I may be still in the thrall of Jobs' charisma, but I have to say the iPhone leaves me feeling tickly and excited. They sure make gadgets a joy to use rather than a drudgery. And they care about aesthetics! Who knew?

I just heard the "Rock Me Amadeus" song on the radio so I gotta pick that as the MP3 I'll listen to. It's stuck in my head!

YOURE KIDDING, RIGHT?

fans or friends of Marriage Records i suppose

iPhone + this (http://www.appleinsider.com/article.php?id=2247) = this (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roland_TR-808). Garageband is shrinking..... a full recording studio in your pocket.

IS THIS ONE OF THOSE VIRAL ADVERTS?
mixu62

Hey! That's us! Hope you don't mind that Jona threw one of your tracks in the mix....

Delighted, Claire! And I like your track on there!

Ah, day #2,348 of being glad to have never owned cell phone.

I don't know. from the photos I've seen it seems to be about as big as an adult hand. That's some major stuff to lug around.

everyone's iphone screen will always be so greasy from their greasy cheeks >;]

Yeh that's what i thought. A big greasy nick-able phone. Lot's of school children in East Dulwich getting mugged.

I'm going to stick with my old black and white cell phone. RIght now its the only phone i have due to the fact i keep moving about every year. I'm going to stick with just my normal cell phone and use it like one does a phone.

Countdown to the thing slipping out of people's hands as they put it to their ears. That thing has a weird shape.

Hey Momus~

I was digging your blog, and the props to Jona and Khaela, when I noticed that there's a big dispute over Khaela's Wikipedia entry. Check it out at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Khaela_Maricich.

This pisses me off, because I played a show with Jona a while back and he was super nice, and I think that they're really doing neat music.

Keep up the awesome posts.

~Kyle

http://perhapsidid.blogspot.com
http://theradioproject.com

The fact that someone has cited their mention in this blog as evidence of their mainstream relevance is incredibly hilarious.

Does anybody know what the story is behind Jona not showing at their last Portland show? I asked him when I ran into him later but he didn't say much.

While it gives me a big rubbery one I'm more excited to see the technology coming out rather than the excitement and promise of actually getting one. By the time I need to get a new phone (and I'm pretty good with not destroying my phone) I hope that even fairly cheap phones will be as well designed.

are apple products really that well designed or are they going for the lowest common denominator ? - which might indeed be the mark of good (fascist) design.

I've never wanted a cell phone. I've never had an mp3 player, I want one of those but not enough to get one. I want an iPhone.

The phone looks great but I don't think it would fair well in my construction worker pocket.

I'm interested in the AppleTV and sending content from my laptop to a hi def tv wirelessly. Looks like it's tied in with iTunes but I'm sure there'll be some workarounds a la Airfoil.

I was recently arguing with my grad student room-mate how that hybrid devices are always a waste of energy. How they never give you ample amounts of each "device". You always get a crippled audio player, or a low mp camera, etc. etc. etc.

But this iPhone, seems to buck the trend.. hopefully. Except for the low gig ipod, it seems to be on the money. The talk about the casing, about whether or not it'll scratch easy or whether or not it'll slip out of your hands.. both are cheap shots. I think after last years debacle over the nano scratches they've probably done more research than they cared to, to get that fixed. And about the phone being slippery. Once again. I can't see that slipping pass them. They aren't perfect, but again, they do their homework.

ONLY APPLES

I can only imagine how frail this phone is, if the durability of the iPod is anything to base this on. I can see XBM calls for Cingular up 500% on this one....ONLY touch sensitive input? Proprietary, iTunes-only interface? A big screen with an easy-to-crack surface?



Oh, yes, Apple might just be trying to get into monopoly land like Microsoft. Expect DOJ lawsuits, soon.

Cisco is already suing Apple over this, by the way.

i, too, am a member of the apple cult (powerbook and ipods) but i don't think i'll go for the phone--it does look too breakable and i'm of the mind that it would be way too many features for me to carry around--i like my gadgets to be separate things; i guess there really are two kinds of people in the world: those that think using your hellphone to buy things from vending machines is a good idea and those that don't, for example. i mean, i don't even fancy the video ipods. i think i heard jello biafra on the radio talking about 'who wants to watch a freaking bon jovi concert the size of your thumb!' (or, i would add, at any dimensions).

it seems like it's all going to get confusing--like inspector gadget. i could see myself talking into my credit cards, or trying to answer my shoe or attempting to plug headphones into my watch, or zeus knows what else! enough already!

WELL THATS KINDA SAD IF THATS ALL JELLO BIAFRA HAD TO EVEN SAY

wow. those bechtolts get around. jona's crazy (and i mean that in the most deadly serious way. completely barking) brother organised a film screening for me in portland a year ago. have u checked out urban honking then? big portlander online community that jona is a major part of.... oh yeh, and the weird band the brothers started when they were teens.... 9i forget the name but u shud check it)

piu piu

www.tenminutesolder.blogspot.com

If I ever get one I would load it up with stuff from Fischerspooner, Squarepusher, Aphex Twin and Momus along with some classic rock and J-Rock/J-Pop stuff to name a few.

I still would not get it because for one I hardly ever use the phone. Only time I'm ever on the thing is if I need to call work to tell them I'm not coming in for the day (like today because it snowed A LOT and doing the two hour ride to work by bus in this stuff is very bad) or if I got to deal with the government which is only once a year or close to that.

Two a lot of people around the blogosphere have said it already and also on TV news the thing looks like it can brake easy if dropped and God only knows how much it would cost to fix if it brakes good enough. I think of Apples new phone the "crystal stemware" of phones: Very pretty but very breakable at the same time.

I know Apple makes some nice things I should know I used quite a lot of the major Macintosh computers back in school for my school work (my hands motor skills were very bad and slow as well) and I hardly had problems with them and they always had a nice slick look to them overall. But my God the price that Apple sets over all on almost all it's products is enough to turn the normal computer spender over to Microsoft lock stock and barrel for one of their computers instead.

Up here in Canada the iPhone is more then likely not going to show it's face for a long time and when it does it's going to cost us 700 plus taxes on top. What sucks about "the Jesus phone" (that's what people are calling it as well) for the US from what I found out just now is Cingular is the only one who is going to be providing this thing and if you want it you got to lock in to a two year contract with them:

http://consumerist.com/consumer/iphone/cingular-confirms-iphone-will-require-2-year-contract-227684.php

So that sucks quite a lot. I wonder how much times Apple will hear "Cingular Sucks!" or something to that effect to get them to open the phone up to more providers instead of just Cingular.

It wont be long before either someone cracks the thing open so it wont be Cingular only, or Apple gives in, and unlocks it. Either way, it's gonna happen.

Rather than music I would probably only load up the iPhone with the video content I watch while I'm at work. 4GB is more than enough space to hold a night's worth of viewing. I only need about 4-5 hours worth. The larger screen will be a great improvement over the iPod video.

Music would probably stay on my regular iPod, which has enough space to hold the most essential pieces of my music collection, plus some extra space for shuffling in, and out, the flavor of the week.

"I don't say I'll actually relent and buy a cell phone now, but I'm inclined to say that one reason I had to hate the things was simply that Apple hadn't made one yet"

*******

"The erasure of the personality is the fatal accompaniment to the conditions of existence that is concretely submissive to spectacular norms, and thus more separated from the possibilities of knowing experiences that are authentic and thus from the discovery of individual preferences. Paradoxically, the individual must permanently repudiate them if he wants to be respected a little in such a society. This existence postulates a fluid fidelity, a succession of continually disappointing commitments to false products. It is a matter of running quickly behind the inflation of devalued signs of life. "


"The methods of spectacular democracy are of great subtlety, contrary to the brutality of the totalitarian diktat. It can keep the original name when the thing has been secretly changed (beer, beef or philosophers). And it can just as easily change the name when the thing itself has been secretly continued. In England, for example, the nuclear waste reprocessing plant at Windscale was renamed Sellafield in order to better allay suspicions, after a disastrous fire in 1957, but this toponymic reprocessing did nothing to prevent the rise in local mortality rates from cancer and leukemia."


"The individual who has been marked by impoverished spectacular thought more deeply than by any other aspect of his experience puts himself at the service of the established order right from the start, even though subjectively he may have had quite the opposite intention. He will essentially follow the language of the spectacle, for it is the only one he is familiar with; the one in which he learned to speak. No doubt he would like to show himself as an enemy of its rhetoric; but he will use its syntax. This is one of the most important aspects of the success obtained by spectacular domination."

Comments on the Society of the Spectacle

Guy Debord, 1988

Yes, all that nonsense is intimately related to a piece of mass-marketed pablum designed to draw human attention to a bright, shiny video pebble instead of to other humans.


Can't you just say "WOOOOHOOOOO" or "BOOOOOOOO" like the rest of us plebians?

One moment you are complaining about the ubiquity of blue jeans, the next you are exclaiming at the greatness of a company whose products are owned by almost everybody. Yet, owning the former makes you an unimaginative sheep, while owning a product produced by the latter makes you a fan of "good design".

I've got that right?