Lo, The Moving Magazine

After a day of a spiritual community meeting event with Marty's teacher earlier today, I'm sitting here in a cafe, waiting for the laundry. The Velo Rouge Cafe, the hipster little cafe down the street from the house, is playing Fleetwood Mac's Greatest Hits album and I'm feeling completely charmed. I love this quality of the human world. Bless the Egyptians (probably even the Sumerians and Babylonians) for the existence of the Cafe. And the French and Italians for perfecting it. It's like its own little contained world. People, food, music, the buzz and chatter of life going by. You can be social or not, with someone you came with or not. You can people watch, you can computer watch. You can eat or drink, be merry. Or not.

The Velo Rouge doesn't have an internet connection (on occasions sometimes the mysterious Linksys you see around the city is up), which seems strange in our digital age, especially our digitally oriented cafe age. But due its smaller nature, it is encouraged to use up seats even if someone is sitting at a table already. Meaning, if one person is sitting at a table with three seats, it's etiquette here to allow others to sit at the same table with you. Marty and I have done this several times. Usually with someone studying on one edge of the table while we tappy tap away at our keyboards with our iPads. Once, we got crammed into the corner where there are some funky "couch/chair" like items with a couple whom we ended up striking up a conversation with. So in this way, this particular cafe encourages a more social quality.

Marty has joined me and is reading Wired magazine on his iPad while I write this. He'll be finishing up the laundry since I have to go off to a night photography class down at Pier 39.

I've always kind of poo poo'd the idea of reading books or magazines on a screen, hence never have gotten into the Kindle or Nook or any other reading device, nor even really the iBooks on my iPad. There is something to me about holding that hunk of paper in my hands. But in light of my beginning (well, always) bent towards environmentalism, I recognize that it would be more ecologically mindful to have digital copies as well as more convenient, considering you can carry several issues of many magazines/journals in one slim, light little place. And once I got Newsstand going, pulling down copies of some subscriptions I already had in place, I was sold. Blazing quality, definitely readable without eyestrain, and usually adjustable. Also, I got into comic readers as well, downloading the entire "The Walking Dead" series to read on comic. Talk about not having to worrying about archival problems.

But one thing that I really love about Newsstand and now having some of my magazines on here is something Marty and I were talking about a couple of weeks ago (while here at the Velo Rouge, doing laundry) was the musing that media such as magazines can go completely interactive in this format. And lo, as I mess around with my fitness magazine, I run across an exercise about bar lifting or some such and it shows the little pictures of how to do it, naturally, but then I notice a box with that all familiar arrow play button. So I press it and lo, it pulls up a video that proceeds to show me how the exercise is done. Okay, I am completely sold now.