I love airports. I love to be in them. I love the way they smell and the specific kind of architecture that can be found therein. I continue to find planes themselves mysterious and wonderful. I've been known to book the flight that has the most connections expressly because I will thusly be able to spend more time at the airport. The hour and a half layover between flights is the most perfect one. Airports have been designed, I imagine, with the idea that that is roughly the optimal amount of time anyone will spend within them. Enough time to have a drink or two at the airport bar (an inspiring entity worthy of its own monograph) and then make the next connection. The margaritas at such bars have a special chemical in them that stimulates a unique kind of unimportant bliss, stupid bliss.

The anonymity of the airport is what gives it its special charm. There is nothing in particular about airports. But lingering just under the surface is an excitement. That is the excitement of the connection implicit in airports. They are one step away from somewhere, potentially, radically different. The soothing emptiness of airports is the emptiness that precedes the fulfillment of a promise. Anything that one might purchase at an airport is immediately three and a half times more pleasing for being purchased there. Things taste better, clothes look sharper, useless objects maintain a charming aura that drops away from them as soon as they leave the space of the airport.

With these thoughts in mind The Terminal, by Steven Spielberg, was an intriguing viewing prospect. I am also fond of the way that Tom Hanks has aged. He's kind of chubby and something weird has happened to his neck, and his eyes have begun to recede behind a vaguely simian build-up of the upper brow. Where will he go from here?

Of course, the entire premise of The Terminal is centered around humanizing the airport. The airport, we all implicitly understand, is a place so beyond the arena of normal life that it is hard to imagine how someone could possibly stay there for more than a day or so. The airport is a place of transience by definition; it is unlivable. The conceit of The Terminal (loosely based on a real story of an Iranian in Paris) is that someone is forced to treat a place like that as a home.

That is an intriguing conceit. And like all places, we assume that every airport has its own idiosyncrasies, its personalities and rhythms. Scratch the surface and the airport will reveal a humanity that bubbles underneath. In that sense, The Terminal is a logical step in the Spielbergian program. The motto of this program could be stated as, "Find the real humanity in all things, all situations." The airport is but the latest challenge to the Spielbergian mind. For someone who took up the challenge of finding the humanity in the Holocaust it would seem an achievable goal indeed.

And, of course, Spielberg succeeds in his task. But it is a Pyrrhic victory. The airport never has a chance. Poor airport. "Come on airport," I heard myself pleading, "you are more empty than that. You can crush this intrepid citizen of some former Soviet Republic under your absolutely neutral heel." The more Hanks and Spielberg humanize the airport the more boring the movie becomes. The fight was fixed.

I would have done the movie the opposite way round. Robust, resourceful, Eastern European type ends up in airport and completely fails to humanize it. There are some spaces that were made to be alienating and uncanny. That is how we know the difference between home and its other. The Tom Hanks character is robbed of meaning and meaningful relationships. He becomes just like the airport. He becomes Airport Man, a new and disturbing kind of ubermensch. He spawns a new race of people who only feel at home in the very places we cannot.

- posted by Editor @ 9:20 PM

 
On the occasion of last night's loss by the LA Lakers and given J.M. Tyree's June 9th thoughts at American Notes something ought to be said. It is a pleasing illusion indulged upon by many that sports has anything to do either with ethics or with politics. My dear friend Steven Levine has often tried to equate the New York Yankees with the ruling class in general. The Yankees will wither away, it is presumed, only with the emergence of a just social order. Mets fans find solace in a secularized Christian Socialism, the meek and those unable to provide solid run-support shall inherit the earth.

The LA Lakers did not lose due to some deep moral failing or an inability to finally recognize the sins of hubris. The LA Lakers lost because they were old and tired, for the most part, and they were met by a team that could mobilize everything in the way of youth, organization, and skill. There is no moral lesson here except that a greater force defeats a lesser force. But this is a lesson that utterly lacks a moral component.

It is surely pleasing for many to watch Kobe, especially after his game-two heroics, fall to such a defeat. There is a smug little smile on his face that neither rape trials nor the groans of the audience at his umpteenth ill-chosen jumper are able to wipe away. Perhaps the audience takes some satisfaction in the knowledge that death will, at least, finally wipe away the Kobe smile. And the Lakers looked nothing if not aged and mortal in defeat.

Oddly, though, the Lakers managed to snatch away some humanity in their defeat. One of the difficulties in being a sports hero is that one's personality tends to be defined purely by physical action, the way one moves, the way one performs under pressure, the style of one's play. Being fundamentally non-verbal, the aspects of personality that are normally at the forefront are generally an afterthought or a disappointment. Muhammed Ali was so striking partly because his words could be as remarkable as his punches.

As elegant as the Pistons were on the court, as much as Billups and Hamilton and Prince and the Wallaces emerged as particular players with particular basketball personalities, they faded away as people once the game was over. In the end, the Lakers got to be human beings in losing and sulking off the court and in Derek Fisher's heartfelt after-game interview far more than the Pistons. The Lakers performed an interesting reverse-coup. They lost so pitifully that they became sympathetic again. It just goes to show that sports is really and truly completely meaningless. The 'because' of the Lakers loss amounts to nothing of any moral significance. Which makes it all the more inevitable that we will think about it as precisely that.

- posted by Editor @ 10:52 AM

 
Lionel Trilling used to talk about something he called the adversary culture. It's an imprecise term, but at the end of his essay "On the Teaching of Modern Literature," he includes a passage that does a good job of capturing the basic feel of the term. The passage is as follows:

"The author of The Magic Mountain once said that all his work could be understood as an effort to free himself from the middle class, and this, of course, will serve to describe the chief intention of all modern literature. And the means of freedom which Mann prescribes (the characteristic irony notwithstanding) is the means of freedom which in effect all of modern literature prescribes. It is, in the words of Clavdia Chauchat, 'se perdre et meme . . . se laisser deperir,' and thus to name the means is to make plain that the end is not merely freedom from the middle class but freedom from society itself.'

This kind of will to freedom doesn't only characterize modern literature, it characterizes one of the basic impulses of modern art in general. What is extremely interesting right now, and something I have difficulty in putting my finger on in any more precise a way than Trilling with his 'adversary culture' is the feeling that this isn't really true anymore. The adversary culture still exists, of course. But it is hard to take it seriously as the primary expression of our cultural attitude.

'Bravo,' you might say, 'you've discovered post-modernism.' That is a fair charge. But if it is true then there is still something different about the post-modernism of today than that of the eighties or even the nineties. Perhaps it has something to do with the muting of the extreme irony that existed in those decades and has transformed itself into something new today.

The fact is, there is something more mature about today's form of irony and the way it isn't scared to say that some things really do mean more to us than others. Maybe it is also more mature in that it isn't so afraid to use the term 'us' again, now that we realize that 'us' isn't any more particular than those who identify with it.

All in all, the adversary culture approach seems boring now, it doesn't have the excitement it once did. What is exciting now is caring a little more, being a little more open to what is happening within the culture one inhabits instead of thinking that authenticity only resides in negation. Do we appreciate someone who proudly proclaims that they do not own one of those . . . televisions? Instead of being intimidated by such a proclamation we feel a bit sorry, there is so much to be delighted by on the boob-tube. At the same time, we don't like the person who professes to worship pure surface. Fashion shows are still strange and troubling events.

What I am describing is we, the neo-sinceritists. Neo-sincerity is sweeping the land though we aren't sure about proclaiming it openly. Neo-sincerity, coined by Stefany Anne Golberg as far as I know. My colleague Roy Brand once dubbed it Ironic Romanticism but neo-sincerity feels even better. You can put it in the lower case. We are accepting new members. It's sincerity achieved the second time around, after having thought about it for a while. When you reflect upon it you'll realize that many things you like are neo-sincere. Often, you'll realize that you are being neo-sincere frequently and throughout the day. Don't be afraid to be OK with that. Neo-sincerity is pretty OK.

- posted by Editor @ 1:13 AM