Birthplace of Another Popular Meat

Frankfurt.

Frankfurt-am-Main

This is not a normal stopover for us. Or rather, it's not a city served by the MD-11, so I can't expect regular layovers here. But the business of deadheading crewmembers to and from assignments in Cologne dictates the occasional use of nearby airports. Frankfurt is only 100 miles from Cologne, so if the flight schedules are suitable we sometimes deadhead in or out of FRA and shuttle by car to CGN. Our schedules must be built to ensure FAA-legal and contractual rest before or after flight segments, and logistics are such that we are occasionally treated to a layover here in FRA (if that's how we're commuting) before or after operating in or out of CGN. I flew in to FRA this morning from Louisville, and am scheduled to sit here in for about 18 hours before being shuttled over to the CGN airport and to my airplane, where I will operate back to Louisville.



A three and a half day assignment to operate a single leg, and even then I'm not actually operating the flight. Or not much of it. For this trip I'm doing what is called IOE support. The captain on the flight is an instructor, and he's giving Initial Operating Experience training to a new first officer (just as I received my own IOE just a few weeks ago). Since the flight leg is over 8 hours, these crewmembers are required by FAA regs to have a break so that they're not at the controls for more than eight hours. Normally, the two crewmembers take staggered breaks, and a third crewmember--called an IRO, or International Relief Officer--takes each of their places in turn. But when one of the regular pilots is receiving IOE, they are not technically qualified to do their job except under the watchful eye of a training captain. So if the IRO is not an IOE training captain, the new F/O is not allowed to be at the controls when the captain takes his break. Ergo, an entire replacement crew is required.



One of the downsides of being an IRO is that you virtually never get to do a takeoff or landing (at least during IRO legs); you only occupy the front seats during the cruise portion of the flight. The IRO will be assigned a few other tasks for the flight, but s/he spends much of it in the bunk sleeping or watching movies, etc. So the IRO is colloquially called the "kitchen bitch," since, among other things, they often take care of the catering for the flight (on a long flight with some jumpseaters there may be 15 meals to dispose of). And the IOE support guy (me) becomes the IRO's bitch, which puts me waaaaaaay down the pecking order. But hey, it pays the same.



I mentioned in an earlier post that I found it a little disconcerting to be abroad wand unable to tap into the company's resources as I'm used to. In that earlier post I was in CGN, and in that case I had traveled in with another crew and I knew where the crew hotel was (and a lot of our company people stay there). But this time I was traveling to FRA on my own, since the rest of the crew was flying around Europe / Asia and I was only needed for the crossing back to the US. This was the first time I had done this solo positioning stuff internationally. I was told that when I got on the ground a driver would be waiting at the airport specifically for me to take me to the crew hotel in FRA. (I always see these drivers with a printed cardboard sign waiting at baggage claim.) Well and good. But of course there was nobody there when I emerged from customs. After looking around for 15 minutes, I decided to consult my bid package (where our layover hotels and transportation providers have always been listed). But the transportation numbers and the crew hotel lists have been removed for economy's sake. Neat. So I have no idea 1) how I'm supposed to get to my hotel, nor 2) which hotel it even is. I could take a cab and be reimbursed, but I have no idea where to direct them to take me, and I don't want to stiff some poor schmoe who is somewhere there at the airport waiting for his pre-assigned fare.



After my last big trip abroad I decided to activate my phone internationally. I figured, cost be damned, sometimes a fella just needs to be able to communicate. And here was my vindication. I pushed the Louisville MD-11 scheduler button on my iPhone (I love that the phone knows how to dial from wherever you are) and she was able to put me on hold and call the German company who was assigned to pick me up and find out where the driver was. Problem solved, and well worth the $6 or $7 that it cost. And it sounded like she was sitting next to me. In retrospect, I should at least have figured out where our crew hotel in FRA was so I wasn't TOTALLY helpless. And it wouldn't have hurt to have the local number of the transportation provider in my pocket either. But this is the trial-and-error by which one learns.

Shopping in FRA.

So I got to the hotel about 9:am, which was about 2:am my time, and I headed straight to bed. I was up by about 4:pm local, which gave me a few hours of daylight to walk around. Here's another tidy, walker-friendly German city. Most everything is clean and in good order, and everybody is outside and active. People are friendly, and the sidewalk cafes are buzzing. Like Cologne, Frankfurt has a pretty extensive shopping district downtown, with large pedestrian-only plazas and a fun mixture of new and old architecture. The city straddles the Main river, just upstream of its union with the Rhine, and the river has walking / biking paths along both sides which appear to be heavily used. In fact, there are bike lanes all over the city, and once again it seems that a fair bit of the population uses bikes to get around.

Our hotel.

Obligatory hotel room view (the hordes clamber for it!)

As always, my attention turns to transportation issues. A couple blocks behind our hotel here is the Hauptbahnhof (which--somebody help me out with my German--translates roughly as "main train house" I think), the primary train station for the city. (I just spoke to the front desk girl who confirmed my suspicions, and said there is typically a hauptbahnhof in most larger cities, abbreviated Hbf on the train boards to differentiate it from the other stations in the city.) And once again I'm struck by how differently Europeans and Americans approach transportation. They put the big train station right near the center of town, and the city's bus and local train lines--above-ground and subway; they have both--all meet up here. So a visitor can get off their train and quickly get anywhere in the city on public transit. What a concept. The station itself is an architectural marvel, with its soaring glass and steel train sheds. The stations are a relic from an older time, I know, a time when train travel was an event. The sheds' height, rather than being intentionally lofty and grand, is intended to get the coal smoke and steam from the idling locomotives away from travelers; this was a concern during the heyday of train station design a hundred years ago. A modern station would have no such requirements spurring its design, and so we get Penn Station in New York, which is not so much a station as a collection of tunnels that vent into a common manifold.

The FRA Hauptbahnhof.

The central one of six or seven trainsheds.

Anyway, Frankfurt's Hauptbahnhof, in addition to being architecturally fascinating, has all manner of shopping--food, books & magazines & newspapers, electrical gadgets, some clothing--to cater to the needs of the thousands who pass through it every day. This isn't so different from, say, New York's Grand Central or Penn Stations, but you have to go to our biggest city to see it. Otherwise, trains are pretty much dead in the US of A. You either drive your car, or you take Greyhound, which is like a facial tattoo denoting desperation. Instead, we're all about airports, and travelers are expected to take their car to and from the airport. With a vast and largely empty country, this works. But how refreshing to just be able to walk in and out of the train stations here, without the phalanx of TSA agents (who too often strike me as high school dropouts who stood in their mirrored sunglasses tapping a billy club in front of the mirror at home saying "Respect my authoritah" before they answered the call to service). You can bring your dog on the train. You can bring your bicycle. You can buy food at the station and take it on board. There's almost unlimited space for luggage, and you get to just bring it with you. You get to walk around. During the trip. And you can actually see something enroute. When I'm going from Philly to Los Angeles, I'm very glad there's an airplane to get me there; but it frustrates me that Susan and I cannot get from Appleton to Chicago on the train for a whirlwind weekend (not to mention that Chicago is probably three times the size of Frankfurt and its rail station is pathetic compared to FRA's Hauptbahnhof).





I went back at sunset to get a sandwich, and the station is virtually as busy at 9:pm as it was at 4:pm. Trains come and go continually, and most of the shops and kiosks are still open after dark. Likewise, I'm told that (with our strange sleep schedules) if I'm peckish in the middle of the night in CGN, the train station is open 24 / 7 and has good food.



It's too bad that I'll likely not ever get a longer stretch here than these 18 hours. Since the MD-11 doesn't stop here, my longer layovers are likely to be in CGN. At least FRA is only a short train ride away if I find myself with a weekend in CGN and want a change of scenery.



***

Addendum: The Transport Situation.

I learned after posting the above that the reason we go in and out of FRA instead of CGN is because there is very limited service to CGN by US airlines. There's not that much commercial positioning done, but there's more of it going thru FRA than I realized.

I also learned that the company encourages us to use the excellent train service between the FRA station I so enjoyed and the one I love in CGN. If I had known this I would surely have taken this option rather than the 1:30 a.m. cab ride for the hundred miles to CGN airport (I do love the trains, you know).

Not that the cab ride wasn't interesting. The cabbie was a thousand years old, driving what appeared to be his personal car, a quite new Mercedes E-Class diesel (one of the few diesels sold in the US, though they exist elsewhere in the world in several variants, and I'm not sure which motor was in this guy's car). The hotel doorman pointed the guy out to me parked at the curb; I had expected a van or a marked car and dismissed the Mercedes pulling up as a hotel guest. When I came out, the driver was standing at the trunk, hunched over and with a noticeable palsy to his head and hands. He knew two words of English. But he must have been a race driver in a former life, as he drove the entire distance like he was fleeing from the polizei. This was, I believe, my first time on the vaunted autobahn, and he made good use of the absence of any posted speed limits, traveling never below 120kph and often up to and slightly beyond 180 kph (75-115 mph). He kept the radio on during the drive, and bobbed his head jauntily at the music, occasionally even conducting with his right hand a bit.

But--and here was the interesting part for me--he didn't let anything distract him from the primary task of driving, and it was not done absently no matter the speed. Both hands on the wheel virtually all the time, and it was thrilling to see strict lane discipline by him and everyone else on the freeway. The leftmost lane was NEVER occupied except to pass, and everyone made it a priority to to get back as far right as possible after passing. He even moved back right after a pass when he could see another pass impending ahead of him. All trucks were exclusively in the right lane, in a (much slower) constant-speed caravan. One begins to see why the Germans were so slow and reluctant to pepper their cars with cup holders. Driving at speed requires focus and concentration, and things will go awry very quickly at 100+ mph. If you're doing this you're not sipping on anything. A couple times he change lanes with a slight abruptness, or stepped on the brakes if something ahead did not look right, and again one begins to understand the German focus on stout, performance-oriented running gear. What seems routine in our driving takes on a different quality at speed. A spirited slow-down from 120 mph taxes one's braking system far beyond our casual city driving and in a manner quite different from, say, a panic stop from 40 mph. And lastly, when things do go wrong (which, fortunately, they did not for me), one appreciates the vault-like structure of the Mercedes-Benz. The safety features--crumple zones, high-strength steel cages, safety glass, anti-lock brakes, airbags, seat belt pretensioners, etc., etc.--suddenly appear far less like marketing ploys or silly luxuries for the rich and far more like things intended to save your life in a crisis.

Lastly , as concerns German radio stations, two words: acid trip. This guy picked a station for the first half of our drive that featured a positively bizarre mix of styles. There was the occasional '60s American / British pop hit by the Byrds or the Hollies, but most music was in German. There were a couple country-western songs--German country music!--with the singer doing his best to conjure a Brad Paisley kinda sound. Then there was the Chorus of Heidis and Helgas doing a kind of jaunty ABBA-style of singing over a thinly disguised oom-pah backdrop (the old head REALLY bobbed at that one, the rhythm and the palsy giving a kind of compound wave of appreciation). We were treated to Tom Jones's It's Not Unusual, with carefully copied instrumentals and the fatherland's best leather-panted imitator at the microphone. Surreal, even a little sickening. Lastly, and my favorite, the Village People's YMCA, but with different English words! Crazy For You sung to the tune & rhythm of YMCA. Why change the words and then sing it in English? It sounded like someone doing karaoke.

But it kept me awake.

Vice and Virtue

I wonder if a person doesn't reach a certain age and see all of life repeating itself. It's a truism that there are something like 12 stories in life, the rest being a question of detail.

Stephan Elliott's 2008 film Easy Virtue feels to me like a variation on a familiar theme. A young man from a fading upper crust 1920's British family, John Whittaker (Ben Barnes), impetuously marries a brazen American divorcée Larita (Jessica Biel), and the newlyweds return home to the Whittaker estate to find his family mortified at his choice. The rest of the two hours lets us watch these particular dominoes fall. Even when the details are at times unexpected, the general thrust of the story is distinctly familiar.

The one twist to the otherwise age-old two-sides-of-the-tracks storyline is that the upper crust Whittakers are small-minded and provincial while Larita is not only the expected American upstart (being a racing driver and all), but also, rather inexplicably, highly educated and erudite and always ready with a barbed comeback to the slings and arrows from John Whittaker's befuddled family.

So the story's freshness isn't much of a player, and there seems little else in this adaptation of the Noel Coward play for us to latch onto. Well, except for Jessica Biel's performance, which she pulls off pretty heroically given a script that never quite gets us inside anyone's head. I'm actually a little hesitant to credit her in this way, as I suspect I'm willing to overlook a lot just to see Ms. Biel parading her beauty on the screen--she is stunning to look at. But I'm trying to be objective, and I'm not out on a limb much to credit her with breathing some life into her character.

The rest of the cast, however able and expert, gives us little to like, very little opportunity for sympathy. Mr. Whittaker (John's father, played by the dependable Colin Firth) has returned a decade ago from the Great War a changed and disengaged man. The family matriarch (Kristin Scott Thomas, who is easing her middle-aged self into Maggie-Smith-in-waiting territory) is left to oversee the estate as financial difficulties force the family to liquidate for survival. Even beyond the dire circumstances Mrs. Whittaker is difficult in the extreme, a cold and judgmental woman who never misses an opportunity to harp and slash at Larita, or anyone else. Her one talent is to spew acid; everything that comes out of her mouth decimates someone. Her two daughters--John Whittaker's sisters--are similarly disfunctional, and it all makes for a stew of clash and discomfort into which Larita is meant to be the bit of sun and spice. There is wit aplenty from all corners (as one would expect from a Noel Coward story), and for all the unsavory characters at least the script keeps one reasonably entertained.

Apart from the newlyweds who, at the start of the movie can barely keep their hands off each other (and who grow increasingly distant as the story progresses, something that is little explored), the only bit of empathy and understanding in the film is between Larita and John Whittaker's estranged father. His time in the trenches has left him with little taste for pretty much everything that absorbs his wife's and kids' lives. In their rejection of the little arbitrary niceties that Mrs. Whittaker treats as gospel, Larita and Mr. Whittaker are much closer to sharing an outlook than anyone else in the film. And it's almost enough to carry the film, but not quite; this side of the story comes off as almost an afterthought. Likewise, Larita is meant to embody the spirit of the Roaring 20s and the Jazz Age and all, but again this detail comes off as incidental. The film is nice to look at, though perhaps without the attention to detail of, say, the similarly-set Gosford Park.

By the film's end, at which point we figure one of two or three things must happen, it was tough for me to care much which option prevailed, which leads me to conclude that this is a noble effort that misses its mark. For my part, I was happy to keep watching Ms. Biel parade around in varied and expensive frocks, but clearly there are limits to what an actress's commitment to her personal trainer can do to save a film. And this one proves the point.

Grade: C+

Yet Another Republican Scumbag

Man, but the Right sure can pump out the hypo-Christian sleezeballs, no? Another white guy wrapping himself in the shroud and waving the flag while shitting on whoever gets in the way of his power grab. It's not John Ensign's inability to remain simply truthful to his wife and good to his promises--reprehensible as this might be; it's that, true to Republican form, he's up under the lights castigating everyone else who fails to hit the high standards he demands, even exactly as he is pulling the very same morally bankrupt stunt!

From the AP:

Ensign has been a rising star among conservatives, speaking out against President Barack Obama's stimulus package, statehood for the District of Columbia and union-organizing legislation and in favor of gun owners' rights. Ensign has been a member of the men's ministry the Promise Keepers, a Christian ministry.

He had been highly critical of former Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, who served in Congress for a quarter-century when he was arrested in an airport bathroom sex sting. Ensign stopped short of urging him to resign but suggested strongly that he should.

"I wouldn't put myself hopefully in that kind of position, but if I was in a position like that, that's what I would do," Ensign said. "He's going to have to answer that for himself." In the end, Craig served out his term.

This is who they pick for their "rising star." Here's the Promise I wish he would Keep: resign your seat, go back to your hole in the ground and spend the next 20 years genuflecting at the Church of STFU.

Almaty

(I wonder if this is what it's like for Bruce Willis...)

A couple days into my long weekend here, I'm having trouble summarizing this place. It was hard to figure even before I got here, and it's only slightly easier after seeing it in the flesh. We have a place on our union website where crewmembers can put in their two cents' worth about places, both flying concerns and layover cautions / points of interest. And no other place to which we fly has garnered the number and extremity of comments as Almaty.

Hotel room view.

A former Soviet Socialist Republic, Kazakhstan declared its independence in 1991 after the fall of the Soviet Union. While no longer a Communist state, it is a "democracy" like Dick Cheney dreams about, having granted its president, Nursultan Nazarbayev (former head of the Kazakhstan Communist Party) a lifetime tenure in office and full veto power over the work of the legislature (and in any case it sounds like they only really work on legislation he proposes). Wikipedia says Kazakhstan is the world's ninth largest country (by area), and the largest landlocked country. The country is home to over 16 and a half million people; Almaty about 1.4 million.

("There's no place like... well, there aren't many places like... OK, yeah, it's a dump.")

Like Warsaw, Almaty retains a strong primer coat of Soviet style, with most of its architecture and the transportation system all looking like they were lifted right from 1970 Moscow. But apparently its economy has made some forward strides, and Monday morning finds a city buzzing with activity.

(...even if this picture doesn't show it.)

Crew comments about Almaty have been sharply divided between those who have run into trouble (or, more accurately, those who know somebody who knows somebody who has run into trouble) and those who feel the bad press is quite unwarranted. At its darkest, Almaty is said to be virtually run by the Russian mob, and we are urged to use great caution in dealing with people. There are several harrowing stories, among them a fellow who, after a night at a bar, went back to the hotel with a local woman and, after a bit of playtime, was accused of rape and thrown in the local jail. The resources of the entire crew were needed to bail the guy out, and the money was divvied out right in front of them between the accuser and police and judge. (Now, as a "pilot story," I'm inclined to discount about 90% of this; and I always have to stop the teller mid-story when they get to the "...and so he agreed to take her back to his hotel room..." part: TIME OUT! Don't you DARE continue from this point and tell me how this guy got a raw deal! I begin to think wives should be allowed to attach a GPS ankle bracelet with audio / video capability to these Fox Noise scumbags.) And on the other hand, there are many reports of guys' favorite restaurants and how to get around and scenic walking routes.

Almaty lawn care.

Anyway, I didn't know quite what to expect. We got here just after noon local time on Sunday, and I went out walking around. There were a lot of young men just sitting around, singly and in small groups, loitering in the afternoon shade, keeping an eye on the goings on. But none of them seemed particularly menacing, and everybody left me alone. Monday I took a much more extensive walk, and found much the same aspect. The sidewalks were full of people walking or sitting, and everyone seemed to take note of me but no one payed me any attention beyond that. There is an instant of initial eye contact, but then everyone just minds their own business. In contrast to Cologne and Warsaw and even Shanghai, there is almost no English spoken here, but people are patient and happy to let one point and gesture one's way to a purchase.

(Notice that everybody but the one dude is looking at me in this picture. And I took about 2 seconds of setup. The Soviet Union may not actually be dead.)

A millennium ago I took a couple years of Russian at the University of Minnesota. Kazakh is the "state language" of Kazakhstan, and Russian the "official language" (whatever that means), and most signs are in Russian. Now, my 2 years of mediocre studies almost 30 years ago would have enabled me at the time to ask where the bathroom was. That's about it. (And I would have had to pray that their answer came in the form of a finger pointed at a nearby door; that would have been the limit of my understanding. Even the four-year students were not really considered to be conversational, as the language is so difficult.) Today, if I take long enough, I can sound out the Cyrillic words, which yields one about a 30% payoff, and my dusty memory yields me a few more words. But where Russian deviates into Kazakh is unclear to me, and it just makes for a larger body of incomprehension.

I've noted that Kazakhs are more reserved and stoical than the other recently-visited places on this trip. People do smile and laugh, but most are taciturn and interactions with people, even hotel and restaurant service people, are terse and all-business. I remember reading an article a few months back which noted that Russians (who are perhaps of much the same cast as the Kazakhs) looked upon habitually-smiling Americans as foolish and silly. One has a bit of that sense here too, though I have not been aware of anyone's scorn toward my sunny disposition.

As always, I'm taken by transportation matters. I've seen a couple above-ground trolley car lines, the rail cars themselves looking quite old and dirty and tattered. The tracks look just maintained enough to keep the trains running, and the thumps and squeals from the humpy rails, like an oxcart on cobbles, announce the coming train from a block or two away. Drivers here are quite crazy and aggressive, and they give way to pedestrians only very reluctantly. So the train letting people off in the middle of the road seems pretty hazardous.




On all the other streets, a veritable armada of buses ferry people around. They are everywhere, and typically full of riders, especially at rush hour when it's standing-room only, the standees jammed in like sardines, making it challenging to get the doors closed. The buses themselves cover quite a spectrum, from old and small and almost agricultural to more modern (though few of these). About 2/3 or 3/4 of the bus fleet are diesels, and the others are electric, taking their power from an overhead catenary. The few new-ish buses I saw were electric, though most of the electrics looked as battered and tired as the diesels.

"Didja ever have the feelin' you was bein' watched?..."

All the diesel buses are manual transmission, as they were in Shanghai, which would seem odd to me except that virtually every other automotive vehicle in these places is manual shift as well. Even the oldest buses I drove back in the day in MSP were automatics. (We appear to be the only country who collectively have forgotten how to drive a stick.) The diesels, through age or cost considerations, are old-school diesels: rattly and belching black smoke (trucks and delivery vehicles too). In the middle of the morning rush hour the air was notably grimy from the commute. None of the buses are air conditioned, and most have curtains to draw against the sunshine to try and control the temperature, but I couldn't help thinking that a packed-to-capacity smokey old rattle-trap of a bus taking commuters home after a hot day in the office would be a rather farm-like experience.

Especially with the wide variety of hygiene standards in force here. As I walk around the city, any woman in front of me always smells fresh and lovely , but the guys are a mixed experience. Maybe 10% are perfumed in some way; most of them, about 50% have no odor at all, and the other 40% vary from slightly animal to pointedly rank. I remember my Russian teacher from college saying that Russian society was not nearly so obsessed with cleanliness as Americans were, and I wonder how much that idea applies down here.

Odd things. On my first walk, I saw several occasions of individual women flagging down a car and then talking through the open window to the driver; and then she got in and they drove away. By the third or fourth one I knew something was up. In one case there was a policeman right there. Is prostitution legal, I wondered? Is this really how it's done, in the middle of the day from a curb at a busy bus station? Later I saw a couple guys doing the same thing. Is Almaty smaller than I thought and everybody knows everybody else? Back at my room, I read my notes more carefully (and looked on the Wikipedia site for Almaty) and learned that this is one form of their local taxi service: you stand at the curb and hold your hand out, and generally within a minute or two someone--in their private car--will stop. You negotiate a destination and price (generally two or three dollars' worth) and off you go. Fascinating. The street you stand on and the direction of the traffic you flag is enough to ensure a high likelihood that a driver will be able to satisfy your travel needs. Apparently a number of our pilots have used it and nobody's yet awakened with their face in a bucket of ice water and their corneas missing. Most of the cars I saw doing this were old and ratty, but it's really an excellent way to cover some costs (and help reduce societal usage of fuel). If you did this on every drive you'd at least operate your car for free, and might even make some headway towards a payment.

My timing was bad. Here two middle-aged women are using the citizens' taxi service.

I've seen several places with lawn-watering systems in the form of big, permanent irrigation pipes laid above ground (and painted green) with multiple offshoots which spray water around the space. But then nothing gets mowed, not least because the pipes are in the way (chicken or egg: do they not mow because of the pipes? Or are the pipes this way OK because nobody was going to mow anyway?). But I've seen little mowed grass anywhere, even at the nicer hotels. In fact, I've been surprised a few times to see people going in and out of buildings I was sure were abandoned, mostly because the yards look like abandoned US buildings' yards would look. (There are a lot of abandoned buildings here, and maybe the general lawn care ethos is intended to camouflage the abandoned buildings to keep property values up...) (For that matter, there are a lot of vacant spaces even in the occupied buildings.)

The sidewalks are made of a mixture of materials--concrete, pavers, crushed gravel, tar macadam, dirt--all of which are crumbling and none of which look less than 30 years old. And the sidewalks are bounded typically with bare dirt or perhaps weeds. There is no manicuring of these spaces at all. And yet the trash is almost always picked up, and I saw quite a few people tidying up their walkways with old witch brooms or rakes. The air is dirty and there is grime and dust everywhere, but people do not seem to litter, and there's not a lot of graffiti. This constant sweeping and picking up makes me think the decrepitude of the buildings and infrastructure is partly due to the harsh climate. It's not a dirty place, exactly, and it's not poor in the sense of some of the tropical nations where there is no infrastructure at all. It reminds me a little of some of the industrial places in the US after the industry has pulled up stakes.

Dirt sidewalk with open storm sewer.

Nice tar sidewalk, still with open storm sewer. Lots of heavy iron fences around the city.

The convenience stores are quite different from what I'm used to. My beloved Diet Coke is available (in the slightly vile Coke Light variant), but only at a few select places. The convenience stores concentrate on magazines and newspapers and cigarettes and a few other things, but not particularly on snacks or soda (and, perhaps subsequently, people are mostly thin, if not especially athletic). And no attempt whatsoever is made to beautify any of these places. I thought at first that these little cubicles were actually storage sheds for street maintenance tools or the like, as they are often filthy and inconspicuous.

The Kazakh Seven-Eleven.

The big intersections have street under-passes, which often have little shops in them. But most of the stores are unused, and some of the tunnels are unlighted and seem quite spooky. Even where there are functioning stores in the tunnels they are often little more than a room with a bare light bulb and makeshift shelves. I saw one woman preparing some kind of food--there were several people waiting for their orders--in a small, bare room with two huge ovens and a card table and chair. That was it. No sign, no wall decorations. It looked like a KGB interrogation chamber. I saw another, a clothes cleaning service, I think, that had a board-and-sawhorses counter in one room, and in the adjacent room clearly the proprietor's sleeping chamber (bed, chair, side table). I can't imagine feeling secure there sleeping behind a window at 2:am in a tunnel off a busy street. Maybe it's only for naps, but even then. (I went by a day later and the same windows were blacked out.)

There are no street signs anywhere. I got a map from the hotel, and it struck one immediately that having the map is useless if the streets on the map cannot be identified on foot or in the car. One can use the huge mountain range to the South to orient, but finding things takes a bit of trial and error (or experience). It's not unpleasant to hunt and peck, and the city is pedestrian-friendly enough. But you'd need to take some time and learn your way around if you wanted to get somewhere efficiently. Maybe a transportation map would be in order. (And that reminds me: no bicycles whatsoever.) And as for the street names, the map is instructive of the city's recent past: the street names are listed on an index with the old names alongside. These include: Kommunistichesky Ave, Pravdy Ave., Kosmonavtov St. (the Russian Baikonur Spaceport is in Kazakhstan), Lenin St., Gorky St., Sovetskaya St., Karl Marx St., etc.

Almost all places of any size have guards at the door. I don't see a lot of armament on these guards, but the security presence is marked. The small grocery store in the mall I went to today had several security people keeping an eye on things, in addition to the security in the mall itself. The driveway to our hotel has a guard and a gate at it, and he circles all incoming vehicles with mirror to look under the chassis. (I wonder at this: there is an entry driveway with a guard shack and a plastic gate arm and, on the other side, an unsupervised exit gate with the same arm. What person savvy enough to plant an explosive device under a car wouldn't think to just enter the exit side? Maybe the scrutiny is for devices planted unwittingly on an innocent person's car.) There are quite a few police booths around town, usually with a couple guys in uniform sitting outside on folding chairs, wearing huge flying-nun hats (like a pilot hat with several times the flare). On my divergent walks over the past three days I've seen these police booths all over the place. Again, one wonders what to make of this. Is this a holdover from the Big Brother Soviet era? Or does the new government operate exactly the same? Is it a reflection of ongoing security problems in the city? (This seems unlikely, if the stories about police corruption and collusion with the mob are to be believed.) In any case, the city seems quite safe; I saw no evidence of malarky at all.

The WWII Memorial at Panfilov Park.

I walked today over to Panfilov Park, where there is a huge memorial to soldiers who fought in all of the USSR's wars. The war memorial is huge and foreboding, and serves as the terminus to one end of the memorial plaza, which includes battle sites and an eternal flame. On the other end is a very Soviet-looking official building.

Elsewhere in the park--right next door to the memorial, actually--is an old cathedral, which is billed as the second tallest wooden structure in the world. I managed to step inside right at the beginning of a service. No organ, but a very competent small choir was singing á capella some very dirge-like selections (along the lines of Rachmaninov's or Gretchaninov's Vespers, though not quite so inspired--but the acoustic and effect was the same). At first I thought it was a recording, they were so good.

The Cathedral in Panfilov Park.

I sat for a while and listened to the singers, and watched the be-shawled babushkas with sensible shoes and no ankles hobble around to the stations and bow & scrape to the various pictures. Most of the old women actually leaned over to kiss the picture frame, demonstrating firsthand how infectious disease has spread throughout human history. (It's one thing to show up to a beautiful place and be calmed and soothed by the ritual and the music and the beauty. It just seems other-worldly to me to see people engaged in the ritual and treating it as something real, crossing oneself again and again and kneeling and kissing icons, etc. But that's another post.)

Sorry for the blurry picture. No flash (I probably wasn't supposed to take the picture at all).

So in the end this has been a pretty enjoyable layover: good hotel, decent food, not a bad place to walk around. Of course I'd prefer Shanghai or Cologne (and I'm told that Hong Kong and Sydney are fantabulous), but from my brief exposure I'd say the bad reputation is undeserved. We'll see how I feel after a winter weekend at -30°F.

The New First World

Now this is more like it.

Even ignoring my predilection for cities (and Shanghai being one of the largest populations on the planet), the place is just intensely interesting. The main thoroughfares are busy--everything is busy, Manhattan busy--and very much like a bustling European capital, but the side streets remind one of old movie footage of Hong Kong. Skinny old men on bicycles mix with BMWs, and 20-somethings hawk all manner of products on the sidewalks and inside the shopping centers. Down the side streets, everybody has laundry hanging out in the dirty breeze.

Hotel room view. The haze is a regular feature, I guess.

A bicycle courier.

We flew in about 2:30 am local time, and the haze pretty much obscured our view of anything. Likewise, on the long drive into town to our hotel the visibility was about 1/2 mile. This, I am told, is pretty typical, as there is so much pollution that fog forms very easily. After a fitful sleep (in a surprisingly not-fresh bed), I was down in the lobby for breakfast about 9:30, after which I took a cab (clunky-looking, but solid Volkswagens called--like something from a Monty Python episode--the "Santana 3000" model; there are thousands of these in the city) over to a favorite market of pilots on layover, The 580. I had no particular shopping list, being mostly interested to see what things were on offer in contrast to what I'm familiar with from NYC's Chinatown. And it was very much the same: watches, purses & handbags, some jewelery, wallets & scarves, t-shirts, tech gadgets.

Under the bridge on the right, the 580 Market.

Well OK, I might have been looking for a watch. We may recall the saga of The Watch from a year or so ago. I subsequently sold that watch at a party to some guy who took a shine to it (even making five bucks on the deal!). But after this year's NYC trip, I kind of regretted selling it, as I didn't see a single Bell & Ross that didn't seem like, well, a cheap copy. Last year's began to seem like a real find. So when I found an even better version at the 580 today, I figured I better spring for it. I may get a photo of that up later. After several booths with Bell & Ross offerings I did find a quiet vendor at the 580 who had a little nicer selection. I immediately homed in on the most expensive Bell & Ross she had (of course) and she insisted, after coming down about 25% in price, that there just wasn't any more room in the high-end model. Suckered or not, I tended to believe her; and given that it was a better deal than the one I got last year in NYC, I was happy.

After leaving the shops, I was really tempted to walk around. But I stupidly left the hotel without a map or having spent any time orienting myself. So I reluctantly took a cab back to the hotel (a decision I regretted less when even the cabbie had to phone someone to figure out where the Hilton was, even though I gave him a card with the address and a map on it--it's only a couple miles). But after I got back and dropped off my stuff in the hotel room, I went down and got a map from the concierge and set out on foot. And about two miles down the main shopping road from the hotel was... the 580 Market. Go figure. The main shopping thoroughfare in Shanghai is Nanjing Road, running East / West. A couple blocks from the hotel, which is on one end of the shopping district, the road runs three and a half miles East to the Huangpu River. This street alone could keep a serious shopper busy for weeks. I walked the entirety of it, and I must have passed at least 150 shopping centers and countless stand-alone vendors along that length. In most of these shopping centers, booths and vendors are very densely packed. While there is a huge amount of overlap in what they are selling, there are clearly deals to be found for one who knows where to look.

The street culture is a jumble of Chinese and European and American. English words are spread around liberally--there is a lot of English in the city, on a majority of street signs--usually as an accent in a larger Chinese-language context. And there are lots of English language t-shirts, with charming grammatical errors (on a lovely young woman, "And over just here more delight.")

Nanjing Road scenes.

The one big difference in the shopping (particularly the 580 versus NYC's Chinatown) is the assertiveness of the sales people. Many clerks are young kids--early 20s, say--who appear to be running their own little booths. And every single person courts you aggressively, following you and talking to you. A couple guys walked along with me for several minutes, all the while yammering away about what I might need. Many of the merchants touch you as you walk by, and some even try to detain you. One guy in particular held tightly to my arm and I had to wrench myself away. I notice that there were very few Asians shopping in the 580, and those who did were not accosted in the same way as The Great Fat White Westerner. (It needn't be sinister, I know; I'm clearly a visitor, and visitors often come here to shop.) But even out on Nanjing Road later I was hailed by quite a number of merchants and even women who were presumably selling their services as a shopping guide (and perhaps more?). They automatically addressed me in English and assumed I was American. In all this I have no desire to be rude, but there just seemed no point in encouraging anything, so I ignored all of it, just pretending not to understand English (which ruse apparently fooled no one, as they just kept talking to me in English, even when I had not uttered a word).

There seems little point in saying this aggression was off-putting, but really I have to wonder whether the tactic even works. I would have been MUCH more inclined to look through a store's offerings if someone had not been practically undressing me in their attempts to get me to buy (maybe it's my Buddha-like physique). The slightest hesitation at a shop caused a veritable feeding frenzy of activity from the sales staff (on top of the tsales tsunami that greets every passing shopper), often with several people inquiring simultaneously: Watches? Rolex? T shirt? ("We have big size!!" in case I was hesitating on that account.) You need scarf? Camera battery? Camera case? On and on. I saw a number of American couples in the shops, several looking really overwhelmed and out of their depth. The innate desire to be "nice" had them quickly roped into some carnivore's store and there was no getting loose now.

In the 580 virtually every store (each of which is really just a cube, a stall) has a hidden door somewhere with a small back room where the "good stuff" is kept. And a premium seems to be placed on getting a body into the back room. I did go back a couple of times to see if they had my Bell & Ross, but the crush in the back room was even more off-putting than the pitch to get one back there in the first place. In both places, there were more people in the back room than the staff could help, and customers were clearly unhappy at the service. Again, I just wonder at the functionality of the whole model. (In a shopping center later in the day, not the Western-favored 580, the presence of the Fat White Guy took some people by surprise, as chatting girls looked up and, startled, launched their spiel. ("Yadda yadda yadda... Oh you! You need purse? Come here look at scarf!" etc.)

The blood-thirsty salespeople notwithstanding, I could spend days here (not to shop, though I'm happy to do some of that too). There is this strong sense that this part of Shanghai (and this little part of China) is sporting a shiny new entrepreneurial outfit on a very old frame. But for Chairman Mao on the currency (they even left his big, nasty-ass mole in place on the engravings), Shanghai feels about as Communist as Chicago. It's easy here to forget the China one hears about regularly on the news. Evidence of this duality, subtle and overt, is everywhere, from the sparkling and impressively huge modern airport terminal to the back alleys of town which take one back a couple hundred years. And this impression is pretty strong even from a single afternoon walking along a single route. While Shanghai may not quite match New York City's population density (and perhaps it does), it has twice the population, so the crush of humanity spreads over a vast area. Our 40-minute cab ride into town from the airport passed an unending parade of high-rise housing blocks, mile after mile after mile of them. I think I could spend a lot of time getting to know this place (or know it as well as a foreigner who doesn't speak a lick of the language can know it).

Alas, this time it's a mere 24 hours, with a couple sleep periods wedged in. But I look forward to my next visit.

Part bike, part trike, part truck, part personal transportation: the "Truick." (OK, maybe not.)

A 4-way pedestrian footbridge leaving our hotel.

Marco Polo said it best: "Let them eat bread." (Marie Antoinette was a plagiarist.)

Breakfast & Diet Coke: 259.90! (luckily, not dollars.)

Warzsawa

The Palace of Culture: Stalin's gift to Warsaw. Workers Unite (in your opposition to scary architecture)!

So I spent the morning roaming around Warsaw, birthplace of my buddy Chopin (well, a stone's throw from here). I checked into my room and availed myself of the hotel's fantabulous massive breakfast buffet and, map in hand, headed off on foot. As I suspected would be the case, I was pretty quickly sore from the eight-plus miles I walked yesterday in Cologne (added to several ten-mile days in NY a couple days back), so after three hours I was about done. But that was still enough time to give me a feel for things (still, one hates to miss an opportunity to explore a new place).

The Vistula. Not much riverfront presence.

A much better use of water: the fountain in Saski Park.

This is an interesting place with a turbulent history. In the past century it has played host to a brutal occupation by Nazi Germany followed by several decades of communist rule. Probably a direct result of this last fact, WAW is supposed to rank as one of Europe's most unattractive cities, so I wasn't sure what to expect. Certainly it's a far cry from the meticulous order of Germany generally or the vitality of Cologne specifically. Everything seems gray or tending that way, and roads and sidewalks are tired and a bit crumbly. But it could be far worse: the neglect seems maybe one of wanting funds rather than disinterest. Trash is mostly picked up, and public squares and parks are suffering from long grass and some weeds but not from trash. The one exception to this seems to be broken glass; it's everywhere, on sidewalks and in public squares, mostly from thrown bottles. I don't remember seeing a single piece of broken glass in Germany, so I wonder what the deal is here for there to be so much of it. It seems like the residue of some late night hooliganism, but who knows?

A Bad Photography tradition: the view from my hotel room window.

Our hotel is in a newer part of town, so I decided to head for the historic "old town," which is a good 40 minute walk away. There seems be some religious holiday going on today, so all the churches were open and most businesses were closed. But this enabled me to poke my head inside the churches as I went. I reached the far side of old town at the Vistula, and walked back along the river to the first bridge and went across. Another big church over there, and a couple interesting old buildings. Then back across a more modern suspension bridge, and up the hill toward the hotel again.

Sparkling new Old Town.

Our hotel is across the street from a pretty extensive high-end shopping mall. I don't mean to overplay the whole Soviet bloc vibe of WAW, but there's a kernel of truth in the association; and this hip shopping mall here is anomalous with its expensive architecture and construction, expensive stores, Western vendors. Whereas CGN has extensive regions of high-end shopping, WAW seems a poorer, less-touristy place, and the snooty mall is clearly not where the typical citizen shops. The mall is connected to one of WAW's primary rail station, the Warsaw Centralna Station, which runs below ground in the intervening space between our hotel on one side and the mall on the other. Six or eight lanes of road traffic plus a large transport terminal lay atop the station, which then seems like a gigantic subway station. The whole business is dimly-lit and not very clean, and even when new I imagine it had a dirty concrete aspect (It's striking to me how many buildings here are clad in concrete-colored stucco--that is, not colored at all except what the building materials yield). Dark hallways that connect the various entries with the station complex are lined with NY Chinatown-style booths and vendors, and during the harsh Polish winter this place must have an odd feeling.

On the left: train station. The Chernobyl-like melted structure to the center-right is the mall.

As in the other European cities I've visited, WAW seems to have a much more extensive public transportation system than anywhere in the US (except maybe NYC). Buses are everywhere, painted several different color schemes, which makes me think there are several service providers, and everyone seems to ride them. Car traffic does not seem as extensive as in CGN. There are also several types of what look like Soviet-era above-ground trains, and, at least by the hotel, underground trains as well (though I don't remember seeing subway stops on my trek to old town). Taxicabs are still Mercedes variety mostly, with the occasional Skoda or VW.

Lenin's Chariot: the Trabant!

Looking at the little guide book from the hotel as I had my breakfast, I was surprised to learn how extensively Warsaw was decimated in WWII. I knew that it was harshly treated at the hands of the German occupiers, but it seems that the city's residents, in a kind of retaliatory self-immolation, tore the place apart brick-by-brick in an attempt to get the Nazis to abandon the city. So virtually everything one sees today postdates the war--since nothing survived it--including the "old town," which is a faithful reconstruction of what was originally there. I don't mean to judge--god knows I could not presume to know how a city leveled by aggressive warfare should cope--but I can't figure out what to think of this reconstruction. The simple fact that nothing that appears old is actually old kind of saps my interest, in the same way as I dislike vinyl siding or decorative shutters on the outside of a house. The war was a fact, as was the destruction of this city; it looks much like it used to, apparently, but it's a simulation, like Paris on the Vegas strip or a Disney castle. CGN makes for an interesting contrast, its war damage having been replaced with mostly present-day architecture, with a few small regions strategically reconstructed. In some cases, the surviving old is joined daringly to the very modern (like the Lindt Chocolate Museum).

All this raises questions about what it is for a culture to endure. Is the culture and legacy of a place just a function of its buildings and artifacts? Surely it's a matter of the endurance of its people. And yet it's exactly because people are so transient--individually we don't last very long--that the culture's materiél is used to mark the continuing line. So when a brutal occupier decimates our buildings and our stuff, what of us remains? Just what exists in memory, what is passed down from parent to child, I guess. Still, I cannot shake this feeling that WAW is a fairly young city trying to connect with a past that is irretrievably gone. (But OK, after three hours I don't know shit.)

Some old stuff survives.

Poland is officially part of Europe, but they have not adopted the Euro (which to me sounds like "She's an American but she's not a citizen"). So I'm gradually collecting a bunch of foreign currencies that will molder in my bag until the next time I make this trip. The Polish zloti is worth about 1/3 of a dollar, so whatever is left from my withdrawal of 100 zloti will not amount to much. I still have some Euros left from CGN, but I'm back there in a week or so. Different currencies will prevail, of course, in China and Kazakhstan. I guess one could always just swipe a card and leave the exchange up to Visa.

(Across the Vistula from downtown, this building is clearly older than 45 years. So, are we seeing remnants of war damage? Or is it just falling apart?)

Which reminds me of another thing. A high proportion of MD-11 pilots seem to carry an iPhone, and many (especially the captains) have an international plan. They say they keep their calling to a minimum, mostly just to check in or to arrange a time to Skype, and it costs them about $35 or $40 a month for the privilege. It also enables family members to dial your familiar number and reach you, wherever you are. For my part, I find it really sucks to be suddenly deprived of all my iPhone resources. How quickly one becomes accustomed to having the map & GPS functions, and email checking, etc. I have Skype on the computer, but I'm learning that a fair number of our hotels do not have free wifi. I also have Skype on the iPhone (though I've not used it yet), but it requires a strong--and free--wifi signal to use it. So communications are an issue. Susan and I are used to talking four or five times a day, and to suddenly not be able to talk at all for a couple days, well, requires an adjustment. With an on-the-road lifestyle like this, one's cell phone is the thing that enables one to feel almost as though one is not really gone; to be deprived of that feels old school.



Next up: Shanghai.

Köln, Part Zwei

It's hard not to love this place. We flew yesterday about 7PM, and I had a spectacular view out my window of downtown CGN and the surrounding area. It was harder than hell not to snap a photo or two, and I was restrained only by my being so marginal in my job that I didn't dare handicap myself any further. (I had radio duties for the leg, and it's surprising how difficult it is when A) the person on the other end is not a native speaker of English, and B) they are clearing you by way of phraseology, or to fixes or points, that are unfamiliar. With fully 2/3 of the transmissions to us I either sat there blinkingly uncomprehending, or I had to ask my coworkers to clarify a word or phrase. I'm promised that it all becomes easier with a few repetitions.)

But what I could see was really spectacular. The towns and villages are completely without an orderly grid or any kind of North / South orientation, which betrays the relative age of things. Well, there is a grid of sorts, but it's like a Salvador Dali grid, with nothing running in a straight line; everything obeys the dictates of the terrain and wherever Friar Bubbles routinely walked his goat a buzillion years ago. And everything is pristine. Farm fields (which do follow a more orderly, grid-like pattern, though even then the grid is usually aligned with the predominating local geographical feature rather than the compass) are wonderfully ordered and look like someone has lovingly tended each individual plant; there are no underwatered or overfertilized patches or junky looking fallow sections. There's just no junky anywhere. It seems Germans don't do junky. The farm houses and villages are all perfectly manicured, and you have to search far afield to find any kind of clutter or disorder (about all I ever see is graffiti, and there seem a fair number of homeless youths, tattoed and pierced and mohawked and utterly filthy, living under bridges). The highways and rail systems are gleaming and in spectacular order, with fast-moving trains everywhere. Even the rivers seem picked-up and tidy.




And once again walking around the town this sense of order and meticulousness is everywhere. Even the city street crews seem to work more like surgery than hammer-swinging. One crew was meticulously removing a thin layer of asphalt over some cobbles, with one guy carefully chipping away small chunks of asphalt with a special hand tool and collecting any sprayed debris immediately, and the other ensuring the line of the remaining asphalt was arrow-straight and cauterized with a torch. All the mundane stuff of city life just seems a tick nicer here than what I'm used to: bridges and traffic lights and trains--especially the trains. There is not only (as mentioned) high-speed rail everywhere, but even the local trains are modern and clean and spacious and well lit.







There are extensive bike lanes, and one can bring one's bike on the trains, which makes it so very easy on every front to avoid using your car. And even the bicycles tell a subtle tale of Germany: bikes here are not fashion statements nor lifestyle markers nor signs of club membership. Everything is functional first, and then made cool secondarily. Or best yet, things are cool because they're so functional, bikes and trains and everything else. It's a refreshing change from image- and marketing-driven America. (I should hasten to add that kids here still seem to dress like kids, but there doesn't seem to be quite the same label-consciousness that I'm used to. Maybe it's only that the labels themselves are unfamiliar to me so I don't know when I'm seeing a trend.)

I walked along both sides of the Rhine, covering several miles of central Cologne. I felt obligated to pay a visit to the Lindt Chocolate Museum, which was fun until a couple busloads of junior-highschoolers went through. The museum covers the discovery and rise in popularity of chocolate, and talks about how it is grown and harvested and transported. It's a pretty involved process, actually. And chocolate is produced right in the museum, and we can watch each process and eat the result.

(Actually, the kids were pretty well behaved, but one does wonder whether they get anything out of the experience except a day out of the classroom. Most ran through noisily banging all the displays and interactive gadgets and trying to get through as quickly as possible without actually absorbing anything. Thank god I was never like that!)

Later, on the East side of the Rhine, I ran across a little church (well, little relative to the Dom) that was open. I often pop into churches, both because they're architecturally-interesting public buildings and also because they usually have an organ worth a photo or two (and, it must be said, they are often infused with the holy spirit of shut-the-hell-up, which makes for a cool and serene space for contemplation). This church had an interesting looking organ. In my travels I seem to have luck with organs, and, true to form, an organist was here working on registering a Bach chorale prelude (specifically, BWV 641 Wenn Wir In Hochsten Noten Sein--how very appropriate to hear Bach in Germany). The church was mostly empty, and it was a great opportunity to hear the sounds of the organ and how they interact with, it turns out, a pretty vast acoustic. One had a sense, as the organist tried out a variety of combinations, of how the builder had voiced the instrument strongly to cut through the large room. It's also cool to hear, as the organist toggled between this and that sound for each part, how Bach constructed these magical works, and how each component contributes to this greater-than-its-parts synergy. (There is no escaping Bach's genius; it hits you like a brick every time.) It's also a great reminder that organ music is a visceral thing, a physical experience. No stereo really does it justice. I walked around the interior as the organist played, seeing how the volume and balance of the sound changed depending on one's distance from the instrument. I wanted to talk to him about the instrument, which is clearly a product of the last 30 years or so, but the organ loft door was closed and he was clearly working, so I left him alone. Maybe next time.



Afterward, I ran across a particularly interesting little thing when crossing the famous Hohenzollern Bridge across the Rhine into the big rail station by the Cathedral (which one site says is the most heavily-traveled railroad bridge in Germany). I noticed a couple brass locks along the screenwork separating the walkway from the railroad tracks, and then several more. As the numbers grew, I wondered A) why so many people would forget their locks like this, and B) why people would want to lock their bikes along the railroad bridge in the first place. At some point it became clear that all was not as I thought.



Maybe this is a well-known phenomenon to everybody but me, but it took me by surprise. The locks turn out to be love declarations, most of them engraved (some inked) with couples' names and locked on the bridge in an impromptu "wall of love," a kind of spontaneous mass graffiti. I was walking West on the South side of the bridge, and as I looked across to the North side of the bridge (across some six rail lines) it was immediately clear to me that I was on the wrong side of the tracks. The other side had hundreds of them. So I had to trek to the other side to get a closer look. And it's a moving little collection; very, very cool. A pretty high proportion of them seem to be from gay men (though the gender of some German names is not always clear to me--see below: is Deniz for "Denise" or "Dennis?"). I wonder if this was originally an expression of the gay community or whether the phenomenon says anything about being gay in modern-day Germany. In any case, it seems a delightful little cultural meme.








One wonders if there is some protocol to this. What happens to the keys? Does each party keep one? Does one party unlock the lock at relationship's end? Is this how the other party learns? Are there hundreds of discarded locks (and relationships) on the river bottom? So many possibilities.

I'm back here in about a week, so more pictures to come.

Next stop: Warsaw!

Travel Photos

Lots of traveling lately. This past week was spent in New York as part of the University of Wisconsin Extension's yearly trip to the City for a week of Broadway theatre. In addition to my regular flying layovers in Newark (which offer an easy train ride into the city), this event has become a regular on our calendar, and it offers the luxury of several days in the city, something my layovers rarely permit. This is our fifth year with this event. Susan is the chooser of shows and the theatre resource for the group, and I've become the "transportation guy." It's really a lot of fun to help introduce people to the world's greatest city.

Some photos from this year.

Something new this year. They've closed off Broadway for a few blocks a made it into a pedestrian walkway. There are hundreds of lawn chairs laid out, and the normally-busy place is packed with sightseers. And it makes the always-slow traffic here come virtually to a standstill. 7th Ave. is still open. It's being done as a trial thing here and elsewhere along Broadway, and one wonders if this will become a permanent walking / biking path.

The view from our hotel window. One hates to close the curtain on it at night, but otherwise it's like trying to sleep with the lights on. There's something insufferably touristy about Times Square, but its extremity makes it a singular experience. I'd personally prefer to stay somewhere else, but for all our first-time visitors nothing has the impact of this five-block stretch of Broadway and the hotel is a big hit.

Everybody's seen the Apple store "cube" at 59th & 5th. This time we see the store's interior, corner-to-corner. The big glass staircase in the center of the room leads to the cube and the street-level entrance. I want one of everything in this store.

A random street scene. I forget where I shot it. Lower Manhattan somewhere.

OK, I remember where I shot this one! Broadway & 23rd. The fabulous Flatiron Building.

A bit of subway art. A train station mosaic.


Chinatown, a tire shop. Hard to imagine making a living this way.


I'm simply not capable of passing the Ansonia without taking photos. So here's my favorite building on 6/6 (the cockroaches are invisible from this distance).



And one for my brother the railroad fan. The tracks & station for New Jersey Transit at the Newark Airport. Pretty nice station for American commuter rail. And live bodies there to help you get to the right place! New York without trains would be like Jenkins without trees.

First Impressions of Cologne

I'm only here for about 24 hours, during which I need to get a couple sleep periods. So this covers a single day spent wandering around.

***


It was a long flight over here from PHL, the longest single leg now in my logbook, about seven and a half hours. And it seems even longer since we fly against the earth's rotation; we departed in the morning from PHL and landed in darkness in Cologne at about 10:30 pm local, so the seven hours seems more like an all-day affair. Unfortunately, it was mostly cloudy beneath us for the duration, so apart from the occasional glance of the featureless Atlantic we saw little. And for my comparatively brief glimpse beneath the cloud deck coming into CGN the landscape looked (dare I say it?) very much like America in the dark from the air--similar patterns and colors of lights with darkness interspersed, though with perhaps fewer of the twinkling safety yard lights between settlements. Not sure what this implies (if indeed it's even an accurate observation).

The CGN airport is beautiful and strikingly modern and fresh-scrubbed. The company has a new gazillion-dollar facility here, and it all looks aggressively high-tech. All lighting and equipment are top-shelf, with a lighted "follow me" car meeting each and every arrival and marshalling us to our parking spot, where we descend the nicest and most over-built set of crew stairs I think I've ever seen (after all we're about 2&1/2 stories off the ground). Legendary German engineering abounds everywhere, with everything--tugs and power carts and air carts and loaders--looking new and carefully-maintained. Everyone wears full-body orange canvas suits for visibility. Our transportation into town is waiting for us, a Mercedes-Benz Sprinter driven by a slighly Emo-looking woman who proved very adept at her manual transmission.

For whatever reason CGN (the official nomenclature for which is EDDK) has the most stringent noise regulations of any airport we fly into, and we've had an ongoing flurry of company communications about how to minimize our noise footprint. To that end, there are a bunch of arrivals and departures from the airport which must be used and flown with absolute precision concerning both their tracks over the ground and also the altitudes and power settings at which we fly them. Letters of warning and fines lie in wait for even small deviations from the procedures. There are similar procedures in place for American airports, but nothing like the to-the-letter adherence to every last detail of them. We will often be given headings to join up somewhere in the middle of a procedure or even to bypass the procedure entirely. So I expected A) the airport to be plunked MDW-style in the very center of CGN's population, and B) a pair of Empire Strikes Back / Cloud City-style flying police cars to meet and flank us from area arrival to touchdown. Shockingly, neither supposition came to pass. Our approach to the field was over sparsely-populated terrain, and--surprise--the controller gave us a heading that bypassed the entire arrival. Just like an arrival to ORD. After all the build-up, I almost wish I'd put the gear & flaps down and carried a bunch of power just for spite. (OK, no, but I was glad it was all so painless.)


The cab ride into town was like our regular cab rides everywhere, though it's always interesting to see the subtle differences in how the roads are constructed and in signage. I once flew with a guy who made a habit of renting cars in whatever foreign city he visited, and he said that driving in Europe was exactly like driving in the States, and I can see that this might be true here, at least for this short stretch (though I'm reminded of the perilous nature of what I'd expect driving to be like in England, at least initially). Signage is similar or at least decipherable, and people drive in familiar fashion.


Cars here seem to be like what I remember of European cars from my visits to Paris, with (naturally) all manner of German cars--M-B, BMW, Audi, VW, Opel--plus all French makes--Citroën, Peugeot, Renault--and even the occasional American car--specifically, a couple Jeeps, an old Cadillac and a bunch of European Fords. All the taxis seem to be Mercedes-Benzes, driven by (I feel sheepish even mentioning it) what appear to be native white guys (I did see one white girl later in the day). But everything is diesel-powered, and most everything is manual transmission. Cars are on the whole smaller than what we have in the US (I love the big-style little Alfa-Romeo above), but not everyone is driving a Smart Car. Most cars are VW-Golf-sized, and one sees both larger and smaller from that mean. I saw one especially fetching Renault (maybe a Peugeot) that was slightly larger than a Smart Car that had two rearward-sliding doors, (like a minivan's middle doors) as its main doors. I was not quick enough to get a picture, but it looked fantastic. As we saw a couple years ago all over Europe, there just seems a lot more energy spent here than we see in the US making attractive smaller cars. Work trucks are all smaller than at home (though larger than we saw in Paris), and no one is driving an Escalade or a pickup truck for personal transportation.


There are a ton of bicycles here, very nearly as many as in Amsterdam. The old inner city seems pretty compact, and there are bike lanes everywhere, plus quite a network of above-ground trains which seem clean and much-used. I can only assume that the prevalence of bicycles is an indicator of their utility and not a fitness craze, since everybody here seems to smoke. There is at least some smoking indoors, but most people smoke right outside the entry doors of establishments, like American workers taking their smoke breaks on the sidewalks. Like elsewhere in Europe, CGN has lots of outdoor cafes, though they were quiet for the first part of the day because of the rain. Later when I was out they had begun to fill up.


Everybody is quite friendly, though people keep to themselves. In five hours of walking I was only approached unexpectedly by a single person, a worker unloading a truck who must have thought I was affiliated with the store. I went in a number of stores where I was greeted cheerily and left alone. Everybody speaks a little English, and does not seem to begrudge having to do so, such that basic communication is not difficult. Still, one hears less English spoken here than I did in Paris, with only the occasional knot of American tourists. I managed very early to find an English store, like the American stores I found in Paris, except that these were catered to British tastes. But they stocked honest-to-god Diet Coke, so they are now my new best friend in Germany. If my iPhone were functional here, I'd drop a pin here and list it as an emergency contact.


The city is built along the Rhine river, with the famous Dom cathedral just to the North of our hotel. With the spires towering above everything and easily visible (like Paris's Tour Eiffel), navigation is quite easy, at least in the old town. There are postcards and pictures available showing the condition of the city after massive Allied bombing in WWII, and the cathedral was about the only thing standing. This explains why so much of the city feels new and modern. The cathedral itself is gigantic--Paris-cathedral-sized--and seems very old.

I went inside, where a huge crush of tourists was noisily taking photos of everything (I'm happy enough to see the throngs irreverently treating the building like a mere piece of unusual architecture, but even I am accustomed to finding a sense of tranquility in a church. The crowds are distasteful anyway, and one hopes that there is at least silence in the church!).


I got a few photos, though the exterior is hard to get far enough away from to get a good framing. Inside there are a couple organs, the main one high on the wall of the nave, speaking down to a choir gallery at floor level. The organ console, hidden behind a rückpositif, hangs from cables out over the floor about three stories up; it would seem a scary place for one not happy with heights!


I can see that this would be a great place to have a long weekend layover, both for further exploration of the city itself and also because all of Europe is but a short train ride away. I'm hoping to arrange a layover this summer or next where I can get to a Formula One race, since both North American races are gone from this year's calendar.


I've never been squeamish about traveling, but I realized before I left that so much of the invisible support network that I take for granted in the US doesn't exist here, or at least it's harder for me to access it. For as long as I've been a pilot--even in my previous "international" experience in Canada and Puerto Rico--I've been able to pull out my phone and contact a staff of people whose job it is to solve problems for us when we travel. But here my phone--on which I've become increasingly reliant with its internet access and GPS mapping and all my one-touch phone contacts--does not work, and I can't just pick up a phone and dial an 800 number (or, if I can do it, I don't know how). I discovered Skype a while back, and I used that today to make some calls back Stateside, but of course I need to be checked into my hotel in order to have internet access. I'm used to wandering around strange cities by myself, and I will often call my wife or one of my friends to share the experience. But here I feel distinctly isolated. That's not an ominous thing, or it needn't be, but it's a fact of life in this new setting. And I imagine I'll feel even more isolated in, say, Shanghai or Almaty (where I'll be in a couple weeks' time) where not everyone (no one?) can be counted upon to speak a little English.

And now, after a short nap, it's time to head back to the airport for the flite back to PHL.

Life Is Hard

This was my view from my lunch table today at Duke's on Waikiki Beach.


I guess we have to chalk this up as ample compensation for not knowing how I'll manage to sleep (since I have to try and go to sleep at about 5:30 pm for a midnight wakeup).

Daylight! I Think I See Daylight!

(Or perhaps it's a mushroom cloud...)

As Darth Vader ominously said in Star Wars, "Your training is now complete..."

OK, my MD-11 training isn't quite complete yet, but almost. This morning I'm sitting in the Appleton airport waiting on a commercial flight out to California to begin my first of two series of Initial Operating Experience flights (or IOE, since aviation loves acronyms), which is my last official phase of training. This phase is interesting for a couple reasons: first, it's the first time I'm at the controls in the actual airplane; and second, I get to fly out to frickin' Honolulu and back! This will be my first visit to Hawaii and my first international flight on this airplane (my international experience heretofore is confined to Canada and a couple flights down to San Juan and back). Hawaii is, of course, a US destination, but the flight involves some five hours over international waters. I finish my IOE next week with a bunch of domestic legs, and then embark on what I hope is a new phase in my aviation career of globetrotting to fabulous, exotic destinations. We'll see how this actually plays out (at the very least it should make for interesting blog fodder).

I intended to blog about my whole training circus as it was occurring, but there simply wasn't time. I'm not generally very good at being busy--I like to spend my days in leisurely fashion, and all this crush of obligation would have made me very crabby... except that the controls of the MD-11 lay at the terminus. All airline training is like trying to drink from a fire hose, with reams of information being shoved down one's gullet with little digestion time and various tests and checks at the end to see what you've managed to retain. We were told in advance that the MD-11 training was a "gentleman's course" (apparently "gentlemen" expect be spoon-fed all pertinent data), but I quickly learned there are no shortcuts for taking on this amount of information. The training has been excellent, but there's still a couple thousand dense pages of information that one needs to assimilate. The whole process proceeds in orderly fashion, from phase to phase, though the exact phases for the MD-11 are different from what I'm used to. Every other large airplane I've ever learned has begun with a couple weeks of intensive ground school to learn the airplane itself and its systems--electrical, fuel, hydraulic, pneumatic / pressurization / HVAC. This would be followed by a simulator training phase--also a couple weeks in duration--where we learn the aircraft-specific ways of doing all the things we've been trained to do in every other airplane: checklist protocols, instrument approaches, system failures, windshear avoidance, etc., etc. At the end of it all there is always a do-or-die checkride where one must demonstrate to an examiner anything and everything from one's new vocabulary. That's the usual track.

The MD-11 training was quite a variation on this theme. First, there is no classroom phase. The entire groundschool portion is accomplished on a computer (your own, or a computer in a company training room), with automated lessons about individual aircraft systems. After each computer lesson, my training partner and I go into a non-motion simulator with an instructor and interface with the buttons and switches and displays in the cockpit to learn the system hands-on (this device is similar to the full-blown simulator, except there is no motion of the device to simulate g-forces and so on. The seats and switches and displays are all from the real airplane, but there is only as much cockpit there as needed to hold the required equipment). And in the process, we get an early start on procedures and callouts and so on. This computer / non-motion-simulator phase takes a month, and by the time we reach the full-motion-simulator phase we're already fairly up to speed with our callouts and procedures. That's another difference, since the motion-simulator phase is traditionally where one learns these things. So in the MD-11, the motion-simulator phase takes us in a slightly different direction. We must still practice a buzillion instrument approaches with the appropriate callouts, and we still go through a battery of engine and systems failures with the associated memory items and checklists. But the MD-11 is much, much more automated than any airplane I've flown before, so much of our training involves getting the automation to do the right thing, and teaching us what to do when the automation fails in its tasks.

When that is done and the checkride complete--traditionally the end of our visit to the schoolhouse--we still have a few more boxes to check in the MD-11. Specifically, there is almost another week devoted to long range navigation and to what is termed Landing Awareness Training. The long-range navigation training covers all the different methods and techniques and protocols in use around the world, things which must be adhered to when one is away from home soil. And there's a lot more stuff here than one might expect. The procedures, for example, for crossing the North Atlantic are quite different from crossing the Pacific, both in navigation and radio protocols. For as much standardization as there is in aviation, there's still a wide degree of variance from place to place: the US uses inches of mercury for altimeter setting, while other parts of the world will use millibars or hectopascals; the transition altitude in the US where we move to a standard altimeter setting for high altitude cruising is 18,000 feet, a crucial figure which is different in virtually every other country (different from us and from each other); standard phraseology varies a bit from place to place, though we Americans are fortunate that our native language is chosen as the official language for aviation worldwide. However, in many places in the world the controllers know only as many English words as necessary to do their jobs, and most conversations on the radio are being conducted in (to us) a foreign tongue. So situational awareness can be seriously compromised. After spending 15 years flying in the domestic system, I have firmly-ingrained ideas for how things are done; and now I have to relearn a lot of this stuff. It's a lot of information, and there are myriad "gotchas" hidden in the cracks and crevices (my MD-11-flying crashpad roommate calls it "graduate-level flying," and I begin to see why).

The Landing Awareness Training is to help us with some of the landing challenges specific to the MD-11. The airplane is heavy and it has very high approach & landing speeds. All airplanes present their challenges, of course, but one of the key MD-11 challenges is this fairly narrow operating window we have for landing. When the MD-11 was derived from the original DC-10, the airplane was made considerably longer and heavier (among other changes), but, in the interest of efficiency, the tail was actually downsized slightly. The result is that approach and landing speeds are crucial here because there is so little margin. Specifically, getting even a little bit slow on an approach may leave us without enough authority in the tail to flare the airplane properly for landing. So it becomes crucial that one carries one's approach speed all the way to touchdown, and--here's the über-critical part--that one not attempt to salvage a landing that doesn't start off well. Better to just go around and try it again. Landing is a critical phase on every flight, and this line of prudence exists for every airplane type; but the MD-11 just has a smaller margin for safe operation than most. The tragic crash of a FedEx MD-11 in Narita a month or so ago reminds us of what a challenge this airplane can be. (I must stress that the information about what actually happened on that flight has not been released, and so we're all in the dark to a degree. The winds were howling, but not unmanageably so; the original touchdown was hard, but not terribly so, it seems. We just don't know enough to speculate.) So this training takes advantage of simulator technology to let us experience things that--hopefully--we will never see in the airplane. The training lets us practice strong crosswind landings, and also over- and under-weight landings, specifically where the actual weight of the airplane and the programmed weight do not agree (so that the computer is giving us the wrong speeds to fly). Through this training we're able to see the consequences of these things in a safe environment.

And so on to the final phase of training: IOE. The regulations stipulate the number of hours and landings required, and with these long-haul flights (so different from my last seven years on the DC-8) it takes only a few legs to accomplish the job. Much as I'm eager to see Honolulu, I'm a bit disappointed that these two legs will constitute the end of my international training. There will obviously be a great deal that I will not have seen or experienced when I'm first called upon to perform my job in the international arena. The MD-11 sees some pretty amazing places: Mumbai, Dubai, Cologne, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, Sydney, Warsaw. I expect to have a pretty steep learning curve here for a while.

Ha!

From Ed Brayton's blog Dispatches from the Culture Wars:

Someone who comments here under the name grasshopper has invented a brilliant phrase for the Rush Limbaughs of the world: ignorexia verbosa. Pass it on.

Happy to do my small part for a most worthy cause.

This Deserves Wider Dissemination...

...to both my regular readers.

***

(Reprinted from Slate magazine)

Don't Say a Word
A U.N. resolution seeks to criminalize opinions that differ with the Islamic faith.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, March 2, 2009, at 2:07 PM ET

The Muslim religion makes unusually large claims for itself. All religions do this, of course, in that they claim to know and to be able to interpret the wishes of a supreme being. But Islam affirms itself as the last and final revelation of God's word, the consummation of all the mere glimpses of the truth vouchsafed to all the foregoing faiths, available by way of the unimprovable, immaculate text of "the recitation," or Quran.

If there sometimes seems to be something implicitly absolutist or even totalitarian in such a claim, it may result not from a fundamentalist reading of the holy book but from the religion itself. And it is the so-called mainstream Muslims, grouped in the Organization of the Islamic Conference, who are now demanding through the agency of the United Nations that Islam not only be allowed to make absolutist claims but that it also be officially shielded from any criticism of itself.

Though it is written tongue-in-cheek in the language of human rights and of opposition to discrimination, the nonbinding U.N. Resolution 62/154, on "Combating defamation of religions," actually seeks to extend protection not to humans but to opinions and to ideas, granting only the latter immunity from being "offended." The preamble is jam-packed with hypocrisies that are hardly even laughable, as in this delicious paragraph, stating that the U.N. General Assembly:

Underlining the importance of increasing contacts at all levels in order to deepen dialogue and reinforce understanding among different cultures, religions, beliefs and civilizations, and welcoming in this regard the Declaration and Programme of Action adopted by the Ministerial Meeting on Human Rights and Cultural Diversity of the Movement of Non-Aligned Countries, held in Tehran on 3 and 4 September 2007.

Yes, I think we can see where we are going with that. (And I truly wish I had been able to attend that gathering and report more directly on its rich and varied and culturally diverse flavors, but I couldn't get a visa.) The stipulations that follow this turgid preamble are even more tendentious and become more so as the resolution unfolds. For example, Paragraph 5 "expresses its deep concern that Islam is frequently and wrongly associated with human rights violations and terrorism," while Paragraph 6 "notes with deep concern the intensification of the campaign of defamation of religions and the ethnic and religious profiling of Muslim minorities in the aftermath of the tragic events of 11 September 2001."

You see how the trick is pulled? In the same weeks that this resolution comes up for its annual renewal at the United Nations, its chief sponsor-government (Pakistan) makes an agreement with the local Taliban to close girls' schools in the Swat Valley region (a mere 100 miles or so from the capital in Islamabad) and subject the inhabitants to Sharia law. This capitulation comes in direct response to a campaign of horrific violence and intimidation, including public beheadings. Yet the religion of those who carry out this campaign is not to be mentioned, lest it "associate" the faith with human rights violations or terrorism. In Paragraph 6, an obvious attempt is being made to confuse ethnicity with confessional allegiance. Indeed this insinuation (incidentally dismissing the faith-based criminality of 9/11 as merely "tragic") is in fact essential to the entire scheme. If religion and race can be run together, then the condemnations that racism axiomatically attracts can be surreptitiously extended to religion, too. This is clumsy, but it works: The useless and meaningless term Islamophobia, now widely used as a bludgeon of moral blackmail, is testimony to its success.

Just to be clear, a phobia is an irrational and unconquerable fear or dislike. However, some of us can explain with relative calm and lucidity why we think "faith" is the most overrated of the virtues. (Don't be calling us "phobic" unless you want us to start whining that we have been "offended.") And this whole picture would be very much less muddied and confused if the state of Pakistan, say, did not make the absurd and many-times discredited assertion that religion can be the basis of a nationality. It is such crude amalgamations—is a Saudi or Pakistani being "profiled" because of his religion or his ethnicity?—that are responsible for any overlap between religion and race. It might also help if the Muslim hadith did not prescribe the death penalty for anyone trying to abandon Islam—one could then be surer who was a sincere believer and who was not, or (as with the veil or the chador in the case of female adherents) who was a volunteer and who was being coerced by her family.

Rather than attempt to put its own house in order or to confront such other grave questions as the mass murder of Shiite Muslims by Sunni Muslims (and vice versa), or the desecration of Muslim holy sites by Muslim gangsters, or the discrimination against Ahmadi Muslims by other Muslims, the U.N. resolution seeks to extend the whole area of denial from its existing homeland in the Islamic world into the heartland of post-Enlightenment democracy where it is still individuals who have rights, not religions. See where the language of Paragraph 10 of the resolution is taking us. Having briefly offered lip service to the rights of free expression, it goes on to say that "the exercise of these rights carries with it special duties and responsibilities and may therefore be subject to limitations as are provided for by law and are necessary for respect of the rights or reputations of others, protection of national security or of public order, public health or morals and respect for religions and beliefs." The thought buried in this awful, wooden prose is as ugly as the language in which it is expressed: Watch what you say, because our declared intention is to criminalize opinions that differ with the one true faith. Let nobody say that they have not been warned.

A Most Fascinating Couple Hours

This comes from Richard Dawkins's blog.

This is part one of a two-hour discussion between four of the great rational & scientific thinkers of our age: Dawkins himself, philosopher Daniel Dennett, and authors Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens. I've read a bunch of stuff from each of them, and though I don't know Dennett particularly well, the other three would be on the top of my list of recommended authors. Richard Dawkins's work popularizing biology is of inestimable worth, and Hitchens and Harris have both done fantastic work debunking religious hooey.

I think one would be hard-pressed to ever find four finer minds assembled in one place for an informal chat. This is like getting invited to sit at the dinner table with the crowd that would never have me. So get yourself something to drink and a comfy chair and settle in.

Reflections On An Intimate Working Relationship

So I'm suddenly down to my final few legs on the DC-8. The phase-out of an aircraft fleet must be accomplished gradually, with the aircraft getting mothballed in the desert a few at a time. The first step of this process has been to reduce the work assigned to the fleet, leaving us a bit fat on crewmembers relative to the actual staffing needs. And thus many of us who used to fly set schedules have instead been assigned what is called a reserve schedule. Usually this means sitting for your designated days in an apartment or, if you live in domicile, at your home waiting for the phone to ring with an assignment (technically, you can sit reserve wherever you like, provided you can be at your assignment within 90 minutes of the phone call). But with the reductions of flying on the fleet, the phone doesn't ring very often.

There are far worse things, of course, than to be paid to not work. But one of the few negatives in this situation is that one becomes a bit rusty. In some ways, flying knowledge is a bit like memorizing your friends' phone numbers. When you use them all the time, they exist in some kind of half-long-term / half-muscle memory state; they're readily at your fingertips, but not actually that firmly lodged in memory. Flying involves reams of little facts and procedures and rules, details that begin to fade with just a little inactivity. I've been flying very little now for six or eight months (which is not to say I haven't been away from home quite a bit, sitting in my crash pad in Kentucky), and I can attest to this rustiness business firsthand. But now, as I begin to shift my focus to a new airplane, I'm spending my final week on the DC-8 with a Montreal assignment. And these previous months of relative inactivity enable me to look back on the DC-8 with a bit of freshness.

(Airplanes in mothballs in Roswell, NM in 2006. These are preserved to fly again if necessary.)

Flying an airplane is a unique occupation. It's machinery operation at its core, with a bunch of practical knowledge things tacked on--rules and regulations and airport operating procedures and protocols and company procedures and so on. Maybe the closest analog most of us have is driving a car, but imagine something about five times as complex and then imagine training intensively to do this task with a high degree of proficiency and then doing it all the time--for a daily living, and not just as an afterthought to get to something more important. So a pilot develops a relationship with the machine to a degree that's odd in most other professions. This is partly what makes pilots as a group such machinery geeks (chicken or egg, you decide).

And that contributes to this time being a bit poignant for me. Not only am I ending this relationship of nearly seven years, but there's the added angle that how we do things on an old airplane like the DC-8 is different from a newer airplane, and these old ways are just about gone from the industry. A good analogy here (I'm sure I've made it before) is the rapid influx of diesel technology in railroads in the 40s-50s. Relatively quickly, the steam technology which played such a huge role in America's industrialization and its push to modernity, and which provided good, solid careers for untold thousands of workers, went the way of the dodo. For every railroad in the country, over a pretty short span, a crew brought the last steam locomotive into the shops and dropped the fire for the last time before the equipment was towed away and scrapped. It was a paradigm shift.

(The DC-8's three-person cockpit.)

On the DC-8, one of these things is the flight engineer. All large airplanes used to have at least three people in the cockpit, and the early jets were all this way: the Boeing 707 and 727 and 747, the Lockheed L-1011, and the Douglas DC-8 and DC-10 (among others). The two pilots cope with the flying duties, and the flight engineer runs the airplane mechanically--fuel and pressurization and electrics and hydraulics and heating and cooling, etc. Additionally, the engineer is tasked with keeping an eye on the front-seaters to catch errors and assist with radio calls and checklist duties, etc.

At my own company, the DC-8 is the last three-person cockpit on the property. When I came here in 2001, we had three different fleets on the property that needed flight engineers: the 727, the classic 747 (we've since added newer 747-400s, which are a two-crew airplane) and the DC-8. The 8s are all that are left, and now the end is nigh for these. I began my career here with three and a half years as a DC-8 flight engineer (we referred to the task as "plumbing"), plus a short stint plumbing on the 727. So I learned firsthand of the old school at the very tail end before it vanished. (I'm actually quite pleased to have a flight engineer's certificate--it's a separate license from a flying license--and, though I hated it at the time, having engineered on two different airplanes by different manufacturers gave me better insight to the philosophy behind the job.)

Checklists are a good example. On any modern two-pilot airplane, the checklists while the aircraft is on the ground are generally called for by the captain and read by the first officer. In flight, the checklists are called for by whichever pilot is flying and they are read by the non-flying pilot. Checklist protocol--the call-and-response--is different on a three-person airplane: the responses must come from three people instead of two. Like the two-person airplane, some checklists are called for by the captain, others by the pilot actually flying the leg; but most of the checklists are actually read by the engineer, and space must be given for a third person to speak their piece and accomplish their tasks (there's generally a lot more to do on an old airplane). This three-way interaction is unique, and it always takes people new to the airplane a while to adjust their routines to accommodate the extra person.

[Aside] The core idea here fascinates me, this business of figuring out what tasks need to be performed for a large airplane to fly and how the systems and cockpit are designed to accomplish these things. On one extreme, military airplanes used to fly with two pilots plus an engineer plus a navigator plus a radio operator and all manner of load specialists. On the other hand, through automation we could probably do away with pilots altogether, or certainly all but one (indeed, we have unmanned aircraft performing many military tasks already, though passenger flying is another matter). So what we end up with is a compromise. It's worth remembering that someone had to design this human / machine interface, that the tasks we perform and the displays we use and the controls we manipulate and switches we throw are the result of an intense engineering effort; these things could be quite different. I've read discussions about this with the early fly-by-wire Airbuses (the A-320 & 319); the airplanes were so automated that pilots could spend almost the entirety of a flight doing nothing but watching the airplane to make sure something didn't malfunction. A little research showed pretty quickly that in order for a pilot to respond effectively to a mishap or an emergency they needed to be kept engaged and in the loop. And so a workload was "built in" to the airplane's design, like a complex version of a railroad dead man switch. With railroads, the switch was just there to ensure the operator was not asleep or dead--the train would stop itself without intervention within a specified interval; in the airplane, the tasks are more designed to keep the pilot in the loop on several fronts: communication, navigation, aircraft mechanical status. (I can see my wife's eyes rolling so far back into her head at this little rhapsody that she's going to need surgery to see straight again. I raise the white flag: I'm hopeless.) [/Aside]

(The Mighty Mad Dog. I don't know what that screen-thingie is by the co-pilot's window. It's not one of ours.)

So that--the three-person cockpit--is one big difference about the DC-8. The other is automation. Virtually every modern airplane is flown through programming, and over the past two decades the pilots' tasks have become much more biased toward management of the automation (there are many good reasons for this, but it's another long post in itself). While our DC-8s have a good navigation box and a good autopilot--this is not a luxury, by the way, but a really essential part of flying; the airplane is seriously restricted in what it can do if the autopilot(s) is inoperative--it simply doesn't have the capability of a newer airplane. As one specific example, the DC-8 is almost unable to navigate vertically. It can follow a lateral course nicely over the ground (though not with the precision of a newer airplane), but it does not have the capability to specify that it wants to be at such-and-such a point at a specific altitude and / or airspeed (we can obey most such commands from ATC, of course, but it requires the pilot to figure out how to make it happen). In addition to the the navigation box needing to think in three dimensions--which ours will not--this feature requires the computer to have the ability to control the airplane's thrust: if the autopilot points the airplane's nose down for a descent and doesn't retard thrust, the airplane's speed will quickly build to a dangerous level (and, conversely, if the nose is pointed up for a climb and power is not added, the airspeed will quickly drop and the airplane will stall and fall from the sky. This is bad). This feature which allows the airplane's automation to add or subtract thrust is called the autothrottle system, and the DC-8 doesn't have it. The end result of this is that the DC-8 gets hand-flown quite a bit of the time, which is very rare in the airline world today.

I'm trying to savor all these things a bit in these final days, knowing that I'll never have the chance again. Friday night as we blasted off from Louisville and headed up to Montreal, I thought of all this as I looked at the DC-8's old round dials and heavy controls polished smooth from decades of use. Old seats and small windows and very heavy flight controls--all so different from a newer airplane. A few minutes earlier the captain had called for engine starts, which I accomplished, like a thousand times before, with the flight engineer calling out oil pressures and starting duct pressure readings over my shoulder, and me timing the start and reading back N1 and N2 rotations and announcing "fuel on... flow... lightoff." The captain coordinated with the mechanic over the headset and talked to ground control--and, of course, taxied the airplane while the engineer and I started the remaining engines (what a luxury to have four!). It's an interesting little ballet, a bit of controlled chaos that is specific to this airplane and this circumstance.



I'll have to start the engines in an MD-11 as well--three of them; still a luxury!--but it's a quiet, solitary, mostly automatic task. Push a button and make sure nothing screws up while the start sequence runs. No one looks over my shoulder and joins me in the effort. I welcome the move to a more modern airplane and all the amenities it offers, but I'll definitely miss the third crewmember in the cockpit. As a flight engineer myself I corrected enough mistakes by the front-seaters, and as a front-seater I've had enough of my mistakes caught and corrected by the engineer, that one wonders how we'll get along without the third set of eyes. I guess that's where that machine / human interface design business comes into play.

Old Movie Review XXI

I haven't been seeing too many movies lately in the theater. I feel a little bad, since I saw many of last year's Oscar contenders. But this year I just haven't seen enough to be able to offer an informed opinion. I do enjoy seeing a movie in the theater, though less than I used to. I very often wait for a film to come out on DVD, and I rent or buy instead of seeing the show in a theater; the cost is about the same, and my popcorn is better. (Plus, if a movie is good I'll want to see it more than once, and with the DVD I can back up if I miss something, which I often do.) But my movie reviews are as much for my own benefit as anyone else's, and so I find myself wanting to write a little essay about whatever I'm watching, whether it's topical or not.

So here we are. I find myself reviewing decades-old films.

In this case, I've been watching the great 1964 John Frankenheimer film, The Train. One of the last adventure movies filmed in black and white, it tells the story of the French Resistance during the final days of the Nazi occupation of Paris trying to prevent the Nazis taking a trainload of valuable "decadent art" out of the country as the Allies approach. The Wikipedia article says the story is not based on factual events, but that there was an attempt by the Nazis to take decadent art out of the country, and the Resistance did mount an effort to prevent it (even if the events did not follow those of the movie).

This movie doesn't belong on a short list of history's greatest films, but there's a lot of really good, worthy film art that misses that list. The Train is a compelling story deftly told, a solid moviemaking effort that rises above the mean. Burt Lancaster (whom, it strikes me, stands out here as the lone American in a cast of British and French actors, much like Tom Cruise in Bryan Singer's recent Valkyrie) is fabulous as the exhausted, ultra-cynical French railway man Paul Labiche who quietly works to sabotage the Nazi effort and keep the art train within French borders. Labiche initially refuses pleas for Resistance involvement, knowing from hard experience that every effort costs lives; with so many already dead from defying the Germans, he is unwilling to put more lives on the line for paintings. But he changes his mind--with a little help--when the importance of the art in the country's collective psyche sinks in.

Spearheading the plunder effort on the Nazi side is Colonel von Waldheim (British actor Paul Scofield), a civilized man and art lover who makes the fate of these particular paintings his chief obsession. He wants to possess the paintings and he uses an economic argument--collectively the paintings are almost unimaginably valuable--to get his oblivious higher-ups to authorize his commandeering a train and crew for the purpose, this just as the Germans are crumbling before the Allied advance and can least afford to divert resources away from the war effort. Scofield's characterization is fantastic. His Colonel von Waldheim is part cultured aesthete who grasps the beauty and artistic merit of these paintings (which the club-footed Nazi regime has declared "degenerate") and part ruthless Nazi thug who is accustomed to total obedience and refuses to be thwarted (particularly by the French, who don't have the good sense to stay conquered).



The other key roles are well-cast, though some of the voiceover work is rather dubious, looking at times like an old Chinese movie with English badly dubbed in.

The story cracks right along, and the black and white is both gloriously noir-ish and gives an air of authenticity. Though called "The Train" (a title guaranteed to throw a bucket of water on my wife's enthusiasm), the story is really about the horrors of war and the valiance of resistance, and secondarily about the value of art.

But the train itself plays a strong supporting role, and here's one of the things, bona fide machinery geek that I am, that I love about this film. Great care is taken in showing the operations of the railroad, and of the locomotive particularly. Frankenheimer has clearly made this one of the film's priorities, and what results is part historical document about job descriptions that are all but gone now. Most of the movie was shot on location, so that much of what might have been simulated (like a non-musician pretending to play a piano and his hands are never shown, yet his body motions are subtly wrong) is in fact real footage. The actors were trained to operate the real machinery--locomotive engineer and fireman and railyard switch tower operations, etc.--and Frankenheimer films their actions closely, making for some of the best footage of this kind on film. Don't get me wrong: he doesn't dwell overly on these details, but neither does he simply delete them from the story, and the effort yields dividends of authenticity.



[geekout] One scene in particular involves a train being assembled in a yard. Everything is done according to a schedule, and the operation--the compiling of an armaments train destined for the front--is given the highest priority. As soon as the assemblage of cars is complete, the yard engine is switched out for an armored over-the-road locomotive, and we're treated to a few minutes of the locomotives switching in a freight yard. The yard engine is uncoupled and driven away and then switched onto an adjacent track, while the replacement engine approaches from yet another track and is switched over to where the armament train is waiting. (Frankenheimer lingers here because it is an activity that can't be rushed, and the Resistance seeks to force a delay as an Allied air raid is scheduled for that rail yard at about this time.)

In reality, this would be a routine operation, but still one which would involve a number of people working in concert through a sequence of individual steps. Frankenheimer films the train crews in the cab stopping and reversing direction and starting up again several times, while the switch operator, following the commands of his supervisor who is observing events with a pair of binoculars, configures the tracks from the switch tower--all of it supervised by a Nazi officer, who is on the hook to make sure it all goes smoothly. In the locomotive cab we get to see the operation of throttle and brakes, and all the myriad wheels and valves that were used in running this fascinating piece of machinery. A fireman is there in the cab, throwing coal into the firebox in regular scoops, and the coordination between the two crewmembers is eerily like my own work environment: the same but different, in the same way as horse-and-wagon teams delivering kegs of beer a century ago share kinship with today's beer truck driver.

This trainyard footage beautifully evokes a lost period of history, and the details give us a sense of what these jobs were like. These tasks once constituted a legitimate, solid career for thousands of people in this country, and now they are mostly lost to history. The actors have mastered the skills, and toss them off in the offhand manner of a professional, as though the motions had been done thousands of times before. We passed through this brief period of history, just over a hundred years' worth, where this technology, now so rudimentary, was the leading edge of human science and progress, a technology that featured prominently in the transformation of human civilization during a period of explosive development never seen before.

A steam locomotive is almost a living thing, a crude but immensely powerful collection of heavy steel valves and piping and tankage, all designed to create great pressure and heat and convert it into forward motion. Even sitting idle (as this movie shows us), the engine creaks and groans and spits water and steam and radiates heat and smoke, air pumps thrum away; the machine is never still. When the throttle bar is pulled back, routing steam pressure to the huge cylinders, thousands of rolling tons begin to creep forward with a sense of awesome weight and power and an absolutely characteristic soundtrack--especially the deep CHUFF as the expanding steam escapes the cylinder at the end of each stroke. This sound especially is identifiable to almost anyone, even 60 or 70 years after the last steam locomotives were retired: four chuffs to each rotation of the drivers, increasing in frequency as the locomotive gains speed. I'm hopeless, I know, but I could just put these sounds of an operating steam locomotive on my iPod and listen at night as I fell asleep. [/geekout]



Again, this stuff is just what gets under my skin with this movie. But it isn't too much of the film, really. Even if it's one of the high points for me, all the train stuff is incidental to the essential storyline. A person could easily find trains and mechanical stuff distasteful and still find the movie compelling and well-made. But if one doesn't care for war movies, and Nazi-themed movies especially, this is not the film for you. There is no actual footage of the battle front, but the story very much involves the Nazi military bureaucracy and soldiers tasked with the occupation of Paris.

For my part, this is a movie that combines a bunch of tasty genres, a story well-written and well-acted, a film well-crafted. It shows its period a bit, being a product of the '60s; but the bones are still good. And it's like an opiate for the whore nostalgíque!

Grade: A-

When Worlds Collide

Today's movie: Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day.

From director Bharat Nalluri (known predominantly for television work) and based on a 1935 novel of the same name by Winifred Watson, the story follows the down-on-her-luck governess Guinevere Pettigrew (Frances McDormand) for a single, whirlwind 24 hour period.

Sacked from yet another governess job for what might be incompetence or maybe too-exacting standards (in any case, she appears to be chronically unsuitable for the work), the desperate Miss Pettigrew overhears her employment counselor talking about a vacancy, and she steals off to poach the position before a more suitable applicant can be rounded up. Showing up at the residence, she meets Delysia LaFosse (Amy Adams), an aspiring actress whose life is a slapstick whirlwind as she simultaneously courts three different men. What follows is part comedy of errors, part fateful meeting of the minds, part happy serendipity. Miss Pettigrew seems to possess exactly the temperament and wisdom to bring a sense of dignity and order to the scattered-but-delightful Delysia, and she, in so perfectly availing herself of Miss Pettigrew's talents, helps restore a sense of purpose to the older woman.

The story is set, as it was written, in London just before England's entry into WWII. Conditions are harsh and jobs scarce, and as she is booted from her last job Miss Pettigrew teeters on the edge of homelessness. Through her desperate subterfuge, she finds herself whisked up into the whirlwind of Delysia's high society crowd, but she quickly learns that not everything is as it appears. Despite appearances to the contrary, Delysia herself is painfully aware that she is scarcely further from the street than Miss Pettigrew. In that, as Miss Pettigrew says, they understand each other.



In the DVD's special feature interviews Frances McDormand calls the film a "buddy movie," and what passes between the two women is really the whole banana here. Frances McDormand, last seen in the Coen Brothers' fabulous Burn After Reading, is an actor's actor, someone whose plain looks and no-nonsense manner and versatility enable her to pull off just about anything (contrast her Oscar-winning performance in 1996's Fargo with her dimwitted gym employee in Burn After Reading and the earthy Zoe in 2003's Something's Gotta Give). Sporting a workable upper crust British accent and dressed in a frumpy, mousepelt-colored schoolmarm frock and convent shoes, she is perfectly cast as the middle-aged disciplinarian, a woman made wise by age and experience who has neither the time nor inclination for verbal niceties.

Though she is subtly quite funny at times, she is the straight man, as it were, the Dean Martin to the fabulous Amy Adams' Jerry Lewis. I last saw Adams as Princess Giselle in Disney's 2007 film Enchanted, a movie absolutely carried by the sunshine of her portrayal, and she proves here that sunshine is a welcome commodity in all the nicer places (well, she brought the same virtues to Junebug, but clearly there are limits to what sunshine can fix). Though more of an ensemble piece than Enchanted (even if it's only an ensemble of two), Pettigrew is another movie which owes so much of its tenor to Adams' performance, a movie which would be quite different in someone else's hands. Adams gives us a Delysia who is not unintelligent but a bit scattered, someone who finds delight in many places and, in a perilous world, is doing her best to maximize the chances placed before her. Beneath the bubbly exterior, Delysia is a survivor. But she's a young woman without much wisdom and experience, and what is needed is the guiding hand of an older third party, one with Delysia's best interests in mind. Enter Guinevere Pettigrew.

I think what makes Amy Adams so compelling is how note-perfectly she gives us a sense of optimism and lighthearted elation while at the same time having a little current of sadness, an awareness of grim reality, running just beneath the surface. Her portrayal is never given over to either extreme, and in this carefully-crafted middle ground--even in a light comedy--we're treated to a touching, very human portrayal. It's so convincing that we're convinced she's not acting; Amy Adams must be just like this in real life, we think. She's simply that good, and it's a real accomplishment that we can see it in this kind of froth.

The rest of the movie is peopled by bit parts mostly, caricatures off whom our two stars can carom as the story rolls along: a trio of dashing young men in pursuit of Delysia, a couple of carnivorous femmes fatales against whom she must compete, and an older man (the great Ciarán Hinds in a quiet, confident performance) who sees Miss Pettigrew for who she really is (yeah, *surprise!* I mean, it's not called Delysia Turns Her Life Around).

Director Nalluri has given much of the movie a quick, unsentimental pace. The quiet moments, the key speeches, retain a greater impact this way; the whole thing feels quite confidently pulled off.

I had high expectations from two of my favorite actors, but I expected to find them treading in an insubstantial froth. And perhaps so it is: it's a romantic comedy, after all. But it's more substantial than I had expected, a fine entertainment and very worth two hours of your time.

Grade: A-

A Kind Of Prisoner's Dilemma

Jesus. Obama has just managed to push through a stimulus bill, and now--the very same day as he signs the stimulus--the car companies are back sheepishly asking for billions more. I can't imagine how these companies could more clearly demonstrate their managerial incompetence than with this turn of events, which has the double-whammy effect of making us feel like idiots for being duped into giving them the first billions and of making clear that further assistance is absolutely pointless. We're now virtually guaranteed to see them making the same plea again and again, and we have no reason whatsoever to think they've NOW hit on just the right approach to guarantee solvency. OK, so maybe they're not responsible for the tanking economy (though I think one can argue they've played a starring role in their own demise), but can the management of a multi-billion dollar concern not project better than a Magic 8-Ball? I'm an idiot with no business training, and I feel I could have predicted a lot of this.

But what to do? The previous aid came after urgent pleas that the industry's very existence was in imminent peril, and god knows what else in our teetering economy would be sucked down in the same vortex. Now we have exactly the same stakes plus the billions in (borrowed) public money we just threw down that hole, and all of it tainted by the demonstrated incompetence of the management teams upon whom rests any hope of a viable US auto industry. (Aren't these the same white good ol' boys to whom the Republicans gave huge tax cuts because they're the ones who drive the economy? Or is the teetering economy another liberal plot like global warming?) There's no good solution. Take the aid back away from Chrysler, I suppose, and let them go; concentrate one's efforts on salvaging the viable portions of GM.

***

So much for my philosophical hand-wringing; on to the practical.

Here's my deal. I'm shopping for a new car to replace my three year old Civic. I determined a long time ago that I wanted three things in my next car: AWD, more interior space and a more upscale interior (leather, heated seats, automatic climate control, etc.). I've narrowed my search down to two finalists, and now I'm flummoxed about what to do. My two prospects are the Honda Pilot and the Ford Flex (well, I'm still also considering an Acura RDX and a Honda Ridgeline, and I could be persuaded by a really good deal on an Acura TL AWD as well, but I've mostly eliminated these choices).

My dilemma is this: all things being equal, I really like the Flex better than the Pilot. I never thought I'd say that, but it has a more spacious interior, is noticeably quieter, and I can get a tremendous deal on one. The Flex has been getting glowing reviews on the Long Term Test blog at Inside Line over at Edmunds.com, and I can order one and get exactly the equipment I want (which I've never done before). I've taken two test drives in the Flex and it's a really nice drive. It would be a nice car to live with, especially on my long drives to and from Kentucky, where my Civic gets good mileage but is noisy and rides like a buckboard. But I've had only one Ford in 27 cars--and that one years ago, an unimpressive Escort--and I have little doubt that it will be a more troublesome car in the long haul than the Honda (I've owned a bunch of Hondas and never had a lick of trouble with any of them). My local Ford dealer offers a seven year / 100K mile warranty, which will help, but it's still a weaker prospect than a Honda which will likely not need repairs at all. And I'm concerned about resale value. A $40,000 Flex can be had without much bargaining for $33,000 or so, which makes a mockery of the $40K sticker price. And because nobody else thinks they will age very well either, I'm bound to give up even more when I go to trade it in three years hence. Hondas typically lead the pack in resale.

So I no sooner feel decided in these deliberations than I either get another salvo of bad news about the American car industry or I stop by my local Honda dealer for an oil change and find myself test driving a Pilot. Surprise, it's a really nice car, and... it's a Honda! But here we are with our car industry hemorrhaging its life's blood away (and who knows what of the US economy with it), and it's hard for me to not care what happens. This seems a bad time to stand on some principle--the principle that our industry should sink or swim in the marketplace, that we should reap what we sowed--especially when an American manufacturer has in fact built something that's in the vicinity of what I would ask them to build. On paper I really do like the Flex better than the Pilot.

So what to do? I feel quite assured that a Honda Pilot--in addition to being aptly named--would bring me years of trouble-free and gratifying service. I love my local Honda dealer, too: they are a no-bullshit dealership (no high pressure, no bullshit compulsory fabric protection and pinstripes, etc.); I am eagerly given the keys to anything I want to test-drive, and they offer me a very reasonable bottom-line price without any haggling. But Honda is not hurting as a company relative to the rest of the industry (including Toyota, which will lose $6 billion this year for their first loss in history--a measure, I think, of just how bad the economy really is); they will not much miss my purchase. The Ford dealer is an unknown to me. Their sales department has been more typical of what I expect than the Honda dealer, wanting to get all my information when I stop by to look around, and accompanying me on test drives. (I suppose that's only fair; we have no history.)

Jeffy and I have talked about the "mercy purchase" before, and as a general rule I'm opposed to it. And now when I have nearly talked myself into thinking it wouldn't in fact be a mercy purchase, here come GM and Chrysler basically admitting that they are quite unable to cope, that their best thinking of only a month ago is now--yet again--catastrophically wrong. Ford is not joining them at the moment, but it still leaves my legs a bit wobbly. While Ford does in fact seem on sounder footing than GM, with a pretty nice lineup of models available and in the pipeline, their history seems about 1:1 lemons-to-success stories.

So why a prisoner's dilemma? Because my one purchase won't matter for beans in the end, at least not to Ford's well being (though the wrong choice might matter for my blood pressure). And in any case, I'm already going to be paying for the stimulus which will go much further toward rescuing Ford than my one car purchase.

What to do?

Dublin, 1950s

Benjamin Black: Christine Falls.

This was also in my bag for our January cruise, along with Cormac McCarthy's The Road, which, in retrospect, was not an inspired choice for a beach book.

Christine Falls is another matter; this one was a cracking good vacation read. I picked this up in my local bookstore on the recommendation of one of the staff there, and it's a real find. The Dublin City Pathologist in the 1950s named Quirke (we never learn his first name) stumbles into his office in a drunken stupor after an office party one night to find his adoptive brother, a renowned obstetrician, furtively tampering with the death records of a young woman who has just shown up in the dim recesses of Quirke's basement morgue. By the time he sobers up the following morning, the body has been replaced with someone else entirely and nobody knows what's what. Almost on a whim he starts poking around, and what follows is a gripping whodunit involving a group of people with higher and higher connections who seem very determined that Quirke not get to the bottom of his mystery. What appears to be a second, unrelated story about a naive young girl in a bad marriage adopting a baby pops up about a third of the way through the book, and gradually knits together with the main plot. The story is soon fairly swirling with rich and poor, law enforcement and Jesus folks, two continents.

I'd never heard of Benjamin Black before, and I had to wonder at the name when immediately one opens the cover one learns that it's a nome de plume for the Irish novelist John Banville; why bother at that point? Banville says he picked a different name since it's a wholly different kind of writing from his norm. Since I've never read anything of Banville either, I'll have to take him at his word. But Banville or Black, this book alone would seem to put him on the map. It's a brilliantly-told noir-ish story, with a host of deftly drawn characters, and a fairly lively pace.

Banville has a gift--something I absolutely lack--for not overworking his subject matter; he picks his words carefully and with great skill, and leaves it at that. There's a skill in what is left unsaid, a sense of the silences having been carefully composed. His main characters--especially Quirke--are a bit recalcitrant and reserved, and it needs time to assemble a clear picture of what has transpired. That's the point of a mystery, I know, but he does a particularly good job of making the unexplained parts seem accidental, incidental to the characters' lives--as indeed they would be--and yet it all serves to paint a rich, three-dimensional picture.

Apparently I'm not the only one who thinks so, as Banville has written a second Benjamin Black novel which continues Quirke's story. (There is a third Benjamin Black novel as well, a recent compilation of a New York Times serialization, but it has no connection to the previous two books.) I'm already in the midst of that sequel, The Silver Swan, and we'll get to that shortly.

But for now, I'm thrilled to have discovered Christine Falls. Highly recommended.

A Long Way From Tipperary

A friend of mine lent me the DVD set of the 2007 BBC serial Long Way Down, a ten-part television program which follows the actors Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman as they ride their motorcycles 15,000 miles from the northernmost tip of Scotland down to the southernmost tip of Africa. They pass through 18 different countries on the almost three month ride, from 12 May to 4 August, 2007. This trip is a follow-on to their 2004 trip from London eastward to New York City, which they called Long Way Round. This earlier trip was also televised and is now released on DVD (and there are books of both journeys). In addition to the lure of a long motorcycle trip, Long Way Down had secondary goals of trying to bring some attention to the work of UNICEF in parts of the African continent, and also to show the beauty of Africa and the friendliness of its peoples.

This whole endeavor--nay, the very idea of a 15,000 or 20,000 mile motorcycle trip--seems fantastic to me almost beyond comprehension. I can hardly conceive of a more engrossing adventure than this one (at least if reality is to come into play); I almost wet myself just thinking about it. And for me, this is both a function of the romance of big adventure travel and also of the whole motorcycle angle. Both of these elements play equally in the endeavor's allure.

I hate that "It's a Jeep thing... you wouldn't understand!" bumper sticker, but I'm going to invoke it just the same. I think one has to be a motorcyclist to really grasp how different the experience would be on bikes versus, say, doing the same trek in a 4X4. The car might still be very interesting, but the motorcycle makes the whole business connected and intense and profound. I've said before that music and motorcycles are the two things that come closest to spirituality for me. I don't think there's anything supernatural about either, of course, but I think both tap deeply into the complicated interface in our brains between the logical and the emotional, that inscrutable region of our psyche that marks us as mysteriously human. A motorcycle engages us in a heightened way. The risks on a bike to one's bodily safety tend to make one more alert, and then in that frame of mind one is directly and forcibly exposed to the elements, in contrast to car travel where one is isolated. Smells on a bike are immediate and visceral, you feel temperature and humidity changes on your skin, the ears are assaulted with mechanical and environmental sounds, and your eyes look upon your surroundings without protective steel and glass barriers. It all makes for a much more intense experience than driving a car on the same paths.

McGregor and Boorman augmented even this experience by camping out in the elements on most nights. (In one scene an exhausted Charley simply puts his thin air pad on the sand next to his bike and falls asleep under the canopy of a clear desert sky.) Although the documentary is really about the experience of the two men as they ride North-to-South, they are joined by a pretty sizeable support ensemble. In addition to a large planning and logistical staff in England (headquartered in an old garage in central London that is every machinery-geek's fantasy brought to life: a converted industrial space filled with all manner of cars and motorcycles and a drum set and a pool table and dart board!), the television production adds an additional layer to the traveling entourage.

(The boys in their London garage headquarters.)

So in addition to the two men on their bikes, there was a third rider, a German cameraman Claudio Von Planta, plus two Nissan 4X4s containing Director / Producer David Alexanian, Producer Russ Malkin, cameraman Jim Simak, physician Dai Jones, and cameraman and security expert Jim Foster. While the idea was for the bikes to be reasonably self-contained, the entire crew often camped together, and the vehicles carried some supplies and spare parts that did not fit on the bikes. Much of the documentary footage comes from the two riders themselves, both from their bike and helmet cameras, and also from handheld "diary cam" footage they shot of themselves and of each other.

The enterprise works so well as a spectator event--even my wife, who mightn't normally care much about this kind of thing was quite swept away by it--because McGregor and Boorman are really engaging people, articulate and intelligent and funny and feeling. Despite all the production brouhaha that necessarily accompanied them, one still has a sense of a couple perceptive guys seeing profound things and translating the experience for us. There were a number of rough patches in the adventure, both difficult riding and dangerous situations and also a touch of interpersonal turmoil, and these serve to humanize the endeavor and also to give us a little sense of scale. The two men share a deep and affectionate bond, and their friendship is quite engaging. McGregor's wife, Eve, who had no motorcycle experience whatsoever, decided after Long Way Round that she'd like to accompany them for a bit of their next trip, and so a little bit of time is devoted to Eve learning how to ride a bike in England and then to her joining the expedition a couple months later for a week of riding through Malawi and Zambia. And though she does not play a very substantial role in the documentary, she makes for a slight change of pace and tone which enriches the whole.

(The basic GS Adventure. The bikes in the show were modified a bit from the German Touratech catalog.)

Naturally, if one cares about motorcycles, the equipment here matters. Both men (all three, actually) ride BMW R1200GS Adventure models, the quintessential all-purpose motorcycle. (The neighbor who loaned me the DVDs has just traded his standard GS for the upgraded Adventure model, so I've had a chance to drool at the machine up close & personal.) The bikes are a bit big and heavy for the off-road riding they are called upon to do, but the extreme distances involved rather dictate a spacious, comfortable mount. Plus, the isolation of so much of Africa, both in terms of scarcity of service stops and the unpredictability of petrol stations, demands extreme reliability and capability. BMWs are known for their bullet-proof reliability, and the Adventure has an absurdly large fuel tank. The bikes were outfitted with a number of options, from a full complement of Touratech racks and bags to upgraded suspension components. Cameras were fitted to all motorcycles and the trucks, and cameras and microphones were mounted on the men's helmets so that a running commentary could be recorded.

I recommend a visit to their website, where one can get a sense of the documentary. Both men have stated that they have at least another ride in them, and there is a rumor that the next one will be a Canada-to-Cape Horn kind of thing. I have not found any confirmation of this, however. (But I'm ready if they call!) But there's no sense in pining for what may not be coming when what we actually have is so engrossing. I was not three episodes into the set before I had jumped on Amazon and bought the eight-disc set covering both adventure treks (plus Charley Boorman's stab at the Dakar rally). I'm now champing at the bit to watch the earlier documentary.

And I find my mind now working overtime to figure out how I might fit an epic bike ride into my own schedule. The first couple episodes of Long Way Down deal with the extensive preparation for the ride and their first blast through Europe, and this stuff is unadulterated joy for me--indeed, I've had a specific yen to ride a motorcycle through Europe now for a couple decades. Once they set foot on African soil, though, the turmoil of the many cultures there takes a bit of the stuffing out of it for me. They have eighteen border crossings, and there's always a bit of doubt about how any of these crossings will go. The two American members of the crew were denied entry to Libya, and had to fly on to Egypt and pick up the group again there, and no one was quite sure if any particular border crossing would be a two-hour or four-day affair, or whether bribes would be required and, if so, whether they would have anything suitable. Several times they were required to employ armed escorts--sometimes for quite long stretches--and in one case a mechanical breakdown required them all to camp out in the desert where they were specifically told they must not risk camping. But once they were South of the equator there seemed little risks to their safety and property, and each country seemed more spectacularly wild and beautiful than the last. By the time they reached Cape Town, Africa did indeed seem like a place one ought to visit, and the end came too soon.

Here's hoping there's more in the pipeline.

Grade: A