My life in Apples

[imomus]

As a complement to the Wired article that just went up, Why Apple Makes Me Cry, I thought I'd make a pictorial history of all the Apple computers I've owned. Think of it as my tribute to ultra-pretentious Nathan Barley character Doug Rocket (modelled on the Eurythmics' Dave Stewart), who installs an exhibition entitled "Laptops I Have Owned, 1993-2003" in the lobby of his money-haemorrhaging creative agency. To make things a bit more interesting, I've tried to source contemporaneous photographs of the beloved machines. I've changed Apples as often as I've changed cities and hairstyles, it turns out.

My first "Apple" wasn't an Apple at all. In 1992 I stuck a Gem Apple emulator containing the requisite Mac ROMs into the slot at the side of my Atari STE1040 and managed to run Apple System 6.0.7 very, very slowly on it. I was able to buy my first real Apple thanks to a publishing deal with Rhythm King Music in 1993. The Duo Dock 230 cost over £2000. I remember assembling the complicated structure for the first time in my flat on Cleveland Street, central London, switching it on and feeling like I had a working space craft in my house. The laptop part slotted into the desktop, taking you from a tiny 12" black and white screen to a "huge" 14" colour one. I didn't switch my music-making activities to the Mac -- those stayed on the Atari, which was pretty good for sequencing. What I remember mostly doing is playing two CD-ROMs I'd bought in Japan, "Rodney's Wonder Window" and Kuniyoshi Kaneko's "Alice". It was a good way to seduce Japanese girls, to bring them back and sit them down in front of the Duo. I remember also playing flight simulation games on the laptop while flying to Japan, and that really helping me overcome my fear of flying. If the 747's engines failed, Hellcats suggested, you still had a chance to glide back to earth.

Next thing you know I'm married and living in Paris. Shazna inherits the Duo 230 and I buy an Apple IIvi with a 17" monitor. Actually, it's the blandest and most boring computer I'll ever know. I'm struggling to keep my Apple-mania alive at this point, reading John Sculley's book about Apple without much enthusiasm (he's as interchangeable -- an exec head-hunted from Pepsi -- as the machines are). Anyway, you can see both of those computers in this big collage of my Montmartre flat, circa 1995. By this point I'm making music on the Mac, recording albums like "Philosophy of Momus" and "Slender Sherbet" on it, as well as doing the sleeves myself. I get pretty obsessed by interactive media, start a website, then teach myself Director and make a CD-ROM. Informatique sex games include capturing Laila France dribbling condensed milk out of her mouth on a webcam (it's the most intimate thing we ever do).



Next thing you know I'm back in London, in a flat in Clerkenwell overlooking Barbican tube station. I have a beige G3 tower and a flatscreen monitor, one of the first, and hilariously expensive. But you can play TV on it too. I'm separated from my wife, dating Japanese girls again. But it's Shazna who emails me from New York to tell me that Steve Jobs, newly returned to the company he co-founded, has released a new computer that looks like a cross between a fishtank and a lava lamp. In 1999 I begin my Vaudeville Tour by admiring the orange iBook Kahimi Karie's manager shows us in the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood, and end it by purchasing an orange version of the portable in Toronto.



After that there's a succession of white iBooks. I use them to make my "Stories of O" trilogy of records. The first is bought in Tokyo when I'm living there in 2001. It has a Japanese keyboard, naturally. Although I never use the Japanese keys (unless I'm asking Shizu to write something for a Google search), I consider them a badge of honour, a status symbol. I go through four of these white iBooks -- two 12"s and two 14"s -- in four peripatetic years (the white models aren't as sturdy as the molded orange one, and I see rather too much of the "blue screen of death").

Which brings us up to the present: Berlin, 2007. I'm a bit more settled these days, and my Apple plans reflect that. My next computer will be a desktop, my first in ten years. In the next couple of weeks I'm planning to buy a 24" iMac. The price of the machine can be offset by just three articles or three concerts, and I'll probably make at least one album and one book on it.

I've lost count of how many Apples I've owned -- if you include all the retro Classics and Performas I bought at markets to run favourite old sequencing software like EZ Vision, it's something like fifteen. Sure, they sometimes make me cry with frustration, but I still weep tears of delight and gratitude when Steve Jobs rolls out the new ones. It's my albums that really define the years for me, and my girlfriends. But behind those, it's my Apples. Of course they make me cry.

Comments

"GIVE ME INTERNET OR GIVE ME DEATH!"

[ex-mimic736.livejournal.com]

DUDE COME ON SERIOUSLY
DO YOU REALLY NOT SEE ANYTHING LOST IN THOSE TRANSLATIONS/TRANSITIONS AT ALL?
OBVIOUSLY IM TALKING TO YOU ON THE INTERNET SO IM NOT A PURIST LUDDITE
AND WERE IN MOMUS' JOURNAL WHERE MANY INTERNET IDOLIZERS HANG OUT
BUT HOW OLD ARE YOU EXACTLY?
I CAME OF AGE BOTH PRE-INTERNET AND EARLY INTERNET
LIKE SOMEONE BORN IN THE DAWN OF INDUSTRIALIZATION
SO I HAVE NOSTALGIA FOR BOTH WAYS

NAPSTER = HAHA FUNNY JOKE ABOUT "THE DEATH OF FILESHARING" OR WHATEVER YOU WERE DOOMSDAYING ABOUT, MR.INTERNET
DONT GET ME WRONG I LOVE SLSK
BUT I ALSO LIKED KAZAA, LIMEWIRE, AND NAPSTER
AND EVEN MY FREE TRIAL AT EMUSIC WAS ONCE RELEVANT TO ME
THERE WILL ALWAYS BE SOMETHING ELSE

HI MY ENTIRE LIVEJOURNAL IS IN CAPSLOCK COME BY SOMETIME AND BE FREINDS