The decline and fall of air travel

A fine rant on the state of air travel today: My Wonderful Trip To South Africa That Didn’t Happen Thanks To The TSA And Delta Airlines

At this reminded me, one of the reasons I’m so incensed by George Bush, Jr. and his cronies is the way they have managed to suck out completely the romance of air travel.

I can vaguely remember the first time I flew, in a Vickers Viscount, from Canberra to Sydney (or in any event, from Canberra to somewhere). Looking at the photos now, I am struck by how small it seems.

In those days everything was simple and direct, my parents packed our luggage, it was handed over at the counter, weighed, labelled and carted off. We more or less walked along side it as we walked out of the terminal onto the tarmac, and walked up to the aircraft. The thing I remember the most is the sweet smell of burnt kerosene.

As the years went by, the airlines upgraded their hardware. First to McDonnell Douglas DC-9s and then Boeing 727s. Learning that the flight was to be on a DC-9 was always a disappointment. But in either case, going up the rear stairs was always cool.

An Airbus A380 at the ILA 2006

For our first international trip, our first leg up to Hong Kong was on a Qantas 707. It seemed huge in comparison to the aircraft I’d flown on until then, but even so we were all disappointed that we didn’t get to fly on a 747. As it turned out, that wasn’t to be the next flight either, which turned out to be a DC-10. The ride on a 747 came eventually, along with a variety of Airbuses that I have trouble distinguishing. But each time there were more gadgets, more dials and buttons on the armrest. More music channels (although never anything worth listening to). More freebies and giveaways. The first time the overhead screen plotted the journey on a map of the world. The first screen on the back of the chair in front of you.

It was so sexy.

As the years went by, airport facilities were upgraded as well. There were fewer walks on the tarmac, and more direct passages via aerobridges. Metal detectors made their appearance. Visitors were slowly shunted out to the periphery of the terminal. Luggage was no longer delivered out the front, instead you had to wait in yet another lounge at the end of the trip, and wait some more for it to appear on the carousel.

And now it’s no longer fun at all. I dread having to travel by air. The time it takes to get to the airport. The time needed to check in. The fact that I cannot remove my silver bracelet, so the the metal detector goes off and I get frisked. Having to take my shoes off. Having to power up my laptop. Being careless and having to give up a pair of forgotten nail scissors or a tube of gel or toothpaste. The bargains at the duty-free shops that aren’t. Wanting to grab the suitcases as fast as possible and get out of there. Hoping to look sufficiently innocent to not be hauled over and have more time wasted by security guards looking for contraband that I wouldn’t be stupid enough to sneak through in the first place.

In many airports you can’t even see the aircraft outside, never mind a runway where you might pass some time seeing take offs and landings. That might distract you from buying litre bottles of gin and kilogram packets of Toblerone. And what I want to buy, they no longer sell. I tried to buy some film in Hong Kong’s new airport a few years ago… after trying a couple of shops someone behind the counter told me that she didn’t think anyone stocked it in the terminal any more.

Even the smell of kerosene has vanished.

The Meerkats, by James Honeyborne (2008)

Meerkats on patrol

We took the children to see The Meerkats last week. The filming itself is exceptional with very sharp close-up views. I kept wondering how they had managed to pull it off. On the other hand the soundtrack was pretty uninspiring, and the text, even though narrated by Paul Newman, is without merit. We’re a long way from Richard Attenborough’s Life on Earth.

For instance, we learn that the litter from the previous year stays with their mother, and help teach and protect the offspring from the following year. But it’s only near the end of the film we learn that the father of Kolo (around whom the film revolves) is part of the group. But it’s never made clear if meerkats form a partnership for life, or if each litter is the result of opportunistic encounters.

In a similar vein, basic genetics tells us that inbreeding within a small group will draw out lethal alleles rapidly and thus new members must come into the group, and other members must leave. But just how meerkats solve this problem is never even hinted at.

Vicky Cristina Barcelona, by Woody Allen

Vicky Cristina Barcelona

Saw the latest Woody Allen last night. We had seen Match Point, although we took a pass on Scoop. We nearly didn’t go to VCB at all, because the trailer was so awful. It was only on a friend’s advice that we did.

Like Match Point, Allen continues to explore the darker side of human relations, in the sense that nobody gets out unscathed. Cristina (Scarlett Johansson) throws everything away and Vicky (Rebecca Hall) ends up heading into a marriage of dubious merit. Right up until the closing scene I kept hoping that there’d be a happy ending™, but no, it was not to be.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Films don’t have to be escapist fluff, and I like the direction that Woody Allen has taken over the past decade. It’s just that at the final scene when it fades to black, announcing the credits, my only thought was “What? It ends now?”

The major flaw with the film is the godawful voice-over. For a start the voice itself is completely at odds with the subject. Worse, on a number of occasions the use is completely gratuitous, running rough-shod over an otherwise subtle storyline. It creates an unnecessary barrier between the viewer and the film. It’s almost as if the narrator wants to pin the characters down like insects under glass or move them around like chess pieces, rather than let them live free and make their own mistakes. Everything is preordained and will come to pass, just as the narrator tells us.

On the plus side, the soundtrack is excellent, all Spanish flamenco and what not. There’s a particularly haunting track that I think I taped off a late-night Nova mix years ago. I’d like to be able to track that one down. Allen also lets Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem carry out several conversations in Spanish, which I imagine won’t go down too well in America.

All in all, not too shabby. It won’t go down as one of his best but still enjoyable.

Update: I managed to track down the song, thanks to Amazon. It’s Entre dos aguas by Paco de Lucia. Turns out there’s a clip or two on Youtube. My god, it’s 32 years old. Check out the hairstyle.

The Piano Shop on the Left Bank, T. E. Carhart

Pem sent me this book some time back, and I finally got around to reading it.

It’s the story of an American writer living in Paris, who learnt to play the piano as a child and after a long hiatus decides to take it up again. That means acquiring a piano for his Parisian apartment and taking up lessons again.

The tale begins a bit wonkily, with a barely credible story of a store keeper who didn’t want his custom because the he lacked the secret handshake. The premise is that you need to be introduced in order to do business in France. It might be the case of this particular shop, but it definitely isn’t the rule. No matter where you are in the world, les affaires sont les affaires, and you can’t pick and choose who you care to do business with, especially when trying to earn a living selling pianos in a city whose dwellings aren’t really designed to cope with them.

I suspect Carhart was more a victim of a aging Le Pen sympathiser suspicious of un étranger, américain de surcroît, than lacking a suitable introduction that would let him into the back of the shop. I have a feeling that the owner would not give a French person the same amount of grief if they walked in off the street. Things take a turn for the better when Luc, who takes over the business is willing to take a chance with Carhart and allows him in.

The story then hits its stride, with a series of vignettes and recollections relating to buying, playing and tuning pianos. I kept hoping he would hold a lens up to French society and look at it as deeply as he did to pianos, but regretfully that side of the story never really moves out of the background. Despite this minor flaw it’s an enjoyable read.

For a detailed account of contemporary French society, Théodore Zeldin’s The French is a good book to dig into, even if it was written in the 1980s.

Le Cirque Invisible (Chaplin and Thiérée)

Victoria Chaplin in Le Cirque Invisible (credits: JL Fernandez)

We took the children to see Le Cirque Invisible, by Victoria Chaplin and Jean-Baptiste Thiérrée this weekend.

If the name rings a bell, yes, Victoria is indeed the daughter of Charles.

The performance was sublime. Chaplin and Thiérée take it in turns on the stage, with some numbers lasting no more than a dozen seconds. This in itself is an extraordinary piece of high-precision choreography. Thiérée plays the clown, looking ever so much like an affable Benny Hill. Chaplin plays the more whimsical parts, full of grace and poetry.

The costumes are superb, as is the musical score, an intersection of Glass, Nyman and Reich. A number of Chaplin’s pieces involve taking a costume and transforming it into something else, such as a bodice becoming a horse’s head and thus what begins as her walking on stage as a person ends up one of any number of creatures and much of the excitement comes from anticipating what it will be this time.

The scene where Chaplin plays a one-woman-band (see photo) is simply extraordinary. In this regard the performance reminded me a lot of the whimsy of Cirque Plume, with a quite sense of understatement so lacking in Canada’s Cirque du Soleil.

If you ever hear that they are on tour in your part of the world, you really must go and see them. It’s one of the most beautiful things it’s been my chance to see.

Rumba, by Dominique Abel, Fiona Gordon, Bruno Romy (2008)

The second film we saw in Brussels was a UFO, an Unidentified Filmed Object. It’s refreshing to know that there are still people out there who are writing films that are completely off the beaten track, and other people who have the courage to distribute them (MK2 in this case).

Fiona and Dom are teachers at a school. She teaches English, he teaches Physical Education. Outside school they attend dance competitions (do the Rumba) and win lots of prizes. And then, one day, everything changes. Their lives fall apart. It’s played as a comedy, but the two main actors are so endearing that I couldn’t bring myself to laugh. Tragedy upon disaster piles up on them, and yet they remain entirely oblivious to the fact that their world is crashing down around them. But in spite of everything that happens to them, against all odds, things work out in the end. Even if plus rien ne sera comme avant.

The film as gloriously coloured as a Jacques Demy film, choreographed like a Jacques Tati and is a delight to watch. Ok, so it isn’t strictly a Belgian film, more a Belgian-French coproduction, but close enough. Highly recommended. There aren’t enough films like this being made these days.

Not your regular ballroom dancing