11 am, Friday.

Knock knock.
Knock knock.
Knock knock.
(I wake up, stumble out of my room putting on pants on along the way, peering out to see who's knocking.)
Who's there?



Michael's new, free (well, almost free) 20 GB Ipod.

So I've just joined iPod Nation, courtesy of www.freeipods.com. I think it's already been sufficiently established that the freeiPod/flatscreen/PS2.com thing isn't an internet scam, just a moderately invasive, though rather clever viral marketing tool, but I've got empirical proof of it now. Empirical proof that's empirically loaded with about 350 songs already, and I've barely scratched the surface of my CD collection yet.

So far, I've got a few thoughts. Stick with me, there's some grad school geekery ahead.

I've never had an Apple product - wait, we did have a IIGS when I was a kid - but as introductions to the brand go...this is a good one.

One great thing about uploading all my CDs comes in rediscovering the CDs I've had hiding in storage boxes and folders for years, and forgot all about. Walked out to the park this afternoon to shoot a bit off the spongy turf; the second time I've really tried since surgery. A brilliantly blue, blustery, cool spring day. Lazily dribble-walking the ball ahead of myself down the sidewalk, Daniela Mercury comes on the shuffle. Forget that Carneval is over. Forget that I don't even know Portuguese. Suddenly my legs are moving a little different, like Ronaldinho is possessing my lower half (didn't Steve Martin make this movie 15 years ago?). I'm not so much walking as...dancing ever so subtly over the ball...juking without trying...gliding. I've GOT to find a way to wear this thing when I finally get a game again.


(Shoulda got the iPod Photo, if only so I could look at Daniela every once in a while)


One of my main research areas has to do with media, technology and urban communications/development. I'm still searching for a good way to define this to people who ask me about it (I usually get a lot of quizzical looks, and feel semi-dumb as I stumble and stutter through some totally inadequate description of what it is I want to study). I've attended a conference or two and take part in a mailing list, because I'm concerned with how technology affects "community". In an excellent post to a list I'm on, Eric Gordon of Emerson College wrote (of cell phones)
"I am physically proximate to the people around me and yet I am with someone else. All rules of co-presence are disregarded for the moment when I stand next to someone and connect to another. When I am connected to a discontiguous space, I feel at ease
in my physical place. But I wonder, what becomes of the crowd when the nodes within its connective tissue so severely fragment? What becomes of the public
when one’s experience within it is private?"

I wonder, too. Let's just say that, whether I'm wearing my study-geek hat or my everyday peoples version, I don't regard that situation of fragmented, shredded social connective tissue (great metaphor) as an entirely good thing. That's one reason I'm here doing what I do in the first place, because I'm interested in that question. And things like iPods shred that connective tissue even more violently, or at least in a different way, than cell phones.
Yet as I walked uptown today iPodding away, I too inhabited this private, discontiguous, antisocial space - actually, it was more like co-habitating, partnered as I was by Ben Folds Five and Franz Ferdinand and Frankie Valli and Marvin Sease and (naturally - days like this were just made for them) Eggstone.* That was real, too. I had a soundtrack...sounds themselves were all shut out. It's been a long time since I went out into the world with things stuck in my ears. Even back when I spent two hours a day on the PATH, I preferred surveying the world/drawing up poetry in my head/falling asleep to turning on and tuning out. I like to think I'm somewhat mindful of the world around me...and inside me.
But now I won't be alone with my thoughts again.

So what's the difference between this and the good old Walkmans people have been using to shut out the world for the past 20 years? A few things, I guess. What comes to mind most strongly is a conversation I had with a guy in Istanbul last year - an artist/musician/researcher, he somewhat surprised me when he told me he absolutely hated the whole idea of the iPod. That's because now, instead of selecting one or two (or even half a dozen) tapes or CDs to take with you out to town or on a trip - an act that requires some forethought (is this Cannibal Corpse album REALLY what I'm gonna want to listen to for two weeks, traveling around France?), and which ends with those relatively few tunes being utterly inseparable from the "being-there", you can take your entire album collection and then some. That sense of place-music attachment, a thing of physical limits, is destroyed if you can take thousands upon thousands of songs with you wherever you go. With 20 GB equalling room for 5000 songs, I'm on the low end these days. 60 GB? I listen to a good deal of music, and I probably won't listen to 60 GB worth of different music before I'm 50.
It's not a bad argument, and my experience leaves me with some sympathy for it. I know how some albums stir up strong memories of places and times; not any particular event, but just the fact that I was there, then. A sentimental attachment, because that was all you had with you and you listened to it over and over again. It doesn't have to be particularly place-appropriate, either. Like San Francisco Days and my first time in Switzerland (I bought it in a shop in Lucerne). Parklife, the winter after high school I spent working. Smoke City, when I lived in Florence. I'm a sentimental guy and memory...not just an image you remember, but the phenomenological bits attached to the experience...that all means a lot to me.

Then again, I already love putting on shuffle and hearing The Bluetones, Royskopp and Raul Malo one after the other. Don't see myself going back to the Walkman and three tapes in my bag anytime soon.



*Was there ever a better day than this to hear "Neil"?

more than the sea
can be beauty and awful
i need sundays, i need highways, and moon walks

and more than the moon
is circling around me
i need mornings i need coffee and sidewalks

and more than i know
when i die i will be gone forever
and more than i wonder
why on earth i try to be so clever
some days will be hell
and others will be heaven

still in a week
there always will be seven

more than a heart
needs work to be working
i need bad jobs, i need buss-stops and day-dreams

and more than a sound
can move a man around
i need pinball, i need phone calls and rainbows

and more than i know
when i die i will be gone forever
and more than i wonder
why on earth i try to be so clever
some days will be hell
and others will be heaven

still in a week
there always will be seven


No.