No app for that

There's not enough value on the web for the artist to spend much precious time there. Information is useful in context, interpreted, magnified by understanding. Wouldn't a writer be better off in a wireless cottage, sequencing ideas dug out of mad interior play?

The web stream is a dungeon ride through future world, suspended by servers and developers who offer the public a glimpse of life to come. Can the artist find sustenance, strapped into the little car, gaping at the blinking lights of silhouetted rights and wrongs? For this, one needs to do the work of genius, the dangerous non-linear delving into past shadows, present tension, future truth.

Granted, there are facts alluded to by characters of make believe. Otherwise the amorphous yearning of a poet would loll in the womb, generative and warm, unborn. But the web and the world of art are separated by vast and useless corridors of magnitude inhabited by hapless creatures of curiosity in a land of factoid feasting and unsubstantiated conjecture.

Had there been Web 2.0 in Socrates' day, the App Store would lose him in endless choice of chiclets, abandoning his voice. Internet is wide and small, infinity in thrall to scant attention span, while art is time and space and silent breath and confidence to muse them.

Capacitance

My dear father knows a great deal about frugality, magnanimity, cheese and bees. He can distinguish himself in a card game, tossing out helpful tips and random quips, all the while creaming his opponents. He’s aggregated funny and wise, humble and proud, stoic and wry into his crossword puzzler’s brain over ninety plus fruitful years.

But there’s one thing he’s wrong about, and I’m about to tell you why. One Sunday morning of my impressionable youth, Dad pointed out that a pair of hymn singers into microphones had little to write home about because their sets of pipes were enhanced by technology. I, the wee girl, proceeded to disrespect my natural singing voice for just about the rest of my life.

Enter the iPhone.

Today, after Walter and I recorded ‘All Along the Watchtower’ on his phone, I slid the file into GarageBand, juiced up the reverb and listened, dumbfounded by the transformation.

You’d think by now my long hours in the studio belaboring sound waves would have cured me of the misapprehension that only a naturally voluminous voice is worth its salt. But alas, until today, I felt like impostor mom raising fertility drug quintuplets on borrowed pampers.

Nevermore. A quiet shred of evidence enters my tender mind, a whispered brushstroke signifying truth. Philosphers challenging the sea, actors strutting the Globe, sopranos warbling to the rafters, Streisand any day of the week - those are another species entirely from the studio rat, the circus mime, the no-name dame who shares her glory with programmers, engineers and the miracle knobs they twirl and tweak.

A song that touches your inner ear, rushes through your veins, roars out your soul and changes how you are because a microphone stands open to the singer's breath, this is a force of nature nurtured by the congregate contagion of civilization.

Photo Ben Köhler, Patti Smith performing in Finland, 2007 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license