Travel

Music Monday: Arthur Blythe (and friends)

I’m almost back in North Dakota to start the “home stand” portion of my summer research leave. Reminiscent of the “Golden Age of Air Travel,” it is now necessary for my trip home from the Mediterranean to involve multiple overnight stop overs.  This gave me an evening in Athens and an evening in Minneapolis. I can only assume these were necessary to refuel the airplane and restock drastically diminished supplies of caviar, champagne, and cognac (that latter being necessary for turn-down service). I was, of course, disappointed to see so few men wearing ties on the flight.

To classy things up a bit, I decided to listen to some Arthur Blythe. As readers of this blog, Arthur Blythe appears on many albums that I enjoy. He made his debut on Horace Tapscott’s epic, The Giant is Awakened, recorded on India Navigation with the likes of Chico Freeman, and contributed to Jack DeJohnette’s band Special Edition.  

 I’ve posted Arthur Blythe’s debut album, The Grip (1977) before, but it’s worth posting again. The B-side starts with the gently orientalizing track “Lower Nile” is a favorite, and ends with the track “My Son Ra”

He’s perhaps best known for this album Lenox Avenue Breakdown (1979) which is one of the cumulative statements in 1970s jazz and features Bob Stewart on tuba, James “Blood” Ulmer on guitar, Cecil McBee on bass, and Jack DeJohnette on drums:

I was less familiar with Blythe’s appearance with Anthony Braxton on Woody Shaw’s The Iron Men (recorded in 1977 and released in1980). Blythe appears on track 1 and 5 (and with Braxton on track 5). Muhal Richard Abrams is on piano, Joe Chambers and Victor Lewis taking turns on drum, and Cecil McBee on bass. I don’t know this album very well, but the line-up alone makes it worth my attention. 

As a bonus, here’s a live recording of DeJohnette’s Special Edition in Baltimore in 1980 which I find to be a pretty accessible introduction to this band and its recordings:

Three Things Thursday: On Traveling

My dislike of traveling has only grown more intense as I’ve gotten older. The bustle of airports, the cost, and the constant specter of logistical complications (of various forms and causes) usually exhausts me at least as much as the actual travel.

To attempt to approach the start of my summer with a more positive mindset, I’m going to attempt a more positive assessment of travel for a little Three Things Thursday blog post.  

1. Patience. Many years ago, when facing a particularly daunting itinerary, I decided to simply repeat in my head the Jesus Prayer during my trip. It was a simple form of devotional practice, but the result of it was nearly miraculous. I was amazed at how the simple prayer reduced my stress during travel. 

Without proclaiming this a miracle or devolving into full-on amateur psychology, my guess is that this simple routine distracted me from more stress inducing habits such as imagining various catastrophic scenarios or attempting to figure out how I could control my fate. Every year, I remind myself to repeat this practice and so far, I haven’t. Maybe it’s just because I don’t want to do it again and find it lacking. Or maybe because I have greater faith in my own capacity for patience than God’s direct concern with my stress levels. Either way, traveling builds patience and helps me develop ways to endure things that I can’t entirely control. 

2. Books. I often imagine that I will somehow use my early summer travel to get some writing done. My dependence on my laptop, the logistical struggle of writing on a plane, and my fatigue always conspires to discourage me from doing that. Instead, my early summer traveling kicks off my summer reading season. On my flights this week, I read a useful chunk of Walter Scheidel’s new book, What is Ancient History? (2025) and most of Adrian Tchaikovsky’s, Children of Ruin (2019). My summer reading list is long and a bit daunting, but at least I have a head start on it!

3. Nescafe. Most of my long trips are to Greece or Cyprus and when I first started traveling to these countries, Nescafe remained a staple of most hotels available to a then aspiring archaeologist (as well as the foundational ingredient in a frappe). Times have changed and the humble frappe has given way to the cappuccino freddo and Nescafe to the now ubiquitous coffee shops. Cyprus has always felt slightly ahead of Greece in this regard, but even in the villages where we work, there are plenty of opportunities to get a decent cup of brewed coffee.

That said, my first cup of coffee on my first morning “in country” is always Nescafe. It’s bad coffee, but it reminds me of fieldwork, of old friends and mentors, and starts my summer season off on the right foot.    

Two Article Tuesday: Melancholia and Euphoria

I’ve been reading around in my “articles to read pile” this week as I try to finish a very rough first draft of my “micrograph.” My “articles to read” pile has no particular order. I neither read from the top nor the bottom, but add to it and take from it almost at random. The second article in today’s “two article Tuesday” prompted me to re-read the first, which is a bit of a classic.   

Article the First: Melancholia

Stephanie LeMenager’s “Petro-Melancholia: The BP Blowout and the Arts of Grief” in Qui Parle 19.2 (2011) offered a complicated perspective on melancholia in the context of the BP blowout in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. The BP blowout came hard on the heels of the Hurricane Katrina disaster and this informed the reactions of residents in New Orleans and on the Gulf Coast. For LeMenager, the BP blowout presented a challenge for the residents of coastal communities because unlike Katrina, the oil spill was not visible. In this way, it finds a parallel with the Tioga terrestrial oil spill that released tens of thousands of gallons of oil underneath a farmer’s field. The invisibility of these events parallels the slow violence of carbon fueled climate change. And like climate change, the impacts on communities tend to be violent and sudden. Narratives of boom and bust, the abruptness of oil booms and their equally rapid dispersion made it difficult to trace specific causality until one is overcome by events. In these conditions, there are reasons to expect that narrative itself is inadequate to convey the emotional consequences of the situations. In other words, reducing these situations to narrative exposition threatens to depersonalize the causes and by extension the consequences of these events. Trauma becomes the product of complex systems and, at worst, the kind of tragedy where all agency is subsumed into the inevitability of the outcome.

The need to express melancholia means both making tragedy of disasters accessible to human emotional response without being drawn into narratives that erase the culpability through their sheer complexity. LeMenager’s arguments are subtle and complex, but she suggests that melancholia surrounding the BP disaster is not simply the mourning for the polluted water, the economic consequences to fishing and tourism, and the long term exposure to subsidence along the Gulf Coast that is a product of 70 years of sustained extraction, but for the failure of modernity. The failed promise of progress, of improvement, and of our ability to not only control nature but to marshal its power to our advantage and advancement.

Article the Second: Euphoria

Yorgos Paschos and John Schofield’s article “‘In the moment’: Euphoria as a heritage value” in the International Journal of Heritage Studies considers euphoria as heritage. Paschos and Schofield argue that sites of euphoric experiences represent meaningful places not only according various criteria for heritage, but also for communities and individuals.

Because Schofield is Schofield (and presumably he and Paschos have shared interests), the paper considers dance halls, raves, music pubs, and concert venues as places where groups achieved euphoric states through music, dance, or mood altering drugs. While Schofield’s work to normalize the recognition of music venues (and other sites associated with the recording and popular music industry) is well known, this paper considers places that can be far less formal. Raves, for example, occurred in disused buildings — abandoned warehouses, industrial sites, and other spaces — created temporary landscapes of euphoric experiences that were prone to dissipate almost as soon as they arose.

Tracing the heritage of such fleeting experiences, even when they are regularized in a historical venue such as the “Cranker” in Adelaide, offers a less through which we can understand the ephemeral. It was disappointing, for example, that Schofield didn’t refer to Carolyn White’s brilliant archaeology of the Burning Man festival, but he did acknowledge Rachael Kiddey’s similar work to understand the heritage of homelessness. Another text that would fit with this would be Kostis Kourelis’s efforts to follow the movement of campus and migrants in Greece who leave only ephemeral traces in the landscapes, but whose experience were every bit as profound as the euphoria of a late night rave.

Some Discussion 

Both LeMenager’s and Paschos and Schofield’s articles emphasize quality of experience at the heart of the contemporary encounter. That melancholia and euphoria are both fleeting reflects that ephemerality of the contemporary world and the fragility of our modern experiences. My current project considers how photographs allow us to understand the experience of the Bakken oil boom. Like euphoric moments, the boom itself was improvised and ephemeral. It was also deeply laced with melancholia as the experience of the boom itself introduced the inevitability of a bust while also representing a disruption to the expected experiences of life in Western North Dakota. This tension between the abruptness and tragedy, between euphoria and melancholia, and between narrative arcs informed by the expectations of contemporary narratives and experiences that defy narration, require new forms of expression and new ways of apprehending (and documenting) heritage. These two articles offer perspectives on this.

Foto Flurries Friday

I’m on the road right now, but got my first glimpse of winter during a layover at the Minneapolis-Saint Paul airport. I was sitting in a section filled with German exchange students returning home after three weeks in North Dakota. 

The gleeful murmurs of “Schnee!” and “schneit!” filled the cabin! 

This will not constitute my annual first snow post because I am not at home (the one exception to this occurred in 2007 and that loophole has now been closed). 

Image

 

Three Things Thursday: Teaching, Travel, and Reading

This month is hectic, hence the disruption in my regular blog posting. Worse still, fragments of blog posts are beginning to collect in the queue, but between late semester meetings, conferences, and deadlines, I’m struggling to develop these fragments into something more substantial.

In other words, it’s a good time for a three thing Thursday.

Thing the First

I’m thinking a good bit about my Byzantine history class in the spring and planning to model it on my relatively successful Roman history class from last year. This means that it’ll focus on three or four key primary texts. I’ve not decided which primary texts (although I have some ideas!), but I think that I will assign Anthony Kaldellis massive The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium (2023).

Of course, there are students who will see assigning a 1000+ page book for an undergraduate class as cruel and unusual punishment, but my plan isn’t for the students to read the entire book. Instead, I’ll ask that every student read at least one 300-ish page section of the book and write a critical review of it. This feels like a nice way to get students to engage with some scholarship on Byzantium, without being thrown into the deep end of very fussy and specialized debates. Kaldellis’s commitment to writing narrative history will help keep students engaged in the “story.” More than that, Kaldellis command over detail offers a nice counterpoint to my tendency to generalize. His extensive references will provide students with a change to dig deeper into a particular topic.

Thing the Second

Traveling sucks for so many reasons. It reproduces colonial inequality, it adds carbon to the atmosphere, spreads disease, and is generally unpleasant. I got to wonder whether the inefficiency and inconvenience of travel might work as a check on the continued reproduction of its more “toxic” elements.

In other words, is there something self-correcting in travel? 

Are forces of efficiency and economy conspiring to make travel less and less appealing, which, in turn, starts to temper the environmental and political damage that travel induces. For example, post-COVID tourism still has not returned to 2012 levels. While tourism is on the rise again, my experience this past week gave me reasons to hope that this rise will not culminate in a return to 2018 or 2019 levels.

Whatever romance existed in travel (perhaps clinging on from mid-century, post-war modes of travel and tourism that celebrated the power of the American dollar and the emergence of a global bourgeoise), it seems to be waning especially as airlines, hotels, airports, and the other institutions necessary to make travel possible are struggling to turn profits or looking to wring every dollar (and ounce of dignity) from the bedraggled traveler.

Thing the Third

Over at NDQ, I’ve posted an essay recognized in this years Best American Essays. Erica Goss’s essay “Talismans” was listed as a “Notable Essay.” In general, I’m not a huge fan of these competitions in part because by elevating some work, they invariably obscure other work (although I suppose one could argue that they draw attention to other authors and contributions published by the journal. 

Whatever one thinks of books like Best American Essays (and the myriad of little competitions), the essay is good. Read it here.

International Travel In COVID’s Wake

My apologies for the intermittent blogging lately. Between a summer study season on Cyprus and a bit more travel than usual, I found it hard than expected to keep up with my writing discipline. 

My trip home took two days and an overnight in Amsterdam. Everything went relatively smoothly other than the typical annoyance associated with travel. That said, after two years of staying home (or at very least not flying), I felt like I experienced travel in a different way.

Here are three, more or less unremarkable, observations.

First, I was struck by the number of times people told me staffing shortages led to delays, changes in policies, and a general sense of crowding. In both of trips through the Amsterdam airport there were long lines for food, to make it through passport control, and the hotel where I stayed had a “luxury buffet” instead of menu service because they were short staffed. In the Amsterdam airport, there were also signs explaining that the delays, long lines, and general crowding were the result of staffing issue.

I’m guessing that this is the results of COVID disruption in a general way and certainly don’t imagine to understand the Dutch economy or the economics of airport service industries (other than a casual chat with a bartender). That said, struggles with staffing seems to be something that is getting blamed for inconveniences across a range of different political and social contexts (if not different macro-economic contexts, necessarily). It is especially interesting to see how staffing issues shape the experience of travel since our experiences exist at the intersection of state controlled processes border control, security theater, and travel regulations, and the market as airports such as Amsterdam’s Schiphol lean heavily into retail shopping and dining and airlines themselves complicating the travel experience with delays and cancelations. 

Second, it was hard to avoid the feeling that something was off about traveling right now. It wasn’t just staffing shortages, lines, crowds, and delays, but how people moved through the airpots that threw me off. In the “before COVID times,” it felt like there was a rhythm to flow of people in large airports. It always struck me as remarkable that groups of individuals impaired to varying degrees with travel fatigue, jet lag, and urgency, nevertheless managed to flow around each other. People seemed to know instinctually how to keep moving and how to follow the currents of people through terminal buildings.

My travel over the last month made me think that something was off. I never recall encountering so many individuals and small groups who would stop abruptly in flow of the crowd in a busy airport. This added an unwelcome new complication to anyone attempting to keep moving while following airport signage or grabbing a glimpse of various flat screens with gate announcements and boarding times. If there is one rule to airport movement it is pay attention to the local flow of traffic and if you have to stop to look at your phone, watch, documents, or a monitor, find a place outside of movement lanes. This understanding seems to have broken down not only among individual travelers who created chaotic eddies of pedestrians that formed around individuals who simply stopped at the end of the moving walkway, but also groups who blindly queued up for coffee or sandwiches in lines that blocked main travel corridors through the terminal.

Obviously some of this awkwardness reflects travelers simply being out of practice navigating airports. I suspect staffing issues and changing COVID-related travel policies compound this by adding to general confusion and creating long lines that interrupt movement in terminals. I also wonder how the relaxing of social distancing policies has created some additional confusion as humans are returning to pre-COVID social practices of movement at different rates. Perhaps even the practice of wearing masks (which I whole heartedly support) changes how we perceive our environment similar to how wearing headphones in a museum makes it impossible not careen randomly through an exhibit space. 

Finally, I was struck this summer by how much airports serve as spaces of social, racial, national, and economic sorting. I know this is a known thing and I get that this is the primary function of borders and border controls. 

That said, I suppose that I needed a couple years away from airports to really SEE it again. This summer, I  spent a good bit of time in passport control lines designated for individuals with non-EU passports. The difference in the racial make up and even the economic make up of the EU and non-EU passport line was pretty remarkable. What made it all the more striking is the line for something called “Global Entry” which was about as white, unmasked, and efficient as you might expect for a private operation designed to make travel easier for, well, white, wealthy people to travel.

In my time hanging out in airports this summer, I also found myself paying more attention to who goes in and out of airport lounges, who walks confidently through priority boarding lines at gates, who is visible beyond the drawn curtains of first and business class (I ride economy+, for the record), who has to deal with random paperwork at the gates, and who travels with a sheaf of travel documents rather than a simple passport. 

Maybe this is simply an indication that I’m getting older and less tolerant of bullshit. Or maybe I’m just more attuned to bullshit because I haven’t traveled as much over the last few years. Whatever the reason, I found the simple routines associated with travel to be even more horrific and dehumanizing than I remembered them to be (and I’m an affluent white guy from a nominally “first world” county with one of the most powerful passports in the world). I realize that avoiding travel is simply avoiding these experiences (and in an of itself a sign of privilege), but traveling makes the horrors of our globalized society so intensively visible and inescapable that I found it soul crushing.

Like most people, I know the rhetoric of traveling opening our eyes and giving us new ways to understand the world, but I can’t help think that participating in the sorting rituals associated with air travel also reinforces social, economic, political, and racial difference and normalizes it. 

(And, yeah, I know people smarter, more socially engaged, and more aware than I am have been saying this stuff for about 50 years. I think, though, that the COVID travel hiatus has made this stuff more visible now, though even for “veteran travelers” who might be inclined to move through airports without noticing or thinking about this kind of thing.)