An idea for a short story/film:
Karl Marx is sitting on the 73 bus, on his way to the British Library. He is deep in thoughts when a group of gorgeous 17-year old Somali girls board the bus and take every seat possible around him (some of them sit on top of each other). They're wearing veils and make-up, and constantly play on their mobile phones, and shouting in an East London accent.
He is thinking:
-The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation into a mere money relation.
The girl in front y are saying: My room is getting refurbished!
-Ah yeah?
-Yes I'm gonna paint in gold!
He is thinking:
-only in so far as it is itself a product of labour, and, therefore, potentially variable in value, can gold serve as a measure of value.
She is saying:
I love what you did to your eyebrows.
Ah yeah
Coz you know, before you were a bit ugly, with those round eyes you have.
Marx continues to grimace:
- In the eyes of each other we are nothing but exchange-values.
Showing posts with label travel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label travel. Show all posts
Thursday, December 04, 2008
Friday, August 01, 2008
The end of flying
Almost a year ago I participated in the Heathrow Climate Camp. I never got to write a long blog entry about it - having to move house and the PhD write-up took higher priority. I still have my notes from last year; I hope to do something with them one day.
The declared goal of the camp was to stop the construction of a Heathrow 3rd runway, and to draw attention to the damage of aviation to the climate. The battle on the runway is still not concluded.
Most of the talks I went to in the camp did not deal specifically with aviation, but when speakers referred to it, it was clear that ending aviation as we know it is essential to stop climate change. At the same time, airplanes were taking off over our heads every 50 seconds; we were sitting in the heart of fly-mad Europe, cheap airlines heaven, tickets at 1p to places you never heard of.
Despite all the enthusiasm and optimism that activists' gatherings often generate, I could not imagine the aviation industry shutting down because of environmental concerns. In 'business as usual' scenarios, emissions from airport expansions would offset a considerable amount of the emissions cuts planned in the UK, if not all. But I could not see any chance of governments taking steps to prevent this. I could also not see a chance of convincing a large enough section of the population to stop flying.
I know a couple of people who decided to stop, or severely limit their flights due to global warming concerns. I respect and admire their choice, but never believed this is a viable course of action. Citizens of rich countries were never going to give up the right to fly. Governments were never going to make their voters angry in such a way.
But flying as we have known it in the last decade is going to come to an end. High oil prices have come to the rescue. 25 airlines have closed in the last year, and still more will follow. Fuel price hikes have taken all their profits away; no airline can make a profit at oil prices above $100 a barrel. British Airways are changing their plans so that they can survive at $150 p/b: this means less flights, higher prices, and emphasis on business class. But what happens when oil reaches $200p/b - and it will, in the next five years? Flying again is becoming a luxury that only upper middle class families will be able to afford.
Peak Oil - the end of the cheap oil era, the stagnating and falling oil production around the world - is not going to save us from climate change, or end this car-based-civilisation; much can go wrong. But aviation is about to become a dead horse. For environmentalists, focusing on an industry going bust does not make much sense anymore (still it would be good to prevent spending public money on expanding airports that will never be used - and the chances to stop Heathrow's 3rd runways are better than they were last year). Instead I believe activists should focus on other things: fighting the comeback of coal; pushing renewable energy, and public transport; and perhaps most urgently, stopping food-based biofuels.
What is important however is that the end of flying is understood for what it is: not a temporary hardship, caused by evil speculators and oil companies. Neither it is, as some would put it, a problem of 'geological constraints', the fact that we are running out of a natural resource; rather this is the logical result of a reckless way of living; a civilisation which is consuming all it can for short-term profit; a cannibalistic system which burns what it finds today and thinks not about tomorrow.
The declared goal of the camp was to stop the construction of a Heathrow 3rd runway, and to draw attention to the damage of aviation to the climate. The battle on the runway is still not concluded.
Most of the talks I went to in the camp did not deal specifically with aviation, but when speakers referred to it, it was clear that ending aviation as we know it is essential to stop climate change. At the same time, airplanes were taking off over our heads every 50 seconds; we were sitting in the heart of fly-mad Europe, cheap airlines heaven, tickets at 1p to places you never heard of.
Despite all the enthusiasm and optimism that activists' gatherings often generate, I could not imagine the aviation industry shutting down because of environmental concerns. In 'business as usual' scenarios, emissions from airport expansions would offset a considerable amount of the emissions cuts planned in the UK, if not all. But I could not see any chance of governments taking steps to prevent this. I could also not see a chance of convincing a large enough section of the population to stop flying.
I know a couple of people who decided to stop, or severely limit their flights due to global warming concerns. I respect and admire their choice, but never believed this is a viable course of action. Citizens of rich countries were never going to give up the right to fly. Governments were never going to make their voters angry in such a way.
But flying as we have known it in the last decade is going to come to an end. High oil prices have come to the rescue. 25 airlines have closed in the last year, and still more will follow. Fuel price hikes have taken all their profits away; no airline can make a profit at oil prices above $100 a barrel. British Airways are changing their plans so that they can survive at $150 p/b: this means less flights, higher prices, and emphasis on business class. But what happens when oil reaches $200p/b - and it will, in the next five years? Flying again is becoming a luxury that only upper middle class families will be able to afford.
Peak Oil - the end of the cheap oil era, the stagnating and falling oil production around the world - is not going to save us from climate change, or end this car-based-civilisation; much can go wrong. But aviation is about to become a dead horse. For environmentalists, focusing on an industry going bust does not make much sense anymore (still it would be good to prevent spending public money on expanding airports that will never be used - and the chances to stop Heathrow's 3rd runways are better than they were last year). Instead I believe activists should focus on other things: fighting the comeback of coal; pushing renewable energy, and public transport; and perhaps most urgently, stopping food-based biofuels.
What is important however is that the end of flying is understood for what it is: not a temporary hardship, caused by evil speculators and oil companies. Neither it is, as some would put it, a problem of 'geological constraints', the fact that we are running out of a natural resource; rather this is the logical result of a reckless way of living; a civilisation which is consuming all it can for short-term profit; a cannibalistic system which burns what it finds today and thinks not about tomorrow.
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
Los Angeles. America
What can I say? Everything is as you would expect it to be. The palm trees are tall. The toilets' flushing containers are huge. The car parks never end. The coffee is weak. The sun is strong. The people always ask me how I am. The sidewalks (pavements) are wide, but few people walk, and they seem to be mainly Mexicans and, in fewer numbers, white trash drunks.
California is over-familiar from all those US culture industry products, so there is hardly any room for surprise. It's the world as we know it, even if we've never been here. On some level it is reassuring but it also causes anxiety. I constantly expect movie scenes to happen on the Freeway, or waiting in the queue in the bank, when exactly does the mass-shooting start?
Strangely, I feel at home. I don't know why. I don't think it's only because of all those movies. I think it's mainly about the climate, which is pretty close to the Middle East as you can get.
California is over-familiar from all those US culture industry products, so there is hardly any room for surprise. It's the world as we know it, even if we've never been here. On some level it is reassuring but it also causes anxiety. I constantly expect movie scenes to happen on the Freeway, or waiting in the queue in the bank, when exactly does the mass-shooting start?
Strangely, I feel at home. I don't know why. I don't think it's only because of all those movies. I think it's mainly about the climate, which is pretty close to the Middle East as you can get.
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
The white man jumped into the 38 bus through the back doors, saying very cheerfully to no-one in particular, 'good old Ken Livingstone. Giving Londoners free buses'. He then turned to stand in profile, and suddenly became quiet and gloomy.
Some of my friends have made an art of travelling all across London on these bendy buses where you don't have to show your ticket to the driver. There's enough of them to get you anywhere, albeit in winding routes. I'm usually too impatient, and also too worried to get caught. When I'm not in the mood to pay, like today, I stand next to the electronic-ticket-reader in case an inspector comes.
I'm reading the new Koetzee book in hard cover and it's hard holding it up while standing.
A man with an indian accent said: 'My grandfather was a great man. He died laughing'.
Free rides come with a price. The bus terminated its journey two stops after Angel, and long before my stop. It was sunny, and I decided to walk to college. The streets sprinkled with some unexplained English good nature and properness that almost made me feel I'm not in London. But then the red brick house, that beautiful 1930s gothic tower. I would so much like to live there. Or squat it for just one winter.
Some of my friends have made an art of travelling all across London on these bendy buses where you don't have to show your ticket to the driver. There's enough of them to get you anywhere, albeit in winding routes. I'm usually too impatient, and also too worried to get caught. When I'm not in the mood to pay, like today, I stand next to the electronic-ticket-reader in case an inspector comes.
I'm reading the new Koetzee book in hard cover and it's hard holding it up while standing.
A man with an indian accent said: 'My grandfather was a great man. He died laughing'.
Free rides come with a price. The bus terminated its journey two stops after Angel, and long before my stop. It was sunny, and I decided to walk to college. The streets sprinkled with some unexplained English good nature and properness that almost made me feel I'm not in London. But then the red brick house, that beautiful 1930s gothic tower. I would so much like to live there. Or squat it for just one winter.
Monday, June 18, 2007
5 Comments from Berlin
1. The line of Ortlieb bicycle panniers in Berlin includes not only the red, black, yellow and green popular in London, but also silver and - my new favourite - orange.
2. Bagels - New York style, filled with cheese, and salmon - are all the rage in Berlin, served in the student cafes and in art galleries. P says that's a new development. Personally, I'm not too keen on bagels, unless its past midnight and I'm near the cheap 24 hour Brick Lane bagel shop: their bagels are very filling. But it's not something I grew up eating: unlike other Jewish East European foods, bagels never made it to Israel, that is until the 1990s and globalisation, when New York bagel shops started appearing. There are, of course, the Jerusalem bagels of the old city, but they are something completely different (I still have to find the history behind them) tastier - thinner, long and crispy, they are eaten with Zaatar (tyme, sesame, salt). - Pretsel, however, is a long tradition in Germany; strangely, they spell it Bretzel.
New York Bagel
Jerusalem Bagel
3. Cliches about Germany made me expect the train loudspeaker announcement to be delivered in a shrill and aggressive man's voice, ending with a stamping of his shiny boots. I was surprised to hear a woman's voice, almost whispering the names of the stations in the most seductive tone one can imagine. Sexier than any underground announcements I've ever heard, including Madrid.
4. The gap in the heart of Berlin, the legacy of the cold war, is still not quite filled. Construction work is largely over, but something still has to sink in, to take its shape. All the buildings - new or renovated - seem too clean. In former East Berlin, history was cleared away with the soot, and the result is somewhat contrived. Maybe it is yet too early, and things will congeal and flow. At the moment, like all large nationalistic projects of regeneration, there is still too many facades, and too little to bring them together.
5. It was my first time to Berlin and yet the city felt very familiar. Partly it's the modernist architecture which reminds me of Tel Aviv. But a lot of this familiarity is because of the beautiful children books of Erich Kästner which I read dozens of times as a child. Kästner's world of sausages restaurants, trams and cafes, and little boys who travel on the train to Berlin, was an fantasy land of which we knew nothing but could, somehow, imagine. These books are probably the reason for the dejavu feeling I had swimming in the small lake in the centre of a city park, and eating fried fish and Kartoffelsalat while standing by the bar in a west Berlin Deli-supermarket. There is more to say about that lost Europe and its resonance in a Israeli childhood.
Emil und die Detektive, in Hebrew
Monday, March 26, 2007
on flying: with Charlotte Gainsbourg
melancholy / aviation / chocolate
perfume / cigarettes
frequent flyer /stow away
dislocation / sleeping / jets
It's my favourite song in the album, by far. It captures so accurately the intoxicating panic that engulfs me each time I board an airplane.
I didn't use to be this way. I used to love airports and flying. Maybe growing up in a country that sees itself as an island, despite the geographical evidence to the contraty, makes one enthusiastic about aviation. Airplanes keep you connected to "the world" (read: New York. Los Angeles. London. Paris.) Or was it the little kiddie gifts they gave me on the flight to New York when I was five. I even liked the food.
we wish you all a very happy pleasant flight /
this is a journey to the center of the night /
and the inflight entertainment's out of sight /
here on AF 607105
It usually starts when I find my seat, gets worst in the first hundreds meters above ground, and slowly subsides some minutes after the seat-belt lights are switched off. It's a take-off panic; some people get it during turbulences or thunderstorms, but I don't mind these. I know they're unlikely to take the airplane down. It's the takeoff and landing that are most dangerous, my air-pilot neighbour used to say, but the landing is done usually by the computer, anyway. Which I personally find reassuring.
My neighbour died by free falling, from a cliff, something I think he must have found ironic.
invent / a new persona /
drunk here on the edge of space /
all the things i carry with me /
and all the things i left behind /
and all the things that wait to meet me /
hover in the air tonight
What I fear exactly, I'm not sure: engine failure, bombs and missiles, air collision? My nightmares take on different shapes. But more and more I feel that it is the simple strangess of being so high, so fast, so disconnected from the earth that unhinges me.
Perhaps it is the knowledge that all this may soon pass. In a few years, when oil prices go through the roof and cheap flights become a thing of the past, we will look back with strange envy and disgust on the time when we used to burn petroleum so wastefully to hop across the planet. Ah the sweet scent of aviation fuel: the crudest form of fuel, the most polluting, and tax-free. Of all our carbon-suicide indulgences, it must be the worst, and the one that has no substitute.
if i can only keep on moving /
and never stop and think of me /
and freefall through the years and decades /
terminal velocity
Her thin and quiet voice makes the air above my desk pulse and fluctuate. I look up to the little stretch of sky topping the inner courtyard, the bright blue above the fading green grey bricks. An airplane is flying through the metal railing, emerging, disappearing, in and out, like the song's heartbeats. We will shortly be landing at Heathrow airport.
the cabin / is burning /
i smile and feel complete /
here amongst / total strangers /
27 000 feet
perfume / cigarettes
frequent flyer /stow away
dislocation / sleeping / jets
It's my favourite song in the album, by far. It captures so accurately the intoxicating panic that engulfs me each time I board an airplane.
I didn't use to be this way. I used to love airports and flying. Maybe growing up in a country that sees itself as an island, despite the geographical evidence to the contraty, makes one enthusiastic about aviation. Airplanes keep you connected to "the world" (read: New York. Los Angeles. London. Paris.) Or was it the little kiddie gifts they gave me on the flight to New York when I was five. I even liked the food.
we wish you all a very happy pleasant flight /
this is a journey to the center of the night /
and the inflight entertainment's out of sight /
here on AF 607105
It usually starts when I find my seat, gets worst in the first hundreds meters above ground, and slowly subsides some minutes after the seat-belt lights are switched off. It's a take-off panic; some people get it during turbulences or thunderstorms, but I don't mind these. I know they're unlikely to take the airplane down. It's the takeoff and landing that are most dangerous, my air-pilot neighbour used to say, but the landing is done usually by the computer, anyway. Which I personally find reassuring.
My neighbour died by free falling, from a cliff, something I think he must have found ironic.
invent / a new persona /
drunk here on the edge of space /
all the things i carry with me /
and all the things i left behind /
and all the things that wait to meet me /
hover in the air tonight
What I fear exactly, I'm not sure: engine failure, bombs and missiles, air collision? My nightmares take on different shapes. But more and more I feel that it is the simple strangess of being so high, so fast, so disconnected from the earth that unhinges me.
Perhaps it is the knowledge that all this may soon pass. In a few years, when oil prices go through the roof and cheap flights become a thing of the past, we will look back with strange envy and disgust on the time when we used to burn petroleum so wastefully to hop across the planet. Ah the sweet scent of aviation fuel: the crudest form of fuel, the most polluting, and tax-free. Of all our carbon-suicide indulgences, it must be the worst, and the one that has no substitute.
if i can only keep on moving /
and never stop and think of me /
and freefall through the years and decades /
terminal velocity
Her thin and quiet voice makes the air above my desk pulse and fluctuate. I look up to the little stretch of sky topping the inner courtyard, the bright blue above the fading green grey bricks. An airplane is flying through the metal railing, emerging, disappearing, in and out, like the song's heartbeats. We will shortly be landing at Heathrow airport.
the cabin / is burning /
i smile and feel complete /
here amongst / total strangers /
27 000 feet
Wednesday, March 21, 2007
about hotels
Hotels are very strange places.
1. I have a friend who can't stay at hotels. The idea that other people slept in that bed the night before, and others still will sleep there tomorrow night, gives her goose skin. And people come into the room while you're not there and mess with your sheets! How obscene! She would rather sleep in a mountain lodge, or stay with the grandma of the neighbour of friends of friends (curfew time: 8.30pm). But hotels? No no no ya habibi pas de question!
2. Hotel rooms are to normal bedrooms what porn is to sex. A supposedly perefected, exaggerated, hyper-real version that is as far from the real thing as you can get. The hotel rooms you find from Hong Kong to Madrid are all the same: the bedside lamp, the small desk, the marbled bathroom, the four towels, the airconditioner, and of course - the television (the same movies, again dubbed in a language you do not speak). As if someone, probably in the US, probably in the 1950s, tried to come up with the universal notion of a home for one night, and then applied it meticulously to creat a model as a-personal as possible. In a friend's house, such room would seem cold and lifeless. But in a hotel one pays money to stay there.
Yet hotels work. Sometimes there is comfort to find in alienation. Sometimes, strangeness can provide some solace. Uniformity, brought to its perverse extreme, has some character - but then, perhaps only for two nights.
3. Hotels are always a reference to somewhere else. The wallpaper of north American lakes in a shabby hostel near Rome's train station; the fake Eastern splendour of King David's hotel in Jerusalem; the fading Colonial pretense of Raj hotels in an Indian hill station; and of course, the names of foreign lands and places. In Paris you stay Hotel Venezia, in Venice in Hotel Londres, in London in the Savoy, and in Vienna at the Alhambra . Always a promise, and never a fullfilment, the names suggest that your journey cannot be finished, at least not here, in the Hotel Austria, beneath the splendid Alhambra of Granada.
1. I have a friend who can't stay at hotels. The idea that other people slept in that bed the night before, and others still will sleep there tomorrow night, gives her goose skin. And people come into the room while you're not there and mess with your sheets! How obscene! She would rather sleep in a mountain lodge, or stay with the grandma of the neighbour of friends of friends (curfew time: 8.30pm). But hotels? No no no ya habibi pas de question!
2. Hotel rooms are to normal bedrooms what porn is to sex. A supposedly perefected, exaggerated, hyper-real version that is as far from the real thing as you can get. The hotel rooms you find from Hong Kong to Madrid are all the same: the bedside lamp, the small desk, the marbled bathroom, the four towels, the airconditioner, and of course - the television (the same movies, again dubbed in a language you do not speak). As if someone, probably in the US, probably in the 1950s, tried to come up with the universal notion of a home for one night, and then applied it meticulously to creat a model as a-personal as possible. In a friend's house, such room would seem cold and lifeless. But in a hotel one pays money to stay there.
Yet hotels work. Sometimes there is comfort to find in alienation. Sometimes, strangeness can provide some solace. Uniformity, brought to its perverse extreme, has some character - but then, perhaps only for two nights.
3. Hotels are always a reference to somewhere else. The wallpaper of north American lakes in a shabby hostel near Rome's train station; the fake Eastern splendour of King David's hotel in Jerusalem; the fading Colonial pretense of Raj hotels in an Indian hill station; and of course, the names of foreign lands and places. In Paris you stay Hotel Venezia, in Venice in Hotel Londres, in London in the Savoy, and in Vienna at the Alhambra . Always a promise, and never a fullfilment, the names suggest that your journey cannot be finished, at least not here, in the Hotel Austria, beneath the splendid Alhambra of Granada.
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