Rave: JBL OnStage

Raving about things is not my normal M.O. I'm not a fanatic for the material world. Even the iPod, that ur-object in the design world, is something I often find baffling. I like the form factor in its purest sense - its heft, how slim it is, the black-on-black-on-silver chic, the way the stainless steel casing captures in cascading hillocks the greasy prints of my fingertips. It is an object I want to toss up and down and move through the air. It is Kubrick's obelisk writ small - a perfect piece of industrial design.

I like, too, that it holds all my music, or almost all, now that I am busting the seams (and, rightfully, with albums that I have both purchased and actually listened to, as opposed to simply stolen from others and then forcefully engorged my disk drive with).

I dislike intensely the navigation, the rotating wheel which is an imprecise way to jump or skip from album to album, or song to song. I take issue with the general orientation, via playlists, on-the-go lists, and the iPod Mini in its whole raison d'etre, of listening to songs, to singles, to whatever comes next, randomly, with little care for the experience of listening to albums as a whole. I dislike the little bud earphones, constantly slipping out of my ears, or being jerked out by an inopportune movement. I dislike the knock-heads of teenagers on the subway, always with the wrong speaker in the wrong ear - should we bother to record in stereo?

That said, I have an iPod. It's the second I've bought, having given away one this winter in India. Until recently, I rarely used it.

For me, music should fill a room. You should be able to move through it. Music is atmosphere.

And since, consequence of my disconnected life, I have managed to set most of my possessions in boxes on either coast, I did not have my iHome stereo in which to dock my iPod.

A short visit to J&R's today changed all of that. The JBL OnStage portable dock, a tiny air hockey puck of a thing, has been kicking out the jams all night. My life is whole again.