Dear Woman with the iPhone
I don't think Marduk had anything to do with music but he's the type of dude Doc would know.
To the woman with the iPhone at the Mew concert at the Mezzanine in San Francisco on Sunday, December 13th:
I try to be fair so I will start by admitting that part of this is my fault. I made the mistake of poking fun at Doc when he tried to improve his vantage point by telling him that I come to concerts to listen with my ears. Either you heard me say this and took me at my word (perhaps you are Canadian?) or Doc is really good friends with some deity and they conspired to teach me a lesson. Perhaps it was a combination of the two and your natural impulses were simply encouraged by the “Solar Calf.” Divine impetus notwithstanding, you have managed to take what should be an awesome and powerful spectacle and turned it into nothing more than an incredibly expensive viewing of a Youtube video.
I hope your friends say “Oh, I understand exactly what they show must have been like.” Tack on “for those immediately behind you” and they’d be right. Actually, that’s not completely true. There were plenty of occasions where my view consisted solely of your arms because you turned sideways to take pictures of the projector screens. During the time you spent waffling on the decision to photograph the left or the right screen you could have actually been enjoying the show.
I don’t want this to become personal. I hate you in the aggregate. I hate all cell phone/point and shoot camera people at shows. (At least SLR people tend to care enough to get in the front row. And I find that the possibility of their pictures turning out ok makes their behavior seem less boorish.) You are all the woman with the iPhone to me. But you specifically, woman with the iPhone, outdid yourself last night, as did your friend. At first I thought you were alone. Who else would have nothing better to do than take pictures of screens and specks of musicians? Not once in the first forty minutes of the set did you seem to motion to another human being or share a moment, so engrossed you were in your archiving and memory banking. It became clear though that you did had a companion once she started “shhhing” the couple behind her for talking. I was standing next to them and could barely hear them. You know, over all the music and everything.
I have been lamenting the trend in live reviews involving the skewering and blaming of crowds* and I still think it should be next to impossible for a crowd to ruin a show just based on simple unresponsiveness and especially on scene/demographic (aka hipster presence) but in this case one individual, you, made my experience less pleasant than it otherwise would have been.
*Exhibit A
*Exhibit B
I just don’t understand. You were obviously a fan. You knew the words. You repeatedly said how awesome they were. Why wouldn’t you want to see and experience it for yourself instead of fumbling with your phone. Help me understand, ladies with the iPhones. What could you possibly get from this?
