[ 22:05 thursday 23 october – dulles airport, virginia ]

dulles airport again, on my way back to london. being in washington two weeks before the presidential election has been deeply bizarre. news media are saturated. nick-nack shops are stacked with election trinkets, typically including lifesize cardboard cutouts of the two pair of presidential and vice presidential candidates. verges are peppered with placards supporting one party or the other, not just in the city but in the remotest corners of countryside. driving around you can tell a lot about the demographics of an area from the balance between mccain and obama placards, the same way variations in shrubs tell you about the underlying soil.

at the weekend, out on the maryland coast, the mccain faction was decidedly in the ascendent. at breakfast on sunday morning i naughtily eavesdropped conversations on neighbouring tables. one woman was seriously arguing that obama was a sleeper agent for a hostile power: “you know there are literally thousands of these sleepers waiting for the call”.

22:56 / on the plane, ready to take off. only forty-five people in economy so i’ve got a row of four seats all to myself!

: c :

[ 17:46 thursday 11 september – washington dulles international airport, virginia ]

i’m sitting with a cup of tea at the end of concourse b, a vast white featureless corridor stretching as far as the eye can see. it’s actually been extended since i was last here and it now takes about twenty minutes to walk from one end to the other. i fear washington dc is a city i will never learn to love. it’s unrelentingly conservative, populated by blandly uniformed people and apparently lacks any iota of experimental culture. people hear wear clothes to go out in the evening that folks elsewhere would choose for the office. that can’t be good, can it?

monday afternoon’s presentation at the network roundtable went rather well. i was launching trampoline’s new technology for analysing and visualising social networks so it was a well-informed crowd. from time to time i sense a buzz in the room when i’m talking and this was such an occasion. the subsequent days were spent meeting various customers. this included my first visits to a couple of intelligence agencies. i was expecting terrifying security procedures but in fact it wasn’t much different from a typical international airport. the most bizarre experience was at the one and only agency that permitted me to bring in my laptop (though not connect it to the internet). here a man was specifically employed to stick a sort of rivet into my laptop’s microphone socket when i arrived and remove it again on my departure.

after an afternoon meeting at fort meade i made an impulse decision to drive out to the maryland coast rather than face the rush-hour traffic battling to get into washington. i picked a random point on my gps and half an hour found myself at the edge of a tranquil creek with neatly- tended lawns descending to the water and chesapeake bay beyond. i sat on the bank and watched the sun set over a power station then drove back into town.

yesterday evening i was walking down seventeenth street when a fellow in a kilt and flat cap strode past in the opposite direction and bid me good evening. i returned the greeting and we both continued on our way. but everything about this encounter was so wildly improbably that after a short while i stopped, stood pondering a moment then turned and ran back the way i’d come. he was walking at a good lick so it took me a few minutes to catch up. when i reached him i told him he was the first person to greet me on the street in the last three days in washington. we walked and talked together for the next thirty or forty minutes. he was kelly, born of irish parents who’d moved to nevada to run a petrol station. he’d come to washington a year earlier when he was kicked out of home.

chance encounters like this do more than anything else to remind me how wonderful the world is.

: c :

[ 18:55 saturday 19 july – miami international airport, florida ]

i’m in my seat on the flight for london, taking advantage of a pre take-off delay to tap out a few words on my trusty laptop. following foo camp i took a couple of days’ holiday to stop off here in miami and visit shemoel at his family home. the main objective was for us to work out a modus operandi for producing songs together with me in london and him in san francisco.

this is the first time we’ve tried composing together instead of improvising. neither of us knew how it would work out but things fell into place smoothly. after two days our first song is already coming together. shemoel put down an idea which sparked me to add something, which in turn prompted him to change another section and so on. i recorded bass clarinet, vocals and a few electronic bits. shemoel recorded drums and the bulk of the electronics. we listen to a lot of similar electronic artists but we have very different musical personalities. i’m constantly delighted by shemoel’s perspective and how he responds musically in a completely different way to me. the process we followed over the last couple of days seems like it will lend itself well to long-distance collaboration. it will take more will power to keep it going but hopefully we can muster that.

we took breaks from the music to go swimming on the beach, hang out in sweat records (the epicentre of miami’s small experimental music scene) and join the full moon drum circle on the beach until the police broke it up. i managed to record half an hour of this on my new digital audio recorder.

it looks like the flight’s cleared for take-off so i need to shut my laptop. there are big tropical storms all the way up the florida coast. it should be an exciting ride.

: c :

[ 17:37 tuesday 6 november – united 732, denver airport, colorado ]

one hundred and fifty-six business people squeezed into a tube that will carry them from denver to san jose. serried ranks of standard- issue wheely cases line the overhead lockers. denver airport is an hour’s drive from the city itself, though all that lies between them is a vast empty plain. driving across this expanse from denver the spiky airport building slowly rises on the horizon like a giant white armadillo.

denver felt strangely derelict with a chill bone-dry wind blowing through vacant streets. it feels as if the city has some rather serious social problems. on each of the nights i was in town there was a fatal shooting within two blocks of my hotel, which was right in the city centre. to balance this rather bleak picture, on sunday night i walked out to a place i’d heard of called the “mercury cafe” and it was a gem. i ate a superb meal in its organic cafe with a riotous series of performances going on in the theatre next-door and a swing dance class continuing upstairs. a frail-looking gentlemen in full wizard regalia came in and sat down blandly at a table.

i flew in from san francisco on sunday evening to talk at a conference about social networks. now i’m heading to san jose to give a lecture at another conference.

departure is announced. time to close my laptop.

: c :