Thou Shalt Know Your Starting Point

Let's ask Daniel for some travel advice on where to eat in insert city here, but in a much deeper way. So May West was speaking to me when she said, and I paraphrase, good boys go to heaven, bad boys go everywhere. Today's travel commandment thou shalt know your starting point. I always say my birth mother is normal Gene, not quite Marilyn Monroe. But what she did do is travel with wild, abandoned topless, with the wind through her breasts. She was in Africa, and so it all felt so

free to her. Okay, let's establish this right now. Africa's like that. It helps you lose those strange inhibitions you tend to hoard over time. Remember when you were just a wee lass or lad. You just tried everything twice and again if you wanted to, and you did it all without thinking about it too much. And here you are today and you're questioning whether to go to age old incredible Mexico because the media sparks fear in you

over some border situation. There's something about that scarlet blood soil of Africa that stays in my being. I leave again and again, and somehow being born in Africa means you always get tugged home. That like umbilical cord, is so taught. I know it. When I get off the plane and I smell that air, it alters me every time, no matter where I've come from. It smells like the

bush belt, like everywhere animals sweat for kunt. The clouds are extra enormous, And when the afternoon rolls in, just as you're thinking about a lovely tea time, they do a dance of storms. It's louder than what your ears think they can handle, and it's wetter than any rain you've ever felt. Big drops tossed to clean your soul, and they come with such a riotous frenzy, and all your ships washed away. The drool is always the same.

I kick off my shoes and I find my feet banned the sand or soil or somewhere, and it immediately roots right there. My feet become the very beginning of life as we know it. It taps into centuries of humanity and all its cruelty and beauty. Only Africa can

make you cry and laugh all at once. I'm not supposing that Africa doesn't have its problems, and I'm not suggesting that just because I was born on the continent that somehow miraculously I understand it better than But I don't know the Koi, sand or others that have been there before me. You have spent centuries reveling in it, protecting it. On the contrary, I'm a white boy from Africa. I can partially see both the sword and the shield.

I read this beautiful line and in wild the Cheryl Strait book, and she was talking to Oprah and they were having this conversation and she said something like the wilderness has a clarity that included me. Okay, sure, granted she was talking about the Pacific Crest Trail, but that somehow stayed with me. Africa shows you exactly that ponder about that gorgeous sentence. Once more, isn't the thing we're all looking for and maybe the reason we even leave

to journey across oceans and even now space. Just a little more inclusion, please, So I think my birth mother must have stuffed me with some of those liberty jeans. I'm always climbing up a land rover so I can watch the wild dogs play, or running up a hills so I can see the nearby islands or some open plains. And then there are these endless mountains I'm hiking up

to see what I can see from there. In fact, whenever I get to a city, besides for finding a poor over coffee specifically which I'll share more details with you in a moment, I try and find a rooftop or a hilltop or a uppy uppy situation to observe just what I'm dealing with. Let me demonstrate. So, think

about a city like Santiago, chill Am. You hike a little mountain which is right downtown, and of course there's like an enormous religious statue looking down at you, possibly judging you, And this is where you can survey almost the entire city, and those incredible Andy's in the distance. So that's how I understand it, and I'm able to

swallow it. Let's think about another place like um, Birmingham, Alabama, that has the Roman Guard of Fire Vulcan on a hilltop right downtown, gleaming down at the southern heyday glimmer of a hope city. That's the first thing I did as I arrived. I went to hold hands with this cast iron, burly bearded, bare bottomed man so that I

could really see the city. Why, actually, I lie. The first thing I did as I got off the plane in Alabama was to go to a gas station in this tiny little town annexed to Birmingham for barbecue gas in a rub. I was eating flesh at this point, and I'm much more plant orientated at the moment. For all kinds of reasons. We could definitely debate. Life is simpler when you can drive a truck full of gas and eat a piece of meat. I was told by the man behind a smoker. But let's get back to

the poor of a coffee. When I'm traveling. Before I arrived somewhere New, whether it's Atlanta, Alaska, or Australia, I put into the little Google search bar the following phrase pour over coffee, enter city here and I pressed searched. So the theory is that if they serve pour over from a Comax or maybe a V sixty and even an error press, they probably in lots of certainty take

their beans seriously. So then you know, and this is what I know, is that I will find not only a fantastic cup of coffee, but probably people who also give a shit about their cup. And if we found naked coffee, I'm kidding, but seriously, of course, there's nothing

I love more than bearing some skin. I'm not saying that I'm a nudist or anything, but since twenty three and me says I have some very serious German roots, we could do a whole episode dedicated to the German love for Barden Barda on a kleinder I of course proposed to my new Jersey Italian husband. In the nude. We were leisurely swimming off the coast of Sicily near

some terribly old ruins and agrigento. There were Dover style cliffs over to the left and some fucking crazy Game of Thrones castles to the right, in a place called the lovely sounding Reservo naturale di ponta bianca in my best Italian. So think about it. Proposing while travel, Well, that makes sense, that's what you want to do in the nude. Even more sense. Whilst you're traveling. Maybe your guard is down a little and you're more open to something.

The dog isn't waiting for you to take her out, and there's some magic ship that's about to happen. Well, travel gives you that little opening cranny in the universe to promise your whole heart to someone. And my Jersey boy is always busy. It's hard to get his full attention on anything. And I mean, let's not even try and get his undivided attention. But you know it, deserted soft heeably beach with waves quietly kissing your feet and inviting you in for a dip in the nude. Hell, yes,

that held his attention. Not because it's dramatic and not because it's a selfie inducing moment, but because we were there together and the skies opened up and gave us this private moment to share our love discuss, and that's was the starting point, like no other Michael and I starting in life together, just like the one my bio mom had envisioned, and then a life was changed forever.

I'm gonna pause this right here for a moment for our sponsors to weigh in, But do come back to hear more about where I've been scooting around this week. Trade tables up. You're returning to everywhere land. That's my experience with Secily. Now I also like to think about it in terms of now and then, So I'm inviting my dear friend Holly onto the show to give us that then. Yes, so we're only going to focus on a little bit of them, because history, of course is

very rich in Sicily. There is a lot to discuss and talk about. And this is going to sound perhaps a bit almost morbid compared to your story, but there's a reason I want to go there. I want to talk a little bit about its military history. Uh, there are ruins near where you proposed to your beloved. He saw them, maybe didn't fully process them. No, I was non processing mind elsewhere. Totally understandable. The Deluty Military Battery is there, and that has been there since early on

in the twentieth century. It was built between nineteen fifteen and ninety three, so around World War One. But what we really want to talk about in terms of what makes Sicily important in world history. Is World War two. I thought you were going to say the wine culture, all the delicious press. Judo no, no, also very important on both points. But when Secily was invaded by the Allies on July tenth three, that was known as Operation Husky, it was a very very important moment in the war.

It's one of those places that I think, again to Western ears, we think of this Lee is a very small part of the world, or a small part of Europe, but it was really pivotal that actually is considered by many historians to be one of the most important Anglo

American campaigns of the war. For one, it was the first time that the Western Allies made an assault on what was called Fortress Europe in essence, and it also became this important experiential learning curve for the Allied forces, Like they took from that a lot of knowledge and a lot of experience and a lot of learning that they then could apply to the rest of the war going forward. But here is the thing that to me is always very very important whenever we talk about historical

wars or any military action. It's really easy to lose sight of the fact that those are real people involved. We tend to talk about, you know, the dates and the names and how power changed, but there were young men there that didn't all make it out. The Allies had twenty three thousand casualties at Cecil. That is a lot of people. That is still the smallest number that

I'm about to use in this quick statistics list. German forces had thirty thousand casualties, but the Italians had a hundred and thirty five thousand and a hundred thousand access troops were captured. So those were a lot of young men. But here's really why it ended up shifting part of the war, because at this point, by the spring of ninety three, Mussolini was in some trouble. Like his own people were, We're starting to rise against him. There were

opposition groups that were forming. There were people that were saying, like, I really think we should make peace with the Allies. I really think we should broker some sort of situation and get out of this ward and wine to get that right. Let's all be cool. Who wouldn't prefer that. It's hard for me to understand why anyone would otherwise.

But the problem was that there was a lot of German military presence in Italy at the time, so it wasn't like they could just easily go, Nope, we're voting on this, we have changed our minds, were washing our hands of this war. They couldn't. There were German forces literally everywhere, So that is sort of why this becomes so pivotal. Uh. Sicily had been part of Italy since eighteen sixties, so it was considered a very important part of the country. So before that it was ruled by

the Bourbons and it was considered a different municipality. And then it actually merged with the Kingdom of Sardinia in eighteen sixty technically and then became part of the Kingdom of Italy officially in eighteen sixty one. This is why all the American Italians go to Scillate to uncover all this history. Yeah, and it's kind of like the heartland in many ways. And also we've discussed the delicious things that come from there. Right now, happily, put down those headphones.

Let's go. You don't really have to ask me thrice, but don't ask me a second time because we got to finish this segment. So when uh, this invasion happened. What was happening in Rome was that this was really such a hard hit on Italy, particularly again considering those casualty numbers, that Mussolini's government began to just collapse. And so two weeks after the Allies invaded Sicily on July, he was forced to resign by the Fascist Grand Council.

He was actually arrested that day, And in essence, this removed Italy from the war, from the They're Little Access agreement and they were no longer part of it, and that meant one more country that the Allies were not fighting, So that made it very very important. What's really really lovely, though, is that there has been this waiting for the loveliness to comes. Loveliness coming. Military history is often really dark, but I think very important. You can't turn away from

those things because they are part of our shared history. Uh. In the twenty teens and efforts started to make it into a nature preserve. At this point, like you saw them, the military buildings there have all largely collapsed or you know, crumbled. So environmental groups convened in Palermo in they actually asked the Italian Army to also be part of these because they wanted to make sure that the military history of the area was documented, just as they were preserving all

of the natural things that have grown there. They also want to make sure we don't lose any of that in the process. But what I really love about your story and why this is so important to me to talk about these unfortunate things that happened there and these young men that lost their lives there, is that because this is a place that has seen blood and pain and horror, and yet you have found it to be a place that is nothing but beauty and charm and magic.

And you add to that by sharing your love with someone else there and then in turn sharing it with us. So to me, like these are the moments that redeem the ugliness of humanity, is that people find a way to get through that and then build something else beautiful in those same spots. Holly, I know you're crying, but

I'm going to cry, but that's how I feel. I mean, when I proposed to Michael, it wasn't planning for it to be necessarily on a military area, But now that you told me this, my proposal to him and I'll love together is somehow more meaningful to me like somehow, like the two of us, two men in the freedom of the century, can come and be together. And I love found at a place which is wasn't about love, was about fear and about hatred. Yeah, you have made this place for a lot of young men died into

a place where young men shared love. And to me, that's what makes it magical. That's what makes traveling the way you do such a beautiful thing. Like you can heal these spaces where bad things have happened in some ways and in absolute the same vein the place can heal you. That's why I find myself trying to leave my house and pack a bag and climb on another flight is in fact the possibility that I could get healed.

And then there's this beautiful synergy where that place now is so unbelievably beautiful that it also heals you in return, and you kind of create this this beautiful um infinity of sort of a healing energy that goes back and forth.

That sounds a little hippi or dippier than I usually get, but I think to build on really your whole message, right, Like you have the opportunity when you travel to heal places with your own love like that's part of what makes humanity great, as a counterpoint to all the things that can sometimes make humanity not so great. So thank you for adding love to the world, and to that part of the world in particular. I love that you're

crying everything. You can throw a glitter in the air and yell kittens, and I'll probably cry, But this is to me very meaningful. Let's take a break to him from our sponsors, and we'll be right back with more travel from everywhere. The time has come from everywhere. Now where were we? Welcome back? I was in Washington, d C. Recently interviewing Stephanie Stebsh, the director of the Smithsonian American

Art Museum. We spent the morning chatting about using art as a way to better understand America, and I could listen to her for the rest of my life. Hi, Stephanie, Hello Daniel. It is so lovely to be in d C with you. Thank you for having me. I wish I could offer you a perfect day. Yesterday was a perfect day for the cherry blossoms. It's true. I saw some cherry blossoms, and I'm thrilled to be in DC at this time of the year. I've never done it before.

So well, once you see the cherry blossoms that it suggests a return visit, sort of like seeing Mount Fuji tells you that you're going to return to Easter. Tell me exactly what you do in d c stefinitely. I work at the Smithsonian, which is best described in Forward Everything under the Sun, And if you know the Smithsonian, it's a sun symbol, so that works well for us. But in truth it is the largest museum and research

complex in the world. And in the family of Smithsonian museums, of which there are nineteen, I run two of them. Can we back up one second, I want to talk about crafting. Before moving to America, I had never crafted anything. For me, Crafting is this very American thing. Tell me a little bit about crafting as an American thing. Well, Daniel,

I think language is important. So when we talk about craft, craft can be both a noun the object, the crafted object, and it also can be a verb the way you're using it. And I would say today, in particularly, we're living in the midst of a maker's movement like Etsy Etsy craft beer, you know, handcrafted bread's artisanal. Back to the making of the hand. And if you know your history, which I imagine you do, Uh, there was the industrial Revolution,

and there was a counter revolution. So just as things were becoming mechanized and and you made the same which in many ways was an innovation in and of itself, to repeat in making the exact same kind of object, there was a counter movement led by artists, of course, to go back to the handmaid, to go back to

the human scale. And that, of course took place mostly in the realm of craft, whether it was a wallpaper by William Morris, or crafted objects and furniture like good stuff Stickley here in the United States, or pottery or iron work. That was a moment at the turn of the nineteenth century. Now, of course, we live in a moment where once again I would say, we almost don't know how things are made anymore. So some days I

want to go back to the handmaid. It is meditative, it is quiet, and we even see it in the industrial world. Have you been to a Nike store recently? I have. They now have a counter and many of them that invite you to make your own exactly. Now, some people are terrified that I would like just the regular choices. Others are excited to be invited to create their own versions, and I think it speaks a little bit too identity America as very distinctive, as you know

in your travels. Uh, one place feels very different than another place, and yet it can feel the same. Right we have, We've shared malls across the country. Sometimes it's comforting to travel again as I did as a child, and know there would be the comforts of a holiday

in everywhere you went there was a happy sameness. Or even McDonald's, I know the menu, and again with every movement, I think there's always a happy counter movement, and then suddenly you felt, well, shouldn't I be seeing something that's unique to this place, whether again it's food or fashion or architecture. And that's why I'm such a big fan

of when you travel you should go to museums. I fully agree we should talk about that a lot, indeed, and not just art museums, which talk about the creativity of a place, of a region, of a moment. But I like going to um Charlotte, North Carolina and going to the Museum of the New South and learning about how air conditioning forever change to the South, not something I thought about before I had gone into that museum and saw fabious exhibition on that topic. Well, isn't that

the point of your museum? This very museum we're in, like it inspires you to travel America and beyond in ways that you may not have thought about. People travel and they don't realize that museums are ecilitarian. It's for everybody. There's nothing to be scanned of of a museum. I certainly think so. I always um am fascinated by the

house in which the museum sits. There's a great movement to create new museums, and they often are in brand new buildings with fabius architecture, often signature architecture, and of course also museums are set in history buildings. That's our case. We sit in the old Patent Office, which is actually one of the most spectacular buildings, a great example of

Greek Revival architecture. But more importantly, it's the house of American ingenuity, and the driving force of America in many ways is entrepreneurship, is creating new things, is mechanization, is um making improvements. So of course you'd expect to see a few patents that we have still kept here in some of the wonderful shelves of the old Patent Office building. One of my favorites to point out to people is an effort to improve the mouse trap. Why do you

think people don't understand museums? People travel to all over the world, and you're like, yeah, I should go to the museum, and it's almost an obligation, like, oh, like, I guess i'm here in Barcelona, let me go to the product or oh, I'm in South Africa, I should see the Holocaust Museum in Cape Town or the Apotheid Museum. And and my whole thing is, don't see it as an obligation. Don't see it like a whole day adventure.

Go for an hour, go for ten minutes, go and explore in a way that's yaws, opposed to the museum telling you how. And that's like, I don't know if you guys have been to museum. Heck they do, I've heard about them, but I would have to go in disguise. Okay, great, let's do it. So when we have a date in New York or Los Angeles, and you'll be in disguise

and you should experience that. It's one of the most amazing ways to see in a museum because people, I think as travelers are confused about how to interact with the museum. Well, you know, if you think about the history of museums, museums were not for everyone. Not everyone

was invited in, the hours were limited. One of the great revolutions of the French Revolution was actually throwing open the doors of the loof of extending the hours so that the working person could come experience that they're a museum. And what are museums? We are storehouses many ways. What we really are our treasure houses of things that people care for. So this is the American Museum of Art. What is American art? Uh, it's a big definition, it's

a varied definition. So we at the Smithsonian American Art Museum have a special duty. We cherish forty four thousand works of art across four centuries, across all media. So we have from folk art to photography, We have craft to something called time based media, so things made with video and and lights and l ed s. We obviously have paintings and sculptures, with prints and drawings. We have a definition of America that doesn't really reach all of

the America's Some museums have a broader definition. And you and I spoke earlier about boundaries, again, how do you define America? But it really is about the American experience. Artists capture something about the now and the contemporary that is also hopefully universal, and that's why it speaks to us across time, across materials, and it invokes hopefully wonder sometimes upset, and that's okay as well. We try to help our visitors understand a little bit of the time

in which the art was created. We often try to talk about process and uh. Again, I think artists speak to us through their own creativity and um. When they do it very very well, they stop us in our tracks and they create something that's unforgettable and that sparks hopefully some combination of reflection and inspiration and a sense of wonder. That is the American experience. I mean, I chose to come and live here in search of that, and to me, part of that is the American dream.

Like the idea year of Americana, apple Pie Cowboys, it's very limited, and I think that we're expanding. I'd like to think we're expanding as much as there's a current administration that's tightening on this very limited experience. I think that we as a nation of immigrants and people that have been here from the beginning, as a combination of these wonderful people, we want to expand their definition in

order to enrich our experience, the American experience. My best friend touch down this morning for the first time in his life to America, and he landed in New York and his first impression was everyone feels part of the world. And it was such a He's Dutch, and it was such a beautiful thought that I had, like I live in it, so I forget, but I was like, yeah,

that's exactly America from here and everywhere. Yes, And in many ways we think of America as a young country, which of course does not take into consideration that native peoples who were here for centuries and centuries. What we also have to think about America is in terms of the founding of modern America is its place in the

rest of the world. And so I think there was initially a bit of an inferiority complex, a sense that the grandeur of Europe, these great castles and cathedrals, and these artistic and intellectual contributions that came from Europe and I think that was a little daunting initially in America, until the Americans in many ways realized or or came to understand this notion of American uniqueness. And it begins

with the landscape. It begins with the power and majesty of Niagara Falls, a subject matter that was much painted and photographed, So this sense of natural wonder and bed and then captured by artists. And then you repeat this sense of wonder when you march across the country from the coastlines to the um Yosemite to the Grand Canyon. I love the way Ken Burns has described the American

National Park. He says, it's a uniquely American idea to take lands and forever make them private for the enjoyment of all, for the benefit of wildlife, for understanding our or nature, and coming back to a place to refresh ourselves. And that's a pretty radical idea because coming to America was Wow, look at these endless timber forests, look at these oars, look at all these um resources to exploit

to build with, whether it's ships or or skyscrapers. And so to stand back and say no, this belongs to us all. That's a wonderful sense of um, common need and comm and purpose that is so beautiful. Those are the things that I think about America, and I think a lot of people forget. And that's why you have to travel, right, Daniel, exactly, the I must travel as a great Diana Freedland said. Indeed, and early on the railroads understood that they would have an evolving purpose. Yes,

they would have to connect this great country. They would have to determine places of settlement. Being on the railroad was being connected. And then later on the railroads needed to bring not only um materials across country, but they would need to bring people. They would need to invite people to explore, to put down routes, to grab land and and make their fortune. This kind of manifest destiny

of the country. And it also frankly spread people out across the country as they're pouring onto our shores, whether it was on the west coast with Chinese or on the east coast with the Irish who arrived before the Germans. So the Germans were sent across country and to settle the Midwest. So again, artists were part of that storytelling of bringing people together to understand. Mm I see a lighthouse that must be New England. That must be the coast. M I see a barn, I see fields, that must

be the Midwest. They kind of gave us the language for understanding America. That's why I want everyone to come here. I feel like if you understand that and then you sent yourself out on America, your whole experience will be different. I mean, I feel that I feel for the first time that I'm part of something. I may not have been born here, but I immigrated here and I feel

part of that fabric. Daniel, you haven't touched upon this, but I think it's a little bit implied in the sense of America and when you travel, when typically encounters the national flag. When you come to America, you encounter the stars and stripes every rewear everywhere, and then other things that the world thinks of as Americans. So car culture,

American car culture is unique. The scale of the place, again back to landscape, suggests that we can have oversized cars that are open that invite you to to breathe in as you criss cross the country on on endless stretches of road artists who are drawn to cars to road trips. I also think that there are subsets of American car culture that we should always be attentive to. How do people share their identity in the choice of their hub caps, or in choice of music, or in

choice of color, wheel size, or adornment. We think about the limits of travel because of discrimination. The Oscar Award winning movie Green Book that was a reality for many people in terms of their not being welcome and having to make route and having a kind of a coded book for travel. Certainly women don't always feel safe traveling. The lgbt q I A plus community struggle with those things still today. I don't know if you've seen Um

Killer Mike. They've got to show that they were doing together on Netflix and basically the premises they were going to spend twenty four hours in Atlanta only supporting black African American businesses, meaning everything they do had to be owned or the CEO of had to be African American, so no phone, they struggled to find a hotel, they had to stay at an amb and B they couldn't get into a car because no car company has a

black CEO or owner. And I've been thinking about doing an l g b t q I A plus version of this at least you can use your iPhone right exactly, and I could definitely you find a gay owned hotel in New York. But the idea of that to replicate that on a journey when you travel, I think is genius and that gives you a small window into that is how travel used to be. Well, that's how the

experience was for African American screen book and etcetera. Right, And it's the diversity of America that makes it a whole. It is this notion that we strive hopefully for a better union, that the American story is not complete. There are unwritten chapters, there are overlooked chapters, there are dark chapters that we must reckon with. And then there's a question about what is your contribution to the American story,

and we celebrate American creativity. Whether your work will end up at the Smithsonian American arm Museum, I don't know. Time will tell. Thanks to spending the morning with me, Stephanie. This has been such a delight. Thank you. Thanks for hanging out. Connect with us on Instagram at Everywhere Podcast, Twitter and Everywhere pond, or on the website at everywhere podcast dot com. I'm Daniel Shaffler. Signing off, I'll be seeing you everywhere.