Winging It to Buffalo

(Buffalo) Well, after 24 hours on progressively smaller planes I'm finally here in Buffalo, arriving late last night. An eventless flight on Qantas and American Airlines - a nice sunrise over the Californian coastline flying into LAX, and luckily none of the landing gear problems that occurred so dramatically and telegenically on a JetBlue flight at the same airport just a few days ago. Flying across the U.S. by daylight for the first time I was struck by the vast and barren expanses of land still left more or less untouched especially in the West (this would have been Arizona in particular, I guess) - perhaps its just me, but you don't think about America in such terms these days... Of course I also couldn't help but think 'Google Earth' at the same time - will have to revisit some of the sites along the way later (was that the Las Vegas or Phoenix speedway I saw from the air?).

Staying here at the University Inn, courtesy of my hosts at the Institute for Distributed Creativity and the UB Media Studies department, and despite my late arrival I was still able to find some tasty Buffalo wings for dinner in the hotel restaurant - I guess there's a Jessica Simpson joke to be had here somewhere, but as I don't watch Newlyweds someone else will have to make it. (Did see Jess popping up on a home shopping channel last night, though...) Today I hope to catch up with Trebor Scholz from the iDC and plan the events of the next few days here and the week-long research residency in New York City a couple of weeks (10-15 Oct.).

CNN is still showing wall-to-wall coverage of the Katrina and Rita aftermath, with the focus now shifting to analysing the failure of FEMA to respond to Katrina, and to organising the relief and rebuilding effort. I'm surprised (but perhaps shouldn't be) that the idea of leaving the rebuilding process to the free market to sort out is so prevalent still - I would have thought that the failure to maintain sufficient levee defences and other emergency provisions would be a clear sign that the idea of small government and an unbridled free market is destined to fail unless you happen to live in a country which on the whole closely resembles, say, Kennebunkport. It seems pretty obvious to me that the affected areas will need a strong whole-of-government plan to rebuild (and hell, in other news even GWB is now planning to dip into the U.S. strategic oil reserve to alleviate the petrol price rise on the free market). But perhaps that realisation will still take some time to settle in.