About a month ago I wound up at the El Rey for a VNV Nation show. I had never seen them live but I was incredibly pleased by the performance. I've never in my life seen such a rotund, bald, Irishman bounce so lively around a stage. The band's front man, Ronan Harris, made a point of demanding that everyone there really get into the show. You know, "put your cell phones and flip video cameras back in your pockets and be part of the experience." Throw your hands up in the air when everyone else is. Be as excited as him! After all, if he, a great big tubby middle-aged man, can prance around like a happy 6 year old high on caffeine and sweets, then you damn well should be able to undulate in a moderately rhythmic fashion goddammit.

I thought his cell phone comment appropriate at the time. I often am discouraged by concert-goers seeming lack of social grace when I see a great many of them more concerned with being the first to post their bland but "unique perspective" on the concert experience to YouTube... Because YouTube notoriety is more important than active engagement in an experience. I could probably go on and on about how the internet has really changed social structure at traditionally social IRL events. I might even say something poignant and engaging about how the significance of deeds one does for one's online community has dwarfed the value of experiential wisdom in our culture. But that's boring and preachy, and I'm not a church. Plus, while I'd like to get some credibility for my writing, I'm still just blogging.

Nevertheless, I have had second thoughts about Ronan's disdain for iPhone videos of shows since my recent attendance of the Oasis show at the Staples Center in downtown LA. Thanks to the totally rad people at Golden Voice and Metblogs LA, I am occasionally blessed with free tickets to shows that I would otherwise never think about attending. And while I generally avoid concerts approaching the ten-thousand-in-attendance mark, or any musical act in venues build for twenty thousand, I'm honestly glad that I went. Thanks in part to the dissociative experience of so large a space and so far a stage, made weirder by the sibling rivalry that keeps Liam offstage any time Noel is singing, It reminded me of home.

You see, growing up in Georgia you knew the first day of summer was here when you could run out in the back yard and see the garden full of fireflies glowing unabashedly, begging for mating rights. Yes, the time was ripe for days at the pool and nights... um, nights doing whatever it was that I did as a child when school wasn't waiting to pounce the next morning - oh yes, staying out past curfew, trolling the neighborhood with childhood pals, writing guitar songs in the soccer field, smoking swisher sweets or black & milds, breaking things and ducking into bushes to avoid the police on the frequent occasion that we were stupid enough to do any of these things in plain sight. Skinny dipping, capture the flag, driving for hours on a full tank of gas a prayer to find the Georgia Guidestones or to a Waffle House in Tennessee - because it's there, watching shooting stars, climbing trees, hurting ourselves and others at punk-house parties, homemade fireworks, shooting at clay, sneaking into the Botanical Gardens, fucking with old people in Oconee county at 2 a.m. in our unruly-but-harmless gang of sport-bikes, Mary Hallinan, The 8-Track Gorilla, Stinky Jessie, Jittery Joes, the basement at Blue Sky... All these memories came flooding back to me at this Oasis show. From my seat in section 205, row 10, seat 9, the flickering cameras of all those people who paid 80 bucks a piece for floor seats, the ones who found more value in capturing that moment in low resolution, shaky, backlit, pixelated mpeg, most definitely for no purpose other than to throw at the internet for virtu-props, they all looked like fireflies - little blinking, glowing, floating things in a loud, dark field.

So, While I agree with Ronan - life is there to be lived, not watched - Harris, my experience is expanded and enlightened with memories of happy child and young adulthood by those who just can't keep their goddamned phones in their goddamned pockets.