Take Me Out Tonight, Because I Want To Ignore Music and Just Stare at a Screen

Saturday night I went to the Johnny Marr http://www.johnny-marr.com/messengeralbum show at the Phoenix, a small, intimate concert hall, which I think is the best way to enjoy live music. Huge arena shows are something to experience, but if you really love live music, nothing beats a small venue.

  

Being rather short in stature, I climbed up to the balcony where I could get a bird’s eye view of the stage rather than the backs of a sea of heads. From my vantage point I could see the stage perfectly and the crowd of people below filming the concert on their mobile phones.

We’ve all seen YouTube clips of mobile phone recorded shows and shut them off as soon as we realized what they were. The sound quality is crap, and the video is a motion sickness inducing shaky, blur. Which begs the question, why would anyone buy a ticket to a show, take the trouble to get dressed up, go downtown and watch the entire concert through the tiny screen of their mobile phone instead of larger than life on stage in front of them?

Many people were not dancing because they had to hold their phones still, and with the task of recording, couldn’t offer much in the way of applause at the end of each song. I can’t imagine how the band kept their energy up and pulled off such a tight and fun show with so little feedback from the audience.

I’m sure those fans all went home raving about what a great show it was. If they didn't like the music they would have stopped recording the show so intently, but in the process of recording a very poor quality version of the evening, they missed out on enjoying what was actually happening live directly in front of them.

Meanwhile, up in the balcony, farthest from the action, people danced and sang, cheered, bopped and had a great time because the show was really entertaining. The new album The Messenger is great and I actually prefer Marr’s versions of The Smiths classics to Morrissey’s iconic whine – heretical statement, but that's the way I feel.

Here’s the one photo from my mobile that I had a taller friend take. It’s a terrible photo but a good example of the standard mobile abilities (and mine has a pretty good camera).

I don’t hate mobiles and modern technology; I just think they are overused. What should be a tool of convenience has become a life-support that most people seem to be unable to effectively live without. Which is ironic because it is exactly the living part they are missing out on.

I recommend any fan of jangly guitar hooks to check out Johnny Marr's new album The Messenger because it rocks, and if anyone finds the red “Johnny Fucking Marr” tour t-shirt in a women’s extra small, please send one my way because they only had tents available at the Phoenix

The Conversations on the Bus Go Round and Round (For Jo)

"Granola Girl" that I am, I try to do my part for the environment. I don't eat meat, I recycle like a demon and I either walk, bicycle or take public transit everywhere. The latter makes me privy to conversations of a private nature. I try to arm myself with reading material and an iPod but I find the more I really don't want to overhear a conversation, the more it intrudes on my concentration. I don't know why people forget that everyone around them can hear their mobile phone conversations, but they do. I've heard so many "baby daddy drama" conversations that they have all blended into one he isn't paying child support-was with another woman-won't get a job-needs to move out ball of confusion and it is hard to differentiate them all. Those are the conversations I forget quickly. The ones that really stick with me are those of unintentional comedic brilliance. Recently a friend suggested I blog about them and so, here we are, some of my favourite snippets of public transit talk:

A young woman having a phone interview for a job from the seat behind me offered this gem: "I'm a scheduling wizard." This did make me immediately want to read the rest of her resume with a keen interest in what school she attended that had any kind of "wizardry" on its curriculum.

The lost young man who wanted to learn master guitar building from a prestigious school in "somewhere in BC or Saskatchewan, I forget, anyway it's somewhere on the East Coast." (For my non-Canadian readers, BC and Saskatchewan are both in Western Canada and Saskatchewan, being a Prairie province, doesn't have a coast of either an Eastern or Western variety).

The alphabetically challenged woman trying desperately to locate her lost Fendi wallet explaining that it "looks exactly like the Coach intertwined C's...but....you know....with F's" which is true, I guess, but there has to be a better way to put it.

Girls do need math, as was proved by the group of them having a one-up conversation about their footwear collection, 

 Girl 1: "Oh my god, I have, like, 20 pairs of shoes"

Girl 2: "Well, I don't even know how many pairs I have now because I had about 23 pairs but then I bought, like, another 15 pairs."

Recently I came upon the plan to start turning to the loud mobile conversationalist and say, "I can't believe you did that! I would be so embarrassed" as a way to remind them we all can hear them and to possibly traumatize the bad behaviour out of them. However, being sat directly behind a man twitching in his seat who was muttering in graphic detail about all the violent things he was going to do to "her” has made me rethink this plan. Transit people can be a volatile lot and its best that I not provoke them in person. Instead I'll do it via the safety of the internet.