SURREAL PLACES — JOHN F. KENNEDY AIRPORT, 1985 (Introduction)
This is about my challenge to people to share their personal experience of surreal places in space and time. The inspiration piece was a list of fifteen such physical places that are in some way overwhelming, disorienting, or otherwise unforgettable. I offered to share fifteen of my own, hoping the process of investigating their own memories would cause people to discover uniquely powerful moments in their own lives, linked to specific physical places and times.
This one is something that could seem trivial. Why I worked to capture it in a graphic visual way.
The subject of the experience was in part at least a motorized beast called the Countach, shown below.
SURREAL PLACES — JOHN F. KENNEDY AIRPORT, 1985 (Part 1)
The airport once known as Idlewild and renamed after a presidential assassination was always a depressing place for me. The ride to Queens was a stark reminder of just how much the great city of New York had declined. Highways in bad shape, shoulders home to numerous unremoved wrecked and stripped cars, the route itself involving a sad passage by the remains of the 1964 New York World’s Fair, tall weeds marring the view of the fairground’s once gleaming now rusting globe. The sixties and afterwards had been hard on world’s mightiest metropolis.
The airport has always been one of the nation’s busiest, the prime hub of NYC’s international flights, but it seemed when I was there that the place was always strangely empty, the terminal an echoing barrack and the tarmac not empty of planes but nearly so. At JFK you get a sense of how vast the property is and how bleak the surrounding landscape. Other airports are so jammed up, so full of themselves and their busy-ness you tend to feel like you’re walking through the equivalent of a transportation casino. (Except in Philly, but that’s another grim story…)
I’m sure the unpopulated, or depopulated, feel I got at JFK was not a special experience reserved for me but a function of the off-hours schedules that seemed to accompany my international business flights, the only ones I needed JFK for. This day was like the others, far from the busiest time, and I boarded the only airliner I saw, settled in for the takeoff, in a window seat for some reason I can’t explain because it’s so atypical of me.
Not a very full flight as I recall, but more of us in business class.
The stewardesses (as some of us still thought of them) were bustling up and down the aisle, providing pillows and blankets, and I must have had a seatmate I didn’t want to exhaust my small supply of small talk with before we were even airborne, so I opened the blind of the window and looked out on the tarmac.
A ho hum glance.
And there was the most astonishing, fantastical sight I had ever seen at an airport. Much less than a hundred yards away, just forward of my window was an Air France Concorde, the first I had ever seen and the only one I ever would see. It was gorgeous, of course, more breathtaking in person than in its breathtaking photographs, low, white, weaponlike in shape but lovely of line and shockingly small compared to the Boeing 747 I was on.
Most shocking of all about the tableau before me was that the Concorde wasn’t even the most incredible thing in it.
Countach. A red Lamborghini Countach sitting on a huge wooden crate like some royal personage waiting with his vast luggage for dilatory attendants to arrive. Like ships, exotic sports cars are referred to as females, with the seductiveness, curves, and femme fatale temperaments to fit. Never thought of the Countach as anything but male, an Italian brute of a muscle car, four-square to the road and predatory in its stance. Here on a crate at JFK USA, the first Countach I had ever laid eyes on. Because they were famously unavailable in the United States.
It was a photo shoot. Had to be. The Countach was coming to the U.S. This might even be the first one. Nah, but close anyway. It wasn’t the Concorde that had brought it obviously. The crate was too damn big. It was a pairing of two of the world’s great mechanical beauties in a place of speed, glamor, and international flavor.
There you have it. My surreal moment at JFK. A jaded consultant injected with a disorienting rush of schoolboy enthusiasm. In my mind’s eye, I could see all the thousands, millions, of Countach posters tacked up on boys’ bedroom walls since the year 1978, a place of honor next to the iconic posters of Sophia, Raquel, Farrah, and whoever the It girl happened to be at the moment. The Countach was the It car of every boy who dreamed of going 200 mph with Sophia or Farrah at his side. None of those boys (well, say 99.9%, consultant talking) had ever seen what I was seeing now.
Cool. We done now? Should be, I suppose. But I like to show you old things I’m talking about. This was 33 years ago. Many of you have some familiarity with the Concorde and the Countach, close or distant, and more than I like to think probably know almost nothing of either except maybe for the tragic, fiery end of the world’s first supersonic airliner.
The Internet has no record of this event. I looked, using every search term I could think of. I was forced to a weak resort, finding photos on white backgrounds of the plane, the car (red!), and the crate. Particular angles required of all three. Laboriously assembled with many “close but no cigars.”
The Raw Materials
But how to put them together. I had Photoshop for a decade or so, but no longer. It perished in some computer nightmare years ago and I’ve not replaced it. The graphics I do must be done otherwise. I was complaining about my options to my wife, saying I can’t just post three different objects on white backgrounds and say, “All you have to do is imagine this one sitting on that one in front this great big one. Surreal, huh?!”
She said she thought it might be good that way. Imagination and all. Tried it. As you see here.
SURREAL PLACES — JOHN F. KENNEDY AIRPORT, 1985 (Part 2)
After I did that first Concorde-Countach rendering (or arranging), my wife liked it, or said so, and I hated it. So I dug as deep into my bag of graphic tricks as the bag was deep and produced this. I kind of liked it. My wife loved it. I was ready to go with it. Here it is.
I was proud of this one.
Conceptually pure. All elements in place. It was my favorite one.
SURREAL PLACES — JOHN F. KENNEDY AIRPORT, 1985 (Part 3)
On the verge of posting it I was reviewing all the interim graphic files I’d created with an eye to deleting a couple dozen of them when I saw a tarmac shot I hadn’t really studied before. Thought I’d try to up the ante on what I’d already done. Showed it to my wife thinking she’d probably agree that the all white background had a certain minimalist elegance about it that made it the right choice. No. She latched onto the new one with instant finality. “That’s the one. No contest.”
So here it is. I still kind of prefer the… oh forget it. This was the winner of the contest.
What I saw from the window of a 747. Almost exactly. My wife’s favorite.
P.S. Why am I boring you with the process of making a graphic? I think it might be the real proof of the impact this brief visual experience had on me. I had to do this for some reason. Pull a memory out of the mists of dreamy half-existence into living pixels. Not for you particularly, though partly, of course. But I did it for me. Re-orienting myself with respect to a gossamer airport romance, briefer but far more moving than a one night stand.