Wednesday, May 18, 2011

bohemian love pad


Some people are all about iPad FaceMelter

David Johansen, David Johansen
Beres Hammond, Beres Hammond
Various Artists, I Roy - Singers and Dubs
David Johansen, Here Comes the Night
David Eggers, What Is the What
Kid Congo Powers, Dracula Boots



I am as in love with this device in the precise amount that I suspected I would but maybe not in the ways. The iPad is a consumer product first and foremost, the issue about which most software developer types grouse and much as I might want to distance myself from that sometimes, I'm one of them, and thus one is pushed into Using a Thing As It Is Designed, a sensible request any object would ask of its utilizer. I look to my devices to be Star Trek tricorders, Batman utility belts, Swiss Army knives - little all-purposes that support the multiple-purposed engagement with the multiverse and this thing is that and it isn't. It is really more the bohemian love pad about which Mr Johansen croons.

You know the cockroach traffic in here
It's got me drinkin' too much beer
But it ain't any worse than any major town

OK, it's not like that at all; I really wanted an excuse to put the words "cockroach traffic" out there, and really, the David Johansen in my mind's sleazy, druggy eye would pronounce it as "cockaroach" - it would be terrible and wonderful; I'd be all, you aren't really like that, a you? Do you really say "cockaroach"? Probably, for a while, as it suits his purposes. David Johansen is the rock 'n' roll embodiment of adaption - becoming a woman, a blues singer, a Springsteen-esque streetcar, a monstrously popular novelty act - whatever for which the situation calls. He supersedes arch-chameleon David Bowie in that David Bowie stole the idea from David Johansen, or maybe that make Bowie even better for it.

Anyway, this device is making me reassess how I do things, how I use things. Flipboard turns the dull shopping list party-line of Facebook and Twitter and RSS into a shimmering magazine, on the fly. It's genius in its design, turning cockaroach traffic into a bohemian love pad where you want to invite everyone to bask in that which you bask.

I checked out an eBook from our eLibrary (Eggers' What is the What - I think I have assimilation problems... I never watched a compatriot get eaten by a lion while escaping genocidal armies) using Overdrive which makes perfect sense except it doesn't. Why are there limited copies, a waiting list, old world library ideas at play here? Money, I'm sure, which like religion (which is itself a kind of money) ruins everything. It reveals my bohemian love pad to have papr walls, the glitter covering up the particle board. I love libraries because they roll with mind-bending bureaucracy and still manage to be leaf-end useful.

I just had a tête-á-tête (weirdly, the iWorld has reintroduced the diacritical back into the accessible from the realm of obselesene into which it was largely cast by the Internet) with the IT folks (great irony in the fact that I am one) about getting a new desk phone which I do not even want. My clunky old one with the bell somehow lets the dial tone run when you answer. I like to think it is some sort of quantum aberration happening every time the little electric bell rings, which is sweet and quaint in a Brazil way but sucks in a phone way. It has now resulted in a olde skule CF of multi-platform communiqués and people stopping by the office to tell me what their system-generated email said about my not getting a phone and I wanna go - yeah, yeah, sorry I asked. (I always am, which is why I never ask) Look, you ever listen to David Johansen? But that would spiral off another Universe of Talk before I can get anything done in this one. Cockaroach traffic.

Love you baby and
Drivin' you crazy
Is all I want to do
You act so bad
You drive me mad
You make-a me bad
In my Bohemian love pad

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