The Golden Nunchuk

I guess this is what they call a “first world problem,” but I’m just going to plow ahead with the minimum amount of shamefacedness.

Which reward should I get from Club Nintendo?  

The Hanafuda cards for 800 coins, or the replica handset of Game & Watch: Ball for 1200 coins?

Both are snazzy in their own way, both are legitimate collectibles, both are utterly useless and, frankly, underwhelming, considering what our compeers overseas have been offered over the years. 

Briefly: you buy Nintendo games and register them at Club Nintendo’s website to acquire coins, which you can use to “buy” special items.  As is customary with all things in video gaming, the special items are always cooler in Japan and Europe than they are in home sweet America.

Witness: specially designed retro controllers, limited-edition games, exclusive soundtracks.  Not impressed?  How about a Kirby throwing disc (don’t call it a Frisbee unless you want Word to auto-capitalize it):

Or the deluxe Professor Layton box set:

There’s also the Wii Golden Wheel available in Europe:

And best of all, Skyward Sword owners need scratch their heads no more, because here at last is the Wii Golden Nunchuk:

 

Just not in America.  I mean, why would we bother with rewards that a person might actually use?  I realize this goes against the very meaning of “collectibles,” which I believe comes from a Greek word that means “crap you thought you wanted, but that ends up stuffed into a shoe box under your bed.”

(Ok, so I wouldn’t really use the Golden Wheel, but come on, people!  Imagine the gold Wii-mote nestled in that thing!)

I suppose I could mount either the Game & Watch or the Hanafuda set in a shadowbox.  My god, I could feel the futility oozing out of that statement as I wrote it. 

*          *          *

When I was a child, I dreamed of displaying all my G.I. Joe action figures in a massive glass case, each one posed to best feature his or her combat role and abilities (e.g., Snake Eyes dual-wielding swords, or Lifeline hunched over a prone soldier, medical case at the ready).  I also heard fables of people going to China and buying a gargantuan crate that contained the entire collection of G.I. Joes in one go.  Of course, I never acquired all the Joes, nor did I ever display them in such fine fashion.  And while I look back fondly on what was an innocent dream as a child, it makes little sense as an adult to keep hanging on to things that have no use. 

To be fair, there is an aesthetic justification for having such things.  Toys and trinkets are often little works of art, delightful to behold.  But art can be an isolating experience, visual art especially.  Art museums, more so than going to the movies or a concert, are best enjoyed with company, someone to talk to about what you are seeing.  And unless I’m going to host regular viewings of my swag collection, what use is it for me to gaze alone?  I imagine that the thief of the Mona Lisa finally tried to sell the painting only because he had grown bored of staring at La Gioconda on his dining room table every day. 

*          *          *

I think the very first super-swag I got was a free copy of Dragon Warrior for the NES that came with a subscription to Nintendo Power magazine.  This was a legendary limited time promotion – the gift of a full-fledged game, and a well-known and desirable one at that – and still the king of all promotional giveaways, at least in the nerdlyverse.  This was not a symbolic gesture like most swag; it was something I could pop into my Nintendo and use right away. 

Collectibles tend to walk a fine line between art and mere consumerism (isn’t that the line where pop art lives?), but I would argue that we don’t need to choose between the extremes of pure asceticism and vulgar consumption.  Luxury goods and leisure activities give resonance to serious work, and vice versa.  So I’m not saying we shouldn’t have luxuries.  I just enjoy them more when they are useful luxuries.

Although, looking back, I can’t say that Dragon Warrior was a very useful game, since I never got very far in it.  But hey, I tried.

Bonus: here’s a guy rabidly wetting himself over a moderately pleasant windfall.

I wore the mummer’s motley well, whatever that means.

I was recently asked where Final Fantasy XII stands among the Final Fantasy games.  There is no one-word answer to this question.  I could say that it ranks dead last, but that would be unfair . . . to the other Final Fantasy games.

There was a time when I thought I would probably never beat this game.  I started it, logged dozens of hours, got distracted by being an adult, and lived apart from it, occasionally wondering if I ever even enjoyed playing it. 

I didn’t know why I eventually came back to it.  I didn’t feel like it was a choice.  Maybe it was like the island in Lost, some awful place that compelled me to come back.  Maybe it was that knot in my psyche that had to be undone before I could move on with my life.

Maybe this was my Vietnam. 

*          *          *

My brother asked me if I felt a sense of accomplishment after beating this game.  “Accomplishment” is not the word I would use.  That would imply that I had done something.  In fact, I would say that the playing of FFXII felt more like something was being done to me.  It was like someone had been hurting me, and then finally, after years and years of it, they stopped hurting me. 

More than any of the previous games, it approximated what it would be like for an average Joe with barely any combat training, humble armaments, and an empty wallet to go out and wage war on monsters and fiends.  You would die quickly and often.  You probably wouldn’t want to go on living.  Your battle cry would be lifted from the knights of Monty Python and the Holy Grail: “Run away!”

Many role-playing games have the “monster in a box,” a monster that disguises itself as a treasure chest only to spring upon unwary adventurers.  FFXII has them.  It also has monsters disguised as save points.  That’s right.  Those things that normally heal you and represent refuge from the savagery of perpetual warfare.  Fake save points.  How messed up is that? 

Treasure chests have specific locations throughout the world and dungeons, but they only appear some of the time.  Oh, any particular chest might hold one of several items, depending on mysterious conditions, so instead of getting, say, the rare penetrator crossbow you hoped for, you will get 16 gil. That’s if the chest appeared at all, which it didn’t.  So, I guess, consider yourself lucky?

A glance at the strategy guide reveals that the most durable foe, Yiazmat, has 50,112,254 hit points.  That’s millions.  I mean, yeah, he’s an optional hunt, but still . . . that just ain’t right.

To the west of the main town of Rabanastre lies the Dalmasca Westersand, a vast desert.  To the west of this lies the Ogir-Yensa Sandsea, an enormous desert.  To the west of this lies the Nam-Yensa Sandsea.  No, that’s not a lush forest; it’s a large desert.  And no, you can’t fly an airship over the Yensas because they’re Jagd.  Instead, you have to walk through the whole thing to get to the Tomb of Raithwall, who was the Dynast King, who was given deifacted nethicite by the Occuria, which is not to be confused with manufacted nethicite, which is entirely different. 

I’m so glad this game is voice-acted, so I don’t have to imagine the appropriate way to deliver the line, “Zargabaath, do not tell me you join in this mummer’s farce!” 

For no reason whatsoever, mummers are a big deal in this world.

To use any particular piece of equipment, you have to unlock the “license” for it by earning “license points” in fights.  But even after doing so, you still have to buy the weapon or armor you want to use.  Money comes almost exclusively from selling “loot.”  Loot, when sold in specific combinations, unlocks “bazaar goods.”  The game tracks the “loot” sold, but does not inform the player of either how many of each kind have been sold, or what combinations are required for getting any particular “bazaar good.”  You could create a spreadsheet and keep track of it yourself, and then hoard the “loot” until you have the preferred combinations as reported in your strategy guide, but then you won’t have any money to buy weapons and armor, which means you won’t be strong enough to defeat enemies for their “loot,” which means you won’t be earning many “license points,” which means you won’t be able to unlock the “licenses” for equipment that you couldn’t afford anyway, which means you’ll be closing in on 65 hours of gameplay, and yet you’re still using a freaking Ancient Sword that was already underpowered when you got it near the beginning of the game!

This is a game where opening any of four unremarkable and unmarked treasure chests near the beginning of the game dooms you to not being able to acquire the game’s most powerful weapon later on.  Who on the development team came up with such a needlessly cruel way of punishing the player?  And more importantly, what did they get from doing this?  I ask you, What did you get?!?

Oh, in case anyone cares, the supreme weapon in question is the Zodiac Spear, to be found in the Necrohol of Nabudis, in the region of the Nabreus Deadlands, in the kingdom of Nabradia.  I’m pretty sure this game has more names in it than the Bible.  (Lazy Bible writers, take note: there are no repeat names in FFXII.)

I didn’t know this term, “buffs,” until after I started playing this game.  After I had earned enough “buff” spells, I discovered an excellent strategy for staying alive: keeping my characters buffed at all times.  One by one, I buffed my characters.  Protect, shell, regen, haste, even bravery and faith.  And berserk on Basch to dramatically improve his killing potential.  I usually had to cast berserk on him several times because, yes, it can miss.  Ten minutes later, as I finished buffing out the last character, the first character’s buffs were already wearing off.  Sometimes, other people would watch me play the game, and would complain that this ritual buffing was tedious to watch.  To which I reply: imagine how I feel. 

These strategies were ludicrous, but the power of the game was such that it made me think that completely crazy things were completely normal.  The moment I realized that I may have crossed the point of no return was when I stormed into a boss fight yelling at the TV, “We’re going to do this guy!  We’re going to do him into the ground!” 

 *          *          *

FFXII is the largest and most complicated game I’ve ever played; nothing else comes close.  I wouldn’t call my experience a love-hate relationship, because neither “love” nor “hate” reflects how I feel about this game.  It was more like agony and ecstasy – the agony of trying and failing to understand the gameplay on anything more than a superficial level, the ecstasy that came from giving in to the craziness, and allowing myself to engage the art in the most absurd way.  

What is my lasting impression of the time I spent in Ivalice?  I believe Clive Owen said it best in The Bourne Identity as he watched his life force fleeing from him:

“Look at this.  Look at what they make you give.”

The Goodbye Song

I was recently asked the question: If you could have a “goodbye song,” one song that would play for the entire world before you left it forever, what would it be?

The question doesn’t ask what your favorite song is.  That is a major implication, but you’re also invited to consider whether a favorite song is the one you’d want the world to hear.  And do you interpret the question to mean that, by extension, the world will remember the kind of person you were based on the song you chose?

Songs are like air molecules; they constantly float about me, and I keep sucking them in.  But I have to write about them before I can understand what they mean to me.  For me, writing is the process of figuring out what I think about things.  So here we go . . .

I could pick something like “Act Naturally” by the Beatles, if I wanted my kiss-off to the world to be that human existence is a great cosmic joke. 

If I want to send the message that life is about having a good time, it would probably be “Down on the Corner” by Creedence Clearwater Revival.  If I wanted that good time to play well among Europeans, I’d pick “Sexbomb” by Tom Jones. 

There are specific songs that I think of when I’m in certain moods.  When I’m having conflicts with people I care about, I always think of “We Can Work It Out” by the Beatles, which to me embodies a meta-level ballet/wrestling match between Lennon and McCartney.  When I’m sad, I automatically think of Sarah McLachlan’s version of “Song for a Winter’s Night,” or “Lost Cause” by Beck, or . . . anything by Natalie Merchant. 

If it’s the song I’ve sung the most times in Rock Band and Guitar Hero, it would be “Hungry Like the Wolf” by Duran Duran.

For a message of pure romance, nothing beats “The Way You Look Tonight,” written for and still best performed by Fred Astaire. 

If I wanted to be a greedy scoundrel, I would choose “You Never Give Me Your Money” by the Beatles, which is really like three songs in one (a technique that reached its apotheosis in McCartney’s “Band on the Run”). 

The song I loved best as a child: “Straight Up” by Paula Abdul.  The song I love best with my sexy inner child: “2 Become 1” by the Spice Girls.  The song I loved then and now with equal fervor: “Beat It” by Michael Jackson. 

The two songs I most recently tried to mash up were Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb” and “Wish You Were Here,” but then I realized it wouldn’t work because I couldn’t remember which was which.  Or maybe it worked too well . . .

If I wanted the perfect jukebox song, I’d pick Sam Cooke’s “Another Saturday Night.”

“On Your Shore” by Charlotte Martin is the song that would play when Aeneas lands in Italy . . . in my film adaptation of The Aeneid.  Someday . . .

If it’s a brilliant song that I never play for guests because they’ll never like it (because it takes as its subjects sharecropping and an orphaned child), it would be “Annabelle” by Gillian Welch.  (Also “Names” by Cat Power – not safe for fragile souls.)

I shouldn’t neglect the influence of movies (and nostalgia), and it was Back to the Future that etched “Earth Angel” and “Johnny B. Goode” indelibly into my childhood.  (Equally memorable was “The Power of Love” by Huey Lewis and the News.  Don’t be a hater.)

If I’m going to express my ethical philosophy, then no song says it better than Queen’s “I Want It All.”  (Except maybe “Fat Bottomed Girls,” but that’s more what you’d call a personal history.  Kidding!)

If it’s the one song that will keep the aliens from enslaving humanity, which is probably the noblest ideal I’ve mentioned so far, it would probably be Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill,” because I honestly believe she sings the language of the aliens. 

*          *          *

Gather all those songs, and it would make a pretty good mix tape, which kind of leads me to my final answer.  I’ve always believed that music, and art in general, should be free.  Despite the fact that every artist you’ve ever heard of (except Emily Dickinson) has made money off their art, there is nevertheless something vulgar about selling that which is supposed to express the height of human creativity, and thereby reacquaint you with your soul.  So I think if I had to choose one goodbye song, it would be a song that realistically belongs to everyone.  The problem is, any song like that (“Happy Birthday,” “We Will Rock You,” your national anthem) has lost its meaning or ability to move you.  On the flip side, I could pick something hopelessly obscure, probably something I’d have to write myself, and that would express the world as I’ve absorbed it.  I feel like everything in between these extremes is just another great song. 

And so . . . I have to cheat.  I choose not a “song,” but an aria, “Che gelida manina” from La Bohème, because . . .

Because it’s opera, it is meant to be performed over and over and in a variety of ways.  You can hear it however you want, and you can probably play it better in your head than any orchestra or singer could perform it.

Because it predates recordings, there is no expectation of a definitive performance. So in theory, even I could sing it and make it my own.  In theory!

Because it’s a love song, and love, especially new love, is universal.

Because it’s a song about art and being an artist, a writer of poems and songs.  A song about song seems appropriate for this purpose.

Because it is as beautiful as anything else I could have chosen.

Finally, because I first heard La Bohème when someone shared it with me.  Someone wanted me to hear it.  So if there’s one song I’d pass on for others to hear, this would be it.

The Gateway City

For being such a well-known place and such an old city (by American standards), St. Louis is actually a relatively small city.  St. Louis is home to Anheuser-Busch of Budweiser fame; it hosted, in the same year, a World’s Fair and an Olympic Games (1904 – the first Olympics in the United States); the Cardinals are a storied baseball team.  Most of us are familiar with Charles Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis and the film Meet Me in St. Louis.  St. Louis has most of the things that seem to characterize a cosmopolitan city: museums, trendy restaurants, nightlife, a large urban park, a symphony orchestra, a passable light rail system, an international airport, a well regarded research university, three major sports teams, and at least one iconic feature: the Gateway Arch.  Yet as I drove around town on a recent visit, seeing various neighborhoods, and trying to figure out what made this place special, it was hard to escape the feeling that there wasn’t much going on.  It felt like a smaller version of a city like Chicago, or even San Diego.  It was sort of a Portland of the Midwest, though less hipsterific.  But it’s hard to distinguish yourself by being a smaller version of something else.  As Emerson wrote in the Divinity School Address,

Imitation cannot go above its model.  The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity.  The inventor did it, because it was natural to him, and so in him it has a charm.  In the imitator, something else is natural, and he bereaves himself of his own beauty, to come short of another man’s.

*          *          *

Gateway Arch, designed by Eero Saarinen.  The one thing everyone knows about St. Louis, this symbol is ubiquitous in the city, found in souvenir photos and knickknacks, integrated into logos, and even used as a replacement for the “N” in some signs.

   

A placid scene from the Occupy St. Louis presence downtown, in the shadow of the Arch and the Old Courthouse.

Washington Avenue with the lights on.  The locus of nightlife downtown.

The original office building at the Anheuser-Busch brewery.  I’ll never forget the smell that saturated the air around the complex, richly earthy and almost appetizing.  Malted barley, maybe?  Yeast?  I don’t know, but I like it.

Inside the City Museum, something like a funhouse crossed with a wrecking yard, but nothing like a museum.

Rue Lafayette, a café cum antiques and vintage goods store.  Note the A. E. Housman poem, “With Rue My Heart is Laden,” framed.  Is there a pun there?

What we know as Panera Bread actually started in St. Louis under a more local moniker.  (No, I didn’t go inside for a snack, although on my first visit to St. Louis, some seven years ago, I did go to this very one, and thought, "This food is good.  They should really expand nationally."  I guess they went with that.)

I found religion when I tried the gooey butter cake, one of the triumvirate of uniquely St. Louis delicacies (the other two being toasted ravioli and St. Louis-style pizza).  It tasted like a moist brownie, but not chocolate.  Or something like the widely available raspberry bars or toffee almond bars, but . . . gooey-er.  Like manna, my friends.  I'm talkin' Old Testament.

Toasted ravioli.  I felt very much that this is the right way to prepare ravioli.  I don’t dislike your typical boiled ravioli with sauce, but I don’t think I’ve ever thought to myself, “I really have a hankering for some ravioli today!”  And I’ve always thought it kind of silly when upscale restaurants have some version of ravioli on the entrée menu, whether something exotic like rabbit or elk (no matter how outlandish the animal, you never get any discernable flavor from the ground meat paste that goes inside the dough), or a token vegetarian option.  But when I tried the toasted ravioli, I thought, “Yes, this is something I could find myself craving.”  Perhaps, alongside the Arch, the home-grown cuisine can truly be considered the pride of St. Louis.

*          *          *

St. Louis compares favorably with another medium-sized Midwestern city I’ve visited: Cleveland.  That probably doesn’t sound like a recommendation, but both of these cities have beauty to find, and I’ve enjoyed my chances to visit less obviously enchanting places.  When you go to New York, if you’re a certain sort of savvy traveler, you try to look for “off the beaten path” attractions and “neighborhood joints,” and you marvel at your good luck and ingenuity when you capture a taste of what the “locals” do, as opposed to getting mired in tourist traps.  But when you visit a place like St. Louis, it’s pretty much all “off the beaten path,” and it allows you to appreciate discovering a place without the mist of preconception between you and it. 

My only regret upon leaving the Gateway City was that I didn’t try the St. Louis-style pizza, which is distinguished by the thin and crispy crust and the trademarked Provel cheese, a kind of processed cheese that I have heard will “stick to your mouth” and is “kind of gross.”  Apparently, this oddity can only be found in St. Louis and the environs, and the locals seem to either love it or hate it.  Maybe some even love to hate it, which is as strong a recommendation as I can think of for trying it. 

              

Next time, St. Lou.  Next time . . .

Herman Sinaiko, Superstar

At least two men who were known for wearing turtlenecks died last week. While Steve Jobs receives the kind of farewell that typically conducts American presidents down the River Styx, you probably won’t hear about Herman Sinaiko’s death on your evening newscast, or Slate, or CNN, or the Huffington Post. But those who heard the University of Chicago professor talk about Plato, Aristotle, art, criticism, beauty, knowledge, theater, and so many other subjects, will agree that with a single discussion, he could change something inside you, or rather, draw out some quality or thought that you didn’t know was in you. 

Sinaiko was hailed at UChicago for his dedication to teaching undergraduates. He was one of the greatest teachers I’ve ever had, one of the most humane people I’ve ever known, and a magnetic speaker. Listening to Sinaiko was, I imagine, like listening to Cicero or Demosthenes. The measure of this man was that he, in his greatness, didn’t make me feel small. Rather, he made me feel great as well, and that I could do great things. 

I used to attend rock concerts frequently, mostly smallish venues with medium wattage artists, stars who would show up occasionally on the radio and in Rolling Stone. Artists you could walk up to after the show, and who would sign an autograph and shake your hand. And though I invariably did approach them and ask them to sign my CD liner notes, it was always an awkward affair. What would I say to these people who didn’t know me, whom I would probably never talk to again? You were amazing? Thank you? 

In June of this year, I was at the University of Chicago for a day, and I happened to see Mr. Sinaiko walking rather jauntily on campus. I hadn’t seen him in over ten years. I wanted to walk up to him and re-introduce myself, but I didn’t. I suppose I was embarrassed to approach this monumental man who probably didn’t remember me, and tell him . . . tell him what? You were amazing? Thank you? 

I wish I had gone up to him and interrupted him just briefly. I would have told him that I took two classes with him, and in that short time, he left me with this indelible message: it is noble to help the helpless. It was the ethics not only of a humanist intellectual but of a comic-book superhero. I think in the minds of many of his students, he was both.  

Bouncing Babies

The first personal computer in my family was an MS-DOS-based machine, though it wasn’t very “personal.”  I don’t know what the brand was, or if it even had a “brand” in the normal sense of the word.  In the time that it loitered in my home (probably several years), all I ever really extracted from that humming box of chips and wires was a game called Bouncing Babies, which challenged the player to rescue purple pixel babies tumbling out of the windows of a burning apartment building.  I controlled a trampoline wielded by firemen at ground level, and the goal was to catch the falling babies and bounce them to the safety of an ambulance.  Kind of like Pong or Breakout, but with imperiled infants.

Oh, I also learned the neat trick that if you typed “DIR” into the DOS prompt and pressed Enter, you could bring up a directory of all the files on the computer.

That was it.  That was all I ever learned to do on that machine.

I think I was in 6th or 7th grade, and around the same time, I was playing Oregon Trail in computer class at school on an Apple IIe.  Here was a computer that was almost as old as I was, the best that public school funds could procure for my technological edification, and I got just as much or more out of it as I did on my newish home computer, supposedly a cutting-edge device.

But let’s be real here.  I had a Nintendo.  What were bouncing babies and death by dysentery compared to Mario and Final Fantasy?  Heck, even the Atari 2600 outclassed the foolishness of playing games on a keyboard.  If this was what personal computing was, I could pass.

Of course, no one ever taught me how to use DOS, or even the Apple IIe.  And I suppose that was the point.

In those neophyte days, I remember being reassured by a family friend, who worked in the software industry, that the computer was just a passive, slavish machine.  It can only do what you tell it to do, so I shouldn’t feel intimidated by it.  And yet, unless you were a software engineer, there was no intuitive way to know how to tell the machine to do anything.  It should have been obvious to everyone that the easier it was to tell a computer how to do things, the more enjoyable and useful a computer could be.

Throughout my life, I have come late to computer technology, internet innovations, even (especially?) viral phenomena.  I sent my first email in 1997, just before entering college.  I bemoaned the inexorable drift away from handwritten missives.  As I warmed to the idea and practice of email, I still insisted on writing a date at the top of every email I sent, as though it were a formal letter.  Yes, I wrote the date.  Even though the date and even the time were automatically stamped.  Every email.  Oh, and back then, I wrote the term as “e-mail,” with the hyphen.  I wasn’t the only one, but maybe I was the only one who did it on principle, instead of succumbing to the slurred, lazy, and (in my mind) inaccurate “email.”

In college, I found out from friends about downloading music online.  That’s right, mp3s, the term that for a few years replaced “songs” in the lexicon of cyberspace (do people still say “cyberspace”?).  We would go to a website called Scour, download their downloading program, and then search for any random song we could think of.  This was well before any talk of legality or piracy.  Nor did we worry about viruses and Trojan horses.  We were like boys stumbling upon a stash of fireworks, or hillbillies discovering oil.

And yet I remember saying it was “a fad.”  I had the curmudgeon’s gift of grouse; Andy Rooney would be proud (I mean, he would be if he weren’t such a curmudgeon who hated everything that was born after the Battle of the Bulge).  I couldn’t deny the thrill of downloading “Secret Agent Man” by Johnny Rivers on a whim and listening to the 128kbps mp3 file on my computer’s tinny speakers (satisfyingly retro, hissy like a vinyl record on a turntable, or better, a wax cylinder on a phonograph – ask Andy Rooney for details).  But I started to get tired of simply sitting in front of a computer searching for songs all night long.  Eventually, I ran out of songs to look for.  My mind couldn’t contain that many names.  I couldn’t see how other people wouldn’t get tired of this activity.  And then there were some songs I desperately wanted to acquire, but that were nowhere to be found (“Halah” by Mazzy Star; yes, it was the late 90s).  What would I do then?

* * *

Just as I came very late to the internet and technology game, I came very late to an appreciation of what Steve Jobs was.  When the announcement was made in August that Jobs was stepping down as CEO of Apple, I knew that his death was imminent.  A man like this doesn’t step down, doesn’t let go of the bouncing baby he had fathered and rescued from the flames, unless he knows it’s the end.  I said, “I wouldn’t be surprised if he dies tomorrow.”

And then for the first time, I realized that he represented something very important.  He was an artist of technology, one of the very few of his kind.  As expensive as his products were, as overbearing as his acolytes were, as publicly dismissive as the man could be toward legitimate criticism of his work and ways, it was clear that he believed in the world he created.  I used to think that he was getting fat off of duping the public into buying things they didn’t need, but I think the truth is more complicated.

He got rich by giving people things they didn’t realize they wanted.  He didn’t ask them what they wanted; he told them what to want.  To the extent that he was wrong, we could call him a tyrant or megalomaniac.  But to the extent that he was right, wouldn’t we have to acknowledge that he had shades of a philosopher-king?

* * *

Years ago, my brother won an iPod.  This was a 15-gig device, very early generation.  A Mac-aholic could probably tell you which version it is.  It was the first Apple product that anyone in my family owned.  My brother never really used it, but for a while, I used it every day, listening to all those old college-acquired mp3s at the office.  But I had my reservations.  I cursed the iPod for its frictionless casing, which put me in constant fear of having it slip through my fingers.  I lambasted it for occasionally bugging out and freezing, as if it were a Windows-based system.  I scorned the pretentious white cable that eventually malfunctioned and left me unable to connect the iPod to my computer.  I lingered in my grumblings that a portable music player was nice, but really just a luxury, as all of these overhyped Apple products were.  I didn’t like this little machine, and I didn’t like the iTunes software that served it.  And yet I used it every day, and I never seriously believed that any competing system would operate better.

But after a few years of use, I put the iPod down, and have rarely used it since.  Whether you want to create more or consume more, technology is supposed to make that process easier, faster, better.  The reason I eventually put down the iPod was because I realized it wasn’t making my life better.  I loved music, but having it on all the time while my mind was trying to engage my workday tasks, or driving, or other things that held my attention hostage, I think I started to associate music, even good music, with the parts of my life that I would rather have spent doing something else.  This, along with the overwhelming availability of music, whether through paid or unpaid channels, had desensitized me to the experience of listening.  I was acquiring music, new and old, to “see if it was any good,” but I wasn’t actually listening to it.

I had become the passive, slavish machine.

That’s one of the central ironies of Steve Jobs’s creations and of his legacy.  As much as his life sets an example of doggedly pursuing your own excellence, and as genuinely inspirational as his Stanford commencement address was as a message of perseverance and non-conformity, he created things that, though they arguably had a moral aesthetic, were strictly amoral in use.  They could be tools of liberation or subjugation, depending on the strength of will of the user.  Thus, we see that the hammer-throwing blond girl and the pasty-faced drones of the iconic Mac Super Bowl commercial are siblings, bouncing babies born of society’s equal capacity for self-exaltation and self-annihilation.

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"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life." - Steve Jobs

The Walk

I don't see time begin and end. In my head, the twin towers are still alive.

- Philippe Petit, tightrope artist