Small Screen, Big Feelings
Can the Complexity of the World be Shared in One Tiny Device?
IF you can raise your eyes for a moment, you’ll see that most of us are still peering at our phones, intently scrolling for whatever content might happen to grab us. Staring at the phone is now our default setting. Rather than looking up to take in the space, we are hovered, waiting for transport, either on facebook or whatsapp, it doesn’t matter. We just want to be taken somewhere, somehow, because what all of us want to do, is to feel something.
- Size really does matter
was the lede for a limo rental’s website which a dear friend sent to me, years ago. That this phrase would be associated with what amounted to little more than a car ride sent us both into gales of laughter. It was weeks before 9/11. We were sassy, snarky, thirty-something-year-olds, reveling in the absurdities of everything around us. Now, a generation later, eighteen months after the start of this pandemic, the scale of the world and our current situation can be seen with a focus that is long overdue. But to do this, we’ll need to look up from our phones.
Besides its list of casualties, COVID has wrought many things. For cinema, it has hastened the threat of extinction. Movie goers upgrade their home theaters almost as a reflex, while the cineplex and art houses languish, spooky like ghost towns. In living rooms and kitchens throughout the land, Real Housewives loom, larger than life, but really, when push comes to shove it’s still a challenge to find something worth watching. If it’s time for the news, the Talking Heads gaze outward, every crease and scar writ large in HD, ready to join us at the table.
2. And Yet, Small is Beautiful
Something about the the phone, despite its diminutive size, can elicit really big feelings. Which indeed, is what we’re all after, isn’t it? At least as consumers of ideas. So, in the interest of the now, and despite being a technophobe and hopeless with every app on my phone, I want to pay homage to the truth that really big ideas can come across on very little screens.
A couple weeks ago I was on a flight whose entertainment menu featured David Byrne’s American Utopia. Like everywhere, Broadway’s long and painful hiatus has only recently ended. Normally, I resist filmed versions of live entertainment. But Spike Lee had directed the recording of American Utopia, and I had loved what he did with Mike Tyson’s one man show, so I was game. I plugged in my earphones and pressed the button on my little tiny screen in the back of the seat in front me.
As an aside, I’ve been following Medium’s own Savonarola, Umair Haque for the last year. It’s been a long ride, following someone who uses a takedown of all things American merely as a springboard. It functions as his own neat platform to rail against capitalism, optimism or even to declare there are no such things as random acts of kindness. At least, not in America. As a result, it’s set me on a course, searching for any example to counter Umair’s thesis that Americans are terrible people. I have also lived nearly a third of my life outside of the United States, so I get the impulse to rebuke America’s more loathesome episodes. But these articles serve to whip readers into a frenzy of across-the board-loathing, delivered with a vitriol which is void of any nuance. It’s bleak and really quite terrible, cunningly delivered in the tiny little format of your phone’s screen which you’re holding in your hand.
When American Utopia starts, the stage is empty. David Byrne begins, flanked by a woman of color and a white guy. As the show unfolds, he is joined by ten more percussionists, everyone clad in austere grey suits, barefoot, singing, chanting, conveying a message that is human and undeniable.
3. Life Imitates Art
The show is breathtaking. The power of Janelle Monae’s Hell You Talmbout is devastating- one is transported to a place which reminds us, Life can imitate Art. David Byrne recalls asking whether she’d give permission for him to perform the song, and her gracious response was, “Yes, this song is for everyone.” Summoning the names of those who were killed calls up our collective responsibility, that we- i.e. humans, must do better. Say their names. We are our thoughts. To change the world, we must think differently. Once we shift our minds, our hearts might follow. And who knows? Perhaps our actions won’t be far behind.
Making people feel terrible is easy. Just ask an angry adolescent who’s told her parents what she really thinks. So, as a culture, for Americans a generation after 9/11, why don’t we all try something else for a change? Perhaps a gratitude journal is too much of a reach, particularly in light of the world’s current events. which are horrifying to say the least. But, nevertheless, as a creator on Medium, Umair, why don’t you find a reason or two, to be cheerful?
4. The Kindness of Strangers
If we can’t hunker down together, for many of us, life will become even more miserable. One of the ironies of social media is how it makes so many people feel more alone than ever. But if we use it consciously with discernment, to reach out and across, it will yield connection one million times fold. As a nutty post menopausal gal, I have found a tribe on Hello Revel which is a community of women over 40 (I know, right?) who “gather to share hard-earned knowledge, experience, laughter, and adventure.” Which brings me back to the idea that size really does matter.
Build a longer table, and there is food enough for all of us to share. The world is a cruel place, but people are typically good, and moreover, they are kind. Below is something a brilliantly talented actor I know posted on fb on August 25th. I met Thia through Play Reading with Friends which was created by actor Jon L Peacock and where new works are performed every week with actors from all over the world.
Finally, David Byrne’s site Reasons to be Cheerful “aims to inspire us all to be curious about how the world can be better, and to ask ourselves how we can be part of that change.”
Find a tribe, find reasons to be cheerful. Then let’s go out and change the world.
