Evening Landing at HKG (EWR-HKG flight)
Patrick Smith is – along with Glenn Greenwald – pretty much the only reason I visit Salon.com these days. And it’s for columns like this:
In a way, choosing a favorite airport is akin to choosing a favorite hospital: Conveniences and accouterments aside, nobody really wants to be there in the first place, and the easier and faster you can get the hell out, the better. Which brings us to HKG’s most impressive and appealing feature: its rail connection to the city. The sleek, high-speed Airport Express train is literally only steps from the arrival and departure halls.
Now, let’s put aside for a moment that I don’t agree with that at all. The first part, I mean. But the second, man, it just boggles me that Dulles is still years away from getting a rail link to Washington.* Â And I am *completely* onboard with his BOS disdain:
Compare the best of Asia with, for example, my hometown airport, Boston-Logan. My commute to the airport by public transportation takes almost an hour and requires two changes, including a ride on the Silver Line bus, which, in addition to being at the mercy of automobile traffic, requires, at one point, that the driver step out and manually switch power sources to the bus.
Seriously, I spent at least 20 minutes looking for the entrance to the Silver Line at Logan, once. Â The signs said it was right in front of me, but there were just a bunch of (@#@#)( buses there. Â Christ. Â But to keep on the hatin’ theme:
Or how about JFK, where for hundreds of millions of dollars they finally got the AirTrain completed — an inter-terminal rail loop that can’t take you beyond the Queens subway. Heck, it can take 45 minutes, up and down a byzantine array of escalators, elevators and passageways, just to get from one terminal to another, let alone all the way to Manhattan.
I’ve done the the JFK-LGA transfer I don’t know how many times. Â And every time, in a $50-70 taxi ride. Â And not infrequently seeing the people that I’d been standing at the curb with at JFK alighting with me at LGA. Â Train line, anyone? Â Never mind getting to Manhattan (I understand helicopters aren’t entirely unreasonable). Â But here, too, Patrick has a comparison:
The distance from Shanghai airport to the city is about 20 miles — roughly the mileage from JFK to midtown. Shanghai’s bullet train covers this distance in seven minutes.
This is why the Chinese are beating the US!  Well, okay, not really.  And I even had to take a cab from the end of the line to my hotel in Shanghai.  But that seemed like the right thing to say.  And maybe it’s even kind of true, in the end.  The US can’t manage basic train connections from its international airpots to its effective capitol cities (IAD-DC, JFK-NYC), and  you can roll (levitate!) from PVG to Shanghai in 7 minutes.
It’s not all international roses, for sure:
To be fair, not every Asian terminal is so astoundingly convenient. Seoul, Bangkok and Taipei top a list of those without high-speed rail options.
My memory of Seoul? Â Well, I was 17 and had hair halfway down my back. Â Customs was, uh, interested in me. Â But my recent experience with Taipei’s airport certainly tracks his:
To top it off, everybody at Taoyuan was unfailingly polite, from the immigration officer to the man at the currency booth.
And isn’t this how it should be? In the end, an airport is more than just a place to kill time, more than an annoying conduit between ground and sky. It’s an expression, a gesture, a statement. It’s a welcome to, and a farewell from, the place you’re visiting or coming home to. In much of the world — not only Asia but throughout Europe as well — they have figured this out.
I am absolutely and completely onboard with his “in the end” thought. Â The idea that a significant international airport should well represent the country it’s a gateway to is the thing that keeps me railing against JFK (seriously, *that* is the first thing that people see when they arrive in the US?) and LAX (Just shoot it. Â Please.) while I’m in awe of YVR (Vancouver). Â Airports are amazing spaces for humanity. Â The US needs to do a better job of respecting and supporting that.
*Funny part: when I landed at HKG, it was the end of the longest flight I’ve ever been on – almost 17 hours from Newark. Â I stumbled to the car service, never once looking up. Â And on the way out, I was ten kinds of late, so ran through the terminal without once looking up. Â Yep, I somehow managed to retain zero memories about the biggest indoor space in the world, with the exception of some escalator that ended up taking me where I didn’t need to be (compounding the lateness). Â Well done!
Contrary to what your eyes tell you, I miss this place. Let’s start it back up with some music.
Sure, every know knows that Lady Gaga completely ripped off (b/c that’s *well* beyond a “tribute”) Madonna’s Express Yourself. But DJ Tripp makes it all okay:
Lady Gaga vs. Madonna – Express This Way (DJ Tripp) by Mixes and Mashups #20
In something of a parallel act, Crystal Castles recently turned the clock back a few more years into 80s new wave territory, and brought us this superb bit of work. And yes, that is Robert Smith:
Bonus, of a sort: that was actually a cover of a Platinum Blonde song:
Rep. Weiner takes the time to congratulate the House GOP for finally finding a budget target we can all agree on:
There are loads of “punk covers” out there, and they’re almost uniformly crap. (Like most self-identified punk music, actually, but that’s for another time.) But this cover of the Foundation’s Build Me Up Buttercup by the Goops? Tops the original, in my book. Easily.
(The video is mislabeled – that’s the Goops’ cover, not the Foundation’s original)
P.S. – I saw the first daffodil open along the Potomac today.
Cee Lo’s take on Bright Lights, Bigger City:
Remember these guys from last summer? Â They’re warm weather math gang and literary bangers, it seems. Â My friend PedroGringo discovered this along the W&OD today:
“Shoulder your duds, and I will mine, and let us hasten forth; Wonderful cities and free nations we shall fetch as we go.”
Walt Whitman rules the W&OD, yo.
This week’s Clarendon Cycles column starts:
“Get off the !@#$%^& road!â€
“!@#$ you, I have just as much a right to be here as you do.â€
And so goes a rather sizeable proportion of most on-road cyclist/motorist conversations. It doesn’t accomplish anything, except perhaps raising the blood pressure of those involved and setting the stage for a more aggressive conflict the next time a similar interaction occurs.
It’s stupid, pointless, and childish.
And I’ve got a bit of experience with it. Â Click the link above for more.
Ricky Albores has thoughts in a similar vein.
Took me a while to realize that I wanted to know the name of the artists, but this track – B.o.B – Airplanes (Feat. Hayley Williams of Paramore) – has been working its way into my head over the past couple of months:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kn6-c223DUU[/youtube]
And then I recently came across a mashup involving the B.o.B. track and Kylie Minogue. Â Ah, Kylie. Â Now that’s someone who has the secret to lasting. Â I remember being in awe of her in the late 80s, found her making up a travel soundtrack in the early 00s, and she’s still cranking it out:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHGaW8lBlSk[/youtube]
And here’s Jarod Ripley mashing the two together:
Jarod Ripley – “Get Outta My Airplane” from Jarod Ripley on Vimeo.
Ignoring that it’s from Huffington Post, and despite the fact that the author initially engages in the very behavior he bemoans, I still think this piece on the the lazy left-right dichotomy of American journalism is worth reading. Â Peter Goodman identifies the problematic action:
Journalists so frequently deal in the false liberal-conservative dichotomy because it generates the sort of tension that feeds narrative, and narrative makes for more accessible stories. Simply dividing up he interests into two neatly-differentiated competing camps enables lazy beat reporters to claim to have painted all of reality with but two phone calls. Why venture outside and talk to ordinary people — whose experiences and views almost always challenge the traditional labels — when we can simply sit at our desks and dial up a D and then an R and gather a pair of quotes that supposedly cover the whole spectrum of the American take on anything?
He identifies *why* this action is a problem:
Left versus right: These are overly-simplified labels that perpetuate division, and we ought not cater to them, because that amounts to lazy journalism. That is about who won the week, and who controls the conversation, as opposed to the much more difficult, nuanced and crucial questions that remain operative irrespective of phony ideological labels: How will we make the economy function again for the vast majority of Americans, for whom the last quarter-century has delivered downward mobility? How will we get our fiscal house in order while adding quality paychecks and making health care affordable? These are concerns that are common to nearly every household, regardless of ideology, and these are questions that must be pursued at face value, with good information, critical scrutiny and the pursuit of pragmatic policy.
And then he proposes a solution:
In the sort of journalism I am interested in practicing here, I want my reporters to reject the false idea that you simply poll people at both extremes of any issue, then paint a line down the middle and point to it as reality. We have to reject the tired notion that objectivity means the reader can get all the way to the bottom of the story and not know what to think. We do have to be objective in our journalism, but this does not mean we are empty vessels with no ideas of our own, and with no prior experiences that influence what we ultimately deliver: That is a fantasy, and an unhelpful one at that, because every time the reader discovers that personal values have indeed “intruded” into the copy, they experience another “gotcha” moment that undermines the credibility of serious journalism.
Rather, objectivity means that we conduct a fully open-minded inquiry. We do not begin our reporting with a fully-formed position. We do not adhere to the contentions of one think tank or political party or government organ as truth. We don’t write to please our friends or sources or interest groups. Rather, we do our own reporting, our own independent thinking, our own scrutinizing. But at the end of that process, we offer a conclusion, and transparently so, with whatever caveats are in order. We do not concern ourselves with how others may describe our place on the ideological spectrum, and we do not hold back when we know something, or lard up our journalism with disingenuous counter-quotes to cover ourselves against the charge that we staked out a position. As long as our process is pure, so is the work.
Now, I don’t think, for a second, that his solution is going to be swiftly adopted by many (any?) of the major news orgs out there. Â But it’s something we need to support and demand. Â Without it, we’re at great risk of losing what makes a democracy worthwhile – an informed populace. Â I don’t think I’m overstating the case, here. Â The muddleheaded middle approach that forms the core of modern American journalism is the sort of the journalism that leads to popular support for the war in Iraq, the idea that Obama somehow brought in an era of Big Government, or the perception anyone in DC actually gives a damn about the deficit. Â That kind of ignorance simply isn’t sustainable, and real journalism is one of the few things that can cure it.