Casey Neistat is a 22-year-old multimedia artist who lives in Lower Manhattan, so it almost goes without saying that he"s got an Apple iPod, and that he loves it, because what young, self-respecting multimedia artist in Lower Manhattan doesn"t these days? But his love was tested when his iPod went cold, and he could not bring it back to life.
It is the essential talisman of our yoga-tech times: Ownership of an iPod -- a credit-card-size, white-and-metallic digital music player -- has grown a bit culty, especially when people talk about how it has completely changed their inner musical lives. This sounds like crazy talk, until you get one, and then you understand, because now you, too, are having an everlasting love affair with something very tiny. (Here, small is good.) An iPodder has a telltale white cord coming from his coat pocket to his ears and lives in sonic smugness; he walks around in a kind of perpetually happy glaze, with his entire music collection -- as many as 10,000 songs -- going with him.