Reading in context: a lost art

16 December 2003

On Saturday night, thanks to the babysitter sponsored by gnomi and mabfan, my wife and I saw the Simon & Garfunkel concert at the Boston GardenFleetCenter. A curious incident from that concert:

When they played “The Sound of Silence,” and sang “And in the naked light I saw / Ten thousand people, maybe more,” spotlights swept over the audience on the floor, and the crowd cheered. Why did the lighting engineers decide to do this? Did they want to identify the folks in the expensive seats as “People talking without speaking / People hearing without listening”? And why did the audience cheer? Did they agree with this value judgement? Or were they, well, hearing without listening?

• Later: Dialogue across a chain-link fence
• Earlier: More like Survivor than The Partridge Family