I had the chance to go see B.B. King in concert the other night at the Arena, a concert-sports venue on the campus of Southern Illinois University. King's opening act was a bitchin' band led by the A-list blues guitarist/singer/actor/dramatic stage presence, Joe Bonamassa. Bonamassa is a riveting, masterful blues presence who adorns his passions with his face, his body, his voice and that roaring, beating, screaming extension of his body he calls his guitar.
At first it was almost understandable why so many camera phones were going off in the arena. This guy dilates your blood canals. But then, as more and more of the cell-phone-wielding audience ran up to the front of the stage to take pictures and short videos and stood in front of the people in the front rows, blocking their views of the stage and oblivious to their intrusion, it began to get a very annoying. These new citizen paparazzi are everywhere. Concerts, plays, sports events, political rallies, police riots, maybe funerals, I'm not sure.
Then something peripheral distracted me from the performance. I began to notice the man in front and to the right of me and the women to the left of me and the people in the next section to my right putting up their cell phones to take longer and longer video clips of Bonamassa in his throes. They barely stopped to actually listen to Joe's voice and thrill at his chords and spinal sways. They were too busy capturing the performance; too busy adjusting the picture, centering the figure, recording the experience WITHOUT EXPERIENCING THE EXPERIENCE of Bonamassa.
This disconnect between what was happening, what you came to the venue to experience, and what you do when you are suppose to be experiencing what is happening was not any different when B.B. King and his Blues band strolled on stage and B.B. began his seated concertizing. It unfolded like a primer of reality becoming virtual in the 21st century. Why live life when you can mediate it, record it, film it, digitalize it, pixilate it. It would appear that it is becoming better to "capture" a legend than directly experience him. Is that really what memories are made of, capturing the moment rather than being in the moment? : "Boy, I remember when I went to see B.B. King. Man, I really got some fantastic video. My camera was taking it all in. It costs me 300 bucks, but it was worth it. I gotta watch that video soon; see how really great he was."
Disconnects can be useful in the right circumstance, it should be noted. In the screenwriting class I teach, I assign specific movies so the students can learn something about screenwriting in different genres, in different budget universes, learn about story structure, pacing, dialogue, etc. and how the shooting script and the final product translates what's on the page into what's on the screen. But to accomplish this, I require that the students watch the movie twice: First, in order to get it as an audience does and then, a second time, as a writer might, as he breaks the story down in his or her mind.
I do the same thing, most of the time, when I'm writing a movie review. The first time informs my second purpose (review) so I can be connected to the flow of the movie as an audience before I disconnect and intellectualize about it for my audience. I cannot be both experientially/aesthetically engaged and intellectually engaged at the same time. I must disconnect to analyze the film so that I may cover the often structurally complex and dramatic canvas when I write the review
The point is, though, that my intentional disconnect the second time does not rob me of experiencing-the-movie-as-intended the first time. A screenwriter friend back in Hollywood refuses to go to studio screenings (free screenings for writers, actors, directors, etc.) because he needs to know how the target audience for which he is writing -the public-reacts to the movie, not how professionals do and professional screenings rob him of that input because the audience is too savvy and less volatile than a paying audience. There's overlap between the two audiences but often not a lot. Not to put to fine too fine a point on it, look at the artistic judgments of the voters for The People's Choice Awards and the voters for the Oscars - some overlap but often not a lot.
Disconnects abound today. They invade reveries: When I lived and worked in L.A., I used to walk and run in the Griffith Park area in the Bronson Canyon hills near my home, located 5:o'clock from the Hollywood sign. I did this nearly every morning both for exercise and for my delight in communing with nature. Sometimes I would even share this Maslovian flow state with my wife, a fierce wildlife advocate and tree hugger and smoocher. My ritual embraced listening to the myriad bird songs, the squawks, the hawk kree-eee-ars and the Downey Woodpecker's insect scouring tree pounding, and the sights and sounds of a woodland's other furry charmers. I was always happily regaled with the smell of fresh, dew-laden, early morning canyon-park air, with hearing the chorus of sounds of my footsteps on the different ground covers (asphalt, dirt, grass, fallen leaves, dry, decomposed granite paths), saying hello and replying to hellos from other canyon runners and walkers.
Most importantly, I looked forward to connecting with me. I looked forward to the opportunity to listen to my own thoughts about my time and what I do in time or with surfing the mental time portals of my past, present and future. Sometimes I would do this while moving through the canyon scapes and at other times I would simply sit down and think or stare into space, zone out maybe, and all the while, take in the sounds and sights that were Bronson Canyon.
Inevitably, and increasingly so as years passed, people would pass me either talking on their Bluetoothed cell phones or ranting into them, seeming, to the uninitiated onlooker, like an exhausted schizophrenic putting together bursts of words and directing them to an imaginary or invisible listener; they would walk slowly or suddenly stop while talking or listening, making some important point or hearing it made for them. They were in the canyon but to its restorative offerings, they were oblivious. To its restorative offerings they were disconnected.
There were others, those who were phone-less but not gadget-less. These were the types who ran or walked, with tapes, CDs, iPods, radios, taking in their music or news or talk radio, getting their aerobics in before their trip to the nearby Starbucks or deli for the latte fix. As for unhooked, self-reflective thought? No time. Maybe even no concept. No awareness. As for the unmediated communing with nature in the glorious Griffith Park setting...Forgeddaboutit! This is a most astonishing disconnect, I think. I'm irresistibly drawn to a recollection of Plato's allegory of the cave, where people view life and its motion as cave shadows and think them reality. Is it possible today?
According to the comic strip, Zits, by Scott and Borgman, a backhanded tribute to slackers everywhere, there are an estimated 2 billion cell phones worldwide. And there are more than 8,000 satellites currently in orbit. (I checked this out online and these are correct estimates, even though they're from Zits - it's just fun to cite a comic strip for statistical data -- so remember Zits as a resource in the future.). That is a lot of people using phones for talking, texting, or sending images and text across the planet and lord knows where else.
Much of this cell phone activity is very useful, very convenient and very necessary (or so it sometimes seems to us). But a lot of these users, like slacker Jeremy in Zits, are missing life directly, preferring life in between, in the virtual zone or committed to a life courtesy of Verizon and brothers BlackBerry and iPhone. Perhaps the day will come when the cell phone existence is so organic, so inevitable, so mandatory, that two people will have phone sex, with each other, in the same room, and not find anything odd or disconnected about it. Hmmm. Sounds like an old Woody Allen movie.
