sic transit Ive

Apple’s chief design officer is hanging up his skinny britches. If we’re keeping it a buck, this is probably about five years too late – the Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh was a primordial warning of what Jony Ive was capable of left to his own devices, and without Steve Jobs to keep him on the straight and narrow, it’s hard not to look at Apple’s track record and think that someone in Cupertino fundamentally lost sight of what good design means.

I mean, look at the problems with the laptop keyboards. Look at the massive swing-and-miss of the Mac Pro and the inability to replace it for six years. Look at the translucent mess of iOS 7, the compromises made to the iPhone 6S and 7 for the sake of a 3DTouch feature that never rose above gimmick, the entire experience of macOS High Sierra, the decision that the entire iPhone line was best served by making it too big to use in one hand. Steve died, and Tim was not a strong enough babysitter to keep little Jony from smearing paint on the walls.

When it comes to Apple products, design is necessary but insufficient on its own. Jony Ive’s shortcoming was to think that design superseded all other requirements. It would be nice to see the next regime place some priority on usability, pricing or just an ability to ship without backbreaking bugs (looking at you again, macOS 10.13). Who knows, we might have an outside shot at a one-handed iPhone again by 2020.

flashback, part 106 of n

The festival begins at lunchtime Friday.

They’ve closed the park behind City Hall and the Courthouse on Wednesday. You can’t really shut down the streets of Birmingham until the last minute, but by Thursday the police have placed the sawhorses and the trucks have disgorged their stages and lighting rigs and miles and miles of cable. The first acts will go on at noon Friday, in the run-up to the opening headliner. There’s always some triple-threat of headliners: an “oldies” act, a country act, and a classic R&B act, in some combination over the course of the three days. Because Saturday will start off early and go late, and the place will be packed with people and vendors. Kids splashing in the fountain, absurd lines at the beer tents, and a little bit of everything musically.

I missed the first one, thirty years ago, missed out on Chuck Berry and Travis Tritt and the Temptations. But my friends were adamant: this is the thing. This is our new future. And I didn’t miss one from 1990 to 1998, because it was the signature event of the summer. In 1990, my dad and I stood twenty feet from Charles Barkley watching Bo Diddley perform an hour and a half set that consisted of maybe four songs, with wild feats of improvisation and musicianship.  Then Saturday, everyone from Los Lobos and Dr John to local stalwarts like Slick Lily or Topper Price and the Upsetters. Then Sunday, Ricky Skaggs and the Commodores and Inner Circle, years before they recorded the theme to COPS, and Take 6 (where the crowd was packed in tight and funky and a woman behind me yelled “SOMEBODY ain’t Sure!”).

There was a message board with binder clips under letters A-Z for you to pin messages up for people, in a world without cellphones or text messaging. There was freshly squeezed-and-shaken lemonade, which was a revelation all by itself. There was funnel cake. There was half a plastic cup of Blue Nun, handed over by a friend of a friend who peered at me through a squint and said “Woody, you remind me of Robert Downey Jr.” (At no point in my life have I ever been known as Woody.) There was refuge in the Cathedral Church of the Advent, a soaring space kept miraculously cool and filled with jazz. There was immense gratitude that I’d obtained a pair of prescription sunglasses the year before.

But most of all, there was a sense that this was something cool, something awesome, something people might even come from Atlanta or Nashville or New Orleans to check out. This was something in Birmingham worth showing up for, worth staying all day and all night, and for less than $20 for the weekend. And every Father’s Day weekend was the same for the next several years running. Johnny Cash. James Brown. The Village People. Jerry Lee Lewis. George Jones. The Neville Brothers, BB King, Sun Ra, Eddie from Ohio. In 1998, the last year I attended, they drew 270,000 people. And then, my father was dead and my life was in DC and Birmingham just wasn’t a place I wanted to be any more.

Because City Stages was an anomaly. It was Brigadoon, it was this little weekend flicker of a better life. Open, walkable, easygoing, everyone getting along, a panoply of things to do and things to see and things to eat or drink (but not beer, I almost never had alcohol at City Stages because the temperatures were obscene and the lines were worse). A place you could take pride in, a place that made people’s eyes light up when you mentioned it, a place where you could just be you and hang out and have a good time just being.

City Stages went under in 2009, after years of financial turmoil and an explosion in festivals elsewhere. But before there was the Crawfish Boil in Birmingham, before there was Bonaroo up in Tennessee, before every radio station had their big summer block party festival blowout, we had City Stages. And it was enough to whet my appetite for more, and so I went, probably for good. But if I could throw on a polo shirt and some khakis and stand off at a comfortable distance to see Earth Wind and Fire, or Marty Stuart, or the Doobie Brothers, or Snoop Dogg and Taylor Hicks…it might be worth going back.

So the best possible Brexit analogy…

…Yes, it’s going to be a bit anachronistic and sexist, but that’s right on the nose for Brexit, isn’t it? (Also let me say here that I like my mother-in-law a LOT more than I like my wife’s mother-in-law, so this is not directed at anyone in particular.)

The Brexit referendum, “would you like to be rid of the EU,” is a bit like a referendum on “would you like to be rid of your mother-in-law.” And by a vote of 52-48, you decide yes you would quite like to be rid of your mother-in-law. Well, now, how to go about it? Guess you’ll just wait for her to die of natural causes. Oh no, she’s in rude health, going to live to a hundred she is. That won’t do at all.

Welp, suppose you’ll have to kill her. “But I’m not a murderer! I couldn’t possibly kill her in cold blood!” Could always hire someone. “No! That won’t do at all!” Well all right then. If you’re not going to kill her, how else will you be rid of her?

Well, you know, you could always leave your wife, then you wouldn’t have a mother-in-law at all, you’d be rid of her that way. “But I love my wife! I love my children, I won’t do that! I wouldn’t break up my family just to be rid of my mother-in-law!”** Well it’s that or murder her. I mean, you voted.

“Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea after all. It’s not worth it just to be rid of my mother-in-law.” Ah, but that’s what you chose. You can’t reconsider it now, to go back on that decision would be to blaspheme the sanctity of the decision-making process and destroy the fabric of society. You have to do away with your mother-in-law or democracy itself is meaningless.

You see where this is headed?

It’s like Star Trek, and the referendum is the illogical question that Captain Cameron put to the democracy super-computer, and now it’s smoking and sparking and barking out “ERROR, ERROR, CANNOT COMPUTE.” You can chuck Theresa May out the window (and good riddance), you can have a new prime minister, you can call a general election and set the world on tilt (and probably wind up with some sort of coalition government that has the Brexit party as either a constituent or the leading force of the opposition), but it comes down to the same three options: leave with a deal and live with the consequences, leave with no deal and face chaos (and possibly the end of the United Kingdom), or pull the plug on a bad idea and face the consequences of “subverting the will of the people” (as expressed in a nebulous referendum rife with dodgy external influences). There is no door number four unless you’re willing to wait for the mother-in-law to die and hope nobody forces the issue, and there’s a large (but still not a majority) proportion of the British electorate clamoring for someone to pull the trigger right now.

Rock, paper, scissors. The only way to solve it is by making it a decision between two options rather than three, but since nobody knows how to make “a deal” into “the deal”, nobody knows how to sanely reduce it to only two.

**(And in this analogy, the wife is actually the EU and the kids are Scotland and Northern Ireland, and guess who’s getting the kids in the divorce.)