LISTEN TO THE MUSIC ALL THE TIME [521]

Sony Walkman NW-A45

With my sister deciding to ditch paying Spotify to stop interrupting her music playlists with advertisements, in favour of using an MP3 player to listen in comfort, we were surprised to find that a moderately-priced MP3 player, one that supports high-definition audio, no longer appears to exist, and there is no easy way to fill the gap created by this situation.

When I say “MP3” payer, it may be more accurate to say “personal media player” or, in my case, “Sony Walkman”, having owned an NW-A45 model since 2018 that plays my CD collection in a lossless format that streaming services would require me to pay a premium to access, providing they licenced the songs to begin with.

However, searching Sony’s website reveals that, if the bottom has not fallen out of their MP3 player range, the middle has: apart from low-end, low-storage devices that can only play lossy MP3 and WMA formats, and Android-based wi-fi-compatible models made with premium components that cost hundreds or even thousands of pounds, no mid-range device like my NW-A45 is available, with “Out of Stock” messages  for these being repeated on other online stores to the point where I believe production may have ended. Perhaps Sony are concentrating on publishing and owning the music instead.

Searching elsewhere produced similar results: Amazon either had a number of cheap MP3 players, from unknown brands that give no indication of their quality, or expensive devices by Astell & Kern or Fiio, while UK store chains Currys and Argos had either a cheap in-house brand MP3-only player, or CD players that can play MP3-encoded discs.

Streaming has not killed off the demand for devices that plays the music people own, although I do wonder if some people who junked their records and cassettes in previous years have since deleted their MP3s in favour of streaming. Pretty much everyone has a device that fulfils the job of playing music files stored to it: their smartphone. Apple guaranteed this by adding lossless FLAC playback to iPhones in 2017; discontinuing their final iPod, the iPod Touch, in 2022; and consistently increasing the available internal storage of iPhones into terabyte range. The next question is how to play the files: do you want the Apple Music app to access and subsume them, or play them from “Files”, which lacks the functionality of the dedicated app, or download a third app to keep things separate? 

This circles back to the desire for a dedicated device, and why I have not downloaded my FLAC files to my phone yet. For all that a phone can do in software, and most can do most things well enough, having a dedicated device geared to produce an optimum experience for a specific task is still appreciated where they can be found. The hardware in my Sony Walkman was made like you expect a decent hi-fi system to be made, instead of like a computer that can impersonate one. 

But I know I have not been using my Walkman full-time. I have referenced here a few times that I have used YouTube to listen to music, trading the quality of the audio for convenience, listening to music ad-free there being a by-product of paying to remove ads from videos. In some cases, those songs have been uploaded unofficially by any old person that had their own copy, so I have now found myself recently tracking down and buying CDs of those songs, so I no longer miss out on the quality I am currently sacrificing. Do I save those to my phone or Walkman, and will do so push me to use one or the other in future?

I am prepared to admit that this may all be just me, that I want something that doesn’t exist. But it used to exist.

ABLE TO LEAP TALL BUILDINGS IN A SINGLE BOUND [301]

In the 1987 film “Superman IV: The Quest for Peace,” Clark Kent rushes from the Metropolis Hyatt hotel in an attempt to appear simultaneously as himself and Superman to Lois Lane and Lacy Warfield. Clark dives into a car, getting out the other side as Superman, before stepping on a granite planter to fly away.

Thirty-four years later, I sat on that very step, to eat a yoghurt I bought from the Sainsbury’s down the road. This was something I only realised later.

 

Last week, I was in the town of Milton Keynes to visit an exhibition of postmodern furniture from the 1980s Memphis collective. Anyone who knows me heard my anticipation of this visit for months. However, I also knew the modern grid of Central Milton Keynes – shortened to “CMK” on all the street signs I passed – had once been used to substitute for Metropolis, a city that, like Batman’s Gotham City, is an analogue for New York, a city distinctly more vertical than a town unofficially intended to be no taller than its tallest tree.

 

This substitution is nothing new in filmmaking, even for the Superman franchise: 1983’s “Superman III” uses the Canadian city of Calgary for its outdoor scenes, the first two films used New York itself, and all four films recreated New York street scenes on UK sound stages at Pinewood Studios and Elstree Studios, combined with second-unit photography of the real thing. What distinguishes “Superman IV” from the others is its shooting of interior scenes in CMK as well, for both aesthetic and budgetary reasons.

centre:mk shopping centre and walkway, hidden by trees

Formally incorporated in 1967 as a new town, Milton Keynes deliberately avoided being built like a regular town centre. Squares created by the grid of roads became neighbourhoods, supported by a central business and shopping district. Pedestrians are separated from traffic, surrounded by trees and plants – I had not expected to see so many dragonflies. I stayed in a hotel based in a mirrored glass office building, across from centre:mk, originally known as the courageously dull "the shopping building," a half-mile long shopping mall in a light and airy modernist design, now protected as a listed building. I had expected CMK to feel rigid and ordered, but I now want to live there. A town centre never felt so pleasant to me. Absolutely none of this sounds like Metropolis.

 

As explained in Oliver Harper’s 2017 documentary “Superman IV: The Man of Steel and Glass,” John Graysmark, as production designer, chose CMK as “essential for the budget… Basically, it’s the most contemporary architectural exercise within an hour’s journey from Elstree. That was the brief - otherwise we’d have gone to Toronto.” Graysmark was also dealing with a budget of only $17 million, less than half of the cost of the previous three films, a result of the franchise’s move to Cannon Films, a company in financial trouble that usually sold their films’ distribution rights in advance to pay for their production. This perhaps is why CMK is erroneously thought as being all the production could afford, rather than consciously selecting the best possible location. Putting a fire hydrant outside Milton Keynes train station to make it look like the outside of the United Nations building looks more than a little self-conscious, but as a wide public square, surrounded by glass buildings, it was more effective than what London could offer at the time. (The only location shooting completed in London was for the United Nations building itself, substituted by Wembley Conference Centre, demolished in 2006.)

Milton Keynes train station

One neighbourhood square along Avebury Boulevard contains Avebury House, now used as the headquarters for the retail store chain Argos, but had only just been completed when “Superman IV” was in pre-production in 1986. Next to it is a Holiday Inn hotel, and a health club and Winter Gardens, sheltering tropical trees and plants, is on the other side. Avebury House served as the foyer to the Metropolis Hyatt hotel, while one floor of the building became the offices of the “Daily Planet”. The entrance of the Winter Gardens became the newspaper’s foyer, while the gardens themselves became the Metropolis Museum of Modern Art, where Lex Luthor steals a strand of Superman’s hair from a display to create his “Nuclear Man”. The health club is also used as a gym in one scene. The Holiday Inn was not used on screen, as it hosted the cast and crew.

 

“Superman IV: The Quest for Peace” is a film that suffers when you look at it too closely. Its plot was rendered incomprehensible when test screenings led to forty-five minutes being cut from its runtime, with no reshoots. As mentioned, the horizontal nature of Milton Keynes clashes with the second-unit footage of New York, but only if you are watching the background rather than the action. The film is derided by many, including myself, as one of the worst ever made, but this comes from poor special effects, a choppy plot, and the result suffering in comparison to previous films in the series. Arguably, the film is unfinished. There is no problem with the production design – Metropolis hadn’t looked so modern before.

 

I remain surprised that no other town centre in the UK has been built, or rebuilt, like Milton Keynes. Nowhere so modern should be made to feel like a museum piece, but nowhere this modern will remain so for years to come.

Walkway under a road, garnished with rental cycle and electric scooter

S-H-O-PP-I-N-G, WE’RE SHOPPING [65]

There are those people who may miss the personal touch of a friendly face at the end of their supermarket shopping trip, but for me, the self-service checkout is a joy. I can scan what I bought quickly, pay quickly, and get back into the open air. Granted, there are those times when an item is too light to have been weighed by the machine, the occasional instance of, “unknown item in the bagging area,” and the rare treat of having the machine being opened up because it jammed itself when trying to deliver the change from the note you entered, but other than that, it is fine.

I am not anti-social – at least, I don’t think so – but I want shopping to go by quickly, without having to enter into a conversation with store staff about what I wanted, or what they think I should do – I go in, I get what I wanted, and get out. You do not want any experience that involves your unloading your choices onto a conveyor belt, so a cashier can see the results of your decision-making skills. I also prefer have the cashier being redeployed into a better job elsewhere in the shop, instead of watching them scan a particularly tricky barcode on a bag of bananas, a frustration that did not need to happen.

Superficially, self-service checkouts look like a cost-saving measure, putting one member of staff in charge of a number of machines. However, what starts as a test, or trial, only continues because the rest of us find it too useful. Shops in the UK were generally run as a personal service to all, picking the items for their customers before charging for them, until Sainsbury’s converted their Croydon branch to a self-service supermarket model in 1950, pioneered by the US store Piggly Wiggly in 1916. From then on, you take your basket, and you take what you need from the shelves yourself. It reduced queuing, and freed up staff to help with merchandising, changing the shopping experience.

From then, the more the customer can be persuaded to do themselves, the more that shopping has changed. Argos, started in 1972 as an online store without the website, have stores that are mainly storage space, where customers give staff the catalogue numbers for the items they want. Argos were primed and ready for the growth of “click and collect” shopping online, because they could now get their customers to make their usual transactions with them at home, a system that other shops have had to introduce, or build warehouses that are able to handle home delivery – Argos, on the other hand, have vans waiting out the back of their larger stores, sending out stock the same way they went in.

Will this mean the end of the shop as we know it? Will we only shop online after a certain point? There once was a time when people had to queue at their bank, within its opening hours, to take cash out of their current accounts. Now, you use an ATM to take out your cash, and make deposits in some cases – ATM makers like NCR and Wincor Nixdorf also produce self-serve checkout machines –while the majority of banking is done online or over the phone. I last walked into the local branch of my bank two years ago, and I’m not sure it will be there for the next time.