I'm interested in airports. Like Catullus 5, odi et amo - i both hate and love them.The how isn't important, and ultimately niether is whether i like them or not. (Recently i fucking hate them, but again, not important other than its indication that i am a total fucking hypocrite.))
I'm interested in airports as spaces which have become in themselves representations of movement and connectedness, unification and globalization and convenience, as well as of exclusion, securitzation, surveillance, and collapse.
The film "Love Actually" presents the airport as a site of reunification, where friends and lovers cross borders and find each other. Absence and distance are destructive, but redemptive, and airports return what they take away and make almost everything alright again, save for Alan Rickman and Emma Thompson's characters' marriage, destroyed by the lure of new conquests and the simulacra of familiality/familiarity. (And yet potentially rehabilitated by the construction of the familial unit (though not necessarily heterosexual) as biological inevitability.) Compare this to Stephen Frears' Dirty Pretty Things, in which Heathrow is a site of rupture, departure, and fragmentation, of heirarchies and "flight" and loss, as well as of the violent racialization of citizenship and displacement. These are two very disparate representations. Iti shouldn't be much of a surprise to folks who read this blog on a semiregular basis that i find a greater verisimilitude in the the latter image, which strikes me as more compelling and complex and resonates with my own recent experiences in airports - the dull roar of floor buffers in the Phoenix airport at 3AM on my twentieth birthday operated by subcontracted immigrant workers in what may be the fastest growing right-to-work state in the country, or the split lines at JFK customs after i flew back to New York from DF last year and, even in the "citizens and permanent residents" line. watching folks with greencards and visas forced to stand in line and have their picture taken by the all-seeing eye of sauron/homeland security camera as airport cops leered at their accents and confusion. So Airports are invasive, and indeed even the reunions they promise are always fleeting and bittersweet, and so much goes unseen and unsaid. I need to see Maria Full of Grace, i think. And i haven't even mentioned Jackie Brown or The Terminal (the latter of which i have not seen and would probably strongly dislike.) I am going to sleep.
a quick link on sex work from the village voice, which has ignited a great deal of deserved criticism for not talking about race, class, and the state.
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