Hippos and Haute Cuisine in a Zambian Safari Lodge.

IT WAS FOUR in the morning. The footsteps outside were wet and concussive, one after the other, like a sort of hydraulic pile-driver. They came closer, drifted away, then came closer again. I tugged the sheets up and slowed my breathing, convinced that if I made so much as a sound, he or she would come crashing through the canvas wall of our chalet and devour me.

The culprit was a hippopotamus, a nightly visitor to the grassy patches only a few feet from our beds, contentedly munching in the moonlight. Supposedly there was nothing to worry about. We’d been assured that a hippo would never pose a threat, so long as we stayed inside. But that didn’t make it less scary. This was an animal the size of minivan, with teeth that could puncture aluminum. Each night I’d lay awake in the predawn hours, waiting for the hippo to rumble in from the river, equal parts thrilled and terrified.

That river would be the Kafue, in west-central Zambia. A tributary of the more famous Zambezi River, the Kafue meanders for almost a thousand miles. Midway along, it intersects the enormous Kafue National Park, tracing the park’s eastern boundaries. The second-largest park in Africa, and one of the largest protected areas in the world, Kafue is home to elephant, lion, zebra, antelope, hundreds of bird species, and plenty of hungry, hungry hippos to mess with your sleep cycle.

Think “safari” and Zambia isn’t among the places that normally pop to mind. Kenya, Tanzania, and Botswana get most of the attention. They also get the crowds. Many African parks have come to feel more and more like zoos, replete with screaming kids and conga lines of minivans encircling some bewildered cheetah. It was the promise of a quieter and more secluded experience that drew me to Zambia, and to Kafue in particular.

Here you’ll find 8,600 square miles of unspoiled wilderness. Lush swaths of greenery skirt the riverbanks, then give way to endless expanses of the semi-deciduous woods known locally as “miambo.” Sun-baked plains of scrub and thorn are studded by century-old termite mounds; Baobab and fig trees soar in prehistoric-looking clusters. It’s as beautiful as it is hostile, but either way offering some of the most spectacular vistas you’ll ever see. Tourists are here, but not many. On a game drive you’re more likely to encounter an elephant than a Land Rover.

Of course, as much I appreciate remoteness and solitude, I’m also a sucker for creature comforts and letting someone else arrange the logistics of what to see, when to see it and how. That’s where the Kaingu Safari Lodge comes in. Five hours by road from the Zambian capital of Lusaka, or six from the southern frontier town of Livingstone, Kaingu is the most idyllically set of the Kafue game lodges. It’s right on the river, with six tented chalets, a “family” chalet with space for eight guests, and three campsites.

Kaingu was established in 2005 by Rick and Lynda Schultz, a pair of globe-trotting Australians from Melbourne. They were joined six years ago by Gil and Julia Dixon, by way of Scotland and Germany respectively. The two couples oversee a staff of up to 22 employees, including two chefs and a team of guides.

Kaingu deftly navigates the sometimes uneasy line between luxury and adventure. There’s that phrase, “white tablecloth safari,” with its colonialist overtones and 19th-century style affectations. That’s not Kaingu. Instead, you get just the right blend of rustic and indulgent. It’s not inexpensive, but neither is it extravagant or pretentious. “Bush boutique,” is how Julia Dixon describes it. The tented chalets, with thatched roofs and walled-in outdoor showers, are stylish but unfussy. Each overlooks the river, with a porch and chairs for that golden hour gin and tonic. Just remember to latch the screen door any time you step away. The resident vervet monkeys are as dastardly as they are amusing, and are liable to run off with your passport or binoculars.

Kaingu’s outstanding pair of chefs, Wina and Elizabeth, prepare thrice-daily meals as good or better than anywhere in the country. I’m the ultimate non-foodie, yet there I was jumping with anticipation at the sound of the dinner bell (there is, literally, a bell). Every appetizer and entree, without exception, left me in a state of blissful satisfaction. One night it was the Kafue River crayfish with smoked tomato risotto and snow peas. The next it was lamb chops with ginger and almond sauce. Fish curry with cucumber lime salad? Seared breast of duck with glazed sweet potatoes? Hundreds of miles from the nearest big city, and I’ve never eaten so good. The ingredients are grown at the lodge or otherwise locally sourced, and everything — even the bread — is cooked on site.

Guests are assigned a guide, in whose company you can enjoy any of several partial or full-day activities, from game drives and treks to excursions along the river. The lodge has three aluminum outboards, each with seats for six. Overnight stays are available on nearby islands.

Our guide was the curiously named John Deere. We took this to be a humorous coincidence until John explained that Zambian children are often named in honor of material objects of meaning to their families. In this case, yes, a venerable tractor that had been a fixture on the family farm. John Deere turned out to be the most startlingly knowledgable nature guide I’ve met in over thirty years of travel. In an instant he could identify and describe virtually any of the park’s flora or fauna, be it a tree, a bird or a mammal. Some of these were the sort of marquee stars that needed no introduction (elephant, zebra, warthog, hippo), but without John, we wouldn’t have known a bushbuck from a waterbuck from a reedbuck; a grysbok from a hartebeest from a kudu.

He was particularly helpful when it came to birds. After a pair of full-day game drives I had logged close to 90 species, including several I’d never seen before, like the schalow’s turaco and the red chested cuckoo. The majority of these, if not for John’s keen eye and expertise, would have gone onto my life list accompanied by question marks or asterisks.

In the dry season, water levels in the Kafue drop substantially, revealing strings of almost comically picturesque islets. Soft sandy beaches are backdropped by stacks of enormous boulders buffed smooth and white after millennia of erosion. Beneath the boulders grow lawns of brilliantly green grass, strangely manicured to a perfect 3/4 inch, as if by machine. Thus each islet looks uncannily like a primordial miniature golf course, complete with rock sculptures and putting greens.

I was standing in the center of one of these putting greens when, to my consternation, John Deere matter of factly explained that the “machine” responsible for keeping the grass so neatly trimmed is, of course, the hippopotamus. I’d been dealing with enough hippo-related anxiety as it was, and didn’t need to hear this. We’d seen several hippo pods during the boat ride over, and I knew they were lurking nearby.

That anxiety would reach a crescendo 24 hours later:

It was our final afternoon, and the plan was to take a trip down the Kafue in inflatable kayaks. Whose idea this was I can’t remember, but I spent the morning dreading it, wracked by premonitions of being impaled on a hippo tusk and dragged to my demise. John Deere and Gil Dixon did their best to assuage my worries, employing such non-encouragements as, “It’s not likely to be dangerous.”

“But a hippo can chomp through metal,” I protested. “A golden retriever can sink an inflatable kayak.”

“You’ll be fine,” promised John. “If we do see a hippo anywhere close, just turn 90 degrees and paddle to the bank.”

We weren’t five minutes into the river when exactly that scenario happened. We’d entered a small channel alongside one of those cartoon islets when, right there, not thirty feet in front of me, I saw the hippopotamus, its ears wriggling adorably in that way you see in nature documentaries. It turned directly towards us, then ducked under.

“Hippo!” I yelled, digging in my paddle with an energy I’m scarcely capable of, yawing us hard toward the shore.

A few minutes later we were standing in the mud, waiting for a rescue boat. I refused to go any further.

That evening, on the veranda overlooking the river, Gil handed me a cocktail. “You know,” he said. “That hippo, it was just minding its business. I doubt it posed a threat.” He sighed. “But I guess I can’t blame you.” He then went on to entertain me — which is to say embarrass me — with tales of other guests whose bravado and derring-do made me feel like the biggest coward in Africa. Like the swaggering foursome of Aussies who took to the river in inner tubes, armed with only a pocket knife and a broomstick. They survived, and I would have too.

But heck, it wouldn’t have been a safari without a dose or two of fright. Even if most of it was self-induced.

This story was originally published in 2020 in the Boston Globe.

March 7, 2023

IS IT JUST ME, or is post-pandemic America a wobbly one? Superficially things appear normal, but every so often you find yourself tripping on something that isn’t quite right. Customer service levels, certainly, have slipped across the board. And though it’s easy to blame staffing shortages, you can’t deny that the world we’ve reassembled feels a little, well, lazier than the old one.

For those of us who travel a lot, these weak spots can be stubbornly annoying. I call these my Post-Pandemic Pet Peeves (PPPP, or P4s, for short). I’ve got quite a list, as goes my whiny nature, but today let’s focus on just two of them, both of which you’ll find in hotel rooms:

First is the disappearance of drinking glasses. For reasons that were never fully explained, cups and glasses were removed from most hotel rooms during COVID. Just as strangely, they were never put back.

In the old days, every hotel room on earth, from a suite at the Four Seasons to a $39 room at Motel 6, had a couple of cups or glasses on the bathroom vanity. Maybe they were crystal, maybe they were throw-aways wrapped in cellophane. No more. In the post-COVID world, guests who would dare brush their teeth are expected to stick their mouths under the faucet, or to slurp from cupped hands like savages.

If you’re lucky, you can scrounge a paper cup from the coffee maker, but even that’s no guarantee. And this has become normal not only in budget properties, but in five-star places as well. I was in a Hyatt recently. No glasses, anywhere. So I call the front desk, and the guy says, “Would you like us to bring you some?” Hell, why not skip the pillows and sheets as well? If guests want them, they can always call.

Is this one of those “supply chain issues” we keep hearing about, or something else? Of all the things.

No less infuriating, meanwhile, has become the preponderance of QR codes in place of paper menus.

I wanted room service in a hotel in Florida recently. When I couldn’t find a menu, I phoned reception and was told a QR code was available through the TV, on the guest services channel. After fumbling with the non-responsive television for several minutes, I found the code, which in turn told me I needed to download the hotel’s entire guest services app. After doing that, I needed to dig through page after page of different hotel locations until finding the one I was in, and then hunt down the restaurant menu. Hit the wrong arrow and whole application would bounce to the beginning.

Or, I could’ve picked up a paper menu from the desk and instantly had what I needed.

At a hotel in Spain, a QR code for room service instead kept directing me to a company in Malta that repaired boats. When I called downstairs, they sent someone up to slip a menu under the door. Maybe just have one in the room to start with?

QR mania is hardly particular to hotels, of course. Many dine-in restaurants have forsaken tradition and force their guests to participate in this barbaric task.

We don’t read menus anymore. We “navigate” them. “Where are the entrees?…. Wait, where did the starters go?… Was that an appetizer?… Is there a wine list in here?… Oh shit… No, go back to that first page… Those are the desserts… Did that come with anything?… Was that the one with calamari?… Hang on, I can’t find that veggie burger… What was that called?… Wait… ”

On an airplane, fine. At a take-out joint, sure. But for a serious dining establishment to ask its patrons to peck around on their phones is nothing if not rude.

I understand that menu items change and there are costs involved with re-printing, and so on. And I’m all for saving trees and reducing waste. But there are those situations, and this is one of them, where old-fashioned paper is the friendlier, more civilized, all-around better solution.

As maybe you already know, many restaurants have a secret inventory of paper menus for those irritating customers who insist. I am one of those customers. I was at a Thai place in Long Beach the other day, and asked for a “normal menu.” I use this phrasing intentionally. To say “paper” implies lesser or obsolete. “Normal” implies better. Which it is.

The look on the waiter’s face is one I won’t forget, but 90 seconds later, there it was: leather-bound, elegant and simple. Everyone at the table put their phones down, and we ordered the normal way.

 

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THE STATE OF FLYING IN 2022

Hotel room photo by the author.

Our airports are terrible, and our airlines are finding it harder to compete. We’ve done it to ourselves through flyer-unfriendly policies.

January 24, 2018

FORGIVE ME for repeating myself. In earlier posts, as well as in my book, I’ve emphasized the myriad ways in which U.S. airports pale in comparison to those overseas. I hate driving a topic into the ground, but my experiences over the past few days force me to revisit this:

The other day, traveling on vacation, I flew from Singapore to Amsterdam, with a connection in Hong Kong. The connection process in HKG went like this: I stepped off the first plane into a quiet, spacious, immaculately clean concourse. After a quick and polite security screening that took all of sixty seconds, I proceeded to my departure gate a few minutes away.

That’s it.

Compare this, if you dare, to the process of making an international connection in the United States of America. Imagine you’re a foreign traveler arriving in the U.S. from Europe or Asia, with an onward connection either domestically or to a third country:

You step off the plane and make your way to the immigration hall, which as always is packed to capacity. After standing in line for upwards of an hour, you’re photographed and fingerprinted before finally being released into baggage claim and the customs hall. Or maybe it takes even longer: after docking at the gate, airline station personnel inform you that due to extremely long lines at immigration, all passengers are asked to remain aboard for the time being.

Not to mention, if you’re coming from a country that’s not on the U.S. visa waiver list, you’ll need to have obtained a visa in advance just to begin this process, even you’re only passing through.

Your next task is to stand at the baggage carousel for twenty minutes and wait for your suitcase. American airports do not recognize the “in transit” concept, meaning that all passengers arriving from overseas, even those in-transit to a third country, are forced to claim and re-check their luggage. Once you’ve got your bag, another line awaits at the customs checkpoint, followed by yet another line at the luggage re-check counter.

Finally you’re released into the terminal. Of course, this building is used for “international arrivals only” — another of those peculiarly American airport concepts — and your connecting flight is leaving from a totally different terminal on the other side of the airport. To get there, you walk outside and spend fifteen minutes in the rain waiting for a bus.

And we haven’t gotten to the worst part yet: once you’ve reached the correct terminal, it’s time for security screening. The line at TSA is a good forty minutes long, the guards barking at people amidst the clatter of bins and luggage.

At long last you’re in the departure concourse, which is undersized, overcrowded, and, in the distinct fashion of too many American airports, louder than a football stadium. Babies are crying, CNN news monitors are blaring, and waves of public address announcements — most of them pointless and half of them unintelligible — wash over one another.

How long did all of that take? A solid two hours on some days. Welcome to the American airport.

Even if you’re not making a connection, the arrival process alone often takes over an hour. Back at Hong Kong, a passenger can be off the plane, through immigration and onto the train to Kowloon in fifteen minutes. I remember my last trip to Bangkok, and how I, an arriving foreigner, made it from the airplane to the taxi stand in less than ten minutes. BKK is one of the biggest and busiest international airports in the world, yet the waiting times at immigration can often be measured in seconds, never mind minutes.

Two years ago in a CNN poll of 1,200 overseas business travelers who’ve visited the United States, twenty percent said they would not visit the country again due to onerous entry procedures at airports, including long processing lines. Forty-three percent said they would discourage others from visiting. Separately, in a copy of Air Line Pilot magazine, U.S. Chamber of Commerce counsel Carol Hallett stated that “the United States risks falling behind Asia, the Middle East, and Europe as the global aviation leader.”

I’d say that battle was lost a long time ago.

To be fair, the scenario above is a worst-case to best-case comparison. Most overseas airports require a secondary security check for third-country connections, and there can be a secondary immigration checkpoint as well. Terminal transfers aren’t unheard of, and even some European airports go out of their way to make the travel experience tedious and confusing (CDG we’re talking to you). However, if we’re going to compare the typical connection experience in the U.S. versus the typical connection experience in Europe or Asia, the latter wins almost every time.

The crossroads of global air commerce today are places like Dubai, Istanbul, Seoul and Singapore. These are the places — not New York or Chicago or Los Angeles — that are setting the standards. They’ve got the best airports, the fastest-growing airlines, and the most convenience for travelers.

Some of their success is owed to simple geography. Dubai, for instance, is perfectly placed between the planet’s biggest population centers. It’s the ideal transfer hub for the millions of people moving between Asia and Europe; Asia and Africa; North America and the Near East.  The government of the U.A.E. saw this opportunity years ago, and began to invest accordingly. Today, Dubai airport is one of the busiest, and its airline, Emirates, is now the largest in the world if you exclude the U.S. domestic market.

Not far from Dubai, Istanbul’s new airport is poised to become a similar mega-hub. Its hometown carrier, Turkish Airlines, flies to more countries than any other airline.

There’s not much we can do about geography. At the same time, there’s no excuse for the American aviation sector to have fallen so far. We’ve done it to ourselves, of course, through shortsightedness, underfunding, and flyer-unfriendly policies. The Federal government seems to treat air travel as a nuisance, something to be dissuaded, rather than a vital contributor of tens of billions of dollars to the annual economy. As a result our airports are substandard across a number of fronts, both procedurally and infrastructurally; our terminals are dirty and overcrowded; our air traffic control system is underfunded; Customs and Border Protection facilities are understaffed; passengers are groped and hassled to the point where, if that CNN poll is to be believed, millions of them will refuse to visit the country.

And although our physical location may not be ideal as a transfer point, there are still plenty of travelers moving between continents who can and should be connecting at U.S. airports aboard U.S. carriers — if only we weren’t driving them away.

Traveling between Australia and Europe, for example, or between Asia and South America, the U.S. makes — or should make — a logical transfer point. Hell, we don’t even try, beginning with the fact that our airports don’t allow for transit passengers.

Flying from Australia to Europe, to pick another example, a traveler has two options. He or she can fly westbound, via Asia (through Singapore, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur or Hong Kong) or the Middle East (Dubai, Qatar, Abu Dhabi, etc.), or eastbound via the U.S. West Coast (Los Angeles or San Francisco). Even though the flying times are about the same, almost everybody will opt for the westbound option. Changing planes at LAX on the other hand, passengers have to stand in at least three different lines, be photographed and fingerprinted, collect and re-check their bags, and endure the full TSA rigmarole before slogging through a noisy terminal to the departure gate.

It’s a similar story traveling between Asia and South America. Europe to Latin America, ditto. Few passengers on these routes will choose to connect in the United States because we’ve made it so damn inconvenient. We can only guess at how many millions of passengers our carriers lose out on each year.

Insult to injury, airline tickets in America are taxed to the hilt. Overall, flying is a lot more affordable than it has been in decades past, but if it feels expensive, one of the reasons is the multitude of government-imposed taxes and fees. There’s an excise tax, the 9/11 Security Fee, the Federal Segment Fee, the Passenger Facility Charges, International Arrival and Departure Taxes, Immigration and Customs user fees, an Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service charge, and so on — a whopping 17 total fees! Airline tickets are taxed at a higher federal rate than alcohol and tobacco.

Finally, you should know that the government-run Export-Import (Ex-Im) Bank of the United States provides billions of dollars in below-market financing each year to carriers overseas, helping deliver hundreds of American-built aircraft at rates not available to our own airlines. This is one of the reasons Persian Gulf carriers such as Emirates and Qatar Airways have been able to expand so rapidly. U.S. taxpayers are in fact subsidizing the growth of carriers that compete directly with our own. Ex-Im’s assistance is helpful to Boeing, but it gives foreign carriers a competitive advantage.

 

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IF YOU’RE GONNA ask me about the debacle at Southwest Airlines, there isn’t much I can tell you that you don’t already know. The normal media has covered the crisis ad nauseam, and has done a fairly good job of it.

In short, it began as an employee shortage during a storm in Denver. Hundreds of apron workers walked off the job after the airline reacted threateningly to a high number of sick calls. This gridlocked the operation in Denver, in turn cascading into a massive number of cancellations systemwide. An outdated IT infrastructure then handicapped attempts to get things restarted. Thousands of crewmmembaers needed to be re-routed, departures re-sequenced, and so on. Southwest’s logistics software couldn’t handle it.

And so on.

The “airline meltdown” has become a recurrent event — a revolving series of on-again off-again fiascos. Every few months, it seems, things at one of the big carriers go haywire for a few days. It happened to American, it happened to Sprit. In fact, isn’t the first time it happened to Southwest. In October of 2021 the airline canceled 2,000 flights over a four-day span after bad weather swept through Florida.

What happened over Christmas was the worst of the disruptions so far (the tab for Southwest is estimated at nearly a billion dollars), but it’s unlikely to be the last. The industry’s new normal, at least for now, is to operate right on the edge of crisis, with little margin for error. Flights are full and the skies are jam-packed with planes, while carriers — together with air traffic control, TSA, and pretty much every other moving part in the air travel machine — remain understaffed and inflexible, still playing post-pandemic catch-up.

Which brings us to something that’s been nagging me for quite some time:

Labor, or lack thereof, appears to be the biggest underlying culprit. People resigned or were let go en masse during the pandemic, and haven’t returned. And so the solution should be no more complicated than re-hiring enough workers to replace them. Indeed, companies are trying, only to be met with a lack of interest and position after position going unfilled. This is the case not only within the myriad businesses supporting air travel, but economy-wide, from convenience stores to restaurants to Uber drivers.

What nobody will explain is where all these workers disappeared to, and why they’re staying there. Are they sitting home playing video games and smoking weed? Did they find better jobs? Service workers and other comparatively unskilled employees have always been an integral part of the workforce, if not the very bedrock of it. Where has this sector been displaced to?

It’s possible I’m misreading things, and clearly this is a bigger and more complex situation than I’m equipped to explore on my own. If someone with expertise in the matter cares to explain, be my guest…

In the meantime, if you’ll permit me a diversion…

As Southwest takes a minute to catch its breath, it should consider a refresh of its ghastly paint job. I recommend something that doesn’t make every Southwest jet look like an amusement park ride.

The livery should better incorporate the carrier’s heart emblem. The heart, along with Southwest’s “LUV” stock ticker, harken to its origins at Love Field, in Dallas. It’s a fairly iconic logo, but one the airline inexplicably works to hide. It appears only as a small decal on the underside of the fuselage. This is a friendly and effective motif that absolutely belongs on the tail, in place of those awful red and yellow stripes.

 

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AIR TRAVEL IS BROKEN. CAN IT BE FIXED?

737 Photo by Nick Morales/Unsplash

December 23, 2022

This album — it’s an “EP” actually, from an era when such things existed — was released forty years ago this month.

This was the first Husker Dü record I owned. I first heard it on a cassette. Remember those? The tape was given to me by a high school friend from Marblehead named Mike Gitter. He, as much as anyone, was responsible for stoking my interest in underground music, and, in handing me that tape one day in a hallway at St. John’s Prep, was my introduction to Husker Dü.

As much as I’m sentimentally fond of this album, I would never recommend it to a novice. It’s primarily a thrash-punk record, and hardly a good representation of why I became so enamored of the band over time. That said, it has a few “Hey wait a minute” moments.

Grant Hart’s non-ironic cover of the 1960s hit “Sunshine Superman” marks a turning point in American punk rock, while Bob Mould’s “Gravity,” at the end of side two, is an uncelebrated masterpiece. Greg Norton’s bass work on this song is quietly sublime, and Mould’s guitar work over the last minute or so amazes me to this day — a cascading, climatic series of leads that I once called “the greatest 55 seconds of the 1980s.”

 

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December 22, 2022

LOTS OF MEMORABLE THINGS happened in Decembers past. The final flight of Pan Am, for instance, took place in December of 1991. Three years before that, just a few days before Christmas, was the Lockerbie bombing.

But let’s talk instead about the Clash — yes, the British punk rock band led by guitarists and co-vocalists Joe Strummer and Mick Jones. A number of anniversaries mark December as “Clash month.”

We’ll start with December 14th, which was the 43rd anniversary of the release of London Calling, the band’s most famous album and arguably — argues me — one of the greatest rock records of all time.

This was a double LP (back when there were such things) clocking in with 19 songs, almost all of them outstanding. If there’s a singular highlight, it’s probably “Death or Glory,” which to me is the finest song in the entire Clash canon. But on the whole its best songs are the more freewheeling and divergent: “Jimmy Jazz,” “Rudie Can’t Fail,” “Wrong Em Boyo,” and the ska-powered “Revolution Rock…”

Careful how you move, Mac, you dig me in me back,
And I’m so pilled up that I rattle.
I have got the sharpest knife, so I cut the biggest slice
But I have no time to do battle.
Hey!

What’s all that about? Who knows, who cares. It’s just fun, dammit.

And, at the other extreme, a few songs prior, here’s Mick Jones getting all historical on “The Card Cheat”…

From the Hundred Years War to the Crimea,
With a lance and a musket and a Roman spear,
To all of the men who have stood with no fear,
In the service of the King.

I mean, wow. What rock band would dream of writing a song like that today? Do they even have rock bands anymore?

Only two days earlier, December 12th, was the 42nd anniversary of the release of Sandinista!  Not to be outdone, this was a triple album (three pizzas, count ‘em, in the box) loaded with 36 songs.

Trying to describe Sandinista! is like trying to describe New York City — where a portion of it was recorded, along with London and Jamaica. Where do you start? It’s a staggering — and, for its time, quite brave — melange of punk, reggae, calypso, gospel, funk, dub. And lest we forget, the record’s opener, “The Magnificent Seven,” was punk rock’s first-ever foray into rap.

The title’s reference to the ’80s-era conflict in Central America will clue in the novice to the Clash’s idealistic underpinnings, and Joe Strummer spent his career singing and speaking on behalf of social justice, the politics of Nic-a-rag-you-ah, certainly, among them.

I’d had Sandinista! hanging around for years, but had never really given it a listen beyond the obvious, like “Charlie Don’t Surf” (taken from a line in the movie Apocalypse Now) or the sweet chimes of “Washington Bullets.” All that wax, all those songs; it seemed so daunting. How does one even approach a triple album? But for no special reason I threw it onto the turntable in the winter of 1991 — already it was more than a decade old — and started paying attention.

The first things to hook you might be the steel drums of “Let’s Go Crazy,” or the oddly beautiful “Silicone on Sapphire,” which is the skeleton of “Washington Bullets” set to a host of electronic effects, xylophone, and mysteriously alternating, left channel/right channel voices. Or take a loud listen to “The Sound of the Sinners,” with Strummer as a valiumed preacher singing in desperate euphoria to his congregation. My favorite cut, though, is probably “Living in Fame,” sung the by reggae star Mikey Dread.

Three discs, 36 songs, and a lot of stylistic zig-zagging. But it never feels pretentious or over-extended. On the contrary, Sandinista! is an elegant work of art.

Where were we? Oh yes, Clash bassist Paul Simonon also celebrated his 67th birthday this month.

But most poignant of all, December 22nd marks the 20th anniversary of the death of Joe Strummer. Joe died from a heart attack in 2002. He was only fifty.

Several of my music heroes have left us over the last several years: Grant Hart, Pat Fish, Lou Reed. The deaths of Hart and Fish hit me on a particularly sentimental, even personal level. But from a less subjective, purely artistic point of view, I suppose the loss of Joe Strummer has been the most tragic of all.

While it’s from neither of the aforementioned albums, here’s something to clear your head. This was, you might notice, before Strummer got his teeth fixed. And behold the mullet on Mick Jones.

 

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November 29, 2022

IS IT JUST ME, or is the entire air travel experience broken right now?

Security lines are endless, terminals are noisier and more crowded than ever, airport lounges have become overcrowded feeding troughs, onboard service isn’t half of what it was pre-pandemic, delays and cancellations are rampant. And so on; it’s across the board.

Initially, as the COVID-19 fiasco wound down, most of the trouble could be blamed on a lack of staffing. Passengers came back faster than expected, and the industry wasn’t ready. The resulting chaos was unpleasant, but was expected to be temporary. Yet here we are on the cusp of 2023, and although things aren’t as dysfunctional as they were six or eight months ago, they still feel badly off-kilter.

What troubles me most is that we seem to be resigning ourselves to it. I fear that we’re plateauing at a sort of “new normal.” Much as I hate that expression, it’s worryingly apropos in this case. The traveling public seems to be shrugging its shoulders and adapting.

It reminds me of what happened in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Initially there were howls of outrage over the establishment of the TSA and the excesses of its policies: the agonizing lines, the illogical rules and hostile enforcement. It simply wasn’t sustainable, people declared. Things would mellow out in time, they said. They would have to.

Except that’s not what happened, really. Instead, we got accustomed to it all. Two decades later, security theater, with all of its extravagant waste, and despite the millions of hours it steals from us each year, is simply taken for granted. We endure it.

Is the same sort of thing happening again? Most people have always hated flying. Now they’ll just hate it a little more?

Where and how things are wrong is easy to see. But let me cherry-pick one example: onboard service. Food, wine, amenities. If you ask me, service hit its nadir somewhere around 2004, in the thick of the post-9/11 industry downturn. The airlines were going bankrupt, one after the other, and inflight offerings were scarce. But then it got better. It was a long, slow climb, but by 2019, in the premium cabins of the US legacy carriers, the levels of luxury and pampering at long last rivaled the better Asian and European carriers.

In fact, air travel by that point had entered a whole new golden age. Service, safety and convenience had reached unprecedented levels, and tickets were as affordable as they’d ever been — an achievement I celebrated in this New York Times article in 2017.

Then came COVID-19, and now the whole bar seems to have been re-set. Today, even on long-haul flights, a first class meal is often slung at you hurriedly on a tray, and they’re giving out champagne in plastic cups. At fares that aren’t any cheaper.

Will it get better this time, as the industry regains its footing? I’m not so sure. I’m sensing this is more of a paradigm shift — a change of expectations — than a simple correlation between profitability and service levels. Customers are more or less happy with things they are, I’m told. At least it’s not 2020, the thinking goes, when they got nothing at all.

Thus the benchmark, it seems, is the pandemic-panic realm of two years ago, rather than the golden age of 2019. By this logic, even the crappiest experience is a win. The bar has been re-set because expectations have been re-set.

We can look at this situation more broadly, too. It’s a decline, I think, that extends beyond flying.

This is a nitpicky example, but why do so many hotels, even five-star places, still not stock their rooms with cups or drinking glasses? Apparently guests are supposed to stick their faces under the faucet when brushing their teeth? I was in a Hyatt recently. No glasses, anywhere. So I call the front desk. “Would you like us to bring you some glasses?”

Hell, why not skip the pillows and sheets as well. If guests want them, they can always call.

I’d also like my Uber drivers to stop canceling at the last minute, and otherwise charging me double the normal fare. And don’t get me started with the hellishness of QR menus in restaurants.

And we should probably stop there. This is trending in a rather whiny direction.

These are, I realize, first-world complaints of a selfish, perhaps even gluttonous order. The world is spinning into ecological collapse, the specter of war looms large, and so on. I understand that. But everything has its context. And it’s possible that my gripes are symptoms, warning signs, of something more consequential gone rotten.

Welcome to post-pandemic America, 2022. The land where everything seems to be settling into a half-assed, slightly shittier, and more expensive version of what we had before.

Or, I’m just impatient. I’m known to be, and you’re free to judge my dooming and glooming as unfair.

Hopefully it is, and, at the risk of sounding manic, I’ll close with something more positive, and maybe more rational:

Flying remains, if nothing else, affordable and astonishingly safe. The business just went through the most traumatic two years of its existence, racking up tens of billions in debt. Recovery, which was never a sure thing in the first place, remains a long-term work in progress.

I, indeed all of us, should probably be thrilled with things as they are. It could’ve turned out a lot, lot worse.

And so, give it time.

 

Related Stories:

FLYING: A LOOK ON THE BRIGHT SIDE.
THE MAD, MAD SUMMER OF 2022
TWENTY YEARS AND COUNTING.

Airline cabin photo: Hanson Lu/Unsplash.
Hotel room photo by the author.