Wherever you go, the phone is there. I was playing a gig at a pool on Memorial Day and someone had their phone in the pool, protected in a specially designed plastic envelope. Even when you’re on the bandstand, the phone is there. Often it’s not yours, but it’s staring back at you, held in the rigid awkward sincere manner of a bar patron attempting to record the live musical performance presently unfolding. This move offends some band members. You’re made to feel even more like a trained animal than usual, which is considerable even under the loosest of performance situations. It happens all the time now, the people formerly known as audience members transformed into cinéma vérité auteurs, a still rock catching the shot on the dancefloor. I can’t imagine the video ever gets shared afterward or even watched again. I think the band is good musically, but rather Warholian in our unfilmability. But perhaps I’m wrong. Perhaps someone more attuned would be able to find solace in the various 17-second clips of the band playing over the years, but my life is too short, and besides, I know I’m just standing there. Cirque du Soleil it is not.
In an attempt to make the best of the unavoidable awkwardness, I’ve come to think of mid-performance phone videoing as a form of applause, an almost helpless gesture of appreciation. There is still conventional applause, to be sure. But there are rituals around when it is deployed. The phone seems to represent a new kind of applause, a spontaneous overflowing of emotion, a way to memorialize in deed if not in fact, a way of saying, “This is worthy of being videoed.” It’s worth being thrown into the algorithmic seas, preserved and shared, forgotten once caught. This non-phone experience is interesting enough that I want to make it a phone experience, too. I want to shine it through my ever-present prism of meaning. It’s with a type of astounded annoyance that we encounter something already outside the phone anyway. We must put it back in.
After the gig, breaking down the gear, a teenager walked up and said, “Good job playing.” Then he walked off. It’s almost always nice to be complimented, even if it doesn’t make any sense. I am the youngest person in that band by thirty years and I am still old enough to be that teenager’s father. I’m hardly accustomed to anyone telling me “good job” about anything, much less a teenager. I mean, we did fine. We played “Under the Boardwalk.” There was talk of playing “Sea Cruise” but it was never called, just one of those set-break notions that drifts by like a cloud. It sounds more like a phrase I would tell my own children after the completion of some chore. “Good job”? I almost expected someone to then walk up and present me with a congratulatory sticker. It’s so hard to keep living and not become a less funny version of Andy Rooney.
My middle-aged confusion aside, I still appreciated the compliment. However, it should be noted that said teenager never once recorded us with his phone.