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Living it up at 35,000'...
And why it's good.
Flying Business Class, Sydney-Los Angeles, Sept. '09 |
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The wonderful thing about travel, especially air travel, is that for a brief period in time, you are cocooned from the world, isolated, captive to your conveyance but free from the nagging pressures of daily life.
Sitting here in my airplane seat, no-one can call me, no-one can email me, no-one can send me an sms. No-one can demand that I do something now; no-one can ask for something that, really, I'd rather do at another time, if at all.
Harry Chapin sang, "It's got to be the goin', not the gettin' there, that's good".
Harry was right, and now dead. Killed in a car crash, on his way to getting' somewhere. A cruel irony.
His point remains. Sitting here, in the cocoon of my airplane seat, I have a video screen in front of me, black but available for use with movies, tv shows, games, etc, were I that way inclined, which I'm not. I have my iPhone plugged into my ears and, I've discovered, by plugging it into the jack on the console between the seats, it will charge as we go, which is good on a 12 hours-plus flight.
I have several newspapers on the vacant seat beside me, a couple of books in my backpack in the luggage cabinet above me, my laptop, which I have now positioned on my tray table, and I am, as it goes, like the proverbial pig in mud.
This is thinking time. This is free time. This is time to enjoy some of the things I've been wanting to enjoy for months, maybe years, but "can't" because of all those phone calls, emails, sms-s, demands, that punctuate life on the ground.
No-one can get me here.
Travel liberates the mind, because it opens the mind to fresh experiences and influences. But even the process of travel - the goin', not the gettin' there - is a liberating experience because it frees us from the dross and the static of daily life.
At home, I listen to music in the car, but up here, I can listen. Listening is different from listening. At home, listening is an incidental experience that forms part of the wallpaper of life, some background brushstrokes makng up the detail that is missed for the overall picture. Away from that, listening becomes an end in itself, when you can notice what makes up the music you're playing, pick out the instruments, the notes, pay attention to the lyrics, the message, the emotions. Appreciate them all individually and as a collective production. Ours is a consumer society, and culture is a consumer good. We pay others to produce our culture, and we pay to patronise it and consume it. We sit there in the audience inert, passive. In my cocoon, in the air, the culture I am listening to, produced for me and all of us by others, inspires my own cultural production, as I sit here clattering away on my keyboard. We are all linked. All my efforts relate to yours: yours inspire mine, and mine might then inspire yours. At home, an artifice inserts separations and distance between us, crowded together in our big cities.
Reading at home is punctuation of various of the day's activities. Up here, you're not rushing through a chapter to get to a point at which you can put it down to go to sleep; or you're killing time pending the next routine obligation. Reading, one of contemporary life's most noble activities, becomes an end in itself in my cocoon.
Two and a half hours out of Sydney, I am almost through Neil Young's Greatest Hits, which I bought from iTunes a few months back, but which I have not had the opportunity to hear until now. I have listened once more to Patti Smith's 12, a covers album which, also, I acquired some months back but discovered only this week after my 17-year-old daughter borrowed it. Getting it back, I thought I might listen in the car, and discovered the most wonderful array of rock mostly from "my era": Dylan, the Stones, Young, The Beatles, Hendrix, Paul Simon, and more. Jefferson Airplane, to whom I'd never bothered to listen as a kid.
The terrific thing about covers albums is that it exposes an array of artists in one, convenient location. Ideal for the time-poor. To think that it's been sitting there, ignored and unappreciated, for so long raises the guilt in my heart. Thank you, Elizabeth, for opening my mind to it.
The older you get, the more you appreciate "your era", as you feel it slipping away into the murk of faded memory, a lost youth. You always want more of what you don't have. Money, time, youth, life ahead of you, expectations, ambitions. Bernard Shaw said youth is wasted on the young. Yes.
In the past four days, I have listened to 12 about eight times, including as the first album I listened to on this flight.
Now Neil Young is finished, too. Now it's David McWilliams, someone of whom most would never have heard. I saw him on GTK, a rock music show on ABC TV almost 40 years ago. His Days of Pearly Spencer became one of the icons of my youth. I got the album, played it to death, but haven't listened to it now for 25 years, certainly not since tapes, then CDs overtook vinyl as the medium of convenience.
Also from iTunes, I got a double album of David McWilliams, Days at Dawn, but, like all the rest, it's taken months, until this flight, to listen to it. I recall the timbre, the cadence of that voice from GTK.
My eyes mist, just like my glasses when I sprayed some scented mist onto my face, by invitation in the Business Class loo. Forgot I was wearing them at the time.
I think of all those books in my library at home, bought in the 70s when I lived in New York, shipped back to Stray'a and sitting there still, most of them unread, despite all the best intentions. Memoirs and literature. At the funeral of a friend recently, a eulogist noted that he "loved books, although it must be said that he much more enjoyed buying them than reading them".
Quite.
But, cocooned here at 35,000 feet, I can. I can. I can listen. I can read. I can listen and read together, such is the beauty of the mobile phone, which is an MP3 player as well as a phone, a diary, a notebook. It is a phone as a corollary of the real thing it does, which is to augment one's life in all its aspects.
At shoulder height in the seat back beside me, there is a library of magazines. Hemispheres, the United Airlines in-flight magazine. A sick-bag. An in-flight entertainment guide, which augments the personal in-flight entertainment system which is at my disposal through a handset snapped snugly into the console beside me.
I have extracted this handset from its cradle and inspected it. On a flight to Europe on Singapore Airlines in 2008, I mastered the in-flight entertainment, which offers a library of movies, tv shows, video games, etc, through an individual screen in the seatback in front of me.
On this flight, however, I haven't managed to master the system. The intro screen is in Korean. I see the word ENTER at the bottom right, and while I press the ENTER button, it toggles me between that screen and another, also in Korean. I still haven't figured how to get to a movie or a tv show, although everyone around me seems to have had no difficulty.
Well, I'd rather listen, read and write, anyway. Watching the telly can be an interesting pastime, but it's a time waster next to the real mind expanders like reading, writing, conversation and listening.
There is also in the seat back beside me a magazine entitled SkyMall, which appears to be a catalogue of merchandise, the kind of which you find only on an aeroplane on a long-haul flight. What does SkyMall have to offer, bearing in mind that this merchandise is targeted at the captive audience which, with a wine or two under the belt, relaxed and free from the normal disciplines of daily life, such as commonsense, are highly likely to buy the kind of things that one would never contemplate under conventional circumstances.
On page 3, there is a digital piano, billed as 'the ultimate digital piano experience". Just a snap at $499.99, although that's probably $US. How one is expected to get it home from the airport is another issue.
On page 5, Truck antlers, which are, er, antlers intended to stick on the windows of your 4WD, perhaps to make it look like a very big deer or moose. $24.99.
An entire library of book abstracts. Just the thing for short haul flights, so what's it doing here on long-haul? Shoes with springs in the heel. A digital turntable that records directly to CD. Just $399.95. A mat that smells like dog wee, to attract dogs in home units to wee in an appropriate place. $149.95. My favourite: snorkelling goggles with a digital camera built in. Waterproof to 15 feet. $99.95.
A pneumatic gun that shoots marshmallows over 30 feet! An ultrasonic speaker that quietens barking dogs within 25 feet. $49.95. An electric tooth brush that brushes teeth from both sides at once and lets you clean your teeth in 40 seconds. $99.95. A hat impregnated with insect repellent. $79.95. What ever happened to hats with corks dangling from the brim? A watch that talks the time. Fake rocks that hide posts and pipes. Lawn aerators: strap-on shoe soles with spikes that leave holes in the lawn as you walk around.
Travel really does broaden the mind.
Indeed, but for travel, but for this flight, at least, one would never have learnt that these things exist or that one needs them. What can you say but little wonder people of foreign cultures look upon western countries with disdain when this is what is put up to capture our imaginations. Clear evidence that we have all that we need, and that our economies have evolved to the point at which an efficient use of resources is considered to be flogging half-sozzled long haul air travellers Aculife, a do-it-at-home acupuncture kit. $199.95.
"Are you likely to be using the on-board Duty Free service, sir?" entreats the stewardess, brightly smiling, as she tops up my wine. I haven't had that much yet. "Not likely," I say.
Harry Chapin sang of "the Greyhound, such a dog of a way to get around "It's got to be the goin', not the getting' there, that's good".
And I turn to the console, press the backlit button, and the seat front arches up to support my legs, the seat back eases into recline, I snap off the overhead light, and settle back into track 20 of David McWilliams, Leave the Bottles on the Floor. |
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