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 Come [and] join us spoken-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:
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" - 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 First
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.
I 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 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.