Beauty Week 2: Newspapers on planes

[imomus]

One of the most beautiful things I see on a regular basis is how the world looks from 30,000 feet. I always take a window seat on the plane, and gaze down at cloudscapes, the shapes of the land, even the plain sea, for hours, daydreaming. Even if I take one of the newspapers offered, I seldom read it. The last thing I want to be, at 30,000 feet, is in "a newspaper frame of mind". I'm sure to be "in a beauty frame of mind". Unfortunately, looking so intensely at landscapes and cloudscapes (and of course I'm projecting a million thoughts into them, daydreaming) is increasingly difficult on planes. Once they've finished reading newspapers, my fellow passengers tend to want to sleep or watch films or TV, so there's strong peer pressure to lower the window shades. Sometimes you'll be told by the hostess to pull the blind down. Welcome to wherever you aren't.

The other day I was reading some Cockpit Voice Recorder transcripts of flights that ended in disaster. There's something utterly fascinating about knowing what people say in what turn out to be their final conversations. Normally, of course, you don't want a jet pilot to be paying too much attention to lovely lighting effects, sparkles, cloudscapes, sunsets, moonrises, landscapes. You want him to be concentrating on the job. You forgive him his "managerial mindset" because, well, you're paying him to manage the flight. Occasionally, though, it's nice to know that jet captains are capable of being moved as well as of moving people from A to B. One of the most beautiful things I ever saw in my life was pointed out to me by a plane captain on a nocturnal flight from Tokyo to New York. "If you look out of the right hand side," he said, "you'll see the lights of the Japanese fishing fleet, the biggest fishing fleet in the world." His caption had a newspapery tone, but the sight that greeted us as we looked out was one of vivid beauty: a vast network of lights stretching across the sea to the horizon.

Nevertheless, the final conversations of jet captains tend to be somewhat banal and pragmatic. When they're still sitting on the ground, waiting for everyone to board, they tend to talk about union regulations, real estate values, or power struggles at the airline. The new guy who's got management's ear, so watch what you say in front of him. Office politics kind of stuff. This is totally understandable — what is a plane for a captain but a sort of flying office? — but at the same time a bit sad, considering they're about to die. Jet captains also swear a lot. One can't help longing for the occasional remark about the beauty of the world and the splendidness of being alive, given the circumstances. Perhaps there could be a legal requirement for pilots to make one beauty-related remark per hour, just in case something goes horribly wrong on the flight.

Last night I was reading an old page from Joi Ito's blog. Ito was wondering why Japanese people were so rarely political activists. "There are many intelligent people who don't feel like making a big deal about stuff," he mused. Someone called Masat Izu responded: "support of democracy in Japan does not have deep-rooted commitment to free society, independent individual, and equal rights, which are the basis for the democratic society. Welfare is the most important value in Japan. Majority of Japanese establishment believes stable society is important to their welfare and, therefore, activism becomes their second order priority or undesirable activity." I wonder if you couldn't add to "welfare" values like play, aesthetics, gourmet food and sex? It seems to me that it's precisely Japan's political apathy, its lack of activism and its disapproval of contention and conflict, which makes it such a paradise for the sensual and the aesthetic. "Where the housewife is lazy, the cat is industrious," goes the old Yiddish proverb. Into a political vacuum rush other concerns, not the least of them beauty.

One of my favourite Japanese blogs belongs to my friend Reika. Reika is a refined woman in her late 20s who lives alone in Nishi-Ogikubo with a cat and a greyhound. She has the austere yet sensual, poetic soul of many Japanese people. Nothing approaching "politics" or "the managerial mindset" ever appears on her diary. Entries are titled "The shooting star was seen" or "Meiji Jingu Outer Gardens Fireworks" or "Aroma Treatment" or "The sea was looked at". Each day's entry contains thoughts like "The place where I am is too fantastic" or "A variety of young and old man and woman began to shout with pleasure to flowers of the Hitomicagaya skein night sky." They're exactly the kind of sentences and sentiments I'd like to be discovered on my personal black box recorder, moments before the fatal impact.

Comments

[gunilla.livejournal.com]

the last bit about Reika is just beautiful! Pity I don't understand Japanese and can't read her blog

[imomus.livejournal.com]

You can read it the way I do (http://www.excite.co.jp/world/english/web/body/?wb_url=http%3A%2F%2Fyapeus.com%2Fusers%2Freikayan%2F&wb_submit=%83E%83F%83u%83y%81%5B%83W%96%7C%96%F3&wb_lp=JAEN&wb_dis=2).

[gunilla.livejournal.com]

thank you, I'll do it!

translation illusion shattered

[(Anonymous)]

i was corresponding with a japanese girl for quite a while and was simularly touched and excited by her turn of phrase "Mother is seen in the other side. It waves in the smile. It doesn't recover even if growing up." for example and was a little disappointed when another japanese friend pointed out that she had most likely been using a translator to correspond.

but still i like the idea that her real meanings are somewhat obscured to me as im sure mine are to her, but yet we are both pursuing and enjoying a correspondance...between, myself, her and a little piece of translation software.

Re: translation illusion shattered

[(Anonymous)]

The Excite translation is utterly beautiful, and I hope they never improve it. "New family" turns into the best poem I've read in I don't know how long. Interestingly the Google version is drab.

[svenskasfinx.livejournal.com]

since I'm new to the world of global travel, I thought I'd share that I was very facinated to find out that (about 1990) I learned that pilots usually pilot the aireoplan by sight mostly, and landmarks, things they are supposed to see at that point on the map on their geographic numbers.. roads also.

Maybe they SHOULD be looking out the window allot more, I mean, how does one drive? Maybe they should be watching out for beautiful and unusal sights. And maybe they all need sensitivity courses, anger managment, ect. (I'm told there is a typical personality to the comerical airline pilot as well..and they DO curse very much..)

Plus, HOW many women pilots are out there? And why is Bruce Dickenson of Iron Maiden a pilot? The mysteries of life..

I hope I'm not embarassing myself any more than usual.

Dorian

[jbmurray.livejournal.com]

The last flight I was on (LHR-YVR) we had a very chatty pilot who was particularly keen on pointing out specific sights we might see out of the window: notably as we were approaching the coast of Greenland and starting to cross its icecap, and then as we were descending over British Columbia.

There's also a book I bought a month or so ago, called Window Seat, which aims to help you decipher what you see from 30,000 feet. Ah, look, it has its own website (http://www.windowseat.info/).

I'm always surprised by the amount of water that there is on the ground. Northern Canada particularly, is simply a string of lakes. But even rural England has ponds and lakes and flooded fields in every farm.

Above all, however, I'm interested in the marks of human activity. Which are few and far between, in the High Arctic, of course, but you know there are people down there, and that this was the stage for some of the most dramatic episodes to populate the late nineteenth-century imagination.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

When I flew to New York from London with Virgin in June there was an incredible flight tracking system on their (very advanced) on-demand seatback entertainment system. You could track exactly where the flight was in real time, but if you read all the instructions you could zoom in and get a video-game-style texture-mapped map showing every mountain's name, every road and river, every little creek! As we flew over Canada and the Northern US states I was matching the shapes on the map to the shapes on the ground and it was like imposing one kind of poetry on another: the poetry of language (Sugarloaf Mountain!) on the poetry of form.

[jbmurray.livejournal.com]

Now that's very cool. Air Canada doesn't even have seatback video, so I think I've got a while to wait for anything similar with them.

The last time I flew bmi, though, they had cameras in both the nose of the plane (looking fowards) and the belly (looking downwards), so you got both a pilor's eye view and to look straight down at what was below you.

I always find it very difficult to correlate what I see with the geography I have in my head, however. I wasn't sure when we were over Ellesmere island in the High Arctic, for instance, but even in the UK it's hard distinguishing (for instance) the various cities in the interior. I find myself saying "that must be Nottingham" before next I know it we're over Scotland.

Anyhow, I'm glad you have similar plane-bound interests.

[jtemperance.livejournal.com]

Before those displays, I used to bring a road atlas along with me on flights from SF to NYC so that I could pick out where I was. That was fun.

[nicepimmelkarl.livejournal.com]

i'm your friend. i like your face.

[la-aquarius.livejournal.com]

Not to be a horrible cynic, but perhaps one of the reasons political activism isn't as strident in Japanese society is the prevalence of rampant materialism and consumer values?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

You speak as if rampant materialism and consumer values are necessarily the enemy of beauty, though. I think what Japan has taught me is that that's not the case. Consumerism can bring refinement and beauty. It also feminizes the environment, which I think is all to the good. The trouble with the West is that we haven't taken materialism and the consumer society far enough! A tiny example: the fact that Japanese robots (http://www.livejournal.com/users/imomus/92990.html) are consumer-oriented (cute dogs, seals which keep old people company, hostesses for trade fairs) whereas Western robots are military (bomb disposal bots). Yes, the Western robots are designed for our wonderful environment of political activism: to defuse the bombs people who hate our politics plant.

Robots

[la-aquarius.livejournal.com]

That's an enlightening comparison. Maybe consumerism isn't necessarily the enemy of beauty: but what about waste, and the way consumer culture narcoticizes people? People here (in the U.S.) want their SUVS, damn it all, whether they pay through the nose for gas or blot out the sky with smog. And I love Tokyo, but I also remember traveling across the Japanese countryside and seeing all these power plants, dams, etc. churning day and night to keep the city going.

Re: Robots

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Again, I don't think consumerism and materialism have to mean SUVs and environmental destruction. This is a cultural problem, not a problem with the system of buying and selling things. Because of its scarce natural resournces, Japan recycles much more ardently than most countries. Also, 65% of its land area is forested, an impressive figure by any standards.

Re: Robots

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Percentage of the UK forested: 11.6%.

Re: forested

[(Anonymous)]

Er, are you statistically proving your dislike of Britain? A quick search
says that the US is 33% forested and Canada retains 90%
of its forests. Will you be moving to Canada soon? It's quite beautiful...

Re: forested

[imomus.livejournal.com]

The percentage of my life I've spent in Canada (two years in Montreal) exceeds the percentage of my life I've spent in Japan by exactly the amount that Canadian forestation exceeds Japanese. But the decisive factor was that girls in Japan are 32% prettier.

Re: Robots

[la-aquarius.livejournal.com]

How did you find shopping there, out of curiosity? I'm on the slender side, so I loved Japanese clothes. And since buyers seemed to scorn the previous season's fashions as soon as the calendar season changed, I often bought clothes that had just "gone out of fashion" (even though they were only a month or two old), for quite a bargain!

Re: Robots

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I have an odd relationship with Japanese consumerism, because when I'm there I'm usually saving up to buy a grapefruit; clothes are out of the question. But I walk around Aoyama feeling very happy, like somebody in an art gallery who can't afford the paintings but is happy to be able to see them for free. Who needs to own things anyway? Just looking, thanks!

Re: Robots

[imomus.livejournal.com]

The trouble with the West is that we haven't taken materialism and consumerism far enough!

Here's Guy Debord's take on this (http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/debord/3.htm), from Chapter 3 of "The Society of Spectacle":

"The diffuse spectacle is associated with commodity abundance, with the undisturbed development of modern capitalism. Here each individual commodity is justified in the name of the grandeur of the total commodity production, of which the spectacle is a laudatory catalog. Irreconcilable claims jockey for position on the stage of the affluent economy’s unified spectacle, and different star commodities simultaneously promote conflicting social policies. The automobile spectacle, for example, strives for a perfect traffic flow entailing the destruction of old urban districts, while the city spectacle needs to preserve those districts as tourist attractions. The already dubious satisfaction alleged to be obtained from the consumption of the whole is thus constantly being disappointed because the actual consumer can directly access only a succession of fragments of this commodity heaven, fragments which invariably lack the quality attributed to the whole."

Re: Robots

[la-aquarius.livejournal.com]

It is pretty expensive, isn't it? I end up blowing money without even having any possessions to speak of. Booze, train tickets, concert tickets, museums, a room. And food!

[maybeimdead.livejournal.com]

I think in this case, there needs to be a strong distinction between political beliefs versus political action (involvement, activism etc.) Also, I don't think the Japanese are any more "consumerist" or "materialistic" than any other society that has a market-based system. In my opinion, the key is the distribution of "positional" goods (services, ideas etc.) and the status it confers on its owner, relative to one's peers. In this sense, we are all the same.

[la-aquarius.livejournal.com]

I like the distinction you make between action and beliefs. But there is something special about the Japanese department store, I have to say, and their brand of consumerism in general.

For example, I was a car driver while I was there. Japan has a special "tax" concocted by the government and the auto-industry called 車検、or shaken. Basically, every two years, you pay a flat tax on your automobile, unless it's brand new. The older the car is, the higher the tax. It becomes a losing battle if you want to keep your old car and get the most milage out of it!

Apparently, all the old cars end up in the Philippines, China, Mexico, you name it...

[nicepimmelkarl.livejournal.com]

http://67.15.5.133/about/founder.html

on a lighter note.

Your circuit's blown; there's something wrong

[mongoltrophies.livejournal.com]

record of a frightening aircrash (http://aviation-safety.net/database/record.php?id=19991031-0), very much "welcome to wherever you aren't"

Palm 90

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

I remember (http://i_remember.blogspot.com) that the transcripts of the Air Florida flight, "Palm 90" the tower called it, that went down in a snow storm in Washington D.C. around 1981 had a stewardess remark to the pilots while they were still on the ground about the beauty of the snow, and the copilot, I think, said something about how happy the D.C. children would be: "No school tomorrow! Yipee!" Their last words were: Copilot: Larry, we're going down Larry! Pilot: I know it.

[(Anonymous)]

Most likely, the entries are not titled thusly, the exotism is all Systran's.

der.

[butterflyrobert.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I've always been one to gaze out the window and daydream on flights. You know, if the flight isn't filled to capacity, you can usually switch seats if the light is disturbing someone and you want to keep looking out the window rather than close the blind.

[nicepimmelkarl.livejournal.com]

i'm your friend.

[bill-o-rly.livejournal.com]

(http://livejournal.com/~anti_bisexual)

[(Anonymous)]

then will we all become prettier if we stop voting and stop worrying? I think so too

[cerulicante.livejournal.com]

The Japanese fishing fleet is pretty, but it's responsible for a large part of the overfishing of that region. The lights in Tokyo are pretty, but the nuclear and coal power that keeps the city lit are polluting the environment. The plastics and electronics that dazzle foreigners in Akihabara have toxic byproducts that pervade the soil and water and air. Every beautiful thing exacts a large price and it seems as if you're either skipping from thing to thing without taking into account the totality of intent/design or you're ignoring it if it makes Japan look bad.


By your logic, an atom bomb is also as beautiful as it is destructive because only the visual impact counts; the intent and result of the object is irrelevant.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

A sense of beauty is not a "logic", but it doesn't exclude a strong political and a moral sense either, which is why I don't think I could ever find an atom bomb "beautiful".

[butterflyrobert.livejournal.com]

Cerulicante makes a wonderful point!

Plastic beauty is still, in the end, plastic.

But not all beauty extracts a terrible price, only "compromised beauty".

[noaei-xanadu.livejournal.com]

I thought that the airplane jargon was beautiful, especually when punctuated by last thoughts before doom:

02:34:09 FO: In the name of God, we rely on God
02:34:11 FO: Duct pressure decrease start valve open
02:34:14 CA: N two
02:34:25 ATT: Ladies and gentlemen, good morning on behalf of Captain Kheder and his crew members welcome you on board Flas Airlines Boeing seven three seven three hundred proceeding to cairo, during our flight to Cairo we shall cover the distance at fifty minutes and altitude twenty seven thousand feet, you are kindly requested to fasten your seat belts and put back of your seats in full up right position, and observe the no smoking sign during all the flight, thank you

only to later have

02:44:18 CA: See what the aircraft did!
02:44:27 FO: Turning right sir
02:44:30 CA: What?
02:44:31 FO: Aircraft is turning right
02:44:32 CA: AH
02:44:35 CA: Turning right?
02:44:37 CA: How turning right
02:44:41 CA: Ok come out
02:44:41 FO: Over bank
02:44:41 CA: Autopilot
02:44:43 CA: Autopilot
02:44:44 FO: Autopilot in command
02:44:46 CA: Autopilot
02:44:48 FO Over bank, over bank, over bank
02:44:50 CA: OK
02:44:52 FO: Over bank
02:44:53 CA: OK, come out
02:44:56 FO: No autopilot commander
02:44:58 CA: Autopilot
02:44:58 EC1: Retard power, retard power, retard power
02:45:01 CA: Retard power
02:45:02 : Sound similar to overspeed clacker
02:45:04 CA: Come out
02:35:05 FO: No god except...
02:35:05 SV: "whoop" sound similar to ground proximity warning
02:45:06 END OF RECORDING

and another one:

00.30:54 F/O: which way are we flying?
00.30:56 CAP: I have no-
00.30:56 F/O: I don't know I don't know.
00.31:09 CAP: I have no idea which way is up.
00.31:10 F/O: oh. Ground... I don't know either [].
00.31:13 CAP: *upside down?

Yikes!

Finally (this is way too long), my first international travel experience was last year, for a high school graduation trip I gave myself. Before going off to Niigata and later Mito to stay with my best friend's family, jet lag caused us to wake up at 3 in the morning; we would walk around Ueno.
I miss it.