Not working….

It’s a day when everything—including this blogger—is not working.

Well, I have those days. Yesterday, when I should have been resting, I industriously compiled the largest post I’ve ever written. Today, I am fretting.

It’s the damn iPod. Why is it that I absolutely crave every Apple product, and then instantly hate them the moment I start to use them? Do I have a secret aluminum fetish?

OK—news of the day. The iPod (curious—computer seems to know that word….) that put—or conversely shuffled—music into my ear, has died. And curiously, the death took the form of refusing to display anything except that annoying little apple with the bite taken out of it. It was the techie equivalent of the children’s “nyah nhay NA nyah nyah.”

(Incidentally, and just to fill up space, did you know that that sequence of sounds exists in ALL cultures? And that kids use it the same way? Just one of those facts that fill my brain, shoving out where the house keys are….)

Well, I took the iPod to Radio Shack and they said they might—a shake of the head here—be able to fix it. So now I have a new iPod—not the Touch but the Classic. The new Touch, it seems, has gotten all fancy: camera, video cam, email, I don’t know whatnot. The Classic, I’m happy to report, has but four buttons, three of which I will probably never use. I did check, there appears to be no nemesis—the dreaded shuffle button.

Unless, of course, it’s hidden somewhere on the elegant aluminum sheath, and I activate it….

Right, so spending 250 bucks made me hungry, and I go to the café where a completely annoying woman is screaming into her iPad. She’s on Skype, or rather she’s dragging us all onto Skype—her Skype.

OK—and am I being paranoid in thinking she was using up all the Internet? Because for some reason the connection was terrible. She was closer to the modem, if that makes any difference. (If I’m right, please tell me. Otherwise, no….)

Well, my new iPod has now come to life. Because I have iTunes already installed, it’s synched its way through my library—those 2500 “songs” that are motets, arias, cantatas. It has greeted me cordially by saying “Welcome.”

So what am I supposed to do? Say “Welcome” back?

The manual, I think, which was artfully or zenfully hidden in the bowels of the box, beneath the iPod and above the little gadgets—ear buds, cable, dock.

The little manual, of course, doesn’t deign to do words. Just little pictures. I study these for a bit. The USB cable has to go into the USB port.

Thanks, Apple!

Oh, and don’t submerge the device in water….

Guys!

Well, I press the round button in the center of the dial. And Welcome goes away! Now what we have is a little list on the left side of the display. The first item says “cover flow.” Right, so what happens if I click it? I do, and discover the covers of every album I own doing the stupid Robert Burns (or whoever—Ms. Taí will know) effect that Apple loves so much. (Speaking of which, shouldn’t it be aPple?)

Guess what! I now have Beethoven’s Ninth symphony playing!

I know why—it’s the first “song” on the iTunes library. Why?  Because iTunes has decided to organize itself by artist. The mezzo in the last movement is Agnes Baltsa.

Agnes—A—get it?

I was always perfectly happy to scroll by Baltsa in the past, but now there’s a problem. I cannot scroll. I put my finger on the display—no luck. I press the down button, but that’s “play / pause.” There is absolutely no way I can get my way down the list to “playlist.”

Oh, and guess what!

There IS a shuffle button!

Worse, Apple has again hidden the volume button. On the Touch, it was on the side of the chassis. On the Classic? Who knows….

Hey, guess what! The stupid little black wheel turns out to be a dial! I just started whirling my albums all around—Now I’m hearing Zelenka!

It’s so typical Mac—I’m right back in high school and EVERYBODY knows where to get dope except me. I’m buying it off the undercover cop….

Well, I know what I have to do. They’re expecting me, the boys at Radio Shack. They probably have a pool going on how long it will take me to come back in the door, swearing under my breath, and ranting that their stupid product is defective. They’ll sigh, customers will look on in interest or disdain. It will develop that the volume button has been there all along, or that merely flipping my wrist in just such a way will roar the machine to epic volumes. I’ll learn all of this and forget half of it and have to go back and the boys will explain it all over again.

Of course, I will swear never to buy another stupid aPple product again.

Until the next sleek little device comes out….

P.S.—Jimmy, whom I know better than my own brothers, has just shown me the little dial thing. And when you have achieved the herculean task of actually making the thing play what you want it to play, then all you have to do is swing the little unlabeled dial again, and that becomes the dial volume.

Wouldn’t tell me where to get the dope, though….

All Wrong, As Usual!

OK, look—if this post is more all-over-the-map than usual, there’s a reason.

The damn iPod is all twitty again.

Or rather, it’s following its own internal logic.

Here is—I think—the explanation. 

I had a hankering to hear the opus 40 cello sonata of Shostakovich. So I went into iTunes and looked it up. And there was the big boy himself—Rostropovich, for whom the sonata was written. 

Well, that’s like hearing King James read the Bible. Nobody has ever said Rostropovich couldn’t find his way around a cello.

Eleven bucks—I nabbed it. 

Plus I got a zillion other pieces—this must have been a box set with five or six discs.

And each disc starts with the number one.

Get where I’m going? 

Right, came to the end of the 1^st movement, and then got a tango by Astor Whatever-his-name-is (Pizzarella? Doesn’t seem right…).

Fine, listened to that. Then got a bit of Prokofiev. Then the second movement of the Schumann cello concerto. Then the second movement of the Shostakovich.

Well, I either pressed the damn shuffle key again (possible) or the iPod is playing EVERY track 1 before it progresses to track 2 (likely).

Well, I’m nothing if not resilient these days—thanks, Wal-Mart!—and the purpose of the daily trot is just the trot. And saying, of course, buen día to everyone I meet.

Especially strangers.

It was a thing of Sam Walton’s—the ten foot rule. You gotta say hello, smile, and offer help to anyone within ten feet. That’s if you’re in a store. Otherwise, just smile and say hello.

Well, I did it, of course. Franny must have had some effect on me. Remember that “regular morning hour” her report card adjured on her (not sure that’s correct) when she was a kid? 

Well, when Sam speaks, you listen!

It’s part of making the day. If you’ve been laid off, you don’t get up and lie on the sofa. You grab your shoes and iPad and get moving.

And saying hello to people makes friends, connections. Which is why I was talking to Elvin, the 64 year old Nuyorican who’s working on the building next door.

Fascinating guy. Lives in La Perla, one of the most storied communities of Puerto Rico. Quite literally, the social anthropologist Oscar Lewis wrote extensively about it in 1967 his book La Vida.

OK—for people who don’t know Puerto Rico. Viejo San Juan is the oldest city on the island, and was walled / fortified by the Spaniards. It’s charming—got blue cobblestones that are iridescent when wet, wonderful colonial architecture, vibrant Caribbean colors.

La Perla is its shadow.

Almost literally.  Because the walls are still intact, and the community is wedged between the walls of the Old City and the sea. Take a look!

 Charming, right?

Yes and no. La Perla sprung up quite spontaneously about a century ago. All the cooks and servants for the rich people of Old San Juan, needed a place to sleep, right? And nobody had much money (‘cept for those rich people, who even so may not have had much…). So they went through the gates of the walls, past the cemetery, and found a little land. Built a little house with whatever they could find. And that’s where they lived. 

Everything was fine, and, in a sense, still is. Everybody knows Elvin, the guy I was chatting with yesterday. Everyone likes him. His shop is right in front of the beach, and he sleeps with his window open—no bars, unlike the rest of us. Nothing but salt air between him and the sea.

Sleeps well, too.

Unlike the rest of us, who are living in fear, in gated communities behind barred windows and doors. Oh—and the latest trend? Putting GPS sensors in your kid’s backpacks, so you can track ‘em if anything happens to them….

But if you’re safe in La Perla, you’re safer than anywhere in the world.

Why?

“Anyone messes with my stuff, I spread the word. They find out who did it, tie him up, and throw him in the ocean.”

Remember—there are sharks off the coast of Puerto Rico.

And the “they?”

Well, Spanish is less fussy about specifying the subject—less fussy than English. You can say lo encuentran—literally, they encounter him—and everyone gets it.

But the they may well be somewhat different than the good, hardworking types of a century ago. And La Perla is perhaps not quite so poor. The wood shacks have become concrete houses, over the years. And one of them—you can see from the safety of the walls—has a swimming pool on the roof.

Overlooking the ocean.

Nice!

So it’s not quite the community that Elvin remembers as a kid. His aunt raised him in La Perla. When she left the house, she told her neighbor. Neighbor looked after the house. Aunt came home, cooked, and gave the first plate—arroz conhabichuelas, no doubt, and hmmmm….I can taste ‘em!—to the neighbor.

Actually, the whole neighborhood ate together. People brought what they had, passed it around, sat, talked, laughed, told stories.

Oh, and watch out—‘cause ANY adult could smack a kid who needed it….

Well, those days are gone. Elvin worries, thinks Puerto Rico is going to hell in a hand basket. 

“I hope it doesn’t go the way of France,” he said.

“Two hundred years ago?” I said, startled.

Remember when kids knew about the French Revolution?

“Yup,” he replied.

Well, he’s a good man, my new friend Elvin. Just one little thing.

He’s technically a squatter. 

And that’s where Harry comes into the picture.

“Did you once tell me that reality is different in Puerto Rico? Years ago, in Chicago?” I asked.

“Yes.”

Look, there was land that nobody wanted and there was wood that nobody wanted and Elvin’s aunt’s father or grandfather needed a place to sleep, so what’s the deal?

Turns out that somebody wants it, now.

“Sometime between 2005 and 2007 Donald Trump was fascinated with La Perla as it would be a great place to make a resort. He was looking at it from above and wanted to walk down and see it closer but his bodyguards wouldn’t let him. La Perla residents saw this, heard him [sic.] we know what’s going on. Also some Spanish developers apparently have their eye on the area as well,” Gómez told reporters.

Go ahead, google “La Perla Puerto Rico Donald Trump” and you’ll get the prdailysun.com article from which I stole the above.

Well, I started this post by typing out the title—All Wrong, As Usual. That’s because I had read an article about how to create a great blog. Gotta have keywords right near the top (“keywords?” ummmmm???…). Gotta put in links. And tags.

I was going to tell you that I’m doing this blog all wrong.

But then Elvin jumped into the post, and then La Perla, and now we’re forced into the question of whether we’d prefer to have Trump / Spanish developers and a resort or…

…drug dealers reclining in their infinity pools after a hard night’s work in the puntos de drogas or…

…the remnants of the descendents of Elvin’s aunt, who still remember a place that was and that now isn’t and that still is.

And I’m doing it wrong?

Snit Time

I freely admit it. Yesterday, I was in a full-blown snit.

Not pretty, I have to say. And not cool, unlike the cause or object (haven’t decided which) of the snit.

Which is ironic, because I bought the damn thing out of sheer vanity—yes, I do have some—and it has done exactly what I wanted it to do.

Be cool.

All right, no fool like an old fool. The hero of this piece is a 2500$ piece of excrement called the MacBook Pro. I bought it and fell in love with it and was instantly intimidated.

The first problem was turning it on.

Does anyone remember a time when machines had buttons that said—in red letters—“power?” Or maybe “On / Off?”

This elegant creature before me has an almost invisible circle on the right side of the base. Within it is a tiny grey circle—virtually indistinguishable from the aluminum case—broken by a vertical line.

It’s characteristic Mac. If you know it’s there—great! But for the rest of us?

Take the little tiny dots that live under the programs on the dock. Doña Taí pointed them out. “When they’re illuminated, that means the program is running.”

Oh!

I hadn’t noticed them.

The same is true for the devices. I had to have an iPod, and of course was intimidated by that as well. What I didn’t know—until I pressed it by mistake—was where the volume was. I mean, come on, Steve—a device to play music with no volume control? Hunh?  And how come everyone else had theirs blaring, and mine only whispered?

Worse came when for no reason whatsoever the track jumped—I’d be in the third movement of a different symphony. What? Even crazier was to hear the B Minor Mass and get the resurrection before the crucifixion.

The little iPod has a shuffle button, you see. And just by making a sudden movement, it jumps merrily to a random track. Oh, and by the way, Steve, notice my use of the word “tracks?” Some of us use the iPod to listen to something other than hip-hop, reggaeton, and the rest. “852 songs” my iPod is reported as containing. Wrong—there are rhapsodies, partitas, suites, and lied as well.

So there I’d be, on my morning walk, and bing! I was six movements from where I had started (musically speaking).

It turns out the iPod has a tiny elegant icon next to the “play” arrow.

And I have relatively big fingers.

So that drove me nuts for weeks—until I devoted an hour or two (OK, have that nowadays…) to learning how to disable it.

But it was nothing like the problem with the iPad. This device has this cool feature—it shifts from landscape to portrait depending on how you hold it. Totally cool, except when—as I did—I tried to open an attachment John’s secretary had scanned sideways. It opened fine, but the screen kept changing every time I flipped the device. The document was always sideways.

“Oh,” cried John, “I know what to do about that!”

He was excited to be able to tell me.

“Put the iPad very gently on the side of the table. Then, tiptoe to the OTHER side, and read it standing up!”

Right…and don’t breathe on it, either.

I suppose Steve would manage to look cool doing that in public, but me? The guy who can barely balance a tray of food?

Nothing, however, is as terrible, as awful, as infuriating as iTunes. That iPod I have? It’s synched with another computer.

Now dead.

And apparently, there is no easy way for me to sync to a new computer without losing…

…those 852 “songs.”

I’ll tell you what this feels like. High School! Remember the cool kids—the kids who never got acne, who had the right cars and clothes, who got the right girls? (OK, not a big issue for me….) That’s what the Mac experience is all about.

And guess what! I’ll never graduate—never! I will ALWAYS be 17, pus-filled, acned, gangly, and seven-footed (most of them tangled with the others….).

So, Steve? This is what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna go find—if I can—my computer whisperer. I’m gonna have him rip out the guts of your beautiful machine. Then I’m gonna put the innards of a decent machine—Toshiba, maybe—in your gorgeous, eviscerated beast.

And look totally cool in the coffee shop!