In the latest in our series on people and their favorite spaces, Tucson musician and singer Howe Gelb considers the time-traveling, solitary appeal of a business class airplane seat. By Gillian Drummond. Cover photo courtesy of American Airlines.
Photo courtesy of American Airlines
"I look forward to that space yet I don't look forward to travel, so I think it has to do with the fact that it's an appointed place where something unique happens. I consider it a primitive form of time travel. When you're going overseas you're eight or nine hours into the future by the time you land, and you come home and you're going back into the past.
"Flying to Europe is always dramatic to the disposition and it crumples the body, especially as I'm aging. I fly just over 100,000 air miles a year, and so 95% to 99% of the time they upgrade me.
Photo by Jane Foecking
"Because it's business class, the seat goes almost completely flat. They have a big duvet blanket thing and you can go into your dormant state as you travel through time. Most of the time I'm traveling alone. In my other spaces, you get torpedoed by your family, or pestered by appointments. Being on that plane is the only place where you don't get a phone call. Sometimes I'll work on a laptop, editing songs or just writing.
"There's an art to not talking. I'm mostly with people who can afford to be in business class and I have nothing in common with them. Sometimes you get somebody who's so excited because they've been upgraded, they just talk too much. It's wasted conversation. It's almost like nervous laughter.
"There is another peculiar thing that happens at 35,000 feet, and I am not sure of the exact physics, but I have discussed this with other touring 'men' who travel so high up. We tend to tear up watching movies up there - the same movie that would have no such effect on us down here on the ground. Why is that? My guess is that it has something to do with the tenuous means of existence up there. I mean we are sitting there ignoring the fact that we are soaring at 500 miles an hour almost five miles up from Planet Earth. We are more aware of the thread-like tether to our life... that when we allow a film to soak in, that story line has way more gravity, if you will, and tends to toy with our exaggerated motion of emotions up there.
"I'm a big believer in coincidence. The last time I flew, in February, I got sick before coming home so I had to postpone my flight. The day I traveled, this guy behind me recognized me as I was checking in. It turned out he runs a stateside record label. I had been thinking before that that I needed a good, healthy North American record label. We had a ten-hour meeting on the plane and by the time I landed I had a new record deal."
Howe Gelb of Giant Sand will release his new record (the new label is still under wraps) in October. When he's not touring Europe and North America he lives with his family in Tucson's Barrio Santa Rosa. This summer Howe will fly to Europe again, but this time it will be heavy on family time and light on work. He has two gigs in Italy, and possibly one in Dublin. Find out more here.
