There should be more songs about airports I feel. Why? Because they are such emotional places. They try to be all serious and sanitized and secure but really they are the backdrops for emotional upheavals, sad farewells and expectant beginnings. Nowadays all journeys to far-away places begin in an airport. The ultimate anti-climax to any great new venture is being stuck in a waiting lounge wondering if iPod is not perhaps a new religion or at the very least the soma of the twenty-first century.
Last year when I arrived at Narita Airport and rushed off the plane to get through all that rigmarole of passport control and customs so I could have a ciggie outside (fuck going in that smoking booth), I was stopped dead in my tracks by a big sign on the wall. The sign was split horizontally in the middle. The top half said, “Welcome to Japan” and the bottom half said, “Coca Cola”. That was it! What I had been thinking all along. I knew something was wrong with Japan – now I had discovered exactly what gives. Japan is sponsored by Coca Cola. It all made such perfect sense to me that I forgot about my craving for nicotine. That would explain how you can have politics without policies and ideologies. How people can vote but not have an opinion. It explained why the only real religion in Japan was consumerism. Of course, the country is just doing what its sponsor wants – keep on buying and texting and believing in designer goods and expensive cars and plucking your eyelashes and walking like a retard. Live at the surface of the surface. Let your guide be your navigation system. Let your stomach and your eyes be the arbiters of what is good – cute not justice, cool not cerebral, sugar not ganja. That is the coke cola agenda and it has formed a tidy symbiosis with little east-hailing Japan.
Last year when I arrived at Narita Airport and rushed off the plane to get through all that rigmarole of passport control and customs so I could have a ciggie outside (fuck going in that smoking booth), I was stopped dead in my tracks by a big sign on the wall. The sign was split horizontally in the middle. The top half said, “Welcome to Japan” and the bottom half said, “Coca Cola”. That was it! What I had been thinking all along. I knew something was wrong with Japan – now I had discovered exactly what gives. Japan is sponsored by Coca Cola. It all made such perfect sense to me that I forgot about my craving for nicotine. That would explain how you can have politics without policies and ideologies. How people can vote but not have an opinion. It explained why the only real religion in Japan was consumerism. Of course, the country is just doing what its sponsor wants – keep on buying and texting and believing in designer goods and expensive cars and plucking your eyelashes and walking like a retard. Live at the surface of the surface. Let your guide be your navigation system. Let your stomach and your eyes be the arbiters of what is good – cute not justice, cool not cerebral, sugar not ganja. That is the coke cola agenda and it has formed a tidy symbiosis with little east-hailing Japan.
