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Eternal Layover
Author: Simon Sellars • Nov 24th, 2008 •Category: Ballardosphere, airports, alternate worlds, travel
‘Like the suspended state of duty-free malls, a zone at once inside and yet outside the legal parameters of the country it exists in, Vaughan and [Crash's narrator] Ballard experience the motorways as weirdly detached from an embedded culture or history or morality’.
Roger Luckhurst, The Angle Between Two Walls: The Fiction of J. G. Ballard
.
From today’s news:
‘Japanese tourist Hiroshi Nohara is on a layover at the Mexico City airport. It has lasted almost three months, and he has no plans to leave…
“I don’t understand why I’m here,” he said through a visiting interpreter originally hired by a television station. “I don’t have a reason.”
The embassy can’t force him to leave, and since Nohara’s visa is valid all Mexican officials can do is wait for it to expire in early March. For reasons he can’t explain, Nohara has been in Terminal 1 of the Benito Juarez International Airport since September 2, surviving off donations from fast food restaurants and passengers and sleeping in a chair.’
Yes, I know precisely how he feels.
Author:
Simon Sellars
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