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penfield"Men profess to be lovers of music, but for the most part they give no evidence in their opinions and lives that they have heard it."
- Henry David Thoreau
Way back in my junior high school days, I had a Walkman -- one of those ubiquitous brick-sized personal stereos -- and I would listen to music on my school bus ride home. My dad once chastised me for this practice, suggesting that I was being "anti-social." It was a reasonable suggestion; I didn't have many friends and he must have assumed that I would be more popular if I simply participated in the highly socratic dialogue so typical of junior high school buses. It would have done no good to explain to him that I was channeling my hormonal angst into an appreciation of the Phil Collins catalogue.
I sometimes think of that exchange when I put my headphones on for each segment of my daily commute. Living in the Washington D.C. area generally means a lot of walking and a lot of train rides. For these journeys, I almost always carry with me my trusty mp3 player.
I call it "my mp3 player" because it's not an iPod or a Zune. I don't have hundreds of gigabytes of storage or hi-fi video capability or access to mobile applications. Officially it is a SanDisk Sansa Clip with a lean 2 GB of storage and a startling lack of cachet, but I just call it "my mp3 player". And compared to the sleek iPod, it looks like a soviet-era transistor radio.
It might seem like I'm being a bit of a contrarian, making a point of spurning the iPod and all its market-leading appeal. There's probably something to that; I do mildly resent Apple's whole hipper-than-thou marketing campaign -- which I rationally understand is the point of any marketing campaign but still strikes me as unbecomingly arrogant.
But it more likely stems from my early adoption of the mp3 format. Back in the early 'aughts, when Napster was still an illicit phenomenon and the Mac was the ugly stepchild of the personal computing industry, I bought my first mp3 player: it offered 56 megabytes of flash memory, enough for maybe 15 songs, weighed as much as a dictionary and was made by some miscellaneous Korean conglomerate. But it was a revelation compared to my Sony Discman; I could fit it in my pocket, go jogging with it, accidentally drop it on the ground ... and it just kept on playing.
In the following years I would upgrade to a 128 MB player, then 500 MB, then a 1 GB player, then my current 2 GB player. I became a devotee of the sturdy flash-memory simplicity and the romantic brandlessness of these runner-up companies. While I was evolving, the iPod exploded onto the scene with its high-capacity hard-drive and slick design. And at one point, I did try out an iPod mini, but became frustrated by its archetecture and interface and could not justify the price premium on "coolness".
I think I get enough coolness, anyway. Something really cool happened last week on my way out of the Metro and toward the Pentagon City mall. I had my headphones on as usual, and I was listening to the last three minutes of Death Cab for Cutie's "What Sarah Said," an extended coda that winds gently toward a crescendo and then fades away. It's a very pretty song.
Just as the rolling piano chords started climbing, I turned the corner and came upon a busking tenor saxophonist. Normally he would be playing holiday standards like "Jingle Bells" or "Ave Maria," but at that moment he was simply playing an improvisational jazz riff, a complex little melody that filled the corridor and seeped past my headphones.
And it was in the exact same key and in the exact same rhythm as the song on my headphones. Not a single note was out of place. It was so beautiful, I couldn't catch my breath.
It felt like a perfect moment -- a fleeting, transcendent sensory experience. It was like a three-minute concert that existed, however briefly, just for me. It was so cool.
See, Dad? Sometimes, anti-social-ism has its merits.
- Henry David Thoreau
Way back in my junior high school days, I had a Walkman -- one of those ubiquitous brick-sized personal stereos -- and I would listen to music on my school bus ride home. My dad once chastised me for this practice, suggesting that I was being "anti-social." It was a reasonable suggestion; I didn't have many friends and he must have assumed that I would be more popular if I simply participated in the highly socratic dialogue so typical of junior high school buses. It would have done no good to explain to him that I was channeling my hormonal angst into an appreciation of the Phil Collins catalogue.
I sometimes think of that exchange when I put my headphones on for each segment of my daily commute. Living in the Washington D.C. area generally means a lot of walking and a lot of train rides. For these journeys, I almost always carry with me my trusty mp3 player.
I call it "my mp3 player" because it's not an iPod or a Zune. I don't have hundreds of gigabytes of storage or hi-fi video capability or access to mobile applications. Officially it is a SanDisk Sansa Clip with a lean 2 GB of storage and a startling lack of cachet, but I just call it "my mp3 player". And compared to the sleek iPod, it looks like a soviet-era transistor radio.
It might seem like I'm being a bit of a contrarian, making a point of spurning the iPod and all its market-leading appeal. There's probably something to that; I do mildly resent Apple's whole hipper-than-thou marketing campaign -- which I rationally understand is the point of any marketing campaign but still strikes me as unbecomingly arrogant.
But it more likely stems from my early adoption of the mp3 format. Back in the early 'aughts, when Napster was still an illicit phenomenon and the Mac was the ugly stepchild of the personal computing industry, I bought my first mp3 player: it offered 56 megabytes of flash memory, enough for maybe 15 songs, weighed as much as a dictionary and was made by some miscellaneous Korean conglomerate. But it was a revelation compared to my Sony Discman; I could fit it in my pocket, go jogging with it, accidentally drop it on the ground ... and it just kept on playing.
In the following years I would upgrade to a 128 MB player, then 500 MB, then a 1 GB player, then my current 2 GB player. I became a devotee of the sturdy flash-memory simplicity and the romantic brandlessness of these runner-up companies. While I was evolving, the iPod exploded onto the scene with its high-capacity hard-drive and slick design. And at one point, I did try out an iPod mini, but became frustrated by its archetecture and interface and could not justify the price premium on "coolness".
I think I get enough coolness, anyway. Something really cool happened last week on my way out of the Metro and toward the Pentagon City mall. I had my headphones on as usual, and I was listening to the last three minutes of Death Cab for Cutie's "What Sarah Said," an extended coda that winds gently toward a crescendo and then fades away. It's a very pretty song.
Just as the rolling piano chords started climbing, I turned the corner and came upon a busking tenor saxophonist. Normally he would be playing holiday standards like "Jingle Bells" or "Ave Maria," but at that moment he was simply playing an improvisational jazz riff, a complex little melody that filled the corridor and seeped past my headphones.
And it was in the exact same key and in the exact same rhythm as the song on my headphones. Not a single note was out of place. It was so beautiful, I couldn't catch my breath.
It felt like a perfect moment -- a fleeting, transcendent sensory experience. It was like a three-minute concert that existed, however briefly, just for me. It was so cool.
See, Dad? Sometimes, anti-social-ism has its merits.
