Newman: “I Did Not End Up Making Out with Catherine Zeta-Jones”

Travel Blog  •  Michael Yessis  •  06.15.04 | 9:37 PM ET

Inspired by the upcoming Tom Hanks/Catherine Zeta-Jones/Steven Spielberg movie “The Terminal,” New York Times writer Andy Newman spent three days and two nights in JFK Airport’s International Arrivals Terminal. Newman’s brief stay pales in comparison to Hanks’ character’s one-year tenancy, but he was able to come to some conclusions about modern airport living. “There is a reason that most people try to spend as little time as possible in airports,” he writes. “At their most innocuous, airports are profoundly neutral environments. Every element of their design — the dull fluorescent glow, the long indistinguishable corridors, the recirculated air — is intended to diffuse and defuse emotion. But airports are also places of coercion, of order enforced not just by security personnel but by the wonderfully named Tensabarriers, those modular post-and-strap building blocks of the two archetypal airport configurations, the queue and the blockade. And by design, airports afford almost no privacy. Nearly every task of daily life — eating, dozing, hugging, talking, arguing — must be performed in public.”



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