Jeremy HildrethAuthor Archives:
“No good joke ever survives a committee of six” and other superb insights into the creative process
I envy you who are about to watch this speech for the first time. You’re not likely to run across it elsewhere, and it took me some hunting to unearth. God knows why because it’s absolutely effing brilliant from start to finish. Phil Collins (not the drummer) was a speechwriter for Tony Blair. He gave [...]
Perm-36: Party in the Gulag
I went with Oliver. I always go with Oliver, in Russia at least. Three of the four trips — grand adventures, really — I’ve been on in Russia have been shared with Oliver. First, in 2001, it was St. Petersburg. Last year it was Kaliningrad. This time it was Perm, a top-ten Russian city I’d [...]
A museum with a deep sense of place
This week The Wall Street Journal ran my story about the adored and adorable Pitt Rivers museum of ethnography and world archeology in Oxford, England (as opposed, I guess, to Oxford, Mississippi). You can read it here. For length, they did cut an anecdote about my first visit: It was 2002, and I was just starting a [...]
Everything I know about place branding
Everything I know about branding places
Outskirts of Bangkok: the monk, the BMW and the Death Railway
Dispatch from Bangkok Sat 3/23/02 12:28 PM It was 90 degrees in the shade today. Fortunately, we spent most of our time in the air conditioned sixth car of the weekly government excursion train to the River Kwai Bridge. The highlight of today’s 15-hour, $5 roundtrip rail adventure obviously was the bridge, which we were [...]
My first encounter with Communist China: And I’d thought Wal-Mart in America was cheap!
Dispatch #2 from Kunming, China Tue 3/19/02 8:46 AM In this Chinese city of 3.3 million, there are few outward signs of communism. On the contrary, Kunming is a grimy, bustling semi-metropolis teeming with commerce. It has more in common with what I expected to find, and did find, in Hong Kong than with what [...]
Macau confidential: “Happy! Happy! Happy! Haw! Haw! Haw!”
Dispatch from Kunming, China Sun 3/17/02 6:25 AM Dear Friends, We’re now in Kunming, capital of the Yunann province of the People’s Republic of China. We’ll be here only long enough to arrange permission and transportation for the Burma road, then we’ll head out. In the meantime, we’re enjoying spending $12 USD per night for [...]
In Hong Kong, a shampoo Jean Valjean
From: jeremyhildreth To: triplist Date: Fri 3/15/02 3:35 AM Subject: Dispatch from Hong Kong Dear friends, As I travel the world for the next three months, I’ve promised to keep in touch with all of you as much as possible. Please feel free but not obligated to reply to these dispatches. I arrived [...]
Heat Treatment ’02: Revisiting the travel writing that started it all
The famous “Heat Treatment ’02″ dispatches.
Adventure in Timor 4: A destination in the making
Day 7 Leaving my hotel about ten o’clock on Friday, One Last Bar is where I went first. Here I met a UN adviser named Scott who advised me that the next bar to go to was a Brazilian place down by the beach called Exotica. I took a taxi (it’s just outside of central [...]
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