Archive — Jamie Lyons
Staying still is death. Not the peaceful kind either, the slow rot of predictability, the calcification of the soul into something manageable, something that fits neatly into the calendar squares of your Google existence. The road doesn't give a damn about my comfort. It never promised me anything but the sharp kick of Now, the constant, gnawing reminder that I'm breathing, that somewhere out there is something I haven't tasted yet, some street I haven't walked down while the rain hammers my skull into temporary clarity. Wanderlust isn't some precious package tourist bullshit about "finding yourself." It's messier than that. It's the understanding, deep in my gut where truth lives, that the person I am right here is incomplete, that there are versions of me scattered across geography like fragments of a mirror, and I won't know what I look like until I've collected enough pieces from enough places. I move because standing still feels like lying. I move because the alternative is pretending that my neighborhood, my routine, my carefully curated life actually contains the whole story. There's a violence to it, this compulsion. I've constantly abandoned some things: relationships, jobs, the warm bed, the friends who stopped expecting me to show up. But what I'm chasing is bigger than guilt. It's the raw electric thrill of not knowing, of stepping off a bus in a place where I don't speak the language and suddenly my whole body is an antenna picking up signals I never knew existed. The colors are different there. The light hits wrong. My bones remember that I'm an animal, that my species walked out of Africa on these same restless legs, never satisfied, always hungry for the next valley, the next river, the next horizon that promised something other than what I already knew. I'm not running away. I'm running toward. Toward the next version of myself that only exists when I'm exhausted and lost and the map doesn't match the terrain anymore and I have to actually look up and pay attention to where my feet are taking me.
Industries / Wanderlust 2026
The sky looks like it’s thinking about violence. Not cinematic violence. Not the slow motion hero shot nonsense. The real kind. The kind that does not care if you are ready, if your leash is waxed, if your head is right. The kind that has been doing this since before our species figured out how […]
Read
Wanderlust 2025
Look at this. Just look at it. The land splitting open like a wound that never wants to heal, and right there in the gash… calla lilies. White as surrender flags in a war none of us are winning. That’s the whole damn joke, isn’t it? You go looking for the void, you walk down […]
ReadWanderlust 2023
I’m not a religious man, but if I believed in grace, it would look something like this. Point Lobos on any given day. The same rocks, the same crashing Pacific that Edward Weston stared at through his 8×10, that Ansel Adams turned into icons of American landscape photography, that Imogen Cunningham explored with her singular […]
Read
Wanderlust 2021
Is love like art – something always ahead, never quite attained. Edward Weston My father and I talked a lot about art, and one day when we ended up on the subject of photography, he took to a framed photo of his parents and opened it up and showed me the stamp on the back. […]
Read
Wanderlust 2019
Telephone Archaeology: Santa Cruz Payphone Don’t use the phone. People are never ready to answer it. Use poetry. Jack Kerouac
Read
Wanderlust 2019
Here’s what I didn’t think about when I was standing there at midnight in front of Notre Dame with a Polaroid camera: that I was taking a photograph of something that wouldn’t exist anymore. Not in two days. Not ever again, really. Not the way it was when I was there, then. I’m just exhausted. […]
Read
Wanderlust 2018
Devil’s Slide is the kind of place that makes you understand why people drive off cliffs. Not in some morbid, suicidal way, though Highway 1 has claimed its share of souls who got hypnotized by that impossible blue, but because beauty this raw, this uncompromising, it does something to your brain chemistry. It rewires the […]
ReadWanderlust 2018
Stories: Hawaiian Automobiles (all crashed) on the island of Kauai Once the automobile appeared you could have predicted that it would destroy as many people as it did. Ray Bradbury, The Art of Fiction No. 203, The Paris Review, #192, Spring 2010
Read
Wanderlust 2017
Stories: the Wanderlust of Kauai Chickens… We all like chicken Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X They’re everywhere. And I mean everywhere. Like a feathered occupying army that won the war and now they’re just rubbing it in. Parking lots. Golf courses. The tarmac at the goddamn airport. These aren’t your industrialized, factory-farmed abominations […]
Read
Wanderlust 2017
There are no mistakes only happy accidents Bob Ross What we’ve got here is the absolute American catastrophe rendered in one perfect frozen moment, a car smashed against railroad tracks like some kind of sculptural fuck you to manifest destiny itself. And there, in the foreground, is Sharka, the Portuguese Water Dog who clearly gives […]
Read
Wanderlust 2017
So fine was the morning except for a streak of wind here and there that the sea and sky looked all one fabric, as if sails were stuck high up in the sky, or the clouds had dropped down into the sea. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse Davenport Beach, it’s not some tourist trap with overpriced […]
Read
Wanderlust 2017
The thing about watching a dog run, really run, is it strips away all the pretense we wrap ourselves in. No existential dread, no performance anxiety, just pure kinetic joy translated into muscle and breath. Sharka doesn’t give a shit about my Instagram feed or my quarterly earnings report for the board. She’s a four-legged […]
ReadWanderlust 2017
Look at this. Just… look at this. Lindsey… that face could stop traffic on Highway 1. The kind of beautiful that makes you forget what you were going to say. Natural, unforced, the real thing. And Sharka, with those soulful eyes, gorgeous in that way only dogs who’ve been loved properly can be. Cheap wine […]
Read
Resistance / Wanderlust 2017
The Fifth Circle Interstate 5. The great American scar tissue running through California’s gut. You want to know what we are? What we’ve become? It’s all right here, stretched out under that merciless Central Valley sun for mile after goddamn mile. You smell them before you see them. That’s the thing nobody tells you. The […]
Read
Wanderlust 2017
Here’s the thing about Burden’s forest of castiron streetlamps standing there like some municipal graveyard outside LACMA: it’s the kind of gorgeous, stupid, absolutely necessary gesture that makes you want to laugh and weep simultaneously. Two hundred and two vintage lampposts salvaged from the gutted streets of Los Angeles, arranged in rows like soldiers who’ve […]
Read
Wanderlust 2017
One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you’d be stricken blind. To live a visual life is an enormous undertaking, practically unattainable. I have only touched it, just touched it. Dorothea Lange I descend into Steep Ravine in Mount Tamalpais State Park following Lange’s ghost down the same trail she walked every summer, […]
Read
Wanderlust 2017
For last year’s words belong to last year’s language And next year’s words await another voice. And to make an end is to make a beginning. T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding There’s something pure and merciless about that stop sign planted there on the tracks in Davenport like some bureaucratic punctuation mark that wandered off the […]
ReadWanderlust 2016
Look at her. Lindsey sitting there in that fourth frame like she’s the only thing holding the world together, like she’s the reason the wind bothers to blow across that grass. You know what I’m talking about, that particular quality certain people have where they don’t just occupy space, they complete it. The Halprins knew. […]
Read
Wanderlust 2015
WANDERLUST: Bolinas sunset… This raggedy edge of the continent, where the Mesa drops into the Pacific like God’s own ashtray has the kind of beautiful decay that makes you understand why people become insufferable about places. The light here doesn’t apologize. It just bleeds out across tide pools and driftwood and the barnacled pier pilings, […]
Read
Wanderlust 2015
Étant la plus saisissante manifestation de l’art des constructions métalliques par lesquelles nos ingénieurs se sont illustrés en Europe, elle est une des formes les plus frappantes de notre génie national moderne. Gustave Eiffel Here I am with this gorgeous Leica M2 I scored at some outdoor market in Marseille, and I’m pointing it at […]
Read
Wanderlust 2015
When the water rises,the fish eat the ants;when the water falls,the ants eat the fish.Laotian Proverb These photographs aren’t chasing some National Geographic wet dream of exotic authenticity, they’re tracking the messy, gorgeous aftermath of a place that got carpet bombed with our good intentions and somehow, against all mathematical probability, kept breathing. The shots […]
Read
Wanderlust 2015
Inside Life of Bottles #1 You can just see a little peep of the passage in Looking-glass House, if you leave the door of our drawing-room wide open: and it’s very like our passage as far as you can see, only you know it may be quite different on beyond Oh, Kitty, how nice it […]
ReadWanderlust 2015
Everything has two aspects: the current aspect, which we see nearly always and which ordinary men see, and the ghostly and metaphysical aspect, which only rare individuals may see in moments of clairvoyance and metaphysical abstraction. Giorgio de Chirico (1919) Artists on Art – from the 14th – 20th centuries, ed. by Robert Goldwater and […]
Read
Wanderlust 2014
Out of the rolling ocean the crowd came a drop gently to me, Whispering, I love you, before long I die, I have travell’d a long way merely to look on you to touch you, For I could not die till I once look’d on you, For I fear’d I might afterward lose you. Now […]
Read
Wanderlust 2014
The peacock doesn’t give a shit about your aesthetic comfort. It struts through Di Rosa like some psychedelic deity that wandered off a Fillmore poster and decided to take up permanent residence among the sculptures. This isn’t cuteness. It’s dominance with tail feathers. The preserve itself sprawls across these wine country acres like some beautiful […]
Read
Wanderlust 2013
Wanderlust along the Coast: Beach Piano I had never before thought of how awful the relationship must be between the musician and his instrument. He has to fill it, this instrument, with the breath of life, his own. He has to make it do what he wants it to do. And a piano is just a […]
Read
Wanderlust 2013
There’s this moment when you roll up to San Juan Bautista, mission número fifteen in the chain, if anyone’s counting, which they shouldn’t be, and the whole place just hits differently. Not in some postcarded up, sanitized heritage way, but like walking into a room where ghosts still pay rent. The thing squats on a […]
ReadWanderlust 2012
You stand here long enough, looking out at that impossible blue stretching to forever, and you start to understand why Henry Miller said fuck it to Paris and ended up here, clinging to this ridiculous edge of America. Big Sur is the California that men dreamed of years ago, this is the Pacific that Balboa […]
Read
Wanderlust 2012
The Sonoma Mission squats there like the last gasp of something that already knew it was dying when they built it in 1823. The final outpost, the 21st link in a chain of spectacular ambition and casual brutality stretched up the California coast. You can feel it, this desperate, magnificent hubris frozen in adobe. Stand […]
Read
Wanderlust 2012
Let us venerate the dog. The dog (what a funny creature!), has sweat on its tongue and a smile in its tail. Victor Hugo , The Man Who Laughs Victor Hugo nailed it over a century ago: the dog has its sweat on its tongue and its smile in its tail. And here’s Sharka, this […]
Read
Wanderlust 2012
Wanderlust on the road outside the town of Pescadero… Pescadero’s the kind of place that doesn’t exist anymore except that it does, a cosmic joke on the rest of California racing headlong into its own irrelevance. Two lane blacktop threading through artichoke fields and fog thick enough to drown in, past barns held together by […]
Read
Wanderlust 2012
Tangier light doesn’t just hit the retina, it rewires the goddamn thing. That silhouette against the Mediterranean haze, the way the architecture dissolves into something between memory and hallucination, it’s the exact visual frequency of not knowing what comes next and being perfectly fine with that fact. I have no idea of what is going […]
ReadThe City / Wanderlust 2012
It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince You don’t stick hundreds of roses in the sand at dawn on New Year’s Day because you’re well-adjusted. You do it because something broke open inside you, or because you needed to make […]
Read
Wanderlust 2011
I’m walking through Manhattan at 3:13AM and I stumbles on this… a blow-up sex doll sitting in an empty rickshaw like she’s waiting for a fare that’s never coming? Now this isn’t art, it’s archaeology. It’s evidence. Somebody else staged this little theater of the absurd and then abandoned it, and I just happened to […]
Read
Wanderlust 2010
Here it is, mid fucking day in Avignon and the sun’s a blowtorch turned on this stone plaza, 100 plus degrees of Mediterranean fury, and there’s this ghost, this white painted wraith doing Butoh like he’s negotiating with death itself, and I’m the only sonofabitch here to see it. But here’s the thing that breaks […]
Read
Wanderlust 2009
I open my eyes and the first thing that hits me isn’t the Pacific light knifing through those salt-stained windows or the fact that you’re horizontal in a room where somebody once fucked their way through the Summer of Love, no, it’s the absolute silence. The kind of quiet that makes me understand why people […]
Read
Wanderlust 2008
Wanderlust along the Burma Road… This is Burma and it is unlike any land known about Rudyard Kipling So I’m on the Burma Road with Kipling in one pocket and Orwell in the other, and already I know I’m fucked. Because I can’t unread those guys, can’t unknow what they knew, what they got wrong, […]
ReadWanderlust 2008
Look at those elephants. Seriously, look at them. Towering over the street like a dream made manifest, like something that crawled out of the collective unconscious and decided to take a walk. You think you understand puppets? You think they’re for children? You don’t know shit. Most of us don’t want to admit that we’re […]
Read
Wanderlust 2008
Wanderlust over a collapsing and swaying Myanmar bridge… So I find words I never thought to speak In streets I never thought I should revisit When I left my body on a distant shore. T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding You know that moment, and if you’ve really traveled, you know exactly what I’m talking about, when […]
Read
Wanderlust 2007
Look at this magnificent bastard suspended in mid-flight, caught between the ocean’s memory and some salaryman’s 3 AM craving. This is Tsukiji at 4 in the morning, when Tokyo’s still half-drunk and the only religion that matters is the one written in fish blood on concrete floors. This icon of a tuna didn’t just die, […]
Read
Wanderlust 2007
I was fifteen when I spent that year in Italy. Fifteen, when you’re all elbows and hormones and terrible decisions, when everything imprints on you like wet concrete. And Italy didn’t just imprint. It branded me. We lived in a villa in Fiesole. Fiesole, where the hills roll up from Florence and you can see […]
Read
Wanderlust 2006
Wanderlust outside Avignon in Provence: a lavender field, France. To make a perfume, take some rose water and wash your hands in it, then take a lavender flower and rub it with your palms, and you will achieve the desired effect Leonardo da Vinci
ReadWanderlust 2006
You orbit someone for years. Same rooms, same scenes, same tired circles. You see each other. You nod. You’re both exhausted by the sameness of it all, the mediocrity, but you don’t say it out loud. Not yet. Then one night, Big Sur. A campfire. Michael and Ciara are there too, but honestly, they might […]
Read
Wanderlust 2006
I felt as if I were in an exiled and floating world, isolated from all necessities of life except the one of buying things. Zelda Fitzgerald, The Collected Writings of Zelda Fitzgerald Zelda knew the score. That exiled and floating world she’s talking about, it’s not some poetic metaphor, it’s the actual condition of modern […]
Read
Wanderlust 2005
You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself. Alan W. Watts Look at this thing. Three streams of water dripping into a pond like some cosmic punchline to a joke nobody remembers anymore. Built in 778, rebuilt in 1633, not a single nail holding it together, just wood and […]
Read
Wanderlust 2003
Look at them up there in the white nothing, those figures scattered across snow that doesn’t give a shit about their aspirations or their carefully calibrated sense of adventure. They’re having what they’ve decided to call a party, because that’s what you do when you’re off somewhere expensive, you give it a name, make it […]
Read
Wanderlust 2003
I dream of a grave, deep and narrow, where we could clasp each other in our arms as with clamps, and I would hide my face in you and you would hide your face in me, and nobody would ever see us any more Franz Kafka, The Castle (1926) Those tombstones piled on top of […]
ReadWanderlust 1997
I was the advance man for Mabou Mines, stumbling off an Aeroflot red eye from Seattle, my brain doing somersaults somewhere over Siberia while my body arrived in Moscow like a sack of wet cement. Nineteen ninety-seven. Yeltsin was still clinging to power, the Soviet Union was barely cold in its grave, and Moscow was […]
Read