As long as I'm sounding off about the current state of popular music radio, let me sneak in one more post on something else that gets my goat about it.
When I lived in New Orleans I sometimes listened to WTIX's repeat broadcasts of American Top 40 with Casey Kasem on Sunday morning. If you have the patience to sit through an AT40 program from yesteryear - and I can see how you might not have that patience - you will hear 'diamonds in the rough' thereon, e.g., Aretha Franklin covering "Bridge over Troubled Water", early Kool & the Gang, that sort of thing. However, I'm not going to talk about AT40's music today as Kasem's presentation is the part of the show that really interests me.
For each song that he plays, Kasem articulately states the song title and the name of the artist both before and after the song (if the song appears on an album he normally doesn't give the album name, but then again, his program's focus is hit singles); if the song is a cover, he'll tell you that, and who did the song originally; moreover, he often says where an artist hails from. I sincerely think that all of this is a wonderfully pro-artist thing to do and that all DJs everywhere should follow Kasem's example.
Regrettably, the management/DJs at most commercial music radio stations are pretty slack about relaying song/artist information to listeners. Maybe these people think, "Listeners who care about that stuff can go to the station's Web site or call us up." Maybe they assume that the listenership 'knows it all already'*, so to speak. Maybe they just don't care.
*This assumption is not wholly unreasonable for a classic rock station that plays a small set of songs over and over again. Everyone knows that "Another Brick in the Wall" is by Pink Floyd and appears on The Wall, right? To be sure, a majority of listeners will know this, but some listeners won't, and the station should be willing to cater to the latter group.
A true story:
For the longest time I did not know who Jewel was. I had heard her hits on the radio a zillion times but NOT ONCE did I ever hear a DJ say, "We were just listening to Jewel, doing Song X from her most recent record." This drove me absolutely nuts. If I recall correctly, I finally solved this mystery by latching onto a lyrical snippet from one of those hits and then running a Google search on that snippet - this is what I'm reduced to when I want to find out who does a song these days - pathetic, huh? (Don't ask me to watch a video channel to learn artist names: I detest music videos.)
At non-commercial music radio stations the information situation is also often problematic. College radio DJs are notorious for playing 30- to 60-minute music sets without interruptions of any kind: before the start of a set they'll tell you the first song they're going to play; after a set ends they'll usually give you a list (not necessarily a complete or correct list) of what they just played. What if you really like the fourth song of a 10-song set and can't hang around until the end of the set and are unable or not inclined to check in with the radio station to get the skinny on that song? You're out of luck. Deeply uncool.
Not-so-popular music radio
Classical music radio hosts typically do a good job of keeping their listeners informed. The presentation of jazz music radio is a mixed bag - it ranges from conscientious DJs who announce song/artist information every couple of songs to DJs who adhere to the 'let's play a whole bunch of songs in a row' model - but is generally better than that of popular music radio.
My criticisms of music radio's content and presentation will of course be irrelevant for those to whom radio is little more than a form of 'aural wallpaper', which seems to be the case for a lot of listeners out there. However, if you are interested in broadening your musical horizons - as worthwhile a pursuit in life as any, IMO - then at some point you will need to move your quest to the Web, if you haven't done so already. My reproach of WKBU two entries ago notwithstanding, Web sites of traditional music stations are a good place to start. WWNO.org offers two (NPR-free) audio streams that WWNO-FM does not. WNOE.com is a step up presentation-wise from WNOE-FM. Get going.
Saturday, May 24, 2014
Wednesday, May 14, 2014
I'd Like to Make a Request
I am not going to discuss the Grooveshark music service in detail - you can go to the service's Wikipedia entry or to the Grooveshark.com site itself if that's what you want - but will merely say a few things about my experience with the service in this post.
I did a fair amount of music listening at MP3.com during its heyday. MP3.com's music offerings were mostly chaff and not so much wheat, but that never bothered me: swimming through the chaff was all part of the listening experience, as I saw it. The MP3.com site is still extant, although it is only a faint shadow of what it used to be. It hosts 250 songs that can be streamed or downloaded; there are no selections from big-name artists as there once was. Parts of the site are dysfunctional or haven't been updated for a couple of years.
I had a small collection of MP3.com favorites that I listened to time and again. I was able to download some but not all of these songs - I still have those .mp3s, BTW. One favorite that I wasn't able to download was This Holiday Life's "Come and Remain", which I like for its U2-ish anthemic feel. Fast-forward to the present: after I sorted out my Internet situation here in California, I did a Google search for "Come and Remain" on the chance that I might find a site at which I could play it. Gratifyingly, my search turned up a Grooveshark.com page that hooked me up with the listen I was looking for.
Grooveshark is a service that allows its users to freely stream songs but not download them, and that's just fine with me: believe me when I say that I don't want a bunch of files cluttering up my hard disk. A wide variety of music is available at Grooveshark.com. If you're up for a Muzio Clementi sonatina, a Luciano Pavarotti aria, or a Hossam Ramzy belly dance (you'll have to supply the dancer ;-)), Grooveshark's got you covered.
Ah, but what about the depth of the Grooveshark library? I can report that it's pretty impressive, at least as far as popular music is concerned. Let's put the Grooveshark "Search for songs, artists, genres" widget to work:
• "Killing Me Softly (with His Song)" was made famous by Roberta Flack but was originally recorded by Lori Lieberman. Never heard Lieberman's version? Grooveshark's got it.
• In the late 1970s, "Responsibility" and "I'll Be Waiting" from Robert Johnson's Close Personal Friend got a lot of airplay on KMET, which I briefly discussed in the previous entry. Johnson is a relatively obscure artist and Close Personal Friend is his only record, and I wasn't expecting to find Close Personal Friend's tracks at Grooveshark.com, but they're there. Wow.
• When Huey Lewis and the News released "Heart and Soul", I thought, "I've heard this song before." "Heart and Soul" had in fact been recorded twice previously, and the first of these versions, by Exile (the "Kiss You All Over" guys), did indeed get a bit of airplay. Exile's "Heart and Soul" is longer and more interesting than Lewis's version; you unfortunately won't hear the former on the radio today but you can listen to it at Grooveshark.com. (The second "Heart and Soul" was by The Bus Boys: I couldn't find this version at Grooveshark but I did find it here.)
Imagine being able to call up a radio station and request a song and get it played immediately, without having to worry about the 'tastes' of the station's DJs, management, and advertisers - Grooveshark is somewhat like that.
I say "somewhat" because there are some conspicuous gaps in the Grooveshark library - run a Grooveshark search for the Beatles and see what happens - prompting the questions:
(1) Where does Grooveshark's music come from?
(2) Is the Grooveshark service legal in the first place?
To my understanding, users provide the great majority of Grooveshark's content although, per the Copyright subsection of Wikipedia's Grooveshark entry, Grooveshark employees seem to be responsible for some of it.
I can't answer the second question with certainty, but I suspect the answer is "no".
• Wikipedia notes that Grooveshark has been sued by all of the major music companies - this does seem like the sort of thing that would put the music industry in high dudgeon, doesn't it?
• Some Grooveshark song listings are in disguised form: for example, one "21st Century Schizoid Man" listing is for a song from Kkiinngg-Ccrriimmssoonn's Ttthhee-Ccoouurrtt-ooff-tthhee-Ccrriimmssoonn-Kkiinngg album - listen to it here (Robert Fripp has locked horns with Grooveshark over its hosting of his music). Would this be the case if the Grooveshark service were completely lawful? I don't think so.
I can see why record companies and artists would be upset with Grooveshark, but there's very much a limit to which I can sympathize with these parties given the awful state of today's radio listening experience. Moreover, I own hundreds of records and have been to my fair share of music shows, so it's not as though I don't have any 'skin in the game', so to speak. Grooveshark's detractors can throw stones at me if they want but as long as Grooveshark is around I'm going to avail myself of it.
Leading by example
Let me conclude this entry by noting that you can listen to "stations" at the Grooveshark Genres pane. I listened to the "Classic Rock" station for a while today: in addition to hits from Rush, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and the Steve Miller Band, I heard off-the-beaten-path songs by Styx ("Edge of the Century"), Thin Lizzy ("Brought Down"), Mountain ("Roll Over Beethoven"), the Grateful Dead ("Little Nemo in Nightland"), and Fleetwood Mac ("Morning Rain") - there was even a song by The Tragically Hip ("Pretend"). Can you now see the difference between programming that is run by music fans vs. programming that is meant to maximize advertising revenue?
I did a fair amount of music listening at MP3.com during its heyday. MP3.com's music offerings were mostly chaff and not so much wheat, but that never bothered me: swimming through the chaff was all part of the listening experience, as I saw it. The MP3.com site is still extant, although it is only a faint shadow of what it used to be. It hosts 250 songs that can be streamed or downloaded; there are no selections from big-name artists as there once was. Parts of the site are dysfunctional or haven't been updated for a couple of years.
I had a small collection of MP3.com favorites that I listened to time and again. I was able to download some but not all of these songs - I still have those .mp3s, BTW. One favorite that I wasn't able to download was This Holiday Life's "Come and Remain", which I like for its U2-ish anthemic feel. Fast-forward to the present: after I sorted out my Internet situation here in California, I did a Google search for "Come and Remain" on the chance that I might find a site at which I could play it. Gratifyingly, my search turned up a Grooveshark.com page that hooked me up with the listen I was looking for.
Grooveshark is a service that allows its users to freely stream songs but not download them, and that's just fine with me: believe me when I say that I don't want a bunch of files cluttering up my hard disk. A wide variety of music is available at Grooveshark.com. If you're up for a Muzio Clementi sonatina, a Luciano Pavarotti aria, or a Hossam Ramzy belly dance (you'll have to supply the dancer ;-)), Grooveshark's got you covered.
Ah, but what about the depth of the Grooveshark library? I can report that it's pretty impressive, at least as far as popular music is concerned. Let's put the Grooveshark "Search for songs, artists, genres" widget to work:
• "Killing Me Softly (with His Song)" was made famous by Roberta Flack but was originally recorded by Lori Lieberman. Never heard Lieberman's version? Grooveshark's got it.
• In the late 1970s, "Responsibility" and "I'll Be Waiting" from Robert Johnson's Close Personal Friend got a lot of airplay on KMET, which I briefly discussed in the previous entry. Johnson is a relatively obscure artist and Close Personal Friend is his only record, and I wasn't expecting to find Close Personal Friend's tracks at Grooveshark.com, but they're there. Wow.
• When Huey Lewis and the News released "Heart and Soul", I thought, "I've heard this song before." "Heart and Soul" had in fact been recorded twice previously, and the first of these versions, by Exile (the "Kiss You All Over" guys), did indeed get a bit of airplay. Exile's "Heart and Soul" is longer and more interesting than Lewis's version; you unfortunately won't hear the former on the radio today but you can listen to it at Grooveshark.com. (The second "Heart and Soul" was by The Bus Boys: I couldn't find this version at Grooveshark but I did find it here.)
Imagine being able to call up a radio station and request a song and get it played immediately, without having to worry about the 'tastes' of the station's DJs, management, and advertisers - Grooveshark is somewhat like that.
I say "somewhat" because there are some conspicuous gaps in the Grooveshark library - run a Grooveshark search for the Beatles and see what happens - prompting the questions:
(1) Where does Grooveshark's music come from?
(2) Is the Grooveshark service legal in the first place?
To my understanding, users provide the great majority of Grooveshark's content although, per the Copyright subsection of Wikipedia's Grooveshark entry, Grooveshark employees seem to be responsible for some of it.
I can't answer the second question with certainty, but I suspect the answer is "no".
• Wikipedia notes that Grooveshark has been sued by all of the major music companies - this does seem like the sort of thing that would put the music industry in high dudgeon, doesn't it?
• Some Grooveshark song listings are in disguised form: for example, one "21st Century Schizoid Man" listing is for a song from Kkiinngg-Ccrriimmssoonn's Ttthhee-Ccoouurrtt-ooff-tthhee-Ccrriimmssoonn-Kkiinngg album - listen to it here (Robert Fripp has locked horns with Grooveshark over its hosting of his music). Would this be the case if the Grooveshark service were completely lawful? I don't think so.
I can see why record companies and artists would be upset with Grooveshark, but there's very much a limit to which I can sympathize with these parties given the awful state of today's radio listening experience. Moreover, I own hundreds of records and have been to my fair share of music shows, so it's not as though I don't have any 'skin in the game', so to speak. Grooveshark's detractors can throw stones at me if they want but as long as Grooveshark is around I'm going to avail myself of it.
Leading by example
Let me conclude this entry by noting that you can listen to "stations" at the Grooveshark Genres pane. I listened to the "Classic Rock" station for a while today: in addition to hits from Rush, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and the Steve Miller Band, I heard off-the-beaten-path songs by Styx ("Edge of the Century"), Thin Lizzy ("Brought Down"), Mountain ("Roll Over Beethoven"), the Grateful Dead ("Little Nemo in Nightland"), and Fleetwood Mac ("Morning Rain") - there was even a song by The Tragically Hip ("Pretend"). Can you now see the difference between programming that is run by music fans vs. programming that is meant to maximize advertising revenue?
Wednesday, May 7, 2014
Checking In with the Narrowcast Media
For today's post, your humble narrator heroically listens to some "classic rock" - so that you don't have to.
I have a couple of questions for those who listen to FM rock radio:
(1) When's the last time you heard Procol Harum's "Whiskey Train", Joe Cocker's "High Time We Went", Roxy Music's "Out of the Blue", or Jackson Browne's "The Fuse" on the radio?
(2) Are you familiar with these songs?
I spent my high school years listening to the long-gone KMET, which was based in Los Angeles but whose strong signal easily reached my home in North San Diego County. KMET aired a reasonably satisfying mix of 'hits' and deep cuts from the world of rock music, broadly defined. KMET wasn't that adventurous - I can't recall it ever playing "21st Century Schizoid Man" or "God Save the Queen" - but it was nonetheless a good place to begin one's musical education.
Fast-forward to the present: What is FM rock radio like today?
To research this question, I listened to WKBU, "New Orleans' Only Classic Rock!", on the Web for about an hour and 15 minutes last Friday afternoon. During this time I was treated to 15 songs, about 20 commercials, various forms of station identification, two traffic reports, and a very small amount of chitchat from Kat, the station host.
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers' "Don't Do Me Like That" was playing when I tuned in. Here are the other artists/songs I heard, in chronological order:
The Police: "Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic"
Lenny Kravitz: "American Woman" (the Guess Who classic)
Scorpions: "Rock You Like a Hurricane"
Fleetwood Mac: "The Chain"
Led Zeppelin: "Black Dog"
Don Henley: "All She Wants to Do Is Dance"
Pink Floyd: "Another Brick in the Wall"
Lynyrd Skynyrd: "Simple Man"
Def Leppard: "Bringin' on the Heartbreak"
Journey: "Faithfully"
Metallica: "Enter Sandman"
Van Halen: "Unchained"
Stone Temple Pilots: "Plush" (unplugged version)
Free: "All Right Now"
Pretty standard fare, eh? Not a deep cut in sight. The closest we get to a 'surprise' is the Stone Temple Pilots selection: STP came out of the 1990s alt-rock era and IMO does not really count as "classic rock", at least when compared with Free and Led Zeppelin. (Don't get me wrong: I am definitely not faulting WKBU/Kat for playing STP.) You might also find the Journey selection a bit surprising in that "Faithfully" is now a staple of "soft rock" radio - I know for a fact that WLMG plays it.
WKBU's "Listen Live" widget features a Song History page that maintains a running log of the songs that are aired. For whatever reason, "American Woman" and "Plush" were not entered into the log - make of that what you will.
History-wise, the oldest of these songs is "All Right Now", which dates to 1970, whereas the newest is the "American Woman" remake, which dates to 1999, which by my arithmetic was 15 years ago. Most of the above artists have released one or more studio albums during the 1999-2014 period: Lynyrd Skynyrd has made five such records, for example. Have you ever heard any of this new music on the radio? I haven't. Maybe WKBU should call itself an oldies station, à la WTIX.
With no deep cuts and no recent material, WKBU offers a listening experience decidedly inferior to that provided by KMET back in the day. How can this be?
In her station bio, Kat says that her musical favorites include David Bowie, U2, Foo Fighters, Pearl Jam, Van Halen, and Frank Zappa. Left to her own devices, could Kat put together an interesting set list of songs from these artists on the spur of the moment? Has she ever played "Dinah-Moe Humm" during her program? Intriguingly, Kat also says that she's a fan of Patsy Cline and Frank Sinatra. What response would Kat get if she played "Strangers in the Night"? (C'mon, Kat, let's do this...)
Of course, it is extremely unlikely that Kat is left to her own devices: almost certainly someone higher up is telling her what to play. Let's assume for the moment that Kat is indeed a bona fide music fan and is not just a 'personality'; for all I know, she may own hundreds or even thousands of records and have a comprehensive knowledge of popular music. Whether or not this is true, however, it is clear that the shot-callers at WKBU and other stations of its ilk are NOT music fans, and THAT, my friends, is the real problem that plagues WKBU and FM rock radio more generally.
Actually, I can't say with absolute certainty that KMET's management/DJs were music fans either, but they were at least willing to take some musical chances, and a willingness to take risks goes a long way in determining the quality of a commercial music radio station.
Ah, but what about WKBU's advertisers? Does WKBU's management worry that those advertisers would bolt if Kat and her fellow hosts 'went rogue', so to speak? Is sheer cowardice to blame here? My listen featured ads by Terminex, New Orleans Audi, the Silver Slipper Casino, and Progressive Insurance (at this point in my life I think I would rather hear "Flo" sing than hear "Another Brick in the Wall", but that's another post for another time): Would these businesses really be scared away if Kat were to play Bruce Springsteen's "Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)", or the title track of Heart's Little Queen, or something from U2's How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb (a 2004 release that song-for-song is much better than The Joshua Tree)? I highly doubt it, although their representatives are welcome to contact and correct me if I'm wrong about that.
FM rock radio does not have to be as bad as it is - diversifying its output would attract new listeners and maybe even more advertising revenue, who knows? But it is really bad, and that's why people like me are driven to streaming services like Grooveshark, which I'll discuss in the next post.
I have a couple of questions for those who listen to FM rock radio:
(1) When's the last time you heard Procol Harum's "Whiskey Train", Joe Cocker's "High Time We Went", Roxy Music's "Out of the Blue", or Jackson Browne's "The Fuse" on the radio?
(2) Are you familiar with these songs?
I spent my high school years listening to the long-gone KMET, which was based in Los Angeles but whose strong signal easily reached my home in North San Diego County. KMET aired a reasonably satisfying mix of 'hits' and deep cuts from the world of rock music, broadly defined. KMET wasn't that adventurous - I can't recall it ever playing "21st Century Schizoid Man" or "God Save the Queen" - but it was nonetheless a good place to begin one's musical education.
Fast-forward to the present: What is FM rock radio like today?
To research this question, I listened to WKBU, "New Orleans' Only Classic Rock!", on the Web for about an hour and 15 minutes last Friday afternoon. During this time I was treated to 15 songs, about 20 commercials, various forms of station identification, two traffic reports, and a very small amount of chitchat from Kat, the station host.
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers' "Don't Do Me Like That" was playing when I tuned in. Here are the other artists/songs I heard, in chronological order:
The Police: "Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic"
Lenny Kravitz: "American Woman" (the Guess Who classic)
Scorpions: "Rock You Like a Hurricane"
Fleetwood Mac: "The Chain"
Led Zeppelin: "Black Dog"
Don Henley: "All She Wants to Do Is Dance"
Pink Floyd: "Another Brick in the Wall"
Lynyrd Skynyrd: "Simple Man"
Def Leppard: "Bringin' on the Heartbreak"
Journey: "Faithfully"
Metallica: "Enter Sandman"
Van Halen: "Unchained"
Stone Temple Pilots: "Plush" (unplugged version)
Free: "All Right Now"
Pretty standard fare, eh? Not a deep cut in sight. The closest we get to a 'surprise' is the Stone Temple Pilots selection: STP came out of the 1990s alt-rock era and IMO does not really count as "classic rock", at least when compared with Free and Led Zeppelin. (Don't get me wrong: I am definitely not faulting WKBU/Kat for playing STP.) You might also find the Journey selection a bit surprising in that "Faithfully" is now a staple of "soft rock" radio - I know for a fact that WLMG plays it.
WKBU's "Listen Live" widget features a Song History page that maintains a running log of the songs that are aired. For whatever reason, "American Woman" and "Plush" were not entered into the log - make of that what you will.
History-wise, the oldest of these songs is "All Right Now", which dates to 1970, whereas the newest is the "American Woman" remake, which dates to 1999, which by my arithmetic was 15 years ago. Most of the above artists have released one or more studio albums during the 1999-2014 period: Lynyrd Skynyrd has made five such records, for example. Have you ever heard any of this new music on the radio? I haven't. Maybe WKBU should call itself an oldies station, à la WTIX.
With no deep cuts and no recent material, WKBU offers a listening experience decidedly inferior to that provided by KMET back in the day. How can this be?
In her station bio, Kat says that her musical favorites include David Bowie, U2, Foo Fighters, Pearl Jam, Van Halen, and Frank Zappa. Left to her own devices, could Kat put together an interesting set list of songs from these artists on the spur of the moment? Has she ever played "Dinah-Moe Humm" during her program? Intriguingly, Kat also says that she's a fan of Patsy Cline and Frank Sinatra. What response would Kat get if she played "Strangers in the Night"? (C'mon, Kat, let's do this...)
Of course, it is extremely unlikely that Kat is left to her own devices: almost certainly someone higher up is telling her what to play. Let's assume for the moment that Kat is indeed a bona fide music fan and is not just a 'personality'; for all I know, she may own hundreds or even thousands of records and have a comprehensive knowledge of popular music. Whether or not this is true, however, it is clear that the shot-callers at WKBU and other stations of its ilk are NOT music fans, and THAT, my friends, is the real problem that plagues WKBU and FM rock radio more generally.
Actually, I can't say with absolute certainty that KMET's management/DJs were music fans either, but they were at least willing to take some musical chances, and a willingness to take risks goes a long way in determining the quality of a commercial music radio station.
Ah, but what about WKBU's advertisers? Does WKBU's management worry that those advertisers would bolt if Kat and her fellow hosts 'went rogue', so to speak? Is sheer cowardice to blame here? My listen featured ads by Terminex, New Orleans Audi, the Silver Slipper Casino, and Progressive Insurance (at this point in my life I think I would rather hear "Flo" sing than hear "Another Brick in the Wall", but that's another post for another time): Would these businesses really be scared away if Kat were to play Bruce Springsteen's "Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)", or the title track of Heart's Little Queen, or something from U2's How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb (a 2004 release that song-for-song is much better than The Joshua Tree)? I highly doubt it, although their representatives are welcome to contact and correct me if I'm wrong about that.
FM rock radio does not have to be as bad as it is - diversifying its output would attract new listeners and maybe even more advertising revenue, who knows? But it is really bad, and that's why people like me are driven to streaming services like Grooveshark, which I'll discuss in the next post.
Sunday, March 16, 2014
Musical Loose Ends
My NOLA Library CD tour did not end with Norah Jones. I was able to sneak in two last listens before my time ran out:
(1) Actual Sounds + Voices, a 1998 release from Meat Beat Manifesto
(2) The Next Day, the most recent release from David Bowie
Actual Sounds + Voices
Rather than reach for a term like "electronica" or "industrial", I'll characterize Meat Beat Manifesto's output as "abstract beat music that makes liberal use of samples", which is not always the case but that's the description I'm gonna go with. MBM is a band that you find out about from college radio or a video channel or perhaps most importantly word of mouth - you won't hear it on a commercial radio station. (If you have heard MBM on a commercial station, you are welcome to correct me.) I myself was acquainted with MBM in 1989 or 1990 by WKDU, the radio station of Drexel University in Philadelphia, when one night DJ Chris Vecchio played "Strap Down (Part 1)" from Storm the Studio, MBM's debut record, which I subsequently purchased at Third Street Jazz and Rock, which sadly went out of business in the late 1990s.
Fast forward to my time in the Big Easy. From January 2006 to August 2008 - up until the time we were 'swiped' by Hurricane Gustav - I satisfied my listening fix via the CD collection at New Orleans' Main Library, from which I checked out MBM's Subliminal Sandwich in February 2008. Subliminal Sandwich is a sprawling 28-track double CD whose second, more experimental disc contains some seriously mind-blowing music.
That brings us to Actual Sounds + Voices, which I checked out from the Latter Library last July and which is similar in style to the first Subliminal Sandwich disc. My favorite Actual Sounds + Voices track is the eerie "Hail to the Bopp", whose
(1-5) five minutes of jazz* and then
(6-8) three minutes of spaciness that could have been written by György Ligeti and then
(9-11) an aggressive groove for the last three minutes.
*"Let Go" also has a jazzy feel: given the free-form nature of many MBM compositions, one could be forgiven for suspecting that, deep down, MBM leader and mainstay Jack Dangers, who plays the clarinet, is a Miles Davis wannabe.
The Next Day
David Bowie has been on the scene for almost fifty years although he hasn't been making music for all of that time. A 10-year gap separates The Next Day and Reality, Bowie's previous studio record, and I believe that Bowie himself was putting out an "I'm retired" vibe for much of the 2000s. Is The Next Day a one-off or is there more to be drawn from the Bowie well? Only time will tell.
On my Blogger profile page I state,
So what did I think of The Next Day? The Next Day is a modern rock record with as much edge as could be expected from someone in his mid-60s; it's a good record but not as groundbreaking as Bowie's best work (but what is?) - quality-wise it's much closer to Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) than to Let's Dance. Favorite tracks: "The Next Day", "Valentine's Day", and "Dancing Out in Space".
Bowie is one of many artists who got a lot of radio airplay back in the 1970s but have now all but vanished from the airwaves (at least this is so in New Orleans). I will take aim at the dreadful state of FM rock radio in a future post.
Ah, it was a glorious run, but all good things must come to an end. There were a number of CDs in the Latter stacks that I wanted to get to, but didn't: Reba McEntire's Keep On Loving You, Atoms for Peace's Amok, and Jennifer Hudson's eponymous debut were on my short list of items to check out. C'est la vie.
I am no longer within walking distance of a library but I do now have a broadband Web connection and for the last couple of months I've been wading through the musical archives at Grooveshark.com, which I'll write about when I can get around to it.
(1) Actual Sounds + Voices, a 1998 release from Meat Beat Manifesto
(2) The Next Day, the most recent release from David Bowie
Actual Sounds + Voices
Rather than reach for a term like "electronica" or "industrial", I'll characterize Meat Beat Manifesto's output as "abstract beat music that makes liberal use of samples", which is not always the case but that's the description I'm gonna go with. MBM is a band that you find out about from college radio or a video channel or perhaps most importantly word of mouth - you won't hear it on a commercial radio station. (If you have heard MBM on a commercial station, you are welcome to correct me.) I myself was acquainted with MBM in 1989 or 1990 by WKDU, the radio station of Drexel University in Philadelphia, when one night DJ Chris Vecchio played "Strap Down (Part 1)" from Storm the Studio, MBM's debut record, which I subsequently purchased at Third Street Jazz and Rock, which sadly went out of business in the late 1990s.
Fast forward to my time in the Big Easy. From January 2006 to August 2008 - up until the time we were 'swiped' by Hurricane Gustav - I satisfied my listening fix via the CD collection at New Orleans' Main Library, from which I checked out MBM's Subliminal Sandwich in February 2008. Subliminal Sandwich is a sprawling 28-track double CD whose second, more experimental disc contains some seriously mind-blowing music.
That brings us to Actual Sounds + Voices, which I checked out from the Latter Library last July and which is similar in style to the first Subliminal Sandwich disc. My favorite Actual Sounds + Voices track is the eerie "Hail to the Bopp", whose
Come [and] join usspoken-word sample may be from Marshall Applewhite of the Heaven's Gate cult, but don't quote me on that. A second highlight is the 11-minute "The Thumb", which comprises
(1-5) five minutes of jazz* and then
(6-8) three minutes of spaciness that could have been written by György Ligeti and then
(9-11) an aggressive groove for the last three minutes.
*"Let Go" also has a jazzy feel: given the free-form nature of many MBM compositions, one could be forgiven for suspecting that, deep down, MBM leader and mainstay Jack Dangers, who plays the clarinet, is a Miles Davis wannabe.
The Next Day
David Bowie has been on the scene for almost fifty years although he hasn't been making music for all of that time. A 10-year gap separates The Next Day and Reality, Bowie's previous studio record, and I believe that Bowie himself was putting out an "I'm retired" vibe for much of the 2000s. Is The Next Day a one-off or is there more to be drawn from the Bowie well? Only time will tell.
On my Blogger profile page I state,
My favorite record of all time would probably be Jeff Beck's Wired.However, if I were to choose a favorite set of records it would be the Bowie records running from Station to Station to Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps), inclusive; excluding the live Stage, I own all of these records plus Never Let Me Down and Outside. I have heard Young Americans and Let's Dance in their entireties and, like any self-respecting music listener, know Bowie's 1969-1974 hits like the back of my hand. Adding it all up leaves plenty of Bowie territory that I am unfamiliar with.
So what did I think of The Next Day? The Next Day is a modern rock record with as much edge as could be expected from someone in his mid-60s; it's a good record but not as groundbreaking as Bowie's best work (but what is?) - quality-wise it's much closer to Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) than to Let's Dance. Favorite tracks: "The Next Day", "Valentine's Day", and "Dancing Out in Space".
Bowie is one of many artists who got a lot of radio airplay back in the 1970s but have now all but vanished from the airwaves (at least this is so in New Orleans). I will take aim at the dreadful state of FM rock radio in a future post.
Ah, it was a glorious run, but all good things must come to an end. There were a number of CDs in the Latter stacks that I wanted to get to, but didn't: Reba McEntire's Keep On Loving You, Atoms for Peace's Amok, and Jennifer Hudson's eponymous debut were on my short list of items to check out. C'est la vie.
I am no longer within walking distance of a library but I do now have a broadband Web connection and for the last couple of months I've been wading through the musical archives at Grooveshark.com, which I'll write about when I can get around to it.
Thursday, March 13, 2014
Confessions of a Pedestrian
If you've been following the news lately, then you know that New York City's new mayor, Bill de Blasio, intends to take a hard(er) line on jaywalking. I understand why he's doing this, but speaking as a longtime urban pedestrian, I think it's a bad idea - and then some. It's a bad idea because, 'all things being equal', it is in fact safer to jaywalk than it is to walk across a street at an intersection.
Let me begin by getting an acknowledgement out of the way. Crossing a street on foot does require you to pay attention, and if you're not willing to pay attention, then you really shouldn't expect anyone to feel sorry for you if you end up getting hit by a car. Crossing a street should be a 'dedicated' activity: you shouldn't be doing anything else - making a phone call, texting, whatever - while you're doing it.
My argument parallels an observation made by Tom Vanderbilt in a "When Pedestrians Get Mixed Signals" op-ed that was recently published by The New York Times:
(1) You are on the southwestern corner of an intersection and you want to walk across the street from south to north, and you have a green light.
(2) Directly in front of you is a western motorist who has a red light and who wants to make a right turn and go south.
(3) Directly to your right is a one-way flow of traffic that runs from north to south. The western motorist is looking northward, watching the traffic, and is completely oblivious to you, the pedestrian at the intersection. You begin crossing the street. Meanwhile, a brief break in the traffic spurs the motorist to begin turning right.
Folks, I have come exceedingly close to being hit in this exact situation. (If there are any NOLA readers in the audience, this happened to me at the corner of St. Charles and Louisiana in the course of walking from the Exxon corner to the Rite-Aid corner.) So let's say it one more time,
The "When Pedestrians Get Mixed Signals" article concludes with a cynical comment on law enforcement's attitude toward pedestrians:
And now for something completely different…Everyone else has commented on Arthur Chu's spectacular run on Jeopardy!, so I thought I would as well, being the loyal Jeopardy! viewer that I am.
Arthur Chu was a formidable contestant, and he played to win, as was certainly his prerogative; there was nothing stopping other contestants from adopting his unorthodox tactics and trying to beat him at his own game. As he worked the board, Chu exuded an air of confident competence, and I enjoyed watching him and rooted for him for that very reason, and I'll miss his presence in tonight's show. (Indeed, I suspect it was his demeanor, vis-à-vis his hopscotch approach to the clues, that actually annoyed his detractors.) However, I knew it was only a matter of time until one or more bad bets knocked him off his throne, as happened last night.
FWIW, I missed Chu's first win because the 28 January episode of Jeopardy! was preempted by President Obama's State of the Union address; why anyone would substitute the latter for the former is beyond my comprehension but evidently the directors at NBC felt differently.
Let me begin by getting an acknowledgement out of the way. Crossing a street on foot does require you to pay attention, and if you're not willing to pay attention, then you really shouldn't expect anyone to feel sorry for you if you end up getting hit by a car. Crossing a street should be a 'dedicated' activity: you shouldn't be doing anything else - making a phone call, texting, whatever - while you're doing it.
My argument parallels an observation made by Tom Vanderbilt in a "When Pedestrians Get Mixed Signals" op-ed that was recently published by The New York Times:
I routinely jaywalk across one-way streets with my young daughter in our Brooklyn neighborhood. I do this not as an act of vigilante pedestrianism, but simply because the times we came closest to being hit by cars were when we had the “Walk” signal and a driver attempted to make a turn.Yes! A fellow veteran of the streets who gets it! As a public service of sorts, allow me to flesh out the preceding blockquote with the following scenario:
(1) You are on the southwestern corner of an intersection and you want to walk across the street from south to north, and you have a green light.
(2) Directly in front of you is a western motorist who has a red light and who wants to make a right turn and go south.
(3) Directly to your right is a one-way flow of traffic that runs from north to south. The western motorist is looking northward, watching the traffic, and is completely oblivious to you, the pedestrian at the intersection. You begin crossing the street. Meanwhile, a brief break in the traffic spurs the motorist to begin turning right.
Folks, I have come exceedingly close to being hit in this exact situation. (If there are any NOLA readers in the audience, this happened to me at the corner of St. Charles and Louisiana in the course of walking from the Exxon corner to the Rite-Aid corner.) So let's say it one more time,
<strong>ly: It is simply not true that it is safer to cross at an intersection than it is to jaywalk; show me someone who holds otherwise and I'll show you someone who is not a pedestrian.The "When Pedestrians Get Mixed Signals" article concludes with a cynical comment on law enforcement's attitude toward pedestrians:
The Los Angeles Police Department may be patrolling on foot in downtown Los Angeles, but it is still looking through the windshield.It's not just the police, Tom: as long as society in general is
looking through the windshield(as you intimate earlier in the article), it should be legal to jaywalk.
And now for something completely different…Everyone else has commented on Arthur Chu's spectacular run on Jeopardy!, so I thought I would as well, being the loyal Jeopardy! viewer that I am.
Arthur Chu was a formidable contestant, and he played to win, as was certainly his prerogative; there was nothing stopping other contestants from adopting his unorthodox tactics and trying to beat him at his own game. As he worked the board, Chu exuded an air of confident competence, and I enjoyed watching him and rooted for him for that very reason, and I'll miss his presence in tonight's show. (Indeed, I suspect it was his demeanor, vis-à-vis his hopscotch approach to the clues, that actually annoyed his detractors.) However, I knew it was only a matter of time until one or more bad bets knocked him off his throne, as happened last night.
FWIW, I missed Chu's first win because the 28 January episode of Jeopardy! was preempted by President Obama's State of the Union address; why anyone would substitute the latter for the former is beyond my comprehension but evidently the directors at NBC felt differently.
Monday, March 10, 2014
Wired for Speed
I noted last time that my NOLA-to-Vista move did not include any large appliances. However, I did bring with me a large (5' x 28" x 24") desk that I got from a thrift store in Philadelphia for $35 in a real steal of a deal not quite twenty years ago. Shortly after my belongings arrived, I and my father moved my desk into my bedroom, and then I set up my computer.
If you've followed my blogging efforts, then you know that I've been embarrassingly procrastinative about upgrading my dial-up Internet connection to a broadband Internet connection. Now, here in Vista I could continue to access the Web via my EarthLink dial-up service if I really wanted to, but anyone who has gone from dial-up to broadband can tell you that surfing the Web with a dial-up connection is akin to working with one hand tied behind your back, and I have rather had my fill of the dial-up experience, as you can well imagine.
My Intel Core 2 Duo iMac is equipped with an AirPort Extreme card via which I can piggyback on a neighbor's Cox cable Internet connection, but I don't want to do that either. My father himself has an AT&T U-verse DSL Internet connection, however, and I'm thinking, "There's gotta be some way I can hook up my computer to his system, right?"
An AT&T technician who we'll call "James" set up my father's U-verse system in June 2013. When James was done setting up the system, he didn't give my father a manual therefor but he did leave behind a four-page leaflet containing an AT&T "pledge" -
While I was waiting for James to return my call, it occurred to me: Dude, why don't you do some homework on this? Whenever you are having some kind of problem with a computer, you can take it to the bank that someone out there has experienced that exact same problem - there are no new computer problems under the sun. So I went to Google and did a U-verse connect second computer search.
As it happened, I didn't need to get any help from 'someone out there': my search's first page of results linked to a series of articles from AT&T itself addressing my issue. The first of these hits, a "Connecting a computer to your Wi-Fi home network" article, recommended:
FYI:
• The second U-verse connect second computer result, a "Connecting Computers to the AT&T U-verse Gateway" .pdf, confirmed that I could indeed interface with the system by Ethernetically connecting my computer to the gateway.
• An i38HG gateway manual Google search led me to a user guide applicable to the system.
James never did return my call - let's hear it for AT&T's award-winning customer service, eh? But all's well that ends well. I now have a DSL connection to the Web; it's not that fast of a connection in absolute terms - AT&T's own High Speed Internet Speed Test page clocks its download speed at about 7.6 megabits per second - but it's waaayyyy faster than dial-up. At long last I can watch YouTube cat videos! ;-)
An elephant remains in the room: What am I gonna do about my EarthLink dial-up account? As of this writing, I am paying $21.95/month for a service I would seem to not be using. However, I am actually getting something for that money:
(1) EarthLink's home.earthlink.net server hosts about 7 MB of external files - demos and images - for my blogs.
(2) Much less importantly, I still use the email part of the service to some extent, although I have now routed most of my email traffic to my apeak02@gmail.com address.
If I were to cancel my EarthLink service, then EarthLink would immediately pull the plug on the home.earthlink.net material, which would leave 'holes' in many of my blog entries, and that would really bum me out, to put it mildly. Given the time and energy it would take to migrate my stuff to another Web hosting service, is it worth it to stay with EarthLink, at least for the short term? Stay tuned.
If you've followed my blogging efforts, then you know that I've been embarrassingly procrastinative about upgrading my dial-up Internet connection to a broadband Internet connection. Now, here in Vista I could continue to access the Web via my EarthLink dial-up service if I really wanted to, but anyone who has gone from dial-up to broadband can tell you that surfing the Web with a dial-up connection is akin to working with one hand tied behind your back, and I have rather had my fill of the dial-up experience, as you can well imagine.
My Intel Core 2 Duo iMac is equipped with an AirPort Extreme card via which I can piggyback on a neighbor's Cox cable Internet connection, but I don't want to do that either. My father himself has an AT&T U-verse DSL Internet connection, however, and I'm thinking, "There's gotta be some way I can hook up my computer to his system, right?"
An AT&T technician who we'll call "James" set up my father's U-verse system in June 2013. When James was done setting up the system, he didn't give my father a manual therefor but he did leave behind a four-page leaflet containing an AT&T "pledge" -
It is my goal to provide the best service experience possible …blah blah blah - and a brief survey and other information. The leaflet's second page features James' work phone number, so I called the number and left a relevant message on his voicemail; my intuition told me that running an Ethernet cable from my computer to the system was all I needed to do, but I thought it would be a good idea to check with him to make sure.
While I was waiting for James to return my call, it occurred to me: Dude, why don't you do some homework on this? Whenever you are having some kind of problem with a computer, you can take it to the bank that someone out there has experienced that exact same problem - there are no new computer problems under the sun. So I went to Google and did a U-verse connect second computer search.
As it happened, I didn't need to get any help from 'someone out there': my search's first page of results linked to a series of articles from AT&T itself addressing my issue. The first of these hits, a "Connecting a computer to your Wi-Fi home network" article, recommended:
Try This FirstI myself am a big believer in trying the simplest things first. I trotted over to the 2Wire i38HG residential gateway connected to my father's computer and wrote down the SSID and WI-FI KEY values that appeared thereon (below the third bar code). I went back to my computer, opened the Network pane of the System Preferences application, selected the AirPort option in the pane's left-hand menu, and turned AirPort on. Gratifyingly, the SSID value appeared in the pane's Network Name menu; upon selecting the value I was prompted for a password. I entered the WI-FI KEY value into the Password field and clicked the button. Within a few seconds the pane displayed an
Once you've switched your wireless to On, have your Wi-Fi Network Name and password (found on the side of your AT&T provided gateway) available to enter into your network connections.
AirPort is connected …message. Yes!
FYI:
• The second U-verse connect second computer result, a "Connecting Computers to the AT&T U-verse Gateway" .pdf, confirmed that I could indeed interface with the system by Ethernetically connecting my computer to the gateway.
• An i38HG gateway manual Google search led me to a user guide applicable to the system.
James never did return my call - let's hear it for AT&T's award-winning customer service, eh? But all's well that ends well. I now have a DSL connection to the Web; it's not that fast of a connection in absolute terms - AT&T's own High Speed Internet Speed Test page clocks its download speed at about 7.6 megabits per second - but it's waaayyyy faster than dial-up. At long last I can watch YouTube cat videos! ;-)
An elephant remains in the room: What am I gonna do about my EarthLink dial-up account? As of this writing, I am paying $21.95/month for a service I would seem to not be using. However, I am actually getting something for that money:
(1) EarthLink's home.earthlink.net server hosts about 7 MB of external files - demos and images - for my blogs.
(2) Much less importantly, I still use the email part of the service to some extent, although I have now routed most of my email traffic to my apeak02@gmail.com address.
If I were to cancel my EarthLink service, then EarthLink would immediately pull the plug on the home.earthlink.net material, which would leave 'holes' in many of my blog entries, and that would really bum me out, to put it mildly. Given the time and energy it would take to migrate my stuff to another Web hosting service, is it worth it to stay with EarthLink, at least for the short term? Stay tuned.
Monday, February 3, 2014
History in Motion
Moving is always a headache, whether you are moving across the country or overseas or just across town, whether you are moving a lot or just a little bit of stuff.
There is a vast amount of moving information out there and it is not so easy to sift through. An argument can be made that the Web has made the moving process more difficult in that it has greatly enlarged the information haystack; moreover, the Web is not a substitute for speaking with a 'relocation consultant' on the phone. I nevertheless began my own process for moving my belongings from New Orleans to Vista with a long distance movers new orleans (or something like that) Google search.
The moving business has diversified: in addition to the
(A) moving companies that do it all and
(B) doing it all yourself with a U-Haul truck
standard options, there are now
(C) container services that will drive your stuff from Point A to Point B but expect you to load and unload it (e.g., U-Pack) and complementarily
(D) companies that only un/load but don't do any actual moving.
Being a non-motorist and not having anyone to help me on the New Orleans side, I wanted an (A) company.
My quote quest began with Thumbtack, an all-purpose service broker. After I filled out a brief form for my move, Thumbtack initially promised to
*I indicated on the form that my move was for a studio apartment (the smallest choice) but the form did not contain a comment box for providing more detail; Turnaround probably assumed that my move included several large appliances (a refrigerator, an oven, a dishwasher), which was not the case.
CORRECTION: I rechecked with Thumbtack and its long-distance moving form does in fact include an
BTW, Yelp did not prove that helpful in my long distance movers new orleans search, which is not so surprising given that Yelp's focus is local businesses vis-à-vis interstate ones; however, Yelp did at least enable me to weed out various we-don't-go-outside-of-Louisiana businesses that were not suitable for my move.
On the right side(s) of the Google search pages were a series of ads for discount 'movers' that, like Thumbtack, don't do any moving themselves but instead serve as intermediaries between movees and actual moving companies. I submitted move information to at least two** of these outfits: Budget Van Lines and OrbitzMoving.com (**I seem to recall also doing so at either GetMove.com or GotMovers.com but I just can't remember). Budget Van Lines responded directly to me with a $1333.50 quote. Meanwhile, I received emails or phone calls from five companies (presumably) contracting for OrbitzMoving.com:
(1-2) Allied Van Lines and North American Van Lines wanted to actually come to my apartment and look over my stuff, and would not give me a quote without doing that.
(3-4) Cross Country Movers and Global Transportation offered me quotes in the neighborhood of $1100.
(5) World Wide Van Lines sent me a
At the time that I had to make a decision, I had a Global Transportation 'email trail' - an introductory letter and a
Departure
Global Transportation itself did not move my belongings but rather subcontracted the job to Chico and the Men, a Slidell-based moving company.
A three-person Chico team - two dedicated movers and a paperwork guy who helped the movers a bit - showed up slightly late on the day of the move. The two movers put me at ease; as I watched them it was clear to me that they knew what they were doing. In contrast, the paperwork guy seemed to be going by the seat of his pants:
(1) He asked me to input address and/or credit card data - data that I had given to my Global Transportation contact and that he should have had on hand - into a number of forms.
(2) He asked me for a photo ID and seemed confused when I handed him my passport; he called up a superior to ensure that a passport was an acceptable form of ID (it was). He then told me that I would have to send photocopies of (a) my passport photo and (b-c) the front and back of my credit card to Chico's headquarters before Chico would ship my goods.
(3) He finally told me that it would take at least three weeks to deliver my shipment whereas Global Transportation's binding estimate email had said I would get it in 5-14 business days.
I felt a sense of great relief as the moving truck drove away. "At long last I am getting out of New Orleans," I thought.
Connecting timeline
• My belongings were carted away on 10 December.
• I left New Orleans by train on 11 December and arrived in California on 13 December.
• The aforediscussed photo/credit card photocopies were obtained and then faxed back to Slidell on 14 December.
• On 29 December I got a call from a Chico employee: "Your shipment will arrive in 5-7 days; a day before the delivery the movers will call you to give you a heads-up."
Arrival
On 4 January a mover called me with the news that
(a) my belongings would be delivered the next day but
(b) they were sitting in a massive truck that could not be driven to my precise location and
(c) they would have to be transferred to a smaller U-Haul truck for delivery, which would require an additional $300 cash payment.
It crossed my mind that he was lying about the truck business, but at that point I was eager to get the whole thing over with so I said, "OK, let's do it." Had I known this would happen I would have chosen Cross Country Movers for my move.
(In retrospect there were two Global Transportation minor red flags that might also have steered me to Cross Country Movers:
(1) Global Transportation was difficult to get through to on the phone.
(2) Global Transportation's introductory letter email concluded with a www.globaltn.net Web site URL that points to a "This Web page is parked for FREE, courtesy of GoDaddy.com" page.
Maybe these were relevant considerations, maybe not.)
At about 10:15 the following morning the mover - one guy - arrived with the U-Haul truck, in which my belongings were commingled with someone else's belongings; he would have given me the whole lot had I not said, "Hold it, this other stuff isn't mine." After my items were unloaded, I handed the mover the $300 and signed off on an inventory sheet, and that was that.
I'll write more about my 'new life' in California as time permits.
There is a vast amount of moving information out there and it is not so easy to sift through. An argument can be made that the Web has made the moving process more difficult in that it has greatly enlarged the information haystack; moreover, the Web is not a substitute for speaking with a 'relocation consultant' on the phone. I nevertheless began my own process for moving my belongings from New Orleans to Vista with a long distance movers new orleans (or something like that) Google search.
The moving business has diversified: in addition to the
(A) moving companies that do it all and
(B) doing it all yourself with a U-Haul truck
standard options, there are now
(C) container services that will drive your stuff from Point A to Point B but expect you to load and unload it (e.g., U-Pack) and complementarily
(D) companies that only un/load but don't do any actual moving.
Being a non-motorist and not having anyone to help me on the New Orleans side, I wanted an (A) company.
My quote quest began with Thumbtack, an all-purpose service broker. After I filled out a brief form for my move, Thumbtack initially promised to
deliver multiple quotes from pre-screened prosbut subsequently put me in touch with a single, not-NOLA-based mover - Turnaround Moving Service in Geismar, LA - that offered me a wildly uncompetitive quote* of $6500, which was a good thing in the sense that it spurred me to get up off my duff and go get a better quote.
*I indicated on the form that my move was for a studio apartment (the smallest choice) but the form did not contain a comment box for providing more detail; Turnaround probably assumed that my move included several large appliances (a refrigerator, an oven, a dishwasher), which was not the case.
CORRECTION: I rechecked with Thumbtack and its long-distance moving form does in fact include an
Anything else the mover should know?comment box, in which I didn't enter anything, so evidently I'm to blame for what happened. The moral of the story: The more details you provide to the mover, the more accurate your moving quote is going to be.
BTW, Yelp did not prove that helpful in my long distance movers new orleans search, which is not so surprising given that Yelp's focus is local businesses vis-à-vis interstate ones; however, Yelp did at least enable me to weed out various we-don't-go-outside-of-Louisiana businesses that were not suitable for my move.
On the right side(s) of the Google search pages were a series of ads for discount 'movers' that, like Thumbtack, don't do any moving themselves but instead serve as intermediaries between movees and actual moving companies. I submitted move information to at least two** of these outfits: Budget Van Lines and OrbitzMoving.com (**I seem to recall also doing so at either GetMove.com or GotMovers.com but I just can't remember). Budget Van Lines responded directly to me with a $1333.50 quote. Meanwhile, I received emails or phone calls from five companies (presumably) contracting for OrbitzMoving.com:
(1-2) Allied Van Lines and North American Van Lines wanted to actually come to my apartment and look over my stuff, and would not give me a quote without doing that.
(3-4) Cross Country Movers and Global Transportation offered me quotes in the neighborhood of $1100.
(5) World Wide Van Lines sent me a
not to exceed moving quoteof $5,599.95.
At the time that I had to make a decision, I had a Global Transportation 'email trail' - an introductory letter and a
binding estimatecontract of sorts - whereas Cross Country Movers hadn't sent me any emails at all, so I went with Global Transportation for my move.
Departure
Global Transportation itself did not move my belongings but rather subcontracted the job to Chico and the Men, a Slidell-based moving company.
A three-person Chico team - two dedicated movers and a paperwork guy who helped the movers a bit - showed up slightly late on the day of the move. The two movers put me at ease; as I watched them it was clear to me that they knew what they were doing. In contrast, the paperwork guy seemed to be going by the seat of his pants:
(1) He asked me to input address and/or credit card data - data that I had given to my Global Transportation contact and that he should have had on hand - into a number of forms.
(2) He asked me for a photo ID and seemed confused when I handed him my passport; he called up a superior to ensure that a passport was an acceptable form of ID (it was). He then told me that I would have to send photocopies of (a) my passport photo and (b-c) the front and back of my credit card to Chico's headquarters before Chico would ship my goods.
(3) He finally told me that it would take at least three weeks to deliver my shipment whereas Global Transportation's binding estimate email had said I would get it in 5-14 business days.
I felt a sense of great relief as the moving truck drove away. "At long last I am getting out of New Orleans," I thought.
Connecting timeline
• My belongings were carted away on 10 December.
• I left New Orleans by train on 11 December and arrived in California on 13 December.
• The aforediscussed photo/credit card photocopies were obtained and then faxed back to Slidell on 14 December.
• On 29 December I got a call from a Chico employee: "Your shipment will arrive in 5-7 days; a day before the delivery the movers will call you to give you a heads-up."
Arrival
On 4 January a mover called me with the news that
(a) my belongings would be delivered the next day but
(b) they were sitting in a massive truck that could not be driven to my precise location and
(c) they would have to be transferred to a smaller U-Haul truck for delivery, which would require an additional $300 cash payment.
It crossed my mind that he was lying about the truck business, but at that point I was eager to get the whole thing over with so I said, "OK, let's do it." Had I known this would happen I would have chosen Cross Country Movers for my move.
(In retrospect there were two Global Transportation minor red flags that might also have steered me to Cross Country Movers:
(1) Global Transportation was difficult to get through to on the phone.
(2) Global Transportation's introductory letter email concluded with a www.globaltn.net Web site URL that points to a "This Web page is parked for FREE, courtesy of GoDaddy.com" page.
Maybe these were relevant considerations, maybe not.)
At about 10:15 the following morning the mover - one guy - arrived with the U-Haul truck, in which my belongings were commingled with someone else's belongings; he would have given me the whole lot had I not said, "Hold it, this other stuff isn't mine." After my items were unloaded, I handed the mover the $300 and signed off on an inventory sheet, and that was that.
I'll write more about my 'new life' in California as time permits.
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