Steven Levy, the author of The Perfect Thing, is madly in love. So what if the object of his affections is inanimate and very, very petite? It makes great company and is fun to fondle. It makes him feel good and bolsters his self-confidence. And size is no problem: The more it shrinks, the more “adorable” it becomes.
Levy is also acutely image conscious about his taste in music. He may be a baby boomer (he refers to top record-company executives as “nasty cats”), but forget the Paul McCartney concert tickets: he prides himself on a cutting-edge sensibility. He seeks out songs by musicians “young enough to be grandchildren of the Beatles” and prefers artists “off the radar of anyone whose name is inked on a mortgage.” His example of mortification is to be caught with Michael McDonald in your iPod library.
And he shows other signs of insecurity. His position as chief technology correspondent for Newsweek ought to underscore his authority on this subject. But he is overly fond of emphasizing his backstage access to Steve Jobs, and of locutions like “I once found myself in a heated discussion with Bill Gates about….”
At least he can claim to have been the first person to hand Gates a Microsoft-unfriendly iPod and asked “Have you seen this yet?” As Gates absorbed every detail about the rival product, Levy says, “I could almost hear the giant sucking sound.”
Gates' interest in the Apple iPod could not have surpassed that of Levy, who has written an entire book about one item and even modeled it on that device's hallowed image. The cover of The Perfect Thing looks as much like an iPod as it can, given the necessity for pages and binding. And the book's structure is iPod-mimetic too. Levy has deliberately mimicked the shuffle feature so that different editions of The Perfect Thing present their chapters in different orders. This has less novelty than it promises. There are plenty of books with chapters that address separate themes and don't follow any logical progression.
The Perfect Thing raises one big question: is it possible to spin a whole book out of such literally lightweight subject matter? Answer: yes, if you don't mind repetition and don't expect to learn anything new. The Perfect Thing is more entertaining than informative, but it makes a very satisfactory mash note. Gushing aside (“this is its universally celebrated, endlessly pleasing, devilishly functional, drop-dead gorgeous design”), it does a handy job of crystallizing and commemorating the dawn of the iPod age.
“No wonder that iPods have replaced toasters as bank premiums,” Levy writes, offering a measure of how fully the iPod has pervaded everyday life. Though the idea of walking around with one's own music library was inconceivable two decades ago (a 1985 disk drive for a primitive MP3 player was insufficient to hold Neil Young's nine-minute Down by the River), it has become second nature to a new, wired breed of consumer. “Pity the poor beggars and street musicians who must now compete with the personal concerts buzzing in the heads of potential donors,” Levy writes. With the selective obliviousness of any iPod fetishist, he screens out the thought that beggars might be pitied for other reasons.
This iPod success story also virtually screens out a pivotal factor in its earth-shaking influence: The actual earth-shaking of Sept. 11. The iPod was unveiled in October 2001, and the world was eager for distraction. “This is the freedom to be deaf to the loudspeakers of history,” says one iPod fan.
The rest of that section, Personal, is similarly devoted to the iPod's capacity to isolate. It comes to the predictable conclusion that this is fabulous, not dangerous, and that commuters in cars already enjoy the same kind of privacy zone. It's just that a car weighs a lot more than 6.4 ounces (for the jumbo iPod) and does not require wires in the user's ears.
The Download chapter is one of its best. It describes the anti-download indignation of record companies that are otherwise “spotty on the morality thing.” As Levy nicely puts it: “their history was an unbroken litany of publishing credits pilfered from artists, unpaid royalties and envelopes stuffed with illegal payola. Their plea against downloading came across like an etiquette lesson from the Green River Killer.”
The Identity chapter is similarly lively as it outlines the extreme forms of music snobbery in a world of dueling playlists. The Shuffle section is mathematically interesting, since it examines the complaint that iPods' random song shuffling favors certain artists over others. As Levy discovers, true randomness is likelier to produce repetition than a chain of totally unrelated selections. As Apple tries to fix this, “we're making it less random to make it feel more random,” Jobs says.
This book's chapter shuffling is occasionally trounced by chronology. It's odd to get halfway through the book and then read: “A thousand songs — an entire record collection — in your pocket? It sounded like a dream.” And its Coolness section is fawningly uncool. Is the iPod's bright white really reminiscent of Moby-Dick?
It's even less cool that the Apple chapter sounds like advertising. It takes the reader to “the trippy world of Apple, where productivity, great design and fun are in a constant group hug.” Levy does his share of hugging, too.
May 18 to May 24 Pastor Yang Hsu’s (楊煦) congregation was shocked upon seeing the land he chose to build his orphanage. It was surrounded by mountains on three sides, and the only way to access it was to cross a river by foot. The soil was poor due to runoff, and large rocks strewn across the plot prevented much from growing. In addition, there was no running water or electricity. But it was all Yang could afford. He and his Indigenous Atayal wife Lin Feng-ying (林鳳英) had already been caring for 24 orphans in their home, and they were in
President William Lai (賴清德) yesterday delivered an address marking the first anniversary of his presidency. In the speech, Lai affirmed Taiwan’s global role in technology, trade and security. He announced economic and national security initiatives, and emphasized democratic values and cross-party cooperation. The following is the full text of his speech: Yesterday, outside of Beida Elementary School in New Taipei City’s Sanxia District (三峽), there was a major traffic accident that, sadly, claimed several lives and resulted in multiple injuries. The Executive Yuan immediately formed a task force, and last night I personally visited the victims in hospital. Central government agencies and the
Australia’s ABC last week published a piece on the recall campaign. The article emphasized the divisions in Taiwanese society and blamed the recall for worsening them. It quotes a supporter of the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) as saying “I’m 43 years old, born and raised here, and I’ve never seen the country this divided in my entire life.” Apparently, as an adult, she slept through the post-election violence in 2000 and 2004 by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), the veiled coup threats by the military when Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) became president, the 2006 Red Shirt protests against him ginned up by
As with most of northern Thailand’s Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) settlements, the village of Arunothai was only given a Thai name once the Thai government began in the 1970s to assert control over the border region and initiate a decades-long process of political integration. The village’s original name, bestowed by its Yunnanese founders when they first settled the valley in the late 1960s, was a Chinese name, Dagudi (大谷地), which literally translates as “a place for threshing rice.” At that time, these village founders did not know how permanent their settlement would be. Most of Arunothai’s first generation were soldiers
RSS