After three weeks of making the hour-long commute from Baton Rouge to Hammond every few days, I decided that jumping back and forth from my beloved local NPR station to a Top 40 station out of New Orleans (which was about all I could get on my measly car radio) just wasn't cutting it. My other option, listening to CDs all the way there and back, was working pretty well, but I have a finite number of CDs, and many of them are not suitable for driving, N.B. the shifting dynamics in classical music, which comprises a big chunk of my music collection. I was able to put my first adjunct paycheck to good use last week and buy an iTrip for my iPod, which converts the sound coming out of the iPod into radio waves and allows me to listen to it over the car stereo.

Today was my first day of iTripping, and it changed the whole character of my day. I'm an avid fan of Science Friday and the NPR Music podcasts, and I listened to a little of both today instead of whatever drivel I could pick up on 92.3 FM The Diva (yes, that's the station's name... I think it's supposed to make me want to have a dance party or sing into my hairbrush or something). I'm way behind on my podcasts, going back to May for many of them, similar to the way my mom gets way behind on reading the newspapers but obstinately saves the front sections every day and gets caught up every couple of months or so. The difference here is that the stack of newspapers next to her chair is something of an annoyance for her (I think), whereas my podcasts only represent hard disk clutter-- still, it's nice to feel like I might actually catch up. I heard some stories about JazzFest in NOLA and the release of Springsteen's album The Seeger Sessions (both from back in April), plus a couple of things I didn't know about, like this hip-hop artist who's interested in fusing his style with bossa nova sound, so he collaborated with Sergio Mendes and Stevie Wonder (!) on an album. The NPR stories, interviews, reviews, etc., dealing with music touch on such an eclectic variety of styles that it's really entertaining and informative for me, and I feel like I'm expanding my horizons a bit beyond my classical-art-music world. Let's face it: there's a heck of a lot of great music out there that wasn't written by dead white Europeans (well... they weren't dead when they wrote it, though some of them do have an uninspired, plodding, Professor-Binns-esque quality to their compositional styles).

In other technology news, I (Jack) bought a new power cord for Sputnik, my 8-year-old laptop, last week. In the past several weeks, the ability of electricity to make it all the way from the wall to my laptop was severely hampered by what must have been some bent or worn-out wires, resulting in the last few days in my needing to use an elaborate system of pillows to keep the computer and the power cord in the right position for all the connections to be made properly. It was an adventure in logistics, to be sure. I was elated when we got a fairly cheap cord from eBay and it actually worked as soon as I plugged it in. Sputnik goes on to live another day, and the world (my wallet) heaves a sigh of relief.

Labels: listening miscellany, music

• posted by erica 9/19/2006 06:06:00 PM
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