'Third World' Airports

For the first time a serving Pontiff is making a state visit to the UK, and Papa Razzi has kicked off his attempt to woo the locals by declaring that the UK is a 'force for good', if a little too secular and multicultural for his taste. He also praised us Brits for standing up to Hitler and his 'atheist extremism'. He did not however say what we are supposed to do about Richard Dawkins.

Not at his side was Father Walter Kasper, a close aide who spared himself the aggro of the arrivals process at London's busiest airport by earlier stating in an interview that "When you land at Heathrow you think at times you have landed in a Third World country." (Though officially at least, health reasons, prevented him from accompanying the Pope on this occasion.)

It's not clear whether his drift was that the place is full of insalubrious wogs, or whether it's just the dumpiest major hub on the planet. Or indeed whether he was speaking synechdochially about the parlous state of our nation as a whole.

Anyway, I suppose he's right about Heathrow and we wish him a speedy recovery from Vatican mouth. I live in a proper Third World country but the airport here thankfully makes Terminal 3 look like a dirt strip in Kandahar.

Still, my recent round-the-world journey did incorporate one major international aiport that provides a marginally worse passenger experience: JFK.

As for the rest, here's my personal league table:


1. Hong Kong International: in a city which often feels like one big duty free lounge they were going to have to come up with something special and who can argue when this mini-metropolis claims to be the world's greatest airport?

2. Suvarnabhumi, Bangkok: could not be further from the shithole that appeared in all those movies where naive young western girls are detained by sweaty, mosca-encircled immigration officials for carrying dope that some low-life had planted in their suitcase. Filled with seemingly pointless rolling electric walkways and an entire floor full of top notch Asian eateries.

3. Narita, Tokyo: much like Hong Kong, but somehow not quite as swanky.

4. YVR, Vancouver International: smartened up and 'greened' in advance of the Winter Olympics, the gate areas feature massive glass windows and high ceilings and pleasingly soft-toned upholstery.

5. Changi, Singapore: the trouble here is that while T3 is as smart and shiny as Asia's other leading terminals, T1 rivals its equivalent at Heathrow for all-round outmoded skankiness. The food on offer in the departure lounge is more along the lines of generic international soggy croissant than what you would expect from a foodie's paradise like Singapore.

6. La Guardia, New York: some might quibble about the runway sticking out into the Hudson, but the terminal facilities are nicely compact and the staff remarkably friendly and helpful for denizens of this city.

7. Aurora International, Guatemala City: the old set-up had its charms, but I suppose this new glass and metal make-over with its American-style dirty blue departure lounge seats is a better advertisement for Guatemala's desire to be modern. The old ways are most visibly preserved in the form of unnecessarily long queues for check-in and the payment of a departure tax that only bank employees can be trusted to handle.

8. Miami International (MIA): my unlucky aiport, scene of two emergency landings and other major inconveniences, which this time included being told by an automatic check-in machine that my flight was cancelled and by the nearest AA employee that customer service was in Dallas. Father Kasper should give it a whirl some time.

9. Heathrow, London: They're doing their best by attempting to tart up the original sixties terminals. The brand new T5 looks like a failed British attempt to recreate the experience of those Asian glass palaces, which went wrong the moment they decided to pack it with the same tat that clutters up the other four terminals.

10. JFK, New York: Rather than create a proper airport, the designers of JFK sought to build an airport of parts, where all the facilities you might need are strung out in a circle of wide circumference and linked by slow-moving driverless trains which circulate in only one direction. Authentic blue-collar New Yorkers of the stereotypically coarse and dismissive kind operate in force here.

Presidential enthusiasm

On first entering the Oval Office FDR famously let out a scream which brought aides rushing in to assist him. Obama must surely also have a sense of the magnitude of the task bequeathed to him by the baby boomers, but I still imagine he had one of those poorly-contained smiles on his face when he made his way into that room for the first time as its new executive occupant.

Will he cover the walls with pictures of himself? Helen Searls has written an interesting piece in Spiked! about the preemptive iconisation of America's 44th President:

"Che Guevara, whose simple image was again just a face decoupled from a political message, used to decorate the bedrooms of the youth of America and Europe. Few who owned the poster knew very much about Che Guevara the politician, but having it on your wall signalled that you were somehow progressive and radical. Today, though, progress and radicalism have been replaced by hope and faith. And it is not simply teenagers who want to identify with this message."

Obama made several speeches on Tuesday, not just that epic set-piece at the Capitol. Perhaps the one that will stick in our minds is that which he made at the Western inauguration ball, the ninth that he and Michelle had attended. It was delivered in the 'tired and emotional' fashion made fashionable by France's teetotaling President: "Lesh Save America. I love you....Michelle loves you..."

Still, even these public moments weren't exactly ad-libbed. He repeated the same remarks about his wife's heels at every bash they graced throughout the evening of his first half day in office.

Commentators on Fox and CNN tried to locate Obama's acceptance speech appropriately within the canon. Not as good as Kennedy, some suggested, but then every judgment we make about that President is tempered by what we know of his fate. The ultimate test of Yes We Can will have to be Yes We Did. For until the results are in there is a danger that fine intentions degrade into a form of political escapism.

However, there's no question that self-evident but half-remembered truths can benefit greatly from the kind of kick up the backside they get once repeated to a mass audience by a genuinely inspirational leader.

My own enthusiasm for Obama's words was tempered by the big turn-off delivered by the effect they were clearly having on some audience members who, heads back and hands clasped in front of their faces, were murmuring strange, unenlightened political incantations. And yet, in spite of the fact that there was plenty of hope and faith in Obama's message, non-believers got a brief mention too, and the new President promised to "restore science to its rightful place."

"Hope, n. Desire and expectation rolled into one." Ambrose Bierce

The Greatest Nation on Earth

As a formal speech-maker Obama is a heady mix of post-modern and pre-modern, his discourse full of textual and gestural quotes from earlier American discourse, whilst harking back to the days where no political statement could be made without first embedding it within one or other prevailing mythology.

Maybe Simon Schama was right that he represents a self-conscious reinvention of 'American fervour' It's this aspect of his appeal that fosters reservations in my father's mind. He's in no doubt that the right man won on Tuesday, it's just that what others find inspiring he finds comparatively flimsy.

McCain's speech outside a Phoenix hotel on Tuesday night reminded me how much respect I used to have for him before he picked Sarah Palin as his pitbull companion. And the boos that accompanied every mention of the name of his future President reminded me why he has been ill-served by the GOP's unprincipled use of him as a way of distancing themselves from the discredited good ol'boy in the White House.

I'd have to agree that McCain's valedictory address was the more powerful of the two speeches. I felt a shiver of unease when Obama began to borrow from the Gettysburg address before re-mixing his "Yes we can" refrain. The positive visual image of a little puppy dozing on a chair in the oval office was a welcome one though.

It has to be said that my father stopped understanding modern communications back in the 60s. When an ad doesn't state the benefits clearly and concisely, he shrugs his shoulders with visible irritation.

Maybe my generation of westerners really needs an America with a strong and credible brand, whose champions speak in the kind of fervent idiom that our own politicians un-learned a long time ago. Perhaps we too need the USA to be the 'greatest nation on Earth,' but in innocent, not cynical guise.

Unfortunately we have recent memories of fervour-lite in the form of Tony Blair. So much was anticipated, so little delivered. It may help Obama however that he's going to have to play defense from the get-go. Just avoiding economic catastrophe will be a significant achievement.

A last thought on the clearly very controversial question of whether Palin cost McCain the centre. Perhaps she is taking some of the blame that he himself might shoulder. For her role was clearly to 'shore up the base', Republican voters of the God-fearing sort who might not initially have warmed to the old maverick. He was more or less level with Obama in the polls back then, so all he had to do was reach out to the centre himself. But then came the Lehman Bros collapse and McCain's response was to shift his own discourse to the right and maybe it was that, and not that loose cannonette from Alaska, which ultimately doomed his campaign. The economy - and the real prospect of a complete meltdown in early October - undoubtedly created strong head winds for McCain-Palin, but the particular manner of his navigation through them undermined any sense that the Senator from Arizona's age was an advantage.

CNN exit polls showed that ageism played a much bigger role in this election than racism, but nobody really wants to talk about that now...

TV viewing diary - The American Future

The first part of Schama's book-accompanying BBC series was full of promise; unfortunately parts 2 and 3 have disappointed.

Schama's method here is to use a number of second tier historical events and personages in order to make some restrained points about the counter-currents behind America's historical momentum...before cordially hinting at their relevance to the 2008 election. This he says is "the moment of truth election" which makes it so fascinating to watch.

The series kicked off with the story of John Wesley Powell, the one-armed old soldier who set about exploring the Colorado River in 1869, an experience which taught him that American expansionism would have to have limits. Weaning Americans off their sense of entitlement to near endless resources has proved immensely difficult, but Schama found signs of hope in the aggressive water management policies of Las Vegas (Lake Mead is at 50% capacity after 9 years of drought) and in the fact that neither Obama nor McCain pretend to keep things going along as blindly as they have been. 

In American War (part 2) Schama again set up an underlying intellectual conflict in American history: the contrasting views of Hamilton and Jefferson on the proper role of the military in their new kind of democratic state. Another binary opposition cropped up at the end of the nineteenth century when Teddy Roosevelt and Mark Twain clashed over the rather Iraq-like insurgency situation which arose after the American 'liberation' of the Philippines. 

Twain had originally thought it an immensely good idea to fight for 'another man's freedom', believing his nation's role in the Spanish-American War to be setting an admirable new precedent, but he quickly became disillusioned with the not-so-closet-imperialism that Roosevelt was soon openly endorsing. 

This story led to some rather weak conclusions about America's perennial examination of conscience every time its military is deployed in the name of protecting freedom in the outside world. It was however interesting to see a speech made by General Ricardo Sanchez (V Corps Commander of Coalition forces 2003-4) at a veterans reunion. Schama said he was expecting a call to arms, but instead what he heard was a call to vote - ultimately "more American". (And by implication a call to vote for Obama.) 

An unwillingness to get down and dirty with yet another of America's 'dirty' historical issues characterised part 3 - American Fervour. Schama promised he'd examine why evangelicals had gone from being champions of social egalitarianism into the most socially-conservative force in the country...but then didn't, at least not to any satisfactory extent. 

He drew some equivocal parallels between Americans' faith and their love of freedom, even finding a black Baptist pastor who professed a belief that Justice was an essentially theological issue. This time, he said, it's the Democrats who are making the "fervent call" to save America.

I've seen other programmes which suggest that there's something rather expedient about Barack Obama's religiosity, but Schama was clearly very keen to preserve the Democratic candidate's status in this narrative as the latest and greatest political exponent of Black church fervour in America.

All in all it's become a rather superficial historical contextualising of this particular "moment of truth" and one that is being undermined by its author's determination to remain polite (or at least only indirectly rude) at all times. 

And with the amount of footage devoted to the peripatetic historian doing - well,  not very much really -  it's hard to escape the conclusion that the whole series is something of a vanity piece. 

Schama and Stephen Fry might have swapped itineraries before setting off, as both have put in stops at Appalachian mining towns and at Arlington National Cemetery which, we learned, was deliberately carved out of the estate of Robert E. Lee. 

TV viewing diary - Stephen Fry in America

So far a bit like Borat...but with fewer cultural learnings. Was there ever a more superficial survey of the 50 states?

Fry seems most at home when he's an invited guest in the home of the wealthier, snobbier sort of American. Miami meanwhile is "a hole". 

I did like that quote from Gore Vidal - one time resident of La Antigua Guatemala - that the puritans came to America not so much to escape persecution, but in order to be able to practice it more freely! 

Other interesting factlets were the cost of owning a New York Yellow Cab - $600,000 - and that just 10% of cabbies in the Big Apple are native born these days.

And we both laughed out loud when a member of the Alabama Board of Pardons and Paroles gave as his rationale for rejecting one heartfelt plea for early release that "the only reason he stopped killing people is that he ran out of ammo."

But this is America...

"Australia got the convicts, Canada got the French, we got the Puritans...we're stuck with them."



Tony Blair would be a shoe-in for the Antichrist though.

Stats on Sunday

One in every hundred infant Guatemalans becomes an adopted US citizen.
One in every hundred adult US citizens does jail time.

Viva Obama!

Hillary's remaining hopes of winning the Democratic Party nomination depend quite heavily on the hard-working Mexican-American voters of Texas, who up to recently would have been considered firmly in the Clinton camp. Thanks to Buried Mirror for this clip which shows what Obama has been planning to do about that...



"Hasta con plan de salud!"

Yes we can, yes we can, yes we can...

I met up with Frode and Emily at Starbucks on Regent Street last Friday night. He couldn't wait to show me this video:



What better harbinger of the sort of unstoppable group-hugginess likely to sweep over the American political scene should Obama win his party's nomination. Alienated, partly cynicised individuals everywhere will be revelling in this opportunity to return to the group!

Virgin Maries

Having made four transatlantic trips with Virgin Atlantic over the past couple of months (and signed up for their Flight Club) this comes as unwelcome news.

Many years ago when Surfer and I were Miami bound, we had to stay overnight in a hotel near Gatwick because of a transport strike, and that evening we ran into a bunch of American aircrew getting shitfaced in the bar.

"Ah cun drink until ah puke all over muhself" I distinctly recall one of them informing us. We looked out for him the next morning on our flight.

Sedona and the San Francisco peaks

I suppose I can see why so many people come to Sedona to catch a cosmic tan. Even flying over on the way up to the Grand Canyon one could pick up the buzz that seems to emanate from its ruddy sandstone strata.

And to some extent it is still with me. If I do return to the Southwest next year, it's one place I'd like to make the overland trip to. That and Flagstaff.

Impressive from several thousand feet up too were the San Francisco peaks, a field of perky miniature volcanoes just beyond San Francisco mountain. Up until that point in the journey I had been finding it hard to attune my senses of scale and distance, so empty of human constructions were the ponderosa pine-covered hills to the north of Phoenix.

Grand though the Grand Canyon itself undoubtedly is, it somehow doesn't seem to deliver the same out-of-history experience that you can get from smaller scale European locations. "It seems a bit dead," Gaylene observed of its eerie quietness as we wandered around its sheer edges. (Of the places I have visited in the last couple of years, the Pont Du Gard near Nîmes is the one that springs to mind as a prime example of the sort of place where the sense of deepened temporal perspective is almost immediate.)

Santa Monica, CA

Pretty girls skateboarding their prettier pooches; under-occupied men coming together around picnic-chess tables; bag ladies shunting their lives' possessions in matching plastic carriers up and down the edge of the ocean.

There's something oddly neat about even the indigents here, and I found the whole town unexpectedly under-exploited.

The seagulls are the same as the big capuccino-coloured bastards that feature so heavily in Galicia.

A fuller selection of images below.



http://www.flickr.com/photos/47524364@N00/sets/72157602576704616/

Venice Beach, CA

These guys were the highlight of a lunchtime stroll along Venice Beach last Tuesday.

Before air guitar dude turned up there was just the drummer under the shade and his programme had kicked off rather gently with Lovely Day by Bill Withers. As the outside tables at the nearby Delizia cafe filled up, the percussion became considerably more pronounced and the pair went on to give rousing renditions of Bamboleo and Van Halen's Hot for Teacher. Eventually a nettled-looking waitress leaned over the rail and asked them to keep it down. Air guitar dude then went into one about the local residents and their "be-bop shit".

I ended up eating some delicious empanadas from a little cafe run by an ex-pat Argie, with whom I discussed the impression that the Pumas have made at the Rugby World Cup. He seemed to belong to the limited group of small business owners on this stretch of the California coast who aren't trying to monetise a lost plot.

A selection of my pictures from Venice:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/47524364@N00/sets/72157602579294007/

Usability studies

Does anyone know why the toilet seats in the US don't complete the circle, so to speak?

This just one of several changes of interface I noticed on this trip. Like the way none of the restrooms seem to have cold water.

This was the case even in our LA offices, which made brushing my teeth a tad unpleasant, though it was great for shaving. Ok, I was the only vagrant in there that day, but I can't be alone in occasionally liking to brush my teeth at work.

Still, I do like the way that crossing pedestrians in LA get a count down before the lights change and red hand appears.

It's the little things...

Alison at the Consulate made me a delicious cup of tea and the American security guards there were all charming. They are all forgiven for leaving me stranded for three days in Phoenix!

No more loitering

I'm now sitting comfortably at the very smart offices of H&K on Cloverfield Avenue, Santa Monica, about 24 blocks back from the Ocean and right next door to the Yahoo! Centre.

I'm glad they put me in a quiet corner because I suspect I might not be smelling my best, though I'm surely not as malodorous as the interior of that Greyhound bus last night.
I'd had to blag my way onto it because the presentation of photo ID is usually mandatory. (I was eventually waved ahead with a polite "don't do it again!")

I've made some epic bus journeys across Mexico and Central America but this was one of the roughest I can recall. If parts of the US have felt like one big amusement park, I had a strong feeling last night that I had strayed outside of Mickey Mouse's Kingdom. When I decided to ask one woman about the seating arrangements, opening with the least hostile sounding "excuse me.." I could manage, she looked as if I had pulled a gun on her.

The driver (a dead ringer for MC Hammer in Men in Black garb) kept pulling over and opening up the bonnet to check out his engine. Getting stuck in the middle of the Sonoran desert seria el colmo I thought, but we struggled on to the outskirts of LA where we spent a couple of hours gridlocked in drizzle.

When I did finally get a cab from the bus station towards the British Consulate on Wilshire I rejoined the traffic jam and spent another hour or so on the freeway, but the cabbie was a Mexican and we chatted about el Tri's 2-2 draw last night with Nigeria and their forthcoming match up against Guatemala on Wednesday.

I'd left messages with the Consulate since Thursday morning but as luck would have it this was the moment they decided to call me back and better still, Alison − the Scottish consular official that I spoke to − promised to sort me out a one-year temporary passport today.

In the end she never even asked for ID, but I had already been on the phone to my bank in London and they had promised to dig my passport facsimile out of their archives in Fleet Street first thing tomorrow: looks like that won't be needed any more now. The people here at the LA office may still get that copy tomorrow, along with another from Atlanta.

We made a couple of stops on the way from Phoenix. First at a roadside McDonalds at a place called Quartzite, famed for its rock shops. There was a sign saying 'No Loitering' outside but I didn't really need to be told. Then we made an extra stop at San Bernadino where some people planned to change for a bus to San Diego, but the terminal was darkened and locked up and as nobody had the courage to get down, we drove on.

At one point the driver asked for a show of hands from the passengers to determine whether we were feeling over-chilled. We were. He then chastised us for not having made this clear when he delivered his detailed list of instructions with appended dos and don'ts as we pulled out of the station in Phoenix. "Like I said, I got ma own air up here."

Unlike the Galgos down south, the driver on these beaten-up American buses sits behind a sealed barrier that prevents passengers from coming up and making idle conversation. (In Guatemala it has struck me that this often helps keep the driver awake and out of the barrancos.)

I didn't get much sleep at all on what turned out to be an eight and a half hour ride, so I caught up with two weeks' worth of Mark Kermode's podcasts. Apparently the sub-title of Black Sheep is 'The Violence of the Lambs'. Haha.

Mallrat's diary

In the evenings downtown Scottsdale has the ambience of the inside of a hummer stretch limo.

It would certainly be a fun place to hang out if your idea of entertainment is dressing up like the latest victim on CSI:Miami and getting plastered in loud and dark restaurants.

For anyone else monontonous becomes a universal adjective, suitable for describing anything from the weather to the pink-beige Pueblo-style architecture and on to the food on the menus. (Not forgetting the follow-me muzak at the FireSky.)

I'm feeling the need to vary (and downsize) my diet. Last night in The Pink Taco we shared some cute little mini-tamales with strawberry sauce as our starter, but then these were followed by a burrito the size of a rolled-up bath towel. The other evening we celebrated the end of Digipalooza at a premium eatery called the City Hall Steak House where our 'petite filets' were accompanied by mashed potatoes and spinach soaked with so much full-fat cream that they reeked like the inside of the dairy at the Finca Carmona.

Today a cab driver (the only one I have came across who wasn't Somali) was telling me how real estate was actually quite affordable in the Valley until around five years ago when prices surged, peaking out in 2005. There's something of a slump right now and another local let on that these days you can get a four-bedroom suburban house with a pool in the area for around $280,000; which may explain why people have so much disposable income to blow on the bizarre mix of terribly tasteful and terribly tasteless goods on sale in the city's strikingly elegant malls. (A special mention here for the Cornelia Park store which today at least best epitomised this strange hit and miss American design juxtaposition for me.)

Luxuries do somehow seem more desirable here however. Today I bought V an iPod Touch at the Biltmore Town and Country shopping centre: a device recently described by Niall as "pointless". I also went to Borders and bought a copy of All the Pretty Horses which seemed like the right thing to be reading on this unexpected extension of my stay in the Wild West.

There are some seriously loaded people around here, but it's not really clear to me whether they made their money in Arizona or in more temperate states. There do seem to be rather a lot of banks in town. Yet in spite of this highly visible affluence there are also plenty of poor folk in Phoenix. The local high schools have a 30% drop-out rate and my world-weary cab driver described his hometown as "one of the speed capitals of the USA."

Noting that this is the hottest place in the country outside of Death Valley, he also told me that the last few months had been the most unbearable during his eight year residence in Phoenix. This was because it went up to 110 degrees and pretty much stayed there all summer. And after only four days here the ever-present aircon has left me with parched lips and bleeding sinuses.

The stress of the last couple of days has been amplified by my knowledge that V hasn't been making an ideal recovery following her accident a couple of weeks ago. She was fortunate not to break any bones (especially her skull considering that she landed head first), but the medics at casualty told her that it looked like she had bust every vein in her right leg, and over the past week the foot attached to that limb has been discolouring.

Worried about the threat of gangrene she went back to a specialist and has been told to self-inject a third generation liquid antibiotic called Ceftriaxone mixed with a local anaesthetic called Lidocain. I'm feeling particularly foolish and helpless to be this much closer to Guatemala and yet fairly well stuck in the US for the time being.

Leaving aside my colleague's trip to the airport, today was fairly relaxing. We'd swapped the relentless chill-out of FireSky for the reverberations of merengue-hip hop and reggeton at the Inn at Pima, for when we checked in last night there was a Fiesta de Quinceañera in full swing there, but luckily the sound of it didn't carry to my block. The corridors might have had that three star smell about them, but the chichi-free comforts of this condo-hotel were refreshing.

I would have had a my first full night's sleep here last night had Christofer not rung me on my mobile at 4am to pass on the news from the Rugby World Cup. This sudden and most unusual interest in sporting activity on his part was largely due to its convergence with his longer-term interest in unfortunate things happening to French people.

Digipalosers

Gaylene managed to miss her US Airlines flight back to LA this afternoon, largely because she thought she was on a United flight, and the slowness of the latter carrier's check-in service contributed to the mishap.

In the end it may have been a blessing in disguise, because it seems that her original flight was seriously delayed and she ended up leaving Phoenix before it did. Although she will miss her LA connection, there's a later one, so it should work out OK.

Meanwhile we saw Lisa from Canada at Terminal 2 with the now familiar wild-eyed look of someone who has recently misplaced their passport. So perhaps I wasn't the only loskop at the conference after all!

A la Gran...

...Cañon.

Flying back from the north of the state today I suddenly remembered that my broker in Atlanta should have a copy of my passport on file: a bombilla moment according to V, when I told her. If I can get them to fax it to me in LA on Monday I will be in far better shape when I turn up at the Consulate.

There's no escape the chill-out music at FireSky. On the first night it occurred to me that it might still be playing when I picked up the phone.

Celeb alert! We have just spotted Michelle Williams, Heath Ledger's ex. It looks like she's here for a wedding that is about to get under way. They politely asked us to shift from the little circle of seats around the outdoor log fire so that they could take some photos of the family there. I warned them that the sprinklers tend to come on rather suddenly around here; yesterday one of our delegates took a direct hit in the back during our lunch break at that particular spot.

Right now, some very hospitable member of the hotel staff keeps refilling my glass with a sweet Californian Merlot called Little Black Dress, which features a discarded pair of red, high-heeled shoes on the label. Nothing like the wines that HS ordered last night. I guess I'd be feeling a whole lot better today if I hadn't cleaned my palate between the Cabernet and the Pinot Noir with that Margarita.

There seems to be a lot of PT Cruisers in Arizona...plus something from Chevrolet which looks like a bad Chinese knock-off of the Chrysler. (Made south of the border so they don't have to come far.)

Surprisingly though, it's hard to get a decent Mexican beer (Bohemia, Dos Equis etc.) at the FireSky. But there is an interesting local brew called 8th Street Ale from the Four Peaks Brewery. They're generally not too great at pronouncing Spanish words in this part of old Mexico either. (Cabeeza de Varca, press one for Espannol etc.)

Anyway, we're going out for Mexinosh tonight...The Pink Taco no less. (A review here from Chowhound). If it's authentic it will be the only thing in the southern part of the state that is.

I'd have to say that Phoenix is generally a rather dull, affluent place, in a low key kind of way. Fun if you like cafe-au-lait brunettes in tiny (but very smart) dresses; indeed, the young people in this town dress far more slickly than in towns like Houston. Much of the domestic architecture in Scottsdale is a bit 'low chaparral' and quite impersonal compared to say the suburban buildings of LA.

As for the resort hotels, it's like some over-indulgent interior designer has been let loose on the environment.

Pictures of the Grand Canyon

Pictures from the journey up there...which in many ways was just as impressive

Perdido en el corazón de la grande Babylon...

Today I begin my new life as an itinerant indocumentado in south-western USA. I will be getting the Greyhound bus service to LA tomorrow night. With no passport it will be hard for me even to book a room when I get there...though presumably I could get a job as a nanny in Beverly Hills.

Manu Chao incidentally has one of the best live acts I've ever seen. This clip from Lollapalooza; though he'd have been a welcome addition to our own Digipalooza this week.