Matthew T Grant

I am listening to Flowers by the Rolling Stones on MOG.

I have never owned this album and, although I have yet to hear a song I haven’t heard before (I’m on “Let’s Spend the Night Together“), I feel like I’m hearing it for the first time. It’s pretty amazing.

The first thing that hits you is the bass. It’s way up front and in the stereo mix a galloping, insistent presence.

There’s also a dark noisiness—the blunt organ, the shattered drums, the jumpy, rawly harmonized vocals—that makes this thing seem both straightforward and experimental.

More interesting to me than the music—”Lady Jane” is a weird anticipation of the Grateful Dead (“Rosemary,” “Mountains of the Moon” on AOXOMOXOA) and Depeche Mode (“One Caress” on Songs of Faith and Devotion))—is the fact that I’m listening to music on MOG.

I’m sure others have written this elsewhere (if there were only a way of searching the Web to find out if anyone else has posted anything about MOG), but there is a “dream come true” quality to MOG that I can’t get over: almost any music I think of, I can listen to at will.

After a lifetime of listening to music as chosen by others, in the case of radio, or to the extent that I could access its recorded form (I include mp3 or other rips of albums to be essentially the same thing in a different recording medium or, more accurately, encoding), I am now plugged in to a vast, explorable library of music.

I must say it means that I haven’t used iTunes in going on two weeks.

And that my burgeoned cd collection seems even more archaic than ever.

As long as we have electricity and connectivity and a robust information infrastructure—and are not being attacked by government forces or rebel militia—this is how recorded music (and all recorded media?) will be consumed henceforth.

A bunch of folks I’ve known for a while have today introduced a “webbook” called the “litl.” As I understand it, what differentiates a “webbook” from a “netbook” is that the former has no hard-drive and all of your stuff lives in the cloud.

Aside from a bunch of techie stuff like running a Linux-based OS and eschewing traditional things like software, what further differentiates the litl from other laptop-ish devices is that you can set it up like an easel to watch movies or check the weather while shaving (as illustrated above).

I was around when the concept was being germinated and have watched the development of this device from afar, but have never really seen the machine in action, which I’ll get a chance to do so this morning.

Reviews are rolling in and they range from the skeptical (Gizmodo) to the intrigued (Xconomy) to the bemused (engadget). I’ll toss in my 2¢ as soon as I’ve found them.