enjoy the musical moment

So I'm once again sitting on the sofa watching stuff on TiVo. My current selection is the Jimmy Kimmel Live After Oscar special, which featured this year's celeb-studded viral wannabe Movie: The Movie (sorry Jimmy, it's no Handsome Men's Club) and a skit where Oprah actually allows herself to be made fun of. The show also featured a live performance from Coldplay, which is why I'm typing...

All throughout the crowd, there are hundreds of digital cameras and cell phones pointed at the stage, all with human beings attached, whose focus is clearly on the screen of their device, NOT the actual Grammy-Award winning band performing mere feet away from them for free.

I'm all for recording things for posterity and saving memories, but this practice has become far too common and addicting...especially when you are in the audience of a concert that is already being recorded... like for a national TV show you can watch and relive online whenever you want!

I'm totally guilty of it too. I spent most of U2's concert at the Rose Bowl in 2009 -- where I was lucky enough to have had a general admission floor ticket that enabled me to end up right in front of the catwalk surrounding the stage AND that was recorded for their 360 Tour Live DVD, btw -- with my camera out, recording video of my fave songs and trying to get perfect photos of Bono and Larry Mullen Jr. But I'm kinda bummed that I didn't experience more of the actual experience of being there... "stuck in a moment," if you will... in the FRONT ROW!

Luckily, the most recent concerts I've gone to -- specifically Foo Fighters at the not-so-fabulous-anymore-Forum in October -- have required that I focus on the music, not my camera. See, my camera broke at some point over the summer and refused to focus on anything. So any footage I would have attempted to film would have looked like a super-fuzzy mess. And while I wish I had clear video of Dave Grohl performing Everlong, I am kind of glad I don't. That concert was awesome and I remember huge chunks of the performances and how great the music sounded. I'm not sure that would have happened if I'd been too busy recording the show to actually enjoy the show.