Off The Beaten Track: Karsten Horne and the Emerald Nuts at Midnight

Karsten and Chelsea

Our guest this week is Karsten Horne, king of adventure. Traveling has been in Karsten’s veins from a young age. He followed the overland trail to Europe with his parents then backpacked solo through South America as a teenager. Karsten runs the highly successful Reho Travel in Melbourne and Sydney, Australia, catering to a mostly corporate clientele. He is currently working on expanding the company’s retail offerings with a new brand and through rehope sponsors those less fortunate. He manages to combine his love of writing and photography with his travel enterprises, having visited 75 countries and finding inspiration on every journey.

We start sprinting down the hill toward the noise and the lights, as we get closer chanting starts. 30, 29, 28. We push our way through the crowd and as we leap the fence, it gets down to 3, 2, 1. We cross the start line amidst the deafening roar of fireworks, people screaming and hugging, and get pushed in a sea of runners that are all heading into the darkness. I look across at Chelsea and yell out, “Wow, imagine a night Australian Rules Football Grand Final” just as a massive round of fireworks illuminates the sky.

The pace is fast, I mean, seriously fast. Last time I ran like this I was being chased by a security guard at Western Oval (the home of my beloved football team, the Bulldogs). I still feel bad about that as I think he tore a hamstring. It was worth it though, especially when you look closely at the pictures of Doug Hawkins* being carried off on his last game and you see my hand on his arse. 

For the first mile I stay with the group and am really proud of myself. Given it comprises of Chelsea (who has been secretly training for this with daily crossings of Brooklyn Bridge), her marathon running, wholefood eating friends and me, the old man. Central Park at this time of the year is so beautiful, the air is clear and crisp and the path is lined ten deep with well-wishers. Every chance I get I divert off my line and put up a high five. I feel like king of the world, dressed in several layers of fancy running gear proudly topped off by my Bulldog’s jumper, which always keeps me one step ahead of the fashion police. Several times my mind drifts off and I imagine what would happen if I accidently turned off the path and in the morning the team from CSI New York discover yet another frozen bundle in Central Park. Or have visions of Hugh Jackman on a horse leaping across the path in front of me.

As I reach the half way mark I start to question what I am doing here. Three hours ago I was comfortably locked away in a pen at Broadway and 51^st St with a million of my closest friends ready to welcome in the New Year by watching the ball drop in the traditional style. It was quite simple really; you stop drinking liquid around midday, stock your pockets with energy snacks and wait and wait in the sub zero temperatures. A few hours in we discovered that although we could see Times Square way off in the distance, there was no sound. That is correct—over 1,000,000 people are prepared to stand around for nine hours with no entertainment. What? I decided to take on the role of entertainment coordinator by playing and singing along to We Will Never Get Back Together on the iPhone, which amused the crowd for about 30 seconds. Especially the way I sang “I hate you, we break up, you call me, I love you” with such conviction. Some Kiwi’s then donated Better Be Home Soon which got us all huggy but I knew it was over when a bunch of Koreans started playing Psy’s lesser-known works. After climbing the world’s largest sand dune and completing the Inca Trail for recent New Year’s Eve celebrations, New York was threatening to become a real flop.

Times Square way off in the distance

Then I remembered Chelsea’s invitation to join her on the Emerald Nuts Midnight Run in Central Park. “It’s a really easy run just for fun, not competitive at all” were her exact words. I looked at my watch and had just enough time to get across town register and line up at Strawberry Fields for the start. I managed to register as runner number 5281 only minutes before closing but almost didn’t make it to the start when I got caught on a downtown train and emerged in the middle of a pen at 48^th St, 20 blocks in the wrong direction. One of New York’s finest took one look at my outfit, wished me luck and waved me through the barriers and I ran the 20 blocks, dodging strange looks and weaving between drunk partygoers in 2013 glasses and giant Nivea Uncle Sam hats. Hardly the right preparation for a run with my mind racing—torn between finding my way and wondering what giant furry hats have to do with skin care.

Approaching the half way mark of the run, I’m really starting to struggle. In the first mile I feel like I’m passing people but the trend is reversing and I know I’m in trouble when I get passed by a smurf who looks to be doing it easy. It was hard to tell though as his expression never changed. He ignored me as I yelled out at him to slow down, as it was only a fun run! Clearly nobody told the smurf! I pull over for a breather at the drink station, plug some music in and resolve to catch the smurf. Ahead I see him pause at the cider stand and disappear around the next bend.

In plugging in the music I’ve somehow selected my daughter’s trash metal mix and some idiots screaming at me. Determined not to stop again I remember back to the time I wandered into the Panamanian President’s compound and was chased by his machine gun toting bodyguard down a jungle path, the same screaming only in Spanish. No Karsten, you need to relax, get in the moment. Think of something positive, like Katie Holmes smiling at you yesterday, now that was a New York moment.

The clock says 00:30, that means I’ve been running for nearly half an hour. Can’t be far now. I remember reading the course notes and noticed that most of the last mile is downhill so I pick up the pace and ahead of me notice that the smurf has stopped for a rest. I attempt to high five him but clip the back of his head by mistake. Poor thing, he looks stuffed. The last few hundred yards seem to go on forever, my music’s gone instrumental, spectators are yelling some thing out that sounds like a marketing slogan. I think it was “Every person counts” and I try to high five anything that is not moving but don’t connect once. In the final straight I look for someone holding a flag, anyone would do just like in the movies—so I can cross the line holding it above my head but to no avail, instead I raise my arms which won’t go above my shoulders and end up looking like a goose.

I look up my time is 39:40 and look behind me to see the smurf shuffling down the hill with Santa Claus, Superman, and Catwoman. At least he is amongst friends.

Karsten with Seth Godin

Somebody thrusts a bagel, an apple, and a bag of nuts in my direction and that’s it. All over, no fanfare. Yeah…um…that was fun!

24 Hours later, I sat in front of a Seth Godin lecture and this is what he said:

“Your art is vitally important, and what makes it art is that it is personal, important and fraught with the whiff of failure. This is precisely why it's scarce and thus valuable—it's difficult to stand up and own it and say, "Here, I made this.”

This is my art.

4 Miles

40 Minutes

48 Years of preparation

* Doug Hawkins is a famous Australian Rules Football player

Music Under New York

Musicians and singers have been performing on the streets since before the roads were paved. Yet, modern urban artists get harassed for anything from panhandling to violating traffic laws. The New York Metropolitan Transit Authority approached the problem of the pesky artiste from a different angle. Tired of shooing classical violinists and African drummers off the subway steps and platforms, the MTA created Music Under New York, an officially endorsed program that lets artists perform on subways stations. The program supplies them with an MTA banner and schedule. However, it’s very competitive and not easy to get into.

Every year Music Under New York holds auditions in Grand Central Station for new performers, looking for musicians who reflect the New York City culture and diversity.  Auditions last a day and are open to public, but the applicants’ faith is decided by a panel of professionals from the music industry, cultural institutions, and MTA station operators.

The MUNY artists play everything from Beethoven to doo wop and from Spanish guitar to Russian harmonica. Many of them play unique instruments such as Chinese dulcimer, Senegalese kora, Andean pipes, and Aboriginal didjeridoo. Two or three musicians play a saw - yes, a large metal saw, which sounds like a cross between a violin and a flute.  But, even in this eclectic collection of creative minds, some stand out. Like The Opera Collective.

I could write about it, but instead I decided to post my radio interview with one of the Opera Collective members, Vaughn Lindquist, taken in the Times Square Subway stop to the accompaniment of the passing trains and rushing commuters.

Vaughn Lindquist: The New York Opera Collective

Happy 65th Birthday, Edgar. May You Never Retire!

Writers are not starving artists! At least not at the Edgars.

Invariably held in New York City, Edgars week is celebrating its 65^th anniversary this year. Which means that the city is once again swarmed by the evil-minded, conspiring, and plotting criminal masterminds. It is amazing the NYPD does not flood the streets with extra police.

The traditional schedule includes the Thursday MWA-sponsored award dinner where the Edgars winners are announced, preceded by a full-day Wednesday symposium and an Agents and Editors cocktail party. I’ve only been to the Edgars banquet once, but I never miss the Agents and Editors schmoozing.  It is the only time in the year when a scribe can get drunk next to an agent who is not even his.



Crime writers hug too. Rosemary Harris and Jane Clealand do.



The Wednesday symposium can be helpful for those still writing their breakout novel.  This year, several Edgar 2011 nominees held the panel titled Getting Here From There. Later in the afternoon, Edgar winner Lisa Scottolone shared some insights during her How to Write a Novel talk. Yet, the party always remained my favorite Edgars perk. Where else can you find Mary Higgins Clark, Sara Paretsky, S.J. Rozan, and Reed Farrel Coleman all in the same room at the same time? Only in New York. And only at the Edgars.

Strangely enough, I didn’t see the usual agent bunch – neither Barbara Poelle nor Janet Reid came to the party tonight. I missed them both. Donna Bagdasarian stopped by briefly and left. Hopefully it had nothing to do with Edgar’s retirement age, we all need agents to stay in business so they can sell our books!

More hugs: moi, Reed Farrel Coleman and Cathi Stoler

It was a pleasure to talk to Janet Hutchings, the editor of Ellery Queen who remembered me and my story, The Marsh Island, which is coming out in a few months!  I didn’t have a chance to chat with Linda Landrigan from Alfred Hitchcock, but I am hoping to do so tomorrow at the reception that Dell magazine hosts for its writers (Dell owns AHMM and EQMM). This will be my first one (since it was the first story ever accepted by EQMM) so I’m thrilled. But, I am not sure Edgar nominees share my excitement tonight.

Ironically, the masters of literary tension go through major suspense from the moment the nominees are announced earlier in the year until the winners are announced at the banquet. The committee chooses winners right after the nominees are selected, yet the victims of their own craft have to await their fate for nearly two months. No, life doesn’t get easier for published writers. Perhaps it gets more gripping like a good thriller should be.

A writer is only as good as his or her books. For a mystery writer, she is only as good as her crime. So let’s make a toast to that–may we all conjure up the scariest villains, equip them with ultimate alibis, and pair them up with irresistible protagonists our readers will fall in love with at first sight. Or rather the first paragraph.

And may we all win the Edgar.



Moi, Hilary Davidson and Kathleen Ryan



New York City: Skip The Clichés

Boy, oh boy, where do I begin? Every New York corner hides a culture adventure of some sort. Some of them are well-known, some really aren’t. So I decided to share a few that a typical New York City travel guide may not list.

Skip the Empire State Building – all the hype around it is not worth the thirty bucks and a dozen lines you’d have to stand in to get onto its observation deck (or fifty dollars, if you want the express elevator). You can leisurely observe that same Manhattan skyline from the 42nd floor of Marriott Marquis Lounge with a Manhattan in your hand. And if you long for that speed-elevator experience, the Marriott's glass elevators will whisk you 48 stories above the city in seconds, literally and physically taking your breath away. The lounge is revolving so if you pick out a spot by the window, you will be taken on a 360-degree, one-hour city tour, floating by such famed landmarks as the Chrysler Building, Carnegie Tower, MetLife, or The Intrepid. And by the flocks of the unhappy tourists shielding themselves from the wind on the Empire State Building deck.

If you love art and fashion and are torn between going to a museum and attending a fashion show, kill two birds with one stone and visit The Fashion Institute of Technology Museum – the most fashionable art collection in New York City and perhaps on the planet. It may not compare in size and grandeur to the Metropolitan, but it owns the largest collection of costumes, textiles, and apparel in the world, dating from the 18th century to present times and counting more than 50,000 objects that include garments, shoes, and accessories. The costume collection features Christian Dior, Chanel, Yves Saint Laurent, and Vivienne Westwood. Its millinery medley boasts 3,000 hats, and its handbag collection includes purses, pouches, clutch bags, and portemonnaies by Gucci, Coach, and Roberta di Camerino. However, because the museum is small, the exhibits keep revolving. There are also special exhibitions. The latest one covered eco-fashion, featuring clothing items made from bio-degradable fabrics such as organic cotton as opposed to polyester. The show also explored the challenges of sustainable fashion delving into issues such as natural leather, which requires disposing of salts in the process, versus its synthetic, oil-made cousin, revealing that neither approach was particularly planet-friendly. The admission is free, but there are no fitting rooms. And no sales!

Horseback riding is certainly not the first activity that comes to mind when you are planning a trip to New York City, but you may be surprised to know that every borough maintains stables and bridle paths. Out-of-town visitors are often amazed to see equestrians in Central Park, where horseback riding is actually permitted year round. The recently rebuilt Central Park bridle path is more than six miles long and goes around the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis as well as the North Meadow. In Brooklyn. One can rent a horse or take lessons at Kensington Stables, which was built in 1930 as the last extension of the Brooklyn Riding Academy. A part of it was torn down to build the foot bridge over Ocean Parkway, but the rest survived. Bronx offers the Pelham Bay Park Trail with its beautiful vistas of marshland and woods, as well as the Riverdale Equestrian Center in Van Cortlandt Park.

Forest Park in Queens boasts a four-mile equestrian path that meanders through 600 acres of magnificent oak woods, up and down the hills. The path was opened to horse lovers in December 2002 with a ribbon-cutting ceremony as a gorgeous gray horse pulled a surrey through blankets of sparkling snow – New York had just been hit with its first winter storm of the season, but horse enthusiasts made it through the drifts to show their support for the project.

The time when New York City was nothing but horses pulling coaches, milk wagons, and carts is long gone, but city horsemanship is far from dead. So when you visit the Big Apple the next time, you can skip the cliché carriage ride around Central Park, get yourself on a real horse, and gallop through its woods instead.

New York Underlife with S.J. Rozan

My guest is S.J.Rozan, a born and bred New Yorker who grew up in the Bronx, lives in the West Village, loves her city, and knows its every corner like no one else. She is an author of the Lydia Chin and Bill Smith private eye series, which are set in New York and now counts 10 novels and an even greater number of awards and nominations. Winter and Night, which unfolded a story about politics of a jock-ruled small town, won the Edgar, Nero, Macavity, Maltese Falcon, and Best Hardboiled Novel awards.Reflecting the Sky received the Shamus, Edgar, and Anthony. S.J. has also written two standalone novels and 32 short stories, including Double-Crossing Delancy which won the Edgar Award for best short story. Her latest book, On The Line, in which Bill gets a call informing him that Lydia has been kidnapped and he has 12 hours to find her, was released in fall 2010. S.J. also edited the Akashic short story collection, Bronx Noir, and teaches a writing workshop in Assisi, Italy. Last year, she traveled to Mongolia, where she stayed in a ger (akin to a yurt) instead of a hotel, and brought back fascinating pictures and stories. You can find them on http://www.journalscape.com/sjrozan

The place where we met was just below 14^th Street on the West Side and called itself Snice. It had wooden tables and dim lighting and looked just like the kind of a coffee shop Bill Smith would be meeting someone in for a quick rendezvous. I checked out the crowd, half-way expecting to find Lydia already waiting for him, but no one looked quite like her. I wondered if Linus Wang – Lydia’s cousin and a genius computer geek, whose help Bill had used many a time, would like this place. Snice had an interesting restriction on computer usage: you could only use your laptop if you sat at a long “community table” sharing your working space with a few other people, plus there was only one electrical outlet to refuel one’s dying digital equipment. Linus always makes me smile – maybe because I’m partial to talented geeks, or maybe because his favorite word is “dude,” and so is mine. Alas, neither Linus nor Bill walked through the doors, but their creator did! And it was nice of her to share her stories and answer my questions.

When did you start writing? Did you want to write as a child?

I wanted to write as a kid, but in college I decided I wanted to have a career, do something useful for humanity. I studied architecture, got my degree, got a job – and a great job in New York City too, but something was missing. One day, I finally admitted to myself that I wasn’t happy – and it wasn’t just because I didn’t like my job – I didn’t like my career. So I got an adult ad catalogue from the Pratt School, found a mystery class in it, and took it.

Did that class help you to write your first book?

Right away, it was more fun than anything I’ve ever done. It was thrilling. After the class, I found myself a writers' group, joined it, and two and half years later, finished my first book. Writers groups are great. I still belong to a writers' group, although a different one – and as a matter of fact, I am going to my writers' group tonight.

How did you invent your characters?

I always wanted to write private eyes – the character who can’t save himself but can save others. Private eye is about moral ambiguity. So this is how I invented Bill. But my private eye had to have a sidekick – every P.I. needs a sidekick, because sidekicks can do things that the main character can’t or doesn’t want to do. This is how Lydia came about. In order to be an interesting contrasting duo, Bill and Lydia had to be different from each other as much as possible. I studied a lot of Chinese stuff in college, even Chinese architecture, so I made Lydia Chinese. Originally, she was supposed to be a sidekick, but in the first published book, she turned out to be more of a main character – in fact, Lydia was the character who ultimately sold the series. At the time, Lydia was completely unique – there was no Chinese private eye woman and so the “Lydia” book got published first.

How long did it take to publish your first book?

The first book that got published was not the first book I wrote. Altogether, it took six years to see my first book in print. It came out in 1984 from St. Martin’s Press. In the meantime, I kept my architect job, and I wrote short stories too.

Did you always live in New York?

Yes. I was born in Bronx, went to college in Oberlin, Ohio, graduate school at the University of Buffalo, but other than that, I always lived in New York and I like to write about it.

Where do you get your ideas?

I got the idea for China Trade from an article in the (New York) Times about an academic serving time in prison; his specialty was Chinese porcelain export. No Colder Place came from work – an architect in New York angered someone on a construction side and got thrown down the stairs. I thought what if someone got killed rather than just injured. Winter and Night originated from the Columbine killing. Ghost Hero was based on a real person – a Chinese poet who won a Nobel Prize and is in prison.

How did your writing style change over the course of years?

It definitely broadened. And I am more willing to take a chance.

If you were not writing, what would you be doing?

I started my career as an architect, but if I had to make that choice now, I would be a gardener. I would live in a big house and take care of plants.

You teach a writing workshop in Assisi, Italy, every year in August. How does it work? How many people come, where do they stay, etcetera?

The Art Workshop International has been going on for 30 years. People come to study not only writing, but art, painting, immersive Italian, and even cooking. Painters work in the morning because light is better, and I teach in the afternoon. The writing workshop is a two-week session with 10 students. It is never more than 10 students; in fact quite often it’s six or seven, so the group is very small and tight. The students’ levels vary – there are often people who have completed their novels and there are students who have not even started writing, but have an idea. Regardless of where they are, students work very hard, and the two-week immersion does wonders – it changes their perception of themselves. People come there thinking of themselves not as writers, but as doctors, teachers, retired nurses, etc., but the two weeks they spend with other writers, transforms their mentality. Two weeks of talks about words and sentences completely unplugs you out of your normal life and puts you into an artistic cocoon of sorts. And of course, Italy is beautiful, and food is great. The hotel Giotto lies within the walls of the old city of Assisi and is housed in an ancient piazza with terrific views. And besides writing, there’s lots of things to do around.

If you want to read S.J.’s posts and news, or see Mongolia, visit http://www.sjrozan.com/and http://www.journalscape.com/sjrozan

S.J., thank you so much for the interview!

Speakers' Corner: The Place Where Everyone Gets Heard

I watched as Gavin White, an independent filmmaker, explored the past and present of London’s Speakers' Corner, dubbed “the single best known place for free speech on the planet,” and wondered why we don’t have one in Central Park in New York. I had walked by the Speakers' Corner in London, and more than once. While the concept probably wouldn’t survive in the stricter, more prohibitive cultures, the Gotham city should’ve been able to handle it. For now, I bow to the Brits.

White’s documentary takes us through an engaging and thought-provoking series of clips shot at Speakers' Corner over a few years, ranging from criticism of every political system known to man to a heated debate about the Islamic marriage practice, and from modern gay and lesbian issues to Christianity and atheism. Yet, some speakers stand out of the crowd even in this eclectic sea of humanity. “I preach love,” declares a speaker whose platform seems to be completely apolitical and religion-neutral. He shares a few bits of his wisdom. “There was a Swedish girl here last week. She listened to a nutcase on the left, to a psycho on the right, and came to me. And we had an absolutely wonderful evening together!”

“You have the right to remain vocal,” says the civil right activist and revolutionary, Heiko Khoo, featured in the documentary. A son of a Chinese mother and a German father, he was interviewed about the history of Speakers’ Corner as well as taped during his political and cultural debates. As the film progresses, we learn that Speakers' Corner was frequented by Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, George Orwell, C.L.R. James, Ben Tillett, Marcus Garvey, Kwame Nkrumah, and William Morris. Interestingly enough, this symbol of free speech started as a place for public execution – it was home of the notorious Tyburn hanging tree. Later the tree was replaced by triangular-shaped gallows with each beam able to hold eight people at once. When a convicted person was about to be hung, he was allowed to speak to the crowd, which often gathered hundreds of people, and say anything he wanted. For the first time in his life, he was about to be truly heard.

A native Australian, White had just moved from Melbourne to London to work as a producer on “The Media Report,” a show for European Business News, when he discovered the Speakers’ Corner phenomena. “I was broke and discovering London, looking for a film project that wouldn’t take me away from my day job,” White recalled.
One Sunday, while walking through Hyde Park with his sister, he saw a crowd at the Speakers’ Corner and was hooked. As it was only held on Sundays and didn’t interfere with his work schedule, White explained, “It was the perfect subject for a documentary!”

The Speakers’ Corner project took close to 11 years of White’s life, during which he filmed every Sunday for 3-4 years through every season. “It was quite a labor of love,” he reveals. “The project languished for a while due to lack of funds, but eventually I convinced enough people to assist and make it a reality.”

Gavin White currently resides in San Francisco where he runs a company that provides text-based media to poor communities around the world using an online platform called Mobilize. His documentary Speaker’s Corner was recently screened at the Astoria/Long Island City Film Festival in New York.

A Thick Skin

For all of those who want to fit into a new culture, my advice is: grow a thick skin. If you land in New York, grow a rind.

New York is a great city, but it’s a tough city, too. It is also a city of immigrants and impatient Gothamists who often don’t have the time to listen to yet another foreigner’s accent.

My biggest problem during the first six months in New York was isolation. Back in Russia, where my dissident parents had a bad, but vast and famous reputation, our phone never stayed quiet for long. Someone always called, someone always rang the bell. We seemed to have been connected to every iconoclast in the country, and there had been plenty of those. In New York, our phone sat silent for days. It was friendship and human interaction that I missed the most. I felt like a tree that had been pulled out of its soil and stuck into a rocky ground forgotten by the sun and the rain. Yet, I was determined to grow my roots anew. Slowly but surely, as I met new people and made friends, that unnatural void began to close.

The other problem – a much harder challenge to meet – was language. I got off the Boeing with a somewhat improved high school version of British English with an injection of a three-week crash course in American lingo. The articles, tenses, and verbs were still in a chaotic mess inside my head, and my ear was as deaf to the Brooklyn slang as it would be to Latin. The loss of tongue instantly transformed me from a well-read intellectual with a caustic sense of humor into a wordless creature with a depressed look and desperate eyes. Desperate for an intelligent conversation, for a joke, and for brain food. Depressed because I felt I would never master chit-chat in this new language, let alone writing a beautiful sentence.

During the first six months, I studied my new life in silence. I only opened my mouth to ask for directions when I was hopefully lost, and to tell a pizza guy what slice of dough and cheese I was buying today. I knew it wasn’t the best way to learn a new language, but this was my culture shock. I was ashamed of being a dumb immigrant.

A helpful family committee took part in picking out my new occupation. Computers were hot, IT jobs were plenty, and they didn’t require an extensive vocabulary. “You don’t need to talk to anybody,” a relative said. “You sit in an office and write programs all day. It’s a perfect job.” Three years later, with a diploma in Computer Science mocking me from above, I was perched at a massive mahogany desk inside a Wall Street skyscraper, writing code instead of words, gnawed by a depressing feeling that life was passing me by. I wanted my tongue back and I wanted to write stories.

By that time, my English lexicon had grown and I started to question the disheartening postulate that people don’t become bilingual after fifteen. I began taking writing classes and workshops, going to literary events and putting together critique groups. At work, I switched from writing computer code to writing technical documentation. After reading a book, I wrote down and memorized every word in it I hadn’t previously known. I loved theater so I became a regular at the off-Broadway plays, listening and learning how playwrights expressed their characters’ complex emotions in the language I was determined to master. I hired professional editors who taught me to break my long, whirlwind Tolstoy-like sentences into the precise, razor-sharp modern English. It took time, more explicitly, years, but my perseverance paid off and I began to see my work in print.

A few years ago, during a trip to Brighton Beach, the famous Russian enclave of New York City, I suddenly realized my expatriates stopped speaking Russian to me. They no longer recognized me as their own. I was surprised, but not upset. I figured I have completed my journey into my new culture. Snapping back into my old one was one sentence, one joke and one wisecrack away.