Yesterday's Modernity

Couldn’t find my iPod this morning.  I knew I had it in the car last night.  But in the morning light, with cobwebs still cluttering my mind I got increasingly annoyed.  The morning routine is down to minutes and minutes were steadily being eaten, looking over the same places, again and again.  The fate I was increasingly likely to have to stare down . . . exercise without music. 

This is, somehow, a dreadful thing to contemplate.  Twenty minutes of running or stepping in space with no soundtrack.  Once you’re in the middle of it, it doesn’t matter at all, of course.  It’s just overcoming the psychic drag of silence.  One more futile look around.  Did it fall out of my pocket last night during the dinner?  These are the pants I was wearing.  I didn’t have a coat on.  No point in checking those pockets, again. 

My iPhone, which usually accompanies me to the gym anyway, starred up at me in my anguish.  It just so happened that I’d tried to sync some tunes to it the day before.  I’d tried to use it down town yesterday and whatever I thought had been synced, wasn’t.  So I tried to repeat the process when I was home last night.  There should be a Fela album on there and that would more than suffice.  OK. 分秒必争[1]. Grab it and go. 

Walking over, the blooming apple blossoms and the attendant smell were almost overwhelming.  Can there ever be too much of spring?  How repulsive this smell could become if it were not temporal.  If pollen were manufactured, mandatory, a constant . . .  I fumbled with the phone and the Rdio app, which is fascinating, once you figure it out.  But mid figuring is rather annoying.  The real estate is so tight; you have to guess at what these dots mean and where those arrows will get you and wind up whipping around in circles.

Why not simply use an iPhone like everybody else instead of Apple’s yesterday toy, an iPod?  The phone has some 60 some odd gigs of space, nearly half the pod.  Its' got the ability to sync with services like Rdio in a way that my iPod can't.  I guess because I'm perfectly happy with the music routine, the way it is and see no reason to change, until I'm forced to.  The new device with new functionality and new user interface, new ways to sync all feels, from a distance like a time-sink.  It's similar to how I feel about e-books.  I'm sure a kindle would introduce ever so many conveniences.  But I am perfectly happy reading a book.  I have many on my shelf and I enjoy holding them.  Why change?

One of the reasons is that you can feel that yourself become increasingly distant from your kids and the entire generation and generation after that that is coming up behind.  The things you love and invest meaning in, the things that helped to shape identity and define distinction become irrelevant to all but a few.  And so it has always been since hunter gatherers settled down somewhere and started to make "progress.”

Last night reading to my older daughter, our protagonist "Bernard" in "A Brave New World" is wrestling with a modernity that he isn't happy with.  Everyone is happy.  He wants to think distinct thoughts.  His girl friend wants him to take soma.  I think it makes me feel even older to spend time with an eighty year-old vision of post modernity that already feels antiquated, what with everyone listening to radio broadcasts and reading books. 

I'm down in the city now at what is, for this week at least, the city’s newest Soho tower.  As described a few posts back, there must be a dozen of these complexes here in Beijing.  This Soho Nexus is in a good location.  Fashionably dressed people dart in and out from my perch here at the naugahyde-new Starbucks.  I managed to get the Brazilian rapper / soul singer Criolo's funky album "No Na Orelha" properly downloaded on to my phone and carrying on from the morning, I’m listening to something in a new surrounding, that I wouldn’t otherwise have had. The first tune “Bogata”, sounds more like it should be called “Lagos,” with this commanding thunder groove.  The next tune “Subirusdoistiozin” slower, sly, and nodding my head, I’m reluctantly marvelling at my increased ability to have everything, everywhere, always. 

Yesterday's modernity, our missing protagonist the "classic" iPod, was found, at last shoved into the Odyssey's glove compartment. 

  

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[1] fēnmiǎobìzhēng:  seize every minute and second (idiom); not a minute to lose / every moment counts