Digital makes it so much easier. No bricks of film, no worrying about airport X-rays, etc.
I didn't want my kids having to pass through an airport named after their father.
Nowadays a businessman can go from his office straight to the airport, get into his airplane and fly six hundred or seven hundred miles without taking off his hat. He probably will not even mention this flight, which a bare twenty-five years ago would have meant wearing leather jacket and helmet and goggles and risking his neck every minute of the way.
I meditate at airports because those are the places where I’m extremely tense, and I often meditate while I’m walking down the street. I have a thought and become aware of that thought and thereby create another level of awareness.
I haven't isolated myself. I am not living on a yacht somewhere. I am not tucked away or behind a gate somewhere. I am not flying on a private plane. I am going to the airport, I am with people, some of the interactions are good, some of them are not so good, but it keeps me in touch with being, you know, part of society.
Anything that keeps you happy and writing is part of my writing ritual: I like music, so I tend to have it playing in the background. But if I'm interested, I can write in an airport waiting areas.
I always save a huge book for a flight, because then you read it at both airports and on the plane and by the time you get home you're a quarter of the way through and it doesn't feel so unmanageable any more.
Anywhere I go, there is always an incredible crowd that follows me. In Rome, as I land at the airport, even the men kiss me. I love Rome.
I think the beard helps offset - it's the only hairstyle I can really pull off. But I'm often clean-shaven. I think, you know, for me, it's not that signifier. What's interesting to me though is although the beard isn't a signifier of that to me, other people very often think that it is. And so people in America might react differently. The, you know, border agents might react differently. The guys at airport security might react differently.
In 1992 I was doing one of my first ever tours and I was in Heathrow airport and I saw these middle-aged musicians who had clearly been on tour for decades, and they all looked haggard and unhappy and unhealthy. I vowed to myself that I would never be that person. Flash forward 20 years and I found myself in Heathrow looking haggard and unhappy and unhealthy. I decided I would rather spend my time staying home working on music and making dinner with friends, instead of spending six months in a hotel in a state of depressing suspended adolescence.
Say, I was on The Craig Kilbourne Show and the next day I flew to Minneapolis. I was at the airport and a guy came up. He said, 'Dude, I saw you on TV last night.' But he did not say whether or not he thought I was good, he just confirmed that I was on television. So I turned my head away from him for about a minute, then I turned it back. I said, 'Dude, I saw you at the airport about a minute ago. And you were good.'
Why do we go through all the nonsense with security at our airport? It's not because the Catholic Church is falling apart.
I don't have a problem with many uses of the word genre, just certain ones. I have the most trouble when these labels are used to prevent discussion, to prevent a work from being taken seriously as literature. When we say "genre," we generally mean "something crappy," something that would be sold in an airport.
1. Don't be boring. 2. Be able to pass the airport test; be interesting enough to carry on a 3 hour conversation with a stranger. 3. When in doubt, do what you can never do again.
I find it ironic how New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg is so focused on such small issues as drink sizes, while ignoring the massive infrastructure challenges in New York - lousy roads, third-world airports, traffic jams, etc.
The people who are doing really well and who are getting stopped in airports are the people who are going to say the more outrageous things and get on TV and state their opinion on a regular basis.
I was in Toronto when they had a severe outbreak of SARS - you know, Severe Asian Racism Syndrome. I was in the airport and there were these big snowboarder guys and they had white masks around their necks, and as soon as they saw me, they put their masks on. So I went "cough, cough, cough... You wanna egg rorr?
Over a period of about year-and-a-half, Malcolm X and [Alex] Haley agreed to work with each other. They met usually after a long business day that Malcolm put in very tired. He would get there at about - either at Haley's apartment or they would meet at then Idyllwild Airport at a hotel, and Malcolm would be debriefed by Haley. He would talk, Haley would take notes.
I'm mainly an airport author, and if you're trying to take your mind off the journey, you're not going to read 'King Lear.'
"There is love." Someone wrote that for me on a piece of paper in an airport when I probably looked like I really needed to hear it. I did. We all need the reminder sometimes.
[My House By The Water] is a nice instrumental track. The sound of the water is from the same place where the front photo was taken. I live really close to the airport, so there's also planes going over. It's kind of to remind me of living in there, because I'm not gonna be living in there for very much longer.
Seems like half my anxiety dreams are about airports.
The only way my head was going truly somewhere else was to travel to a different life and not a different airport.
I had more material on weather than anyone else, I guess, ... back when I was traveling a lot on the road as a standup comic, between airport security and the weather... I just wanted to be prepared for sitting in the airport.
But we agree with the NTSB that if we eliminated the thrust- reverser calculation, it would be an extra margin of safety. Airport capacity and airline efficiency are important, but safety is the most important thing.
