Dear NPR Music,
You used to be so great. Subscribing to your RSS feed helped me keep up on new music, see tiny desk concerts, and occasionally discover new artists. But you currently have some BIG problems with your feed.
First, repeats. I got 8 posts of the same exact story on the new Bright Eyes record. I know Connor Oberst gives you all kinds of grown up feelings in your pants, but come on. I saw it already. 7 times too many. Then they had the nerve to play on World Cafe a show who duplicates every feed item. So there was Bright Eyes two more times, and me, still not interested.
Second. Hipster central. Do you guys ever cover mainstream music besides Lady Gaga? I love indie rock. I own an independent studio/record label for goodness sake! But come on, it's like the "must have a strange beard" parade. I feel like I'm at the Newport festival every time I sign on to my reader.
Third. The jazz and classical beats are prolific. I love jazz, but I honestly can't handle the sheer volume of stories about obscure jazz players I've never heard of WITH NO ACCOMPANYING AUDIO. If you're gonna write a story about this one clarinetist who died in 1962 and tell me why he was so pivotal, let me listen to some pivotal recordings. Classical is similarly out of hand with the no-sound music journalism. The worst is the W.W.B.D. series. I don't care what Beethoven would like on the internet this week. I don't even care what music he'd dig (he was deaf). Also, YOU DON"T EVEN KNOW, so stop writing articles about it every week. That series sucks, and it doesn't ever seem to get more interesting.
Fourth. Sheer mass. You need weight loss. Heaven knows I support and love public broadcasting, but I'm the kind of person who opens my reader once a week. I subscribe to not a small number of feeds, but without fail, NPR music is responsible for 65-80% of the content. Which brings me to my biggest complaint.
Fifth. All or none. You have ONE, count em, ONE feed for articles. Even if I subscribe on All Songs Considered's page, I get the full NPR music feed. I could subscribe to just tiny desk for concerts, but once in a very great while, World Cafe or the NPR studios have something I'd like to see.
It's enough to make a music lover unsubscribe, which is I guess what this has come to. I'm sorry, I think we should see other people. And it is YOU, not me.
Jared
Sunday, January 30, 2011
Friday, January 28, 2011
An open letter to the person who gave me my favorite memory...
While this is probably also Danielle, I'm gonna choose a different memory.
Dear Anne-Kate,
I will always remember the night Elder Maxfield and I came home at the end of an exhausting day, ending an even more taxing week of the most difficult and disappointing kind of missionary work, to your voice on our answering machine.
We'd been "flushed into" an area where the prior missionaries had not been doing a whole lot of work (hence they were flushed out). I was a new zone leader, training a brand new missionary, and doing absurd full days of tracting to try and get just a few investigators in a fairly wealthy area of Birmingham where most people would sooner talk to their living room wall than to us.
Dinner that night had even been disappointing. I was served fish. Not deep fried catfish or something I could stomach, something freshwater with the head and scales still on it. I made it through dinner and our short member visit and got on my bike, but it wasn't more than a few hundred feet before I was prostrate and vomiting the whole mess into somebody's bushes.
When we got home and checked the answering machine, the first call was from our only promising investigator who had just been given a heaping dose of anti-mormon literature. He had called us to say he didn't want to visit with us any more. Then your voice came on and you said, "I've read the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants, and the Pearl of Great Price and I believe everything and I'm ready to be baptized. Please let me know how soon we could do that."
Our mouths about hit the floor.
I think you probably feel like I'm the one who helps you to continue to believe, but I assure you, your call gave me a significant faith in the promises God had made me. Nothing I could do was giving us someone to teach. Then God gave us someone to baptize. And not just someone. One of my best friends in life, and a woman who taught me a tremendous amount about compassion and fairness and love.
May God always bless you with what you need and reward your diligent search for truth with understanding. May he bless you and Greg with health and strength and grace.
Worlds without end.
Allahu akbar.
Love, Elder Mooney.
Dear Anne-Kate,
I will always remember the night Elder Maxfield and I came home at the end of an exhausting day, ending an even more taxing week of the most difficult and disappointing kind of missionary work, to your voice on our answering machine.
We'd been "flushed into" an area where the prior missionaries had not been doing a whole lot of work (hence they were flushed out). I was a new zone leader, training a brand new missionary, and doing absurd full days of tracting to try and get just a few investigators in a fairly wealthy area of Birmingham where most people would sooner talk to their living room wall than to us.
Dinner that night had even been disappointing. I was served fish. Not deep fried catfish or something I could stomach, something freshwater with the head and scales still on it. I made it through dinner and our short member visit and got on my bike, but it wasn't more than a few hundred feet before I was prostrate and vomiting the whole mess into somebody's bushes.
When we got home and checked the answering machine, the first call was from our only promising investigator who had just been given a heaping dose of anti-mormon literature. He had called us to say he didn't want to visit with us any more. Then your voice came on and you said, "I've read the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants, and the Pearl of Great Price and I believe everything and I'm ready to be baptized. Please let me know how soon we could do that."
Our mouths about hit the floor.
I think you probably feel like I'm the one who helps you to continue to believe, but I assure you, your call gave me a significant faith in the promises God had made me. Nothing I could do was giving us someone to teach. Then God gave us someone to baptize. And not just someone. One of my best friends in life, and a woman who taught me a tremendous amount about compassion and fairness and love.
May God always bless you with what you need and reward your diligent search for truth with understanding. May he bless you and Greg with health and strength and grace.
Worlds without end.
Allahu akbar.
Love, Elder Mooney.
Monday, January 03, 2011
Not an open letter...
By the way, in case you missed it somehow in that last post, I'm engaged to be married.
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