Sony Put Christmas Lights Inside a Speaker and Nobody Stopped Them

First of all, The Verge. I have things to say about The Verge before I even get to the speaker, and I will say them, because that's how this works, that's how a column works, you don't just leap into the meat of it like a dog through a screen door. The Verge has one of those websites now where the words keep sliding away from you when you scroll, everything's got a little card, everything's got a little chip on it that says "REVIEW" or "NEWS" like I can't tell the difference myself, like I need a chip. I don't need a chip. I needed a chip once, 1974, family trip to Atlantic City, my uncle Lonnie lost four dollars in quarters to a chip machine that gave you poker chips for a chance at a toaster, and to this day nobody in that family has ever seen that toaster, and Lonnie is dead now, God rest him, big sinuses, terrible driver, and that has nothing to do with anything, I bring it up only because the word "chip" got loose in my head and now it's out here running around your living room and I can't catch it. Anyway. The website's got autoplay video. We'll get back to that. We will absolutely get back to that.

So Sony's put out speakers. Party speakers, they're calling them, more bass, more LEDs, more connectivity, and I read that sentence four times because it's not a sentence, it's a receipt. "More bass, more LEDs, more connectivity" is what you say when a machine asks you what you want and you're too tired to want anything specific, you just want MORE, generally, in every direction, like a toddler pointing at the whole candy aisle. Nobody in 1982 wanted more of everything. We wanted less of most things and more of one specific thing, and that thing was usually a Big Wheel or a color television that didn't require a man to come to the house twice a year to hit it with a wrench. I had a neighbor, Gordy — not Gordon, Gordy, that was his whole legal name as far as any of us knew — and Gordy had the first color TV on Larchmere Street, and the deal was you could come watch it if you brought your own chair, and I want to tell you about the night we watched Hee Haw on that television but I'm not going to, not now, we'll come back to it, everything comes back around eventually, that's the beauty of a circle, which is a shape they don't teach right anymore, I'll get to that too.

LEDs in a speaker. Think about that. Think about what a speaker is FOR. A speaker is for sound, it is a hole that makes sound, and now Sony's decided the hole also needs to blink, the hole's got moods now, the hole's got a light show, and I guarantee you — guarantee you — that speaker does not sound one lick better because it's got a light strapped to its ribs. That's like putting a siren on a sandwich. Nobody asked for a siren sandwich. And another thing — and I mean this sincerely, I want somebody at Sony to answer this — when did "connectivity" become a feature you list separately from the thing itself? A phone used to connect to one thing. The wall. A cord went into the wall and that was the whole connectivity story, beginning, middle, end, roll credits. Now everything's got to connect to everything else, your speaker's gotta talk to your phone, your phone's gotta talk to your watch, your watch is presumably gossiping about you to the toaster, and NOBODY IS TALKING TO EACH OTHER, is the thing, that's the part that keeps me up, that's the part where I get the tight feeling in my chest that the doctor says is nothing, which — fine, I trust him, mostly, though I want to say something about doctors and I'm not going to, that's a different column, that's a column for a magazine that doesn't exist yet.

Okay here's a story and it's got nothing to do with the speaker, I want to be upfront about that. 1982, maybe '81, could've been '83, the years get soft on me around there. There was a man named Chick Bellamy who ran the record store on the corner by the Rexall — not a chain, a REAL Rexall, with the mortar and pestle sign, the one that got torn down for a parking structure that then ALSO got torn down, which if you think about that too long will put you in a mood — and Chick had a policy, and the policy was you could listen to any album in the store on the big floor speakers, big as a refrigerator, twin towers of walnut veneer, and you didn't have to buy anything, you just had to not touch the needle yourself, Chick did the needle, that was sacred, that was Chick's needle and Chick's hands and God help the kid who reached for it. And I went in there — I want to say a Tuesday, it smelled like Tuesday, if you know what I mean, quiet, a little bit of rain coming — and I asked him to play something, I don't even remember what, and while it's playing this OTHER fella comes in, big guy, dockworker hands, and he and Chick get into it about a INVOICE, a paper invoice, real quiet argument, the kind where two grown men are hissing at each other over a clipboard, and I never found out what it was about, never will now, both of them long gone, store's a phone case kiosk now inside a mall that's ALSO gone, so really it's a phone case kiosk in a memory at this point, which is the saddest kind of retail there is. And that's it. That's the whole story. Doesn't connect to the speaker. Doesn't connect to anything. I just think about Chick's invoice argument more than a man probably should, some nights.

Where was I. The bass. They say more bass like more bass is free, like bass doesn't cost you something. Everything costs you something. That's rule one, that's the rule they took out of the schools right around the time they took out cursive, and don't get me started on cursive, actually DO get me started on cursive, because — no. No, I said I wouldn't, and I won't, not today, put a pin in the cursive thing, it's going on the list, the list is getting long, the list is a genuine document at this point, somebody should FOIA the list.

And another thing about the LEDs — they say "party speaker" like a party is a thing that requires equipment now. A party in 1982 required a bowl of onion dip, a card table, and somebody's dad's Motown records, and if things got REALLY wild somebody brought a Betamax over and you watched it with the lights off and that was the whole party, that was the ceiling of excitement available to the human species at that time, and we were HAPPY, or at least I assume we were, hard to say in retrospect, hindsight's got a real strong filter on it, like Instagram, which I've heard of, I'm not out of it, I know things.

Speaking of dads and Motown — no, wait, that's not the story, hang on, the story is about a DIFFERENT dad, this is Petey Torkelson's dad, who worked at the Firestone plant on Route 9, and every single Friday Petey's dad would come home with his boots absolutely CAKED in this white plant dust, wouldn't take them off till he hit the porch, and he had this ritual, every Friday, he'd bang the boots against the porch rail three times — always three, never two, never four, Petey timed it once with a stopwatch he got for Christmas and clocked it at three every week for like a YEAR — and then he'd go inside and put on a record, and I don't know what record because I was never inside for that part, I was only ever on the porch for the boot part, that was as far as the invitation went, boot-banging privileges only, and to this day I don't know what record that man played every Friday and it eats at me, it genuinely eats at me, more than it should for a man I only knew from the knees down.

None of this is about the speaker. I'm aware. I want that on the record — I am aware that a professional would have found a way back to the speaker by now, would have "landed the plane," as they say, another phrase I don't care for, planes don't land, PILOTS land planes, the plane's just along for the ride same as the rest of us — but I don't work for a professional outfit, I work for whatever this is, and whatever this is doesn't require landing.

Autoplay video. I said we'd get back to it and here we are. You go to read about a speaker and a video starts playing ON ITS OWN, no request, no invitation, just BARGES in like Chick's dockworker fella, hollering about some invoice nobody asked to see. Nobody in 1982 barged. You waited to be asked in. Mrs. Halvorsen next door, sweet woman, terrible pie, genuinely one of the worst pies ever assembled by human hands, would not cross the property line without a wave first, that was the whole social contract, wave first, and now a JPEG is more forward than Mrs. Halvorsen ever was in her life, and she's been gone eleven years and I still think that pie owes somebody an apology.

So the speaker's got LEDs and more bass and more connectivity and I haven't even told you if it sounds good because nobody tells you if anything sounds good anymore, they tell you what it's shaped like and what it lights up like and how many other devices it can gossip with, and meanwhile Chick Bellamy's twin walnut towers are landfill, and Gordy's color TV is landfill, and the Rexall's landfill under a parking structure that's landfill under a phone kiosk that's about to be landfill, and I never did find out what record Mr. Torkelson played on Fridays, and cursive's still on the list, and the invoice argument is still unresolved, and I don't have a big finish for you because there isn't one, there wasn't one in 1982 either, we just went inside when the streetlights came on, that was the signal, nobody had to blink at you about it.

— Edgar, and the porch light's not an LED and it's never going to be