Stopping Off in the Gothic South, on the Road to Ruin
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In the first feature directed by Shainee Gabel, John Travolta delivers a hammed-up scenery-chewing variation of the brainy good ole boy he played in "Primary Colors."
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Many travelers are chasing what may be a modern-day version of an old human impulse â to behold an untrammeled frontier.
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You might be surprised how far you have to drive from New Orleans, LA to get to the Gulf of Mexico.  Following     the west bank of the Mississippi River along Hwy 23, you go through the separate and well-separated towns of     Belle Chasse, Pointe a la Hache, Port Sulphur, Empire, Boothville, and finally over 60 miles from New Orleans     the tiny oilfield supply and marina town of Venice.    At Empire the highway goes over a pretty tall bridge and on the other side of the canal, beyond the levee     system, Katrina's storm surge came through with a vengeance.  The roads have been cleared but everywhere along     them are the twisted skeletons of steel buildings with vegetation hanging out of shattered second-story     windows.  A refrigerator sits atop the flooded husk of a house.  A perfect square of fenceless pickets     surrounds a perfectly bare concrete slab.  The occasional forlorn FEMA trailer can be spotted parked on one of     many slabs in a field of such slabs that was once a neighborhood.  The carcass of a cow is wedged improbably     in the canopy of a tree twenty feet up.    What is striking is not that the landscape looks like this; most of the coastline of Louisiana and Mississippi     experienced such damage.  What is striking is that it looked like this when I visited last week, in August     2006, almost an entire year after the storm came through.
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The installation - and vandalism - of a series of sculptures in Sarasota has raised questions of taste, art, and local identity.
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Over five films and four decades the director George A. Romeroâs slack-jawed undead have been our tour guides through a brainless, barbaric America.
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The rosebushes at the house on Bayshire Lane in Herndon have died. Plastic wrappers and empty crates are visible through the windows of the otherwise vacant house. A breeze riffles the pages of a weather-beaten copy of the Nuevo Testamento on the front porch.
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CHOROTIS, Argentina - This is an old railroad town, with severed telegraph lines dangling from track-side poles and a depot where graffiti is the one obvious sign of recent activity.
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American cannon blasts bellowed in the English Channel 140 years ago, and bloodied bodies lined the deck of a sinking Confederate ship. Teary onlookers watched in horror from the Normandy coast.
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Pilgrim buses clog a road just outside the Old City of Damascus. Partly to solve that nuisance, municipal planners want to carve a highway through a historic but neglected quarter of the Syrian capital.
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This old mining town in the northeast of England used to be a grimy industrial wasteland. Now it's becoming a gleaming cultural center and -- who would have thought it? -- tourist destination
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Up here in the rogue state of Massachusetts, life goes on. Politicians from the American outback run against its diversity, its liberalism, painting the state as an outsider. And assorted Vandals, Huns, and Visigoths from New York batter at its civilized gates, presumably forever.
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On Scene: As residents leave the war zone to head north, the humanitarian disaster in the south is getting worse
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ATLANTA - Navigating a patch of sodden soil just off a busy north Atlanta road, Alice Champagne is in search mode. She points to the foundation of a mansion built too close to a stream and a silt fence that needs to be wider.  Ms.
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By Doug Smith, The Charlotte Observer, N.C.  Dec. 15--south charlotte When a sign announcing a new development appears in front of a wooded tract, curiosity is sure to follow.   The one across from Calvary Church on N.C. 51 near Rea Road in south Charlotte is a perfect example.
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Painful recollections of a bygone eraÂs racism have emerged with the excavation of an old Mississippi mill townÂs pool.
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Southwest Washington is an antique vision of the future. It's mid-century's idea of "progress," a never-to-be-repeated experiment in bulldozing shabby if genuine neighborhoods and replacing them with chilly high-rise modernity. To this day it struggles to present much sense of life or soul.
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âWoman on the Beachâ is a bittersweet accounting of the geography of desire.