dispatches

Pathologizing iPod

I borrowed the iPod and took it on my bike ride this morning. I have a short, vigorous ride I do nearly every day: down the hill to the Burke-Gilman, north several miles, off at 95th, then up a short, steep pitch to get back on the plateau. One last uphill past the Starbucks, and a coast home. A little over seven miles. I judge my fitness by how fast I do the uphill part, and by how mentally painful that bit is.

The loop is getting boring to me, and is turning into a chore. I know how dangerous it is to listen to music on a bicycle, but, despite the risk, I wanted to see how it changed the tedium. Too well, it turns out.

I have a strange playlist, being unused to composing these things. I installed random tracks from a dozen CDs and they fit together disharmoniously. Simon and Garfunkel. Astor Piazzolla, Mark O’Connor, James Taylor, Turtle Island, Sharon Shannon, Sweet Honey in the Rock, Filippo Gambetta, Yo Yo Ma, Martin Hayes, Frank Ferrel (yes, you have me typed now—boomer folkie).

The landscape flew by like background to a soundtrack. I knew in my mind that I was riding my bicycle, but I didn’t know in my body that I was riding my bicycle. It was like watching myself ride. I told myself to be especially alert at intersections. The odd thing was that I was so aware of telling myself this. With the music forward in my experience, I had to change my usual trajectory through space from automatic to manual. Disconcerting is the least of it.

My steep, painful hill appeared, and my body scaled it while I was elsewhere. I could detect that I was breathing hard, and that I was overheated, but intrigue and pleasure with the vocal harmony of "Rivers of Babylon" was my primary occupation. I might as well have been on my couch, listening to a CD, which is where these things are supposed to happen.

There is a clinical diagnosis for this type of experience. It’s in the Diagnostics and Standards Manual IV (code 300.6, Depersonalization Disorder). My wife treats people with it. It is alarming to me that a new, sexy technology can generate a dissociative experience so readily.

From a creative point of view, the prognosis is more distressing. My life as an artist and a professional depends on my ability to be fully present to the world, and to the sensations I am having at a given moment. It is from that place where my photographs happen. Viewing the world through an iPod consciousness obliterates that process. I worry about the larger impacts on a society that, though not so needful of that sustained focussed attention that I might require, depends upon creativity and flights of fancy for our cultural and economic well being. Are we anesthesizing ourselves into mediocrity?

Hating Apple

It has been one of those days of incessant technological frustration. The iPod is only part of the problem, but one compounded by a hovering mother-in-law who watches me seeth in frustration at various systems not working, and she gets anxious. Whether her worry is more about the health of her iPod or the mental health of her son-in-law is an open question. Both are in jeopardy.

What I’m trying to do is transfer her music library from my laptop to her desktop. I’m going to need the room next week. The empty iTunes library on her computer decided that since it was vacant, her iPod should be too, and promptly deleted what took me four days to load.

I restored the iPod from my computer, and turned off all the auto-load features I could find in iTunes so that this wouldn’t happen again.. I found a shareware program (iPod2PC) that seemed to work to transfer the iPod contents to the desktop. Then I discovered that, until you paid for the program, it maxed out at 60 songs. I found another program, but it choked on the Apple Loessless format I used to record the collection The problem is still a problem. Anyone have an idea?

Why can’t an iPod just act as though it were a USB hard-drive, which is all it is really. Why can’t Apple play nice with others? My determinedly Apple-free-zone computer has been having its own hissy fits however. USB devices are inexplicibly "Unknown Devices" and don’t work. My Epson printer gets confused and stops printing two-thirds of the way through a print. I took it in to get looked at, but of course everything worked fine at the doctor’s office. Back home it’s a fussy computer again. I bet I know what’s wrong. It’s my aura. It’s messing up any electronic device I come near. Either that or Mercury is in retrograde again.

Understanding iPod

My mother-in-law just got an iPod. It has made her exceedingly happy. Being the IT go-to guy in my family, it has been up to me to configure and upload her classical CD collection, whic h is heavily weighted toward obscure and difficult Bach. It has been an education learning a new technology.

The first barrier is the generational divide about how we experience music. The iPod modality is one of no respect for genre or compilation integrity. We boomers grew up with the notion of an album as a whole statement. The artistic message inherent in a sequence of music that, as an aggregate, completes an experience, is something that the technology does not easily support. I copied Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion, which spans multiple disks, into iTunes, along with several other recordings (Glenn Gould, Pablo Casal’s Cello Suites, the Mass in B Minor). Itunes broke up all of these recordings, jumbled the tracks, and reconfigured them in some unusual, incoherent sequence of its own inimitable logic.

I Googled the problem and figured out a workaround. I recopied everything, making each disk a single track. Messing around the iPod itself, I realized that it would take some time to learn the particular logic of the structure of this device. It’s hard to understand just how to start and stop the thing, much less navigate the various nested menus to find what you’re looking for and figure out how to select it. The little wheel is an exceedingly simple interface, but it is never clear what function mode your in. For example, I can't figure out how to back out of a song and get into the list again. The volume just changes, or there's a long pause before anything happens. Elly and I are both struggling. Much as Apple wants us to believe that the logic of its machinery is transparent, the iPod has one of the more obtuse interfaces I have ever encountered. Speaking of difficult, don’t get me started on those damn earpod things.

That said, I’m wondering if I want an iPod in my life. It is not my habit to anesthesize myself with music in my daily routine, though it might be said that I use NPR for that, as when I’m working at home my radio is usually on and tuned to KUOW. The one arena in which music, as a dissociative mechanism, might be useful is with my flying anxiety. I plugged in the plane's earphones on my last flight during a slightly rough descent, and I didn’t go through my usual terror and panic response as the plane bounced around. I’m going to be in the air a lot in the next couple of months. If I can remove myself from the present reality when the present reality is one I don’t want to be in (like bouncing around the atmosphere in a cylindrical tube completely out of my control), an iPod might be something I want. And it has fewer side effects than Xanax.

Squirrel Wars

I am locked in a battle in which there is no hope of success. My foe is craftier, more persistent and patient, and has better manual dexterity than me. For months we have been been testing each other’s resolve, ramping up arms and strategies, trying to outwit our enemy. Property damage has ensued. Physical blows have been exchanged. It is a good thing I do not own a gun, for I would use it against my foe with no remorse.

I am battling squirrels.

Until this summer we had an accommodation. I filled my bird feeders with black sunflower seeds from Audubon. The house finches would fling them hither and yon with abandon until they found a seed they liked. A great mound of seeds and seed shells grew many inches deep under the feeders. The squirrels rooted through this bonanza and left the feeders alone.

Then I switched feed. Shelled sunflower seed chips were more expensive, but there appeared to be no waste. No more piles of half-composted seed amid the small forest of sunflower sprouts under the Lavatera plant. The birds liked them better too. But the squirrels raised a howl of protest.

Soon they were scampering up the poles, wrapping themselves around the tubes, upside-down, and engorging themselves right from the feeders. Chasing them away worked only briefly. Before long I was sneaking up on them, wrapped newapaper in hand, so I could whack them. They learned the sqeak of the screen door, and sneaking didn’t work. The moment I sat again, they’d be back at the feeders. I rose, they fled. I sat, they fed. I think they were amused by the control they had over my movement.

They then learned to fling the feeders themselves off the pole, and lap up the spilled seed. One feeder I found broken on the ground, the bottom missing: a fatal casualty. I hauled out the "squirrel-proof" feeder, the one with the cage around it. They learned to pry off the lid and eat from the tube. When the food got low, they slithered their body down the length of the feeder tube, with only the tail sticking out. Plastic-encased squirrel. Once Robin snuck up on one and yanked the tail. I would have flung the beast high into the air and across the street.

I tried hanging a feeder next to the window, by the cat perch. The cat was very excited for awhile at both bird and squirrel, but soon she ceased to lift her head even when a squirrel passed by inches away. Now they habitually run the length of the windowsill, stop, stare in the house to say, "Hi, thanks for the grub," before leaping to the feeder.

Audubon sells an array of "squirrel-resistant" feeders (note the qualifier) for more than I want to pay. It is almost worth the $80 though to watch the first squirrel step on the motorized whirling feeder. Birds can alight on the feeder just fine. But when the heavier squirrel sets foot, it will spin and fling it off. I have no doubt, however, that it will work only once.

The last bag of sunflower chips is almost gone. I’m switching back to the black oil type; perhaps withdrawing to our borders prior to the war will end hostilites. But I’m afraid it might not. The squirrels look like they’re having too much fun to stop anytime soon.

Stick Pictures

How busy is too busy?

For a freelancer, in those insecure moments (meaning, the default setting) when you fear and expect that the current job is the last one you ever get, the answer ought to be, there is no such state as too busy. But Robin has been complaining. "If this is what you’re like when you’ve got work, I think I liked you better when you didn’t." I’m snappish and irritable, and everything feels urgent and overdue and overwhelming. I’m taking it out on my loved ones. Maybe I’m too busy.

This morning, my Switzerland shoot got delayed by three weeks. As a result, I am much calmer. The client that wanted me for next Tuesday has me now. I can book my no-budget artist shoots for later this week. My schedule feels roomy now, which I suppose is only a matter of perspective from the sounds of this. Yesterday I didn’t know if, five days from now, I was going to be shooting in Lugano or not. As it is, I’ll get back from Chicago, then turn around and go to Europe. But that’s three weeks off. To celebrate, Robin and I walked around Green Lake, and I shot stick pictures.

Stick pictures is a shorthand term I use for a particular brand of my landscape work. I like those brushy edges of places, especially in winter when the leaves are gone and visual chaos reigns. In the midst of these complex places, I try and tease out something structural from the mess. The important part of the work is that I engage a part of my photographic brain that is seeing this stuff sharper and deeper than my conscious mind can. It is from this state of awareness that the photographs emerge. If I control the process consciously, I miss the shot. It’s as if, by being in such a complex situation, I swamp my usual visual response. It has to come from someplace else. In these photographs I am doing the deepest work I do as a photographer.