mercredi 15 février 2006

Does your iPod make you blind? Oh ... and the usual risk warning At the weekend, I had a roundabout discussion -- whose circular nature I don't blame on the other person, but a painful ability we share to tell one another precisely the same things in different ways -- on the unnecessarily complicated nature of iPods. She has no interest in being like me and skim-reading several books that explain, like Apple can't be bothered to do in its packaged paperwork, why it's sometimes necessary to press two buttons at once and stuff like this. See below for more technical stuff and the helpful iPod item mentioned on the front page. What my equally riled conversation partner didn't tell me (and vice versa) came from a woman at work today. Late last year, Sarah sustained a nasty but invisible, in its latter phases, wrench and break to her wrist, a prominently exposed part of her. The protest was that many iPod users find her invisible permanently. She's absolutely right. I see this myself every day, especially now they're everywhere -- not just iPods but all manner of music players where you'd believe the owners shove the earphones into their eyes. On buses, on pavements and in trains, they are constantly banging into people. And, as my colleague pointed out, "It hurts! They're off in their own little worlds and don't give a damn about anyone else." Of course, I don't do this very often since I'm far too busy avoiding people anyway, the way one does after living among abominable masses of them for 50 years and observing what they get down to in their dealings with one another. Since we live in an era where Apple is no longer what it used to be and has gone down-market making fashion accessories I don't consider to be "real" iPods at absurdly high prices for what you get, is ever stingier with manuals and extra parts in the box, and then charges another fortune for what the firm itself now calls "accessories" -- like a Firewire cable for the many people who don't have USB 2.0 and don't want it any time soon -- what do you expect? The "Apple is more like Micro$oft every day" argument bores me now because of the truth in it, but given the American liking for lawsuits, I can see the day coming when people who get whacked as often as my colleague file a mass action against Steve. What's problematic, however, is the potential defence argument that they're blind before they even get their iPods. It's frankly disturbing to see how many men in Paris, among Apple's recent acquisitions who have their wires dangling as dangerously and stupidly as in the advertisements, haul pink Minis out of their pocket. Pink! I don't wish to know what's on their playlists... Moreover, who seriously wants to watch movies on a screen the size of a decorative postage stamp? I'm not doing that to my eyes. I was going to write about some splendid podcasts and why the French have decided that Canada is today one of the most interesting musical poles in the world, but I saw two smart suits with pink Minis on the way home and it turned my stomach. After more listening to Metric, I'm going to count the number of Canadian women on my real iPod, since come to think of it, there are a lot of them. Later. I had a better idea, given the frame of mind. I wondered how many poor suckers (people who have yet to download a dodgy new version of iTunes without checking first, etc.) -- might have penned odes to their iPods. The answer is terrifying. One I did like, though, by Maura, a long-time user. She calls it an ode, but really it was a 15-entry list of brief reasons at notmyself.com on "why my iPod is better than a boyfriend". Somebody else's ode disagrees with her first three, but the closing bunch were penned with a golden nib... For those made mad by manuals It's very irritating trying to get a recalcitrant iPod to "mount" (that is, show up on your computer so you can inspect it) when the various methods provided by Apple -- if not in the box -- fail to work, so you have to go off on a long hunt for alternative means, probably learning more technology on the way than you'd like. The "usual risk warning" is that now iTunes 6.0.3 is out ... only recently out, unless I've been on the moon ... take care! Regulars will know I never install a new version without reading about it first. My software download panel opened and offered it to me as I moved this entry, I chose the "download only" option and won't upgrade until I know it is safe. Why the uninstalled package that went where it should for now has an October date on it, don't ask me. I've not yet looked at the specialist sites. Update at Feb 20: iTunes 6.0.3 works fine for me and apparently has a green light from friends with Windows XP. For fellow Mac users, however, your Disk Utility may malfunction after the iTunes upgrade. If it does, see MacFixit. They've published post-upgrade solutions to this problem. I'm deeply pissed off with trying to produce a brief summary of remedies for the general good when the answers are scattered everywhere and by the time you've got the key points in one place, the models in question are no longer on the market. A lot of people don't have time to wade through specialist sites, even the fine ones. One service was done to all Mac users at least by writer John Rizzo and the O'Reilly people on my front page when they made the 15-page 'iPod Annoyances' section of a book called 'Mac Annoyances' available free to everybody. Since they did this themselves, I trust I'm breaking no rules by putting that .pdf file somewhere you can simply click on the link to fetch, like they did. Some of the info in it is useful to PC and Windows users. You can either click to open it in another browser window if yours reads .pdf files as most do nowadays, or right-click to download it to your own machine (and if that browser happens to be Internet Explorer, you have only yourself to blame, not me, for the mangled presentation it gives part of my site, like it does others that conform to internationally accepted standards and not the ones Microsoft has invented. Do get Firefox -- or almost any other modern browser -- instead, if you'd rather live in the current century, not the stone age of home computing. It only takes 10 minutes to install). My own iPod contribution may get me riled when it seems worthless until I remember that, apart from the friends for whom I began it, there are a lot of you out there with iPods that aren't the most recent types. Even if they are, basic rules still apply for keeping them happy. The happy day I've got as much of that information as I can into one place clearly -- and I don't know when that will be, since it's no longer a priority, but a dossier I just add to from time to time -- I'll likely be able to do just the same with it: bung it on my .Mac disk and tell you it's there. An even longer-term project is to move all such technically tedious and Mac-related entries out of The Orchard, where I like it little more than on the front page, but I'd rather go on writing about music now than spend my time creating a new log category for stuff the manufacturers should have done in the first place. 10:43:33 PM  link   your views? [] Jennifer Terran (and tantalising extra-terrestrial teachers) Evening update: Metric. Looking at the list of musicians still to be restored, I saw the silver lining to a mental cloud that got darker with the loss. When your body and soul start feeling "out of synch" (which mine did towards the end of last week), people whose music nourishes both can make for indispensable listening. I'm absorbing the Metric (home site) conversion to a rawer rock sound on 'Live It Out' than previously heard from the "indie-pop" foursome. It's punchy body language with a satirically wicked, if occasionally overdone, social awareness in the lyrics of Emily Haines, ever the sexy frontwoman, who has strong political views she expresses better with a razor than in taking a sledgehammer to what one of my American friends calls "the Walmart way of life." The quartet left me with an intrigued mind to make up. A sensation of having two albums at once resolved itself with further listening and on remembering concerts like that, but I'll deal with this separately; Metric have audibly distilled two years' worth of a stage sound developed on tour into a studio-produced record with fewer frills than on 'Old World Underground, Where are You Now?' (2003). For the outcome, I'd best later write up the two albums together. Meantime, fragmented experimentation and soft French pillow talk slipped into songs such as 'Poster of a Girl' eased me back to Jennifer. Two Jennifers. Ms Charles is so addictive the next time that piece appears it will cover three albums from Elysian Fields, who consistently serve up exquisite food to put me together again, and add her French fling. Before then, it's the night to reveal the face under that hat. She is 'The Musician' incarnate, flesh and spirit. The wit in Jennifer Terran's fashion sense is abundant on the album where she bared even her teeth to chew off at least one "fucking bastard" in the music industry machine. There'd be no close look again soon at 'The Beekeeper' if I agreed with the person at Amazon who would "gladly trade in all my Tori Amos CDs for ... 'The Musician'." The announcement of a new Terran release in the back-issue of 'Crossroads' mentioned in last Sunday's entry was instant incitement and excitement. 'Uncut' magazine informs us that "haunting and intense, she sounds like a rawer version of Tori Amos". People can't seem to help it, but I wonder which of Amos's successive incarnations they mean. The other item in the pack was 'Choreography', where a similar but unsigned sticker said Lauren Hoffman provides "echoes of Cat Power, Elysian Fields and Beth Gibbons". That kind of talk calls for a heartbreak warning regarding the lyrical content, albeit with mild irritation. Though some in the marketing business consider the comparisons indispensable, I'll skip the rant about how annoying they are and point out that some of us prefer to learn what to expect from people who don't do this and from the musicians themselves. In Jennifer's case, anticipation has been whetted by a four-year interval since 'The Musician', during which she released a live album while working on the latest. "I also took the time to have a baby and get remarried. So many things... Apart from my private life, 'Full Moon in 3' is the result of all that happened to me, what came to me during those four years. Musically, the album concentrates all that was good and less good during that time. It's very enriching, but it takes time to set everything down." Those won't be her exact words. Crossroads is in French, but any interview with Terran is rare enough to be worth its cover price. She's lost none of the sly humour in a serious soul, but the gun comes from Jennifer's own site, one she manages entirely by herself as a committed fan of the Net and its capacity for "perpetual change". I'm look forward to discovering this album from a sharp Californian and the one by Hoffman, while going far deeper into the life and loves of the latter's fellow New Yorker, Jennifer Charles, for similar reasons, as indeed with Tori Amos. Each is expressly concerned on their latest releases with the harmony of body and soul, its intuitive expression in lyrics of high poetic calibre and in individual musical worlds beyond the words. Intense is an adjective people use of all four, so without humour, this could be terrifying, but each possesses the kind that deflates pretension. 'The Musician' is ostensibly a gifted pianist's album about making a CD, with some confessionals thrown in. Terran dished out 'Unconditional Love', with a few sub-clauses, proffered a bunch of 'Emotional Saxatives', had a high time with her partner Brendan and even just talked so much there was more than one of her. The combination of moving song-writing, openness and having fun was a risky gamble, but it works and pays dividends on repeated listening. In 'The America Song', today's Terran asks: "If I was in Paris right now With the croissants and the cafés Would the people there just frown me down?" A straight answer? Right now? Yes, many of them probably would. It's the main mood of the month. This one, however, wants more of Jennifer's style. Being greedy, I don't plan to make her the only woman who has run me, as she told Crossroads, what reads suspiciously like a deep bath of "sensuality, sexuality, existential anguish and dark beauty." It's time for hot soul-food and dancing lessons. 2:01:06 AM  link   your views? []

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