Something Different

You know, over the last few weeks, the world of Macintosh news and intrigue has fallen into a boring place. For those of you who have just joined the fold, you may be wondering what happened to the party which you thought you’d joined when you bought a Mac. I know that recently I can go a week at a time without checking macnn.com and still read the news in a few minutes. Even astheappleturns.com has been loosing my interest—and that’s saying something. Those of you that have been in the Mac camp for some time will recognize, though, that we are simply passing though the Pre-Macworld Doldrums. We are carefully balanced between the point in time in which we’ve run out of stuff to talk about from the last unveiling, and the point at which we can seriously begin speculating about Macworld. Granted, the rumor mill has begun to crank out a thing or two, but the attempts still seem somewhat weak. A third, mid-level laptop? Common. What we need, I think, is something different.

Last week, I had the good fortune of attending a show put on by the alternative music critics ‘darlings’ Tortoise, and by chance also witnessed the opening act by Japanese experimental/ambient artist Nobukazu Takemura. I’d never heard his music, but I was very much taken with his work. It hovered somewhere between dj-type rave music and the organic experimental jazz that Tortoise is famous for. But what’s the punch line, right? He had Macs. And not just any Macs, but a new iBook and a G4 Powerbook. Takemura produced the enterity of the show on these two machines. We are most likely used to thinking of our laptops as devices what help us write papers, check our email, run up our credit cards etc. What we don’t usually think of them as is instruments to make something beautiful. But Takemura was using his Mac portables as musical instruments, and indeed he was doing much more “playing of them” than “typing on them.” I was reminded of a great interview of the digital photographer Stephen Johnson in the January 2001 issue of Macaddict, in which Johnson is shown on a rocky beach, battered by waves with his G3 Powerbook hooked up to his giant view camera. In both cases we have people who bring their Mac right into the fray to use it as a tool to sachieve their art. Perhaps we too can find something beautiful to do with our laptops.