London (STN) to Copenhagen (CPH)
May 6, 2023
I don’t get to concerts that much. I don’t get evenings out all that much, honestly. It’s hard to figure out what’s playing — I can’t see an ad for a show in three months and have any reasonable chance of being in town for it, for one — and that means if I’m going to see something it tends to be very deliberate.1
But I do try. When I was living in New York I made a point of getting out to see plays and musicals and concerts. I had a subscription to the Roundabout Theater. I saw a bunch of singer-songwriters live. It didn’t take much to get me to sign up for something weird and intriguing.2
So I happened to get a notification for a Pentatonix show in London way back in early 2022. I bought tickets. Then the show got bumped a year.3 So I was sitting in a hotel room in London in May, 2022 when I found out I was a year early. I wasn’t entirely sure I was going to be in London, but I didn’t have anything planned so I ended up back in London to see it.4
If there’s a real advantage to just being in town to see a specific show, it’s that you can arrange your whole trip around that one show. I booked a cheap room a five-minute walk from Hammersmith, which was conveniently right next to the Eventim Apollo. I flew in on Wednesday, crashed at the hotel for the night, saw the show Thursday, then absconded to a room in a pub near Stansted on Friday for my flight out Saturday.5
As for the concert itself, it was good. A little short, to be honest. Pentatonix took the stage a little after 8pm and had finished their first and only encore by 9:45. There was a longish bit where the beatboxer, Kevin Olusola, played the cello by themselves, which was impressive but not really what I came to hear.6 And there was a singalong bit with classic pop songs which just kept dragging on — I assume to allow them to rest their voices — that the audience seemed into but I really wasn’t.7 But they ended with their arrangement of “Bohemian Rhapsody” which is honestly pretty great, so I suppose all is forgiven.
I picked up the habit a long time ago of buying two tickets to anything I wanted to attend, largely so I could invite people to come along with me on the spur of the moment. It seemed like a good way to find dates — start chatting with someone, mention an event you’re excited about seeing and if they express an interest you can invite them along — but in the many, many years I’ve been doing it it’s only worked out that way once. Most often I’ll end up inviting friends along instead, which is hardly a bad outcome. Sometimes I end up going alone and eating the cost of the ticket.
That’s what happened this time. I bought an extra ticket assuming I’d have someone in London who wanted to see it.8 And maybe I did, for all I know. The ongoing destruction of all useful social media9 means I have no useful way to actually ask my friend group if anyone’s interested. I posted a few times on Facebook but didn’t get any bites and, based on the number of comments and reactions, I doubt Facebook showed many people the posts anyway.10
That’s fine, as long as we’re talking about a £30 concert ticket. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. It hurts more for more expensive events. When I had a subscription for the Roundabout Theater Company I always subscribed for two tickets. It’s just so much better to experience an event with someone else. And I always felt like it should have been trivial to find people who wanted to see a free show on Broadway, but it rarely seemed to work out that way. Too often I’d find myself texting people out of the blue trying to find someone to accompany me. As nice as it feels to be able to offer a ticket to a friend to see a show they’d otherwise never see, it feels horrible to get stuck with a ticket you can’t use because nobody wants to spend time with you.
And I know that’s not really what’s going on, but it always still feels that way. Sometimes I’d skip events rather than go alone. I’ve always found it hard to keep connections to friends, and while social media seemed like it was making all that a lot easier a decade ago, these days it just seems like it’s given up on that.
And yes, the fact that I’m always on the road isn’t helping with that one bit. But I was struggling with this before I left New York. And it seems like it’s a more universal problem; Robert Putnam wrote the essay “Bowling Alone” in 199511 and makes the claim that our increased mobility is part of the problem — it’s hard to maintain connections if you’re constantly moving somewhere else — but the more significant factor is the way technology atomizes our shared experiences. In the ’50s, everyone stopped going to movie theaters and started watching television. In the ’90s, everyone stopped going to the post office and started sending email. Public experiences have become private ones. Technology has enabled us to isolate ourselves in more and more drastic ways.
That has to have affected our relationships with the people we love. You’re more likely to drag yourself out to see a movie with friends if you know you’re not going to be able to just watch it on Netflix later. But it’s got to have an even more insidious effect on our other relationships, the people we’d like to know better but just don’t know well enough yet, the passing acquaintances with whom we would form those lasting friendships if we ended up stuck next to them during an eight-hour bake sale or telethon or charity drive. That just doesn’t happen the way it used to.
History suggests we will, eventually, work out solutions to this.12 Eventually isn’t now, however. And all I know is that, right now, it feels like I’m putting in a huge amount of effort to stay connected to the people I care about. It just doesn’t feel like people are putting in nearly the same effort staying connected to me.
Footnotes
1 Like the Stratford Festival, or the Athens and Epidaurus Festival, if I ever make it to the Athens and Epidaurus Festival.
2 The best of these was In & Of Itself, an absolutely superb monologue-with-magic-tricks by Derek DelGaudio. It’s an absolutely riveting 90 minute show which is mostly DelGaudio talking to the audience, weaving in a few magic tricks here and there to emphasize the points being made. Maybe the most impressive magic trick is how a 90 minute monologue can be accurately described as riveting, but it is. It explores questions of identity, of how we understand ourselves and others, of how we answer the question: who am I?.
It’s incredibly moving and I feel so lucky to have seen it in person. And you’re lucky enough that they filmed some of the productions, so you can watch it for yourself and get some small part of the thing for yourself. The movie’s excellent as well.
3 I double checked and my confirmation email definitely says 2023, so it happened at some point between my seeing the announcement and my buying the tickets. I must have seen the earlier date and not noticed the date change on the website.
4 It helps that the round-trip flight back to Copenhagen had a layover in London so I could just … not make my connection. It also helps that I didn’t realize I’d be heading to Copenhagen anyway immediately afterwards, and thus booked my hotel before I realized I might have skipped the concert and saved the extra flight.
5 It turns out my flight today is late enough that I’ll be in the UK for the coronation, but far enough out of London that I’m not going to get snarled in traffic. I mean, my flight leaves at 8pm and I’ve nothing to do all day, so I’d have managed either way. And I’m beginning to wonder if I should have planned a day around it, since I’m here anyway. Maybe I’ll catch Harry’s.
6 Olusola was found by the group from their “celloboxing” videos on YouTube, and apparently the cello bit has become a staple of their concerts. The highlight was the remix of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, which really is impressive but it has a backing track and so it kind of feels like cheating at an a cappella concert.
7 If I wanted to join a singalong of the chorus to “Sweet Caroline” I’d attend a sporting event.
8 Not necessarily on a date; I haven’t met a single person since I started traveling who’s seemed both available and interested in a date with me, which is a whole other set of issues.
9 This is what Cory Doctorow has memorably dubbed the enshittification of social media, where extremely useful products are introduced and gradually destroyed by corporate directives designed to wring every last cent out of the accumulated goodwill of their base. Would Facebook have grown to be what it is today if the product, as it debuted twenty years ago, was in its current form? How did twenty years of development end with a product that’s so much worse than when it started?
10 Just a reminder, if you’re reading this from a Facebook link, you can always sign up for RSS or an email instead. Facebook hates you and you should hate Facebook.
11 Putnam tracks declining social capital in the United States through the withering membership in civic organizations — PTAs, labor unions, the Red Cross, veteran’s organizations, etc — and links it to a weakened democracy. I’m talking about friendships, which isn’t quite the same thing, but I think there’s a strong correlation.
12 Maybe the eventually arrival of a post-scarcity society will free us up to focus on deliberate community building?