Adventures in Meat-Space
Listen to them, the children of the void! What music they make!
By Cole Coonce
It was the night of the "Video Games Live" concert at the Hollywood Bowl, and there was a smattering of confusion at the Will Call ticket window. Dylan and Leopold, a pair of 21st-century computer nerds, grew nervous and perplexed as to why the tickets they had purchased online were not waiting for them. I mean, for Luke's sake, they had done the appropriate groundwork: filled in the necessary fields on the online form with the proper digits and dots and ASCII characters. Hit Send. Received confirmation e-mail. Actually left the house and found a place to park at a lot on Highland Avenue, which - to a pair of social-deviant misfits with no girlfriends - was as scary and claustrophobic as boarding a train to Dachau or something. Yes, they stared down the inevitable intermingling with members of the human race, but they were not prepared for this moment of meltdown, where metaphorical wires were crossed and silicon solder joints short-circuited. They were at the Hollywood Bowl IRL ("in real life," natch), beyond the tether of their beloved matrix, away from the cathode-ray blue isolation tanks in their bedrooms and offices, the womb-like gray boxes that bathed them in a pallid light and nurtured their needs for making connections and human sustenance.
Yes: Meat-space can be a little daunting for the children of Pong, the hyper-bright but subhuman meta-race who would inherit the planet soon enough.
It was the ticket window at Will Call that scared them ... perhaps the drop-dead simplicity of the situation is what confused them ... it was a binary process, wasn't even on a hexadecimal level ... there were two lines for tickets ... one for the VIPs, journalists, and guests of the Bowl and another for those who bought their tickets by keying in credit card numbers in cyberspace.
Their tickets were not at this window ... they were at that window, the one for the plebes who actually shelled out e-cash under the pretense that the soundtrack to a videogame was worthy of the L.A. Philharmonic. When the clerk behind the glass figured out the cock-up and that Dylan and Leopold were in the wrong line, the two cyber-geeks stared at their half-tied high-tops. They gathered their personal information, stepped away from the window, and sheepishly sauntered south to the proper spot.
"Dude, that was so Jedi," Dylan said to Leopold.
I stepped up to the ticket window. The clerk was pleasant, but all business and matter-of-fact.
"Who were those guys?" I asked her, as I slipped my CDL into the mouse-hole of the glass.
"That is the future," she said, as she returned my ID with the tickets. "And their bellies are bigger than their eyes. Within a generation, they will be the majority."
***
The concert started and ended, and I'll be dipped in Donkey Kong-shit if I can recall anything memorable about any of the musical intervals, melodies, or chord progressions. Basically, big-screen projections of phantasmagorical vignettes of videogame highlights served as a sort of animatronic basilica of Escher-inspired kung-fu fighting among 8-bit mutants and herky-jerky Virtual Valeries, all of which hung above and dwarfed the musicians of the Philharmonic as they replicated scores originally composed and performed on sundry electronic instruments.
It was a feedback loop that could not tell the cart from the horse ... which is to say that, at one time, the videogame industry couldn't afford real instruments for a proper score for the likes of Super Mario, and by the time Myst, Warcraft, and Tomb Raider were in production, Pro Tools ruled and human beings and their string sections went the way of the Commodore 64. These niggly little videogame scores were the scorn and bane of serious composers and their orchestras. So now that Sonic the Hedgehog moves more units and makes more money than Britney Spears, much less Esa-Pekka Salonen, the videogame mavens and mongers are trying to convince the world that what they are doing is art.
Really, this was beyond Nick Lowe's maxim about dancing to architecture; this made as much sense as needlepointing to pornography. Knit one, purl two ... .
***
As the curfew neared, the L.A. Philharmonic sawed away at their cellos and huffed and puffed into their trumpets, while some vague virtual variation of the Battle of Agincourt jittered across the Über-Vision screens. The concert's coda and crescendo was to feature the histrionic axe-work of long-haired rock-star/wiggle-stick-wagging über-hack Steve Vai, the guitarist's guitarist and heir apparent to Jimi Hendrix, whose guitar was to soar with the virtual Valkyries while hammering out some frenetic faux flight-of-the-bumblebee buzz-buzz that signified not much, despite all the simulated sturm and drang and the pretense of this being real music. Instead, Vai spent his section of the finale staring at his guitar and his snakeskin boots, tinkering with the guitar's volume knob, and trying to figure out why no sound was summoned no matter how hard he hit his instrument.
Apparently, a tech neglected to plug in the guitar - another glaring analog mistake. Aye, empowering human beings to touch things is a bad idea. Human hands are fraught with error. Which begs the question: Do man-droids dream of Electric Ladyland?Published: 08/11/2005
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