Travel Blog: News and Briefs
Travel, Hollywood Style
by Jim Benning | 02.16.04 | 9:17 PM ET
When Anita Gates watched A&E’s new reality series “Airline,” which chronicles the daily dramas of Southwest Airlines’ staff and often inelegant passengers, she longed for the days when travel was glamourous. In a New York Times travel essay on Sunday, she looks back at the ways travel has been depicted in Hollywood films and television shows over the decades. “The glamour waxes and wanes over the years, depending on the journey and the mode of transportation,” she observes.
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Yahoo! BuzzNew Airline Offers Cheap Tickets, Chance to Fly 737
by Michael Yessis | 02.12.04 | 8:19 PM ET
GreenWay, a new co-op airline, plans to begin service between Austin, Texas, and San Francisco “as soon as someone can figure out how to use the booking software,” reports The Onion. “Unlike pricey corporate airlines, GreenWay is run by and for the people,” said Brad Olson, a member of the GreenWay elected board. “But, in order to keep our ticket prices low, everyone who wants to fly with us needs to pitch in and help us navigate and maintain the aircraft. All positions, from baggage handler to pilot, will be filled by volunteers who sign up for four-hour shifts.”
Fear of Flying
by Michael Yessis | 02.09.04 | 9:20 PM ET
Ask The Pilot columnist Patrick Smith’s latest dispatch offers a look at the recent rash of flight cancellations due to potential terrorist plots. “Cynics are prone to see the warnings as either tactical ass-covering or, for those of you with more mobilized appetites for conspiracy, blatant fear mongering with designs toward keeping the populace ripe for manipulation,” he writes in Salon. “It’d be patently foolish of me to accuse authorities—be they our own Homeland Security team or European equivalents—of going the full blatant Orwell route, but general ineptitude, maybe, is a more tempting call.”
“This is the Record-Breaking Flight”
by Jim Benning | 02.06.04 | 9:28 PM ET
Those were the words of aviation fanatic Luke Chittock at the end of the world’s longest non-stop commercial flight—Singapore Airline’s 18-hour-plus Los Angeles to Singapore service—which began Thursday. Chittock was among a number of flying enthusiasts who made the trip, which broke the old non-stop commercial record by more than two hours. The Los Angeles Times featured a great story about the flight Friday.
The Politics of Cuba-U.S. Travel
by Jim Benning | 02.06.04 | 9:27 PM ET
Airline Music: “Inherited Concepts of How Heaven Sounds,” or Just Crap?
by Michael Yessis | 02.02.04 | 9:30 PM ET
It’s a no brainer, of course. Music on airplanes is almost universally awful. But why? Slate’s August Kleinzahler recently explored the subject, even questioning the two major companies responsible for bringing you endless loops of Cher tunes. (The response when he asks who programs the classical stations: “We farm that out to some woman in Germany.”) Kleinzahler only wants what many of us want from our airline music: a little surprise now and then. Alas, it probably won’t happen on the big airlines anytime soon. “[S]urprise is Public Enemy No. 1 so far as market research analysis goes,” he writes. “Which is why airline audio is the aesthetic equivalent to the prose in TV Guide or supermarket paperbacks.”
The Poetry of Flight
by Jim Benning | 01.30.04 | 10:01 PM ET
You can’t help but love poet Billy Collins. When Powells.com asked him this month about being the U.S. Poet Laureate, Collins said: “Well, I did perceive it as having a civic and communal American cultural dimension…I…started a poetry channel on Delta Airlines. If you fly Delta you can look in the in-flight magazine where it has music and comedy and business talk; now there’s a poetry channel with jazz and poetry, a parfait.”
Emancipation Tourism Isn’t So Easy
by Jim Benning | 01.30.04 | 9:57 PM ET
New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof purchased the freedom of two young Cambodian slave-prostitutes recently (see weblog items below). On Wednesday, he wrote that one of the girls has already returned to the brothel.
What’s the Hottest New Rock Band Named After a Tropical Disease?
by Jim Benning | 01.23.04 | 10:37 PM ET
Dengue Fever. How can you not love a band with a name like that? Although the band is based in Los Angeles, the name makes some sense: The lead singer is Cambodian. The Los Angeles Times proclaimed Thursday: “Sixties surf and pop songs may be the group’s source material, but add the stunningly acrobatic vocals of a modern-day Phnom Penh pop star singing in her native tongue and the result is oddly striking.” The Times’ story is available online only to long-term registered users, but a local alternative weekly features a short report here (fourth item down).
The View From the Window Seat
by Michael Yessis | 01.23.04 | 10:34 PM ET
Salon’s Ask the Pilot column today features some nice appreciation-of-flight vignettes from readers.
Emancipation Tourism, Continued
by Jim Benning | 01.21.04 | 10:49 PM ET
He did the deed. In Poipet, Cambodia, New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof bought two slave-prostitutes’ freedom, he writes in today’s paper, concluding his two-part series. (For our note about part one, see “Emancipation Tourism?” below.) Kristof admits he has no idea what will come of this. “[W]ill emancipation help them?” he writes. “Will their families and villages accept them? Or will they, like some other girls rescued from sexual servitude, find freedom so unsettling that they slink back to slavery in the brothels? We’ll see.” Geez. “We’ll see” strikes me as an unsettling conclusion, and Kristof doesn’t say whether he’ll stick around to help them, if helping them is even possible. In an accompanying forum, Kristof acknowledges that his actions here won’t solve the larger problem of slave-trade prostitution in Cambodia. “But the first step,” he writes, “has to be awareness of the problem, and that’s why I’m writing these columns.” Unfortunately, given the space constraints of his columns, Kristof could only begin to explore the complexities of the issue.
Retracing Steinbeck’s “The Log From the Sea of Cortez” Journey
by Jim Benning | 01.21.04 | 10:40 PM ET
Five people, including scientists and a writer, plan to leave Monterey, California on a wooden fishing boat in March to recreate the marine expedition made famous in John Steinbeck’s “The Log from the Sea of Cortez.” The Los Angeles Times reported Tuesday: “The two-month trip will be chronicled by a Steinbeck Fellow, an academic position at San Jose State University held by freelance writer Jon Christensen. He plans to write a book about the expedition and create a daily Web log on the Internet for schoolchildren and others to follow.”
Fun Tips For Your Next North Korean Holiday
by Jim Benning | 01.20.04 | 11:01 PM ET
Emancipation Tourism?
by Jim Benning | 01.20.04 | 10:58 PM ET
Some of the most interesting newspaper travel stories never appear in the travel section. Nicholas D. Kristof’s column about his visit to the outlaw town of Poipet, Cambodia, which appeared in the op-ed pages of Saturday’s New York Times, is a perfect example. Poipet “has a reputation as one of the wildest places in Cambodia,” Kristof writes. He went there to investigate the slave-trade prostitution business, and while there, he met two prostitutes, including one who told him it would cost $70 to buy her freedom. Kristof asked if she really wanted to leave the brothel. “I do not want to let my life be destroyed by what I’m doing now,” she told him. Kristof writes: “That’s when I made a firm decision I’d been toying with for some time: I would try to buy freedom for these two girls and return them to their families.” He promises the conclusion of the story in his column Wednesday.
How America Sees the World
by Michael Yessis | 01.16.04 | 9:09 PM ET
Granta’s latest issue serves up a powerhouse slate of American writers—thirty of them, including Eric Schlosser, Paul Theroux and Nell Freudenberger—discussing how they encountered countries other than their own. Parts of ten of the pieces are online, plus the introduction by Ian Jack, which lays out some of the thinking behind the ambitious theme issue.
