What's that? Not what you wanted? Steve's not listening to you. (Photo by mattbuchanan - (CC))
More thoughts on the iPad
(Note: my gig at Ableton might tempt you to read between the lines of this post to glean information about upcoming plans. Avoid this temptation. Not only do I not have any info here, I would never suggest or imply anything about future Ableton developments on this website. This disclaimer should be implicit, but this is my personal space.)
By now, every geek this side of Cupertino has weighed in on the iPad. So my attempt to add to the noise could easily be seen as just a crude attempt to cash in on a trending topic for the purpose of leveraging website traffic. Fair enough.
But as a geek with a particular niche interest — computer music technology — I hope to bring some fresh perspective.
There seem to be two dominant reactions to the iPad:
- It’s a big iPod Touch. What a joke!
- It’s a big iPod Touch. How awesome!
The WankosphereBlogosphere debates the second half of the realization, but everyone’s basically in agreement about the first half: it’s not a keyboard-less laptop. It’s something much less. Or is it more?
The arguments about “openness” and “extensibility” apply about as much to this device as they apply to the iPhone/iPod Touch, which is to say, they don’t. The market for these devices isn’t hackers. It’s consumers. This is for anyone who wants to sit on the couch and have a simple but functional media experience. It’s for people who don’t want endless possibilities, but rather an elegant and safe set of possibilities.
Now, I’m not afraid to get a little dirty trying to make gadgets do unusual things. But even I have my limits. Every couple years, I try a desktop Linux installation just to get a sense of how far things have come. This usually lasts about an hour. Something is ALWAYS broken, and getting it to work requires near-infinite Googling followed by the editing of scary configuration files. Some people live for this kind of fiddling. I find it boring. I have basically no interest in tools themselves — only as a means to get things done.
And this is why things like the iPad are really exciting for me. Because it’s locked down tighter than an El Al cockpit, you can be pretty sure that there won’t be any fiddling with configuration files. It’s just going to work, period. There are already iPhone apps (like TouchOSC) that do multitouch control of musical applications over Wi-Fi. I can’t imagine it will take long for these applications to appear on the iPad as well. Until now, the only viable multitouch controller for computer music applications was a boutique item called the Lemur. It’s gorgeous, powerful and completely unaffordable for most mortals. Now the iPad is here and, at about a quarter of the Lemur’s cost, stands to bring usable multitouch to a price point that many musicians can reach.
Yes, Apple fosters a closed, monopolistic ecosystem. But they also make tools that work. This is important for people who want to get stuff done, and perhaps less important for people who want to sit around and polish their tools.
If you’re still not convinced, consider this: would there be an ever-expanding field of iPhone competitors if the iPhone wasn’t such a game-changer? Perhaps even more important than the iPad itself is the fact that laptop-sized multitouch is about to become a real market segment. For some, this might be exciting because it means more tools and more fiddling. For me, it’s exciting because it promises more ways to get stuff done.
In C Remixed (Rehashed)
Now that the dust has settled on this project, I’d like to say a few words about it.
The Grand Valley State University New Music Ensemble is a pretty amazing group.
A couple years ago they managed to blow everyone’s minds with a series of killer performances of Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians, culminating in a critically-acclaimed recording for Innova. This year, they’ve done it again, releasing a new recording of Terry Riley’s In C along with 18 remixes by electronic artists from all over the spectrum (and world.)
I was honored to be one of those remixers, and even more honored to spend some time with the students in October and November. I visited GVSU, did a little teaching and provided live electronics for performances of In C with the group on their campus and at (Le) Poisson Rouge in New York.
Playing In C at LPR (photo: Hiroyuki Ito for The New York Times)
The press around this group makes a lot of noise about how their Midwestern pedigree makes them such an unlikely success story. Maybe some of that is true, but that’s the sort of narrative that sells newspapers; not CDs.
The real reason they’re successful is because they play the hell out of this music.
Go buy their stuff.
The health care “opposition” is fake
Like the “Brooks Brothers Riot” after the 2000 election and the “tea party” silliness earlier this year, the current town hall opposition to health care reform is not a grassroots, Middle American movement.
1) Rick Scott, founder of of the deliciously-named Conservatives for Patients’ Rights.
2) Dick Armey, chairman of the deliciously-named FreedomWorks.
Instead, it’s a top-down, highly coordinated effort to create the illusion of a popular uprising. This phenomenon is known as astroturfing.
Let’s examine who’s really behind the scenes:
Rick Scott: Criminal. 1st Class 'chebag.
Before Rick started this group, he made a fortune as the Chairman and CEO of Columbia/HCA, a for-profit hospital business. He’s not a doctor. He’s a lawyer.
During his tenure, Columbia/HCA was indicted for Medicare fraud, and eventually paid nearly 2 billion dollars in civil suits and over 600 million to settle with the federal government.
As Paul Krugman says, you can’t make this stuff up. Why does a guy with a health care rap sheet even have a say in health care anymore? Well, he doesn’t directly. He’s the man behind the curtain, quietly pouring money into maintaining a status quo that made him extraordinarily wealthy.
Dick Armey: Republican. Dick.
Armey was the House Majority Leader during the “Republican Revolution.” He’s the total package: as a professor, he sexually harassed multiple students, and eventually divorced his wife to marry one.
FreedomWorks is hard at work to make sure that health care remains a money-making industry. But they’re not just a conservative non-profit; they actually sell insurance, so they’re directly invested.
Now, it’s pretty clear from watching the heightened emotions at the town halls that there is actual, genuine anger among the people in those rooms. The question is, what is it that’s making those people so angry?
Is it actual concern over actual issues? Or is it the fires of fear, uncertainty and doubt that are being carefully and calculatingly stoked by a right-wing machine that knows how to play the undereducated for suckers?
As Rick Perlstein’s excellent article points out: “the crazy tree blooms in every moment of liberal ascendancy.” The Right is practiced and adept at playing off of the horrors of what a liberal administration might bring: boogeymen like “Big Government,” “Socialism,” “Nanny State” and a loss of “Freedom.”
None of this is real. None of these terms even mean the things the Right would have you think they mean.
“Freedom” to the Right means “freedom to make money.” It’s not about personal freedom (the gay marriage controversy should make that abundantly clear.) It’s about unfettered free markets.
The people who want you to believe that universal health care is “unAmerican” are in the health care business to make money. It really is that simple.
The United States remains the only industrialized nation without universal health care. Glenn Beck would have you believe that we’re the only ones that are doing it right, because we have the best health care in the world, but this is false by most metrics. We rank considerably lower than many universal health care nations in life expectancy and infant mortality.
Yelling “we’re #1″ without knowing what that means isn’t patriotism. It’s white noise.
Patriotism means looking at your country objectively and knowing that it’s capable of doing better. It means realizing that taking care of its citizens is self-evidently the right thing to do, and that this is more fundamentally “American” than the free market.
The Right likes to throw the Bible around in defense of whatever their cause du jour might be. The Bible is pretty ambiguous about a lot of things, but it takes some serious mental gymnastics to not understand what the Bible has to say about taking care of people:
‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’
They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’
He will reply, ‘I tell you the truth, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’
Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.
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