Soothes the Savage Beast, Redux

Two weekends back, as celebration for closing out Long Tail’s first round of financing, I bought myself an iPod Shuffle.

Ostensibly, I bought it to take to the gym, because professional bodybuilders (a significant part of Mid City Gym’s clientelle) apparently have musical taste on par with their fashion sense (way to keep Zubaz pants alive, guys!), and because my trusty 60-gig model weighs enough that I unintentionally occasionally pants myself when moving quickly while carrying it in my gym shorts pocket.

I assumed I’d still use the 60-gig outside of the gym, as I’ve by now filled it to near capacity with a full month of tunes. But, it turns out, even really, really long subway rides (read: going to Brooklyn) are shorter than a month. And during most of them, I put the 60-gig on shuffle anyway, chunking through unexpected swaths of my collection.

So, since I shuffle most of the time anyway, and since I tend to head out for just a few hours at a time, I decided to try taking the Shuffle with me around town, instead of its big brother.

My conclusion: the Shuffle is, well, small. Small enough to be virtually weightless, to leave no strange bulge when pocketed rather than messenger-bagged. And, most importantly, small enough to encourage me to carry it literally all the time, rather than just on certain bag-carrying long-tripping occasions.

So now, full-time, I wander the streets earphones-in. I can barely hear the sounds of the city around me, and I miss them far less than I’d have ever thought.

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Geek Out

I like to believe that, since entering the world of film, I’ve become a cooler person. In fact, just earlier today, I caught an off-Broadway play in previews, and a stellar exhibit of Larry Clark’s photography at ICP.

But, just below the surface, I’m at least as dorky as ever before. That’s the only explanation for, on a Friday night, showing up at Tekserve for their Tiger Launch Party, then spending the rest of the evening home alone with my laptop, installing Mac OS X Tiger. And, worst of all, for being absolutely thrilled about it.

I could say how great the new OS is, how Spotlight alone will eventually overthrow the desktop/folder file organization metaphor, and how all the other little cool bells and whistles are, to quote the Great Leader, ‘insanely great’. But, frankly, most of you wouldn’t care. And the ones that would, like me, have already blown a perfect stretch of prime drinking time installing it themselves.

*cough* Losers! *cough*

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Inked

I remember, before I knew how to drive a manual transmission, that admiring high end sports cars would leave me feeling vaguely ashamed. What right did I have to ogle a Testarosa, if I’d be completely unable to put it to good use?

After I learned how to drop the clutch like a pro, however, those feelings of guilt transfered over to high-end pens. Like expensive cars, it wasn’t so much that I actually wanted to own one myself. Rather, passing through stationery or art supply stores, I couldn’t help but appreciate the beautiful design inherent in a $1000 Mont Blanc, yet know my chicken-scratching would doubtless make short work of an 18 karat nib.

Back in January, appalled by the steady downhill slide of my handwriting, and increasingly unable to read my own notes just hours after I’d written them, I decided it was time to take action. So, aided by an online copy of Arrighi’s [Operina] [], I set out to learn how to write in Italics, a beautiful 16th century hybrid of cursive and print I’d long admired in Da Vinci’s notebooks.

[operina]: http://briem.ismennt.is/4/4.4.1a/4.4.1.01.operina.htm

It turns out, in fact, that Italic handwriting isn’t difficult to learn at all, and, once mastered, it’s remarkably easy to write legibly at high speeds. The Moleskine journal I tote with me daily marks my progress – a slow transition from my prior cramped scrawl to the new smooth chirography that has become nearly habit. For the first time in my life, I have good handwriting.

So, when I stopped at a stationers last week to replace my filled Moleskine, I looked at the fountain pens a bit differently. By the register, I noticed a $15 Pelikano, and impulsively tossed it in alongside the notebook, figuring it was cheap enough to give a shot.

Sitting down at the coffee shop next door, I pulled out the new pen, pressed in an ink cartridge, and wrote my way through a first few paragraphs.

By the end of the page, I was hooked. Aqueous ink flowed effortlessly from the point, at even the slightest touch, leaving a slowly drying trail like a brush of water color paint.

And it occurred to me, dangerously, that while learning to drive manual didn’t leave me jonesing for a 911 Turbo, my new handwriting – and the discovery of how well it flows from a nib – did make the Meisterstuck 149 perched in the window next door strangely appealing.

As far as my bank account is concerned, this likely doesn’t end well.

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gloating

About three years back, on a whim, I bought a record player and started collecting LP’s.

And while, for two and three quarters of those years, I enjoyed record listening immensely, it all came to an abrupt and painful end two months back, when the movers dropped my trusty Sony spinner on the way into the new apartment. Even after my best attempts at stereophonic surgery, I couldn’t get the thing up and running. Which left me with a decent pile of vinyl, and absolutely no way to play it.

Though I looked briefly for a replacement, I was disappointed to discover that the record player market (small as it likely is) seems to have completely bifurcated: on one end, sub-$100 pieces of crap, on the other, $1000+ DJ specials, with pretty much nothing in between. Ah, the pain of the excluded middle!

On clever recommendation of recent house-guest Josh L., however, I today headed onto eBay in search of old Bang & Olufsen Beogram players. Bang & Olufsen! For years, I was obsessed with that company, with their beautifully designed speakers and stereo components, each one a near-perfect estimation of Danish neo-minimalism’s Platonic ideal. Throughout high school, I’d walk their store in the Stanford Shopping Center, swearing that, if I ever had the cash, I’d undoubtedly buy one of their systems.

And then, amazingly, one day I did have the cash. At the high point of my dot-com swing (before the money I made turned back from actual money to paper ‘money’ that I’ll quite plausibly never again see as actual money), I decided to buy one extravagant thing for myself, one object on which I would spend waaaaaay more than justified and not feel guilty and simply enjoy for years to come. As a musician, music lover, and aspirant audiophile, a stereo system – or, more pointedly, a B&O stereo system – seemed the only way to go.

But, wisely, my father suggested that, before I buy, I at least compare similarly priced components from other vendors. And so, with sheath of CDs in tow, I trekked from high-end audio shop to high-end audio shop, listening to speaker after speaker after speaker, trying to make sense of what made Miles Davis or Mahler or Sonic Youth sound richer or purer or kickier or whatever. By the end, I’d realized that B&O’s stuff was really, really good. But some of the other vendors were putting out speakers that were leagues past ‘really, really good’, all the way in ‘truly, astoundingly remarkable’ territory.

Despite my initial Danish-driven intentions, I instead ended up detouring slightly westward in product origin, picking up a load of stuff from Irish boutique audio design company Linn. In most respects, it was one of the greatest decisions I’ve ever made. To this day, just dropping in a CD and hearing the first perfectly-rendered strains from those Linn speakers literally brings a smile to my face. But, at some level, I’ve always felt disloyal to my initial B&O intentions, have always secretly wished I could find some way to buy at least a little bit of B&O cool, if for no other reason than to impress whatever remnants of the 15-year old me still float in the dark corners of my own subconscious.

Which brings me back to today, to eBay, to searching for Bang & Olufsen Beograms, and to discovering and subsequently winning a restored Beogram 3404, for $86. For eighty-six dollars!!!! I mean, this is a record player that retailed for slightly less than $1200 of today’s dollars back in 1980. Hello, 93% mark-down!

Once again, Internet, I am humbled by your power. Without you, there’s no way vinyl vindication could be had so cheap.

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laying off

There is a tradition in Jewish households that, at Shabbat dinner on Friday night, the challah – the braided bread blessed at the start of the meal – remains covered until just before it is blessed. A centuries old story explains a possible reason: On all other nights of the week, the bread is blessed first, while on Friday night, the wine and candles take first position; the cover, then, is to prevent the challah from becoming jealous.

Previously, I always took that explanation as purely symbolic, commentary on how we should give thought to the feelings of people in our lives. But, over the last few days, I’ve begun to suspect the intention is more concrete – literally an attempt to keep the challah from choking us to death in spite by stopping itself partway down our gullets.

I say this because, since I mentioned in passing that I was thinking of trading in my Dell for a new Powerbook, my laptop has been deteriorating at a rather alarming clip. Outlook suddenly refuses to check email automatically. At random intervals, Windows puts itself to sleep for no reason at all. The hinge holding the screen has loosened to the point that the screen itself swings precariously as I type.

And yet, I can’t be angry with my trusty C400. Not just because of the two years of solid service it’s put in thus far, but also because I understand what it’s trying to do. It sees the breakup coming, and it’s preemptively dumping me. Or, if I’m downsizing the Windows part of my life, it’s saying back, “Fire me? You can’t fire me. Because I quit!”

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