morocco, Cameroon to China, New Zealand to Mexico, Royal de Luxe has become a street theatre company of epic, almost mythical proportions since it all began…

All the Different Ouija Boards you Never Knew Existed

We all had a Ouija phase, didn’t we? Or at least most of us saw The Exorcist and know what can happen if you don’t say “Goodbye” to the spirit world before putting away the board. But did you know there are hundreds, maybe thousands of different talking boards out there? And not all talking boards…

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