I recently found out that beneath my vegan, ethical, pro-gay, pro-whatever, etc., etc., facade, I actually do discriminate: I don’t care to see blind performers.

I have no clue how this came to be, but I recently saw that Andrea Bocelli was charge upwards of $200 for seats close to the stage and my immediate thought was… who cares how close to the stage you are? He’s blind! It’s not like he sees you. May as well get the cheapest seat you can and just listen if you like him.

I explore this further and found that, in general, I don’t want to see any blind performers in person. So, I’m thinking that this is some further narcisissm. I always thought it was about how close I was getting to the stage, but apparently, it is about how close the performers get to be to me?

I mean, that is the whole point of being close, seeing the expressions, the glances between band members, which members smirks when someone hits a sour note, and such. The pinnacle being, of course, actual eye contact with the singer.

This can have a downside, too, when you see someone like Tori Amos from front and center, she’ll stare you down without blinking, without looking away, until she finally gets YOU to look away, and then, when you look back, she’s there all creepy and waiting again. Some other times, when you are TOO close, like seats I’ve had for Beck and Ani DiFranco, were like being at an IMAX concert film, since there was NO ONE in front of me except the performer, and when the crowd applauded, it was a strange surround sound coming from behind me, as though I had finally broken down and bought that good Bose system i always wanted. With Beck, I was self-conscious whenever my mouth wasn’t lipsynching all the lyrics properly, hitting a few phrases I never committed to memory, and hoping to not get caught.

But, seriously, put a blind guy in front of me… and what’s the point? May as well bring a videogame. It may be pretty, but that’s the end of it. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not anti-blind. Certainly not in general, and my record collection has Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder, and Andrea Bocelli, etc. I think I tossed the CD of that blind blues guy that was in that Patrick Swayze movie, though, but didn’t we all?

No, the disconnect is ONLY seeing blind perfomers playing live in concert. Strangely enough, when I saw Kurt front Nirvana, I think it was literally 100 minutes of him with his hair in his eyes, eyes mainly closed, hitting all the notes, but projecting the vibe that he’d rather not be there. I couldn’t take my eyes off of him. I think we all focused on him, loved him, wanted him to look up and see people looking back at him who cared. He never looked up, or in my general direction that I can recall, but… there was that potential at least.

This certainly needs further exploration, although with Bocelli charging crazy-ass prices, Ray Charles dead, Stevie Wonder’s catalog being amazingly uneven and also overpriced, I’m sure, and no one able to remember the guy from the Patrick Swayze movie, it isn’t likely to come up anyway.

But this whole revelation does intrigue me… especially how it came out of nowhere. Really blind-sided me.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 19th, 2006 at 1:04 am and is filed under diary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.