According to the filmmaker:
3 guys, 44 days, 11 countries, 18 flights, 38 thousand miles, an exploding volcano, 2 cameras and almost a terabyte of footage… all to turn 3 ambitious linear concepts based on movement, learning and food ….into 3 beautiful and hopefully compelling short films.
For the men involved, this vacation was definitely work: energy expending, fossil fuel devouring, consumptive/productive labor.
Lydia and Vinnie were unwitting recruits for the Pentagon’s invisible army: more than seventy thousand cooks, cleaners, construction workers, fast-food clerks, electricians, and beauticians from the world’s poorest countries who service U.S. military logistics contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Filipinos launder soldiers’ uniforms, Kenyans truck frozen steaks and inflatable tents, Bosnians repair electrical grids, and Indians provide iced mocha lattes. The Army and Air Force Exchange Service (aafes) is behind most of the commercial “tastes of home” that can be found on major U.S. bases, which include jewelry stores, souvenir shops filled with carved camels and Taliban chess sets, beauty salons where soldiers can receive massages and pedicures, and fast-food courts featuring Taco Bell, Subway, Pizza Hut, and Cinnabon. (aafes’s motto: “We go where you go.”)
–Sarah Stillman, “The Invisible Army”, The New Yorker, June 6, 2011
There is no one world–only many worlds. Worlds have no single logic, but proliferate as multiple monotheisms of retail trade in a totemic market. They maintain their logics, fictions, and boundaries by limiting and excluding information–remaining righteous and pure. Worlds aspire to be perfect utopias, singular domains attempting to coerce compliance and compatibility from anything foreign to them. With either evangelism or subterfuge [the franchise] must expand into new territory by reformatting its bytes, containers, ships and infrastructures fro compatibility. The boundaries expand and exclude, extend and tighten, allowing the world to increase in size but not necessarily in diversity and intelligence.
–Keller Easterling, Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and its Political Masquerades, p.4-5
Did this mean that the first cyborg, the first individual to accept having elements of artificial, extrahuman intelligence implanted into his brain, would immediately become a star? Probably, yes. But that actually had very little to bearing on the subject. Michael Jackson might well be a star, but he was certainly not a sex symbol. If you wanted to encourage the sort of mass tourism that would warrant heavy investment, you had to turn to more basic forces of attraction.
–Michel Houellebecq, Platform, p.168
Celebrities never take vacation.
Once they get to their destinations, Americans love their slots and blackjack. [Based on the 2008 Travel Industry Association Annual Report, "Travel and Tourism Works for America"] Gambling was a more popular travel activity than going to the beach, checking out a festival or fair, attending amusement parks or visiting national or state parks. But the top two travel activities should come as no surprise: dining out and shopping. All that traveling makes large ripples in the U.S. economy. According to the Travel Industry Association, more than 7.5 million Americans, with earnings of about $178 billion, are employed in the travel industry. The association also notes that tourism and travel is one of the few major industries where the U.S. enjoys a trade surplus with the rest of the world.
–http://www.eturbonews.com/2370/americans-still-traveling-despite-economy (May 4, 2008)
In the second chapter of her essay On Revolution, ‘The Social Question’, Hannah Arendt takes up the idea that in contrast with the American Revolution, the French Revolution neglected the question of liberty and of the form of government able to guarantee it. It developed instead a politics of pity that… had been in preparation since the mid eighteenth century, notably in the work of Rousseau. Her characterisation of this politics… can be summarised briefly. First of all, it involves a distinction between those who suffer and those who do not. As Max Scheler notes, we do not say that a father and mother who weep over the body of their child experience ‘pity’ for him or her precisely because they are themselves also suffering misfortune. Secondly, there is a focus on what is seen and on looking, that is, on the spectacle of suffering.
–Luc Boltanski (1993), Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics, p.3
Often, tourism involves participating in the economy of suffering.
While eliminating geographical distance, this society produces a new internal distance in the form of spectacular separation.
Tourism — human circulation packaged for consumption, a by-product [sous-produit] of the circulation of commodities — is the opportunity to go and see what has been banalized. The economic organization of travel to different places already guarantees their equivalence. The modernization that has eliminated the time involved in travel has simultaneously eliminated any real space from it.–Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, sections 167-168
Thanks for the quote, Thanksgiving is Ruined!
[E]veryone who has taken a vacation within the highly constrained circumstances of an industrialized society knows that the commodity clock of productive time never ceases to operate. This sometimes leads to the paradox increasingly characteristic of industrial leisure: the harried vacation, packed with so many activities, scenes, and choices whose purpose is to create a hypertime of leisure, that the vacation indeed becomes a form of work, of frenetic leisure.
–Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large, p. 80
Thanks for the reference Barbara!
