The Business of Theatre in the Attention Economy

Last weekend I watched a Hindi play. Although I’m very interested in theatre activity, my work hours and time management prevent me from watching all the plays I would like to. But last weekend, I watched the same play, twice, Saturday and Sunday.

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Several years ago, or what feels like it, I could contemplate the world for hours, drifting between incomprehension and acceptance. But it doesn't really bother me that I can hardly sit still without having to resort to using the internet, or a phone to constantly re-engage and connect with other living elements of my world.

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Somewhere I read, a guy had correctly pointed out that we now live in the attention economy where human attention is a scarce commodity. Our reserves of attention and attention spans are getting shorter and shorter, the further we’re exposed to instant gratification and an assault of data and information every way we turn. So something that holds our attention for really long is what will be prosperous in this economy.

***

So when the internet is where-its-at, when your marriage is validated when you update your facebook status, and most of these public and data-rich activities are performed for the public eye, it behooves one to hold the precious and rare away from the scrutiny of jaded, cynical eyes roving through the cesspit these beholders believe the internet to be.

***

I have been living without a functioning computer at my flat for a few months now, and I find that while I’m sorely missing out on the music I want to listen to, I am getting so many other things done that I would never get the chance to do if I would be glued to my twitter timeline every night, or bouncing off the wikisphere or blogosphere drowning in a flurry of hyperlinks. Cooking, reading, talking to friends on the phone once in a while. Yeah, this is not a bad deal.

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Perhaps at a time like this, an art form like theatre is the most relevant. For art to exist, for artists to survive and interest in art to sustain, it must adapt. But maybe the inability of an art form like theatre to adapt to this age of easy accessibility, unavailability in a virtual form like an e-book or a music album or a film turned into bits, keeps it real. And pure. Theatre remains something to be experienced, in the moment, and is no less visceral in its approach and execution than it was a thousand years ago on the ancient Grecian podiums.

Salt.

Taste is a series of sensory information bits we interpret into an experience. By adding salt to activate our salt receptors, we increase the number of information bits considerably, and in so doing create a fuller tasting experience.

What's your Story?

My friend, Sorjin*, is a guitar player. He loves to play the blues, and can seduce you with a few notes on the slide. He told me once that he decided to go the way of music because it is a free-flowing, real-time expression of you. Who you are, then. Not a distillation, a derivation or a rationalization of what you think your character is. That things like books and movies need a narrative - a beginning and an end. cause and effect. so if you start with one thing, you end up with another. music doesn't rely on that narrative formula, or any kind of rationalization. Take Merzbow. or Lustmorde. What they do is play subliminal 'noise' music, which cannot be brought down to a scale and moves (I think - I don't have it figured out) intuitively, like a mood changing through a landscape. 

Music has the ability, as Huxley said, second best to silence, to express the inexpressible. You can never know who you really are, maybe because there is no you; maybe because it is beyond our perception; or an elusive combination of both. But you will find that music - whether listening and appreciating, or singing or playing - can talk to the you inside. In a way that books, paintings and movies never can. And he played me a song the other day, called 'Untitled', in an album that was untitled - maybe to ensure that nothing more than the music itself could be inferred from that piece. 

#nowplaying Brian Eno - Taking Tiger Mountain

It's a good lesson for life. We've often thought about the OST for the 'movie of our life', that captures in glitzy cinematic detail the trials and travails of a day in our lives. Even autobiographies that don't tell you how the writer became who she became, are decried for lack of a gripping storyline. 

But we don't live our lives like that. There will be days and days together when you don't understand what you're doing, but you know you're doing it because something is making you do it, guiding you in that direction. When/if it ends successfully, people call it motivation, a killer instinct. If it fails - well, it doesn't matter what you call it, nobody's listening. 

So for days like that, I think we'd all do well to think about something like this. I'm reproducing a quote below.

You will find that people love their narratives. They need for your life to have meaning; it must provide them a teachable moment, whether cautionary or aspirational. But you will never be who they think you are. 

The more you allow their expectations to dictate to you what you should be, the more unfamiliar you’ll become with your own reflection in a mirror.

I found this through my subscription to Andrew Sullivan's the daily beast, by the way. Whattay blog. It's a blessing in these days of mindless diversions. 
*name changed. But it would be pretty cool to have a friend called Sorjin.

A Lesson in Star-gazing

Mother:What do you mean... He's not coming back?

Jim: Oh, no, he'll come back. We all come back, Kate. These private little revolutions always die.

The compromise is always made. In a peculiar way. Frank is right... every man does have a star. The star of one's honesty. And you spend your life groping for it, but once it's out it never lights again.

I don't think he went very far. He probably just wanted to be alone to watch his star go out.

Mother: Just as long as he comes back.

Jim: I wish he wouldn't, Kate. One year I simply took off, went to New Orleans;for two months I lived on bananas and milk, and studied a certain disease. And then she came, and she cried.

And I went back home with her. And now I live in the usual darkness; I can't find myself; it's hard sometimes to remember the kind of man I wanted to be. I'm a good husband; Chris is a good son... He'll come back.

Arthur Miller had something very interesting to say of the pivot of drama. That it is not just a matter of creating the right characters and getting them to make up the story as they went along. The point is in knowing, as intimately as the character, not just why he would do something – but why he cannot abstain from doing it; why he cannot just walk away from it. In the creation of that motivation to act lies the reality of drama.

I keep coming back to this exchange. It’s a depressing play, All My Sons, by Arthur Miller. It doesn’t end very well, either. A man lives in guilt for many years, knowing whether he has actually caused the death of 21 fighter pilots in providing faulty fighter jets, knowing that his friend suffers in jail for it. His nerves are frayed by the guilt, his wit dulled and any joie de vivre diminishing in the ever-present doubt that eats away at him.

One of his sons went missing in the war; the same war for which he was commissioned to assemble 21 fighter jets. This son had a sweetheart, the son of his friend now in jail, and the sweetheart re-enters his life on the arm of our man’s younger son. The wife has been utterly shaken by the war and the loss of her son, although she never believes he is truly dead. The dialogue is hopeful and young – the lovers talk of the days to come, neighbours discuss astrology, husbands and sundry. Until the sweetheart’s brother demands that she break off her engagement with the younger son and return as our man put her father in jail. Drama, more of it, ensues. This particular exchange takes place between the wife (called Mother) and her scientist neighbour, Jim, while anxiously waiting for her younger son, Chris, who has just discovered the damning allegations against his father, to return.

Is it true that once our star goes out, it never comes back? Do we lose all the integrity we may possess, all the truth and purity we have lived by, in a passing moment of bad judgement? I may have, in a bid to preserve one of the longest and most beautiful friendships in my life, lied, wilfully, constantly and almost in disbelief that my eyes do not, in fact, speak the truth when all my tongue can do is roll off unconvincing, plastic words that taste bitter even to me.

Maybe my star went out a long time ago.

Yesterday's Thoughts

Fuck the night joint. I'm way too sleepy and tired by the time I return home, and somehow defeated, to really let the drug stimulate my thoughts. The morning brings with it a wonderful wave of contemplation, so morning joint it is.

So while staring at the spirals of smoke, and in the many long-drawn minutes after, I was steeped in thought, of varied things. 


*****

Going easy on myself has had disastrous results on my money management. I have completely eaten into the savings my grandma painstakingly built for me, and I'm left with 1/5 of a lakh now. It's pathetic. I can't live within my means :( I intend to bring it back to the original amount, if not bring it on par with where it would be if I had let the interest accumulate. 


The Flatmate is currently the likeness of a saint. He is finding the strength to always do right by himself and is enduringly pure. He's a real inspiration, if you are looking for it. 
The city noises on the cab to work are gratingly present, each and every day. Sometimes, you hear the voices behind the noises, the urgent alarm of the ambulance, the bored persistence of car horns, the buzz of the beautiful rains. 


Being a non-vegetarian also changes your personality. The way food is attacked, and the defensive response that one evolves in response to allegations by vegetarians makes one develop a different attitude in life. In other news, Woodside's BeerNBurger festival is great, and Ireland's corned beef burger was amazing. It didn't even taste like meat. Just like a really well-cooked and flavoured patty, with smoked bacon. Mmmm. 


I should not smoke so much if I want to sing. It's not good for my voice or my lung power but it won't even let me practice, because getting stoned makes me unable to approach music a little detachedly. But I get so restless just to think of being by myself sober. 


Ze Stick will be coming over in a few weeks. I will have to sort out my room and get an internet connection and stuff by then. Where will she stay otherwise!

I can haz gourmand syndrome

Rule 34 may have to be amended to throw in the word lolcat somewhere.

So I'm in maximum city. And every weekend has been a weekend of fun and frolic, some of it forced. But I've eaten at some fabulous places and have a lot to say of food, drink, ambience and service. In this post (since I don't have a food blog) I shall tell you all about interesting things I have been eating and also, cooking.

Went to this nice Italian place on sunday, called Quattro in Lower Parel. Now I'm not one of those underexposed comfort eaters who rely on potatoes and cheese to give them a global food experience. But I'd like to write about this place because the service was very good. Of course, I also went to Fenix last week and the service there was overwhelmingly good, yada yada, but you really pay through your nose for that kind of attention, y'know? The prices at Quattro are certainly reasonable by Bombay standards.

We ordered a cream of mushroom and leeks soup, siciliano pizza and gnocchi. I didn't have my camera with me, so no photos. The soup came with a few interesting breads and were very subtly and freshly flavoured. (I notice how I've been gravitating towards fresher flavours, even if tossed with stir fried something or a heavier sauce, as an alternative to heavy, spicy, overly rich food.)

So here's a list of the interesting things I've eaten over the last few weeks:

• Gado gado salad (Busaba, Lower Parel)
• Tuna carpaccio with orange, walnut and vinaigrette dressing. (the abovementioned Fenix, Oberoi)
• BLT with cheddar and pesto (Salt Water Cafe, Bandra)
• Beef Bulgagi Maki Roll (Busaba, Lower Parel)
• Mediterannean Salad & Caesar Salad (Kala Ghoda Cafe)
• Gooey Chocolate Cake (Cafe Churchill, Colaba)
• Emmenthal and Pesto sandwich and Olive and basil tapenade sandwich (Moshe's Cafe, Colaba)

And oh, I fell in love with Mediterannean food in Himachal. Now, the list of interesting things I've made (I realise this is extremely tedious without pictures):

• Quesadillas (spring onions, cheddar etc)
• Risotto rice pudding (drenched in mangoes and nutella :-p) 
• Two varieties of salad with Greek Yoghurt dressing. 
• Mushrooms on toast.

And the gourmand syndrome? It's for real. I read a story about a snowboarder, Kevin Pearce, who had a near fatal accident, and re-emerged post severe trauma with an inexplicable craving for basil pesto. Now, I wouldn't generally attribute this to syndromes or afflictions, I can completely understand a craving for basil pesto, with its creamy cheese and fresh basil and quirky, crunchy pine nuts, but he was quite indifferent to the food before.

Pesto is, indeed, the best-o.

Within every extrovert, there's an introvert screaming to get out.

I've been an extrovert for far too long. So long that I have little clue what to do when I do find myself alone. <cue jokes about jilling off> More often than not, I spend my time dilating my pupils and retreating into that passive wonder-world which also, apparently, obeys the economic dictum of the law of diminishing marginal utility.
It's getting difficult to shake off this state, where there are always things to do, but then you always have so many choices - and you know, YOU get to make the right choice for yourself, the overwhelming knowledge of the fact that your freedom is your responsibility - that I get stuck with what Stephen Fry called options paralysis. Truly, I need to spend more time just doing my own thing and getting the hang of it. Not that I didn't, in the past, but really developing it, honing it and making it my own. Even 'doing my thing' feels like a borrowed pastime.

But really, the way to get unstuck from options paralysis is to reject everything. The most peaceful place in your mind is where there is nothing. Try as you might, 'nothing' is an exceedingly difficult state of mind to achieve. So, the next best thing follows, one thing. But to really do that one thing right, and do justice to it, you have to die first. Die completely. Leave your half-hopeful ambitions, your distant dreams and your exotic-for-the-sake-of-it choices. Let go over the cliff, as the zen monk says. And then your own fears and lethargy and false hopes will never deceive you. Maybe I should give it a shot.

Oh, and hat-tip to ol' Prufrock for that line in the title. It's true. 

It's been a bloody long time since I blogged, but I'm not going to dwell on that.

I'm not going to dwell on much, actually. Except to say that I have come back here, because it reminds me of a time when I looked into myself to understand my thoughts and to find sense in what I did, and so, who I was.

Even if I am not that same person any more, as would be the case with anyone after 5 years living an unchronicled, pretty much unhinged existence - I want to reconnect with this dear old identity I had. One I may not entirely recognize, or appreciate all the time, but certainly, this is still me. Somewhen.

And, I have been gripped with a fear that I will slowly, but surely, start losing my voice. Literally and metaphorically. I intend to seek out a music teacher over the weekend, (does anyone in Bombay know who's a good hindustani vocals teacher anywhere in central or south bombay?) and to find what I want, and say it the way I want to, with the words I used to covet as mine. If it is my opinion, and an interesting one, it won't just go on chat windows or into a ear and out the other.

And hopefully my writing will improve as well. It will feel good once I hit publish. But then, I should get down to changing the template and all that shizz. You'll be seeing more of me. :)