There were times when the drama in the lives of certain streamers conquered our interest in the show. One curator, after skipping from feed to feed, found a streamer who would go on to broadcast heroically for nearly the remainder of the night, and we stuck with her, too. She had brought her young child. At one point, the child asked: “Why are you crying?” “Because I’m having the best time with you.”

The vibe was very West Coast: everyone looked like someone I’d played in a Seattle band with a decade ago. Cowboy boots and fleece, a lot of craft beer and sleeve tattoos, #vanlifers with fedoras and rainbow Pendleton blankets, earth-toned knitwear and dusty Chacos (the “pretty” kind with the toe loop), big Indigo Girls energy. I’ve been in New York too long; I don’t own clothes like this anymore.

My favorite genre is the movie musical; my least favorite, the musical-theater-kid movie. Both Spielberg’s Story and last year’s other corny pretender, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights, have arrived as quaint, todos-juntos representatives of the latter brand. Bright, high-pitched, and would-be weird, they come from a time when we weren’t shaken by a global pandemic that wiped out millions of the bottom and made billions for the top. Miranda had the audacity to state in a promotional podcast for In the Heights that he wanted to “transcend” (“progress beyond”) West Side Story by not making “yet another gangster movie.” Good for him.

The alaap is a formal and conceptual innovation of the same family as the circadian novel, in which everything happens, in an amplification of time, before anything’s begun to happen. At what point North Indian classical singing allowed itself the liberty of making the introduction—that is, the circumventory exploration that defers, then replaces, the “main story”—become its definitive movement, I don’t know; it could go back to the early 20th century, when Ustad Abdul Wahid Khan’s romantic-modernist proclivities left a deep impress on North Indian performance.