For the record, thanks for not trying for that third panel. We really appreciate it. You set a good example for those of you (you know who you are) who’s insatiable hunger for sequential art is unconducive to basic courtesy. In fact, please look away while Puffy gives them an extra helping of unthankfulness.
<(>_<)>
Went to see the Blue Man Group the other night. Now, I’ve seen them many a time on video, most of it the low-quality kind that drifts down an internet stream. I own one of their albums. I’ve always enjoyed their mixture of rock, comedy, and thought-provoking exposition. Their well know "drumbone" routine is a condensed exploration of how humans collaborate to make music, all while rocking so damn hard.
Live, however, is an entirely different ball game. The transition from high-definition to just definition is always jarring no matter the experience you are trying to unvirtualize, but the gradient is particularly sharp with this band. Their attempts to unsettle your perception of the stage as a medium by using a screen and clever lighting to offer you rapidly changing views of the live performance ál la edited video ironally cannot translate to video as a medium. You preconceptions are all wrong at the couch at home. The metaphors are lost in too many layers of translation.
One of the core themes of the concert was a trio of giant tablet computers that the Blue Men were exploring with their usual cautious but indomitable spirit. They worked these things pretty hard delivering messages about the social hazards of texting and summarized information, at one point encouraging the audience to read three e-books simultaneously. One book was page after page of fifty-word abridgements of classic novels, another a how-to on multi-tasking with modern media, and the third a tome of factoids that upset the motivation for even participating in the exercise. They moved just too quick for me to absorb it all (I had to concentrate on only two of the ten-foot tablets to absorb anything) and I’m a pretty bodacious reader. It’s was a sort of text where the act of trying to read it was designed to convey a larger portion of the meaning than the actual text was.
And this was in the first ten minutes of the show.
The next morning, I removed my RSS reader and Facebook app from my smart-phone. I still think it’s important to keep up with the news these sources provide, but keeping up with those feeds has turned into a bit of a chore for me. There’s a lot of information flooding in to absorb, and most of it isn’t worth a moment of contemplation. The real problem was having this chore available to me at all times, as if I were carrying our dirty dishes and a sink in a backpack everywhere just in case I get a few minutes to wash some wine glasses. I had never really thought of that until last night.
Ja.