The bitter taste of Apple

Obviously displays of grief for this corporate Zen guru were histrionic.

We visited two Apple stores that week, in Central Park and Greenwich Village, shopping for a MacBook Pro and looking at the combination of mourners, tourists and media.

Crowds everywhere, Diana-sized piles of flowers and one store had 10,000 Post-It notes of condolence stuck on the windows.

In that week's issue of Time Out New York there was a preview for a one-man storytelling show with a photograph of a fat fella called Mike something whose show was called The Agony And The Ecstasy Of Steve Jobs - and I had a quiet laugh that his performance would be screwed up by the death of its subject matter, before turning the page, looking for cool gigs.

I forgot about it until a few weeks ago when listening to NPR Chicago's This American Life podcast which each week features unusual stories from around the US.

Suddenly, I realised the unfolding tale Mr Daisey And The Apple Factory was drawn from that same performance show written and narrated by Mike Daisey, who turns out to be one of the world's finest storytelling performers.

Daisey travelled under his own steam to China to visit a Foxconn factory in Shenzhen where iPads, iPhones and other Apple products are assembled.

His tale is powerful but never overbearing. It is first-hand witness testimony, sublimely writ poetic ahead of polemic.

A shock but not a surprise to have it brought so vividly home how all these Apple - and to be fair rival - products, from my precious iPhone 4 to the computer I type this on now, are assembled entirely by hand with no machinery by underpaid, over-stretched, non-unionised and sometimes under-age human labour.

The factories are staggering in scale - this one houses 400,000 people and operates under China's "relaxed" attitude towards human and employment rights.

The jobs are highly sought after and the wages are low compared to anything here and workers are all housed in basic dorms on site where they can be (and are) woken up in the middle of the night for an emergency shift when needed.

Daisey's show, particularly the NPR broadcast version, made waves in the US and has been a significant contributor in bringing to wider public attention this ethical dimension with our favourite electronic toys.

I'm finding it a particular moral challenge - it's easy to boycott Tesco or Poundland because of "workfair" as I loathe them anyway, yet damn impossible to give up my iPhone.

How do we progressives, who've tied ourselves so completely up in this technology, give it up or find an ethically acceptable road forwards?

Double hats off to Daisey also for posting the entire script of his show online rights-free permitting anyone, anywhere to perform it. Once they've downloaded it to their computer!

Now the Tate Gallery just purchased 10 per cent of Ai Weiwei's "sunflower seeds" artwork made from millions of hand-painted Chinese porcelain "seeds."

I didn't think purchasing a portion of a major artwork was possible but the Tate seems to have managed it and will display them as "a brand new artwork" in a conical shape.

This seems to have nothing to do with the artist's original vision of a "beach" of seeds that visitors to the Tate's Turbine Hall could walk on and sit in. So whose art is this, exactly?

Looking back, it should've been more controversial, or at least hilarious, that such a huge project turned out to contain toxic paint and we were banned from treading on the seeds as originally planned.

I guess we were distracted by the arrest, disappearance and then eventual release of Ai Weiwei in China. Different, yet the same, as the deification of Jobs as something more than a man.

The hand-painting of 10 million seeds beautifully parallels the human endeavour of assembling iPhones - I'd love to see a socio-economic comparison of the relative conditions of the people who did the work. Maybe it's even some of the same people.

During that week in New York last autumn I laughed at the show I could've gained most from.

But I don't feel too bad about that - it undoubtedly counter-balances other people who've seen my own shows advertised and had the same reaction - at which thought, I feel a lot better about it.