Christiern

Dave Brubeck Plays Softly Tom Waits Sings For Lovers Wynton Marsalis Plays Soulfully The Revolutionary Ensemble Plays Footlight Favorites

...and 7) Consider buying a new PC. or better, yet ...

His "Blue Grotto" was in Pittsburgh in 1973, when I spent an hour there on a book tour. As far as the interview goes, I remember very little, except that I had to sit on a wood barrel.

Folding laundry and putting shirts on hangers is probably what I dislike the most. Cleaning the bathroom is a close second. Can't stand cats, so that has never been a problem, but puppies have given me some grief over the years--they learn, however. Cleaning windows was a problem until they installed the ones that have bottom hinges and can be opened into the apartment. The blade tops of the ceiling fan over my bed seriously needs to be cleaned--I procrastinate.

The database name is misleading--this appears to be a New World Records-specific discography.

A Clarence Williams obsession? Sounds serious, Chuck--I hope his pedestrian keyboard work is not the attraction.

I loved the scene wherein a member of a road crew picks up and answers Vito's cell phone.

Sad to say, the Pulitzer people seriously lowered the standard when they gave the prize to Wynton for that piece of pretentious crap he called "Blood in the Fields."

Clark Terry, Sidney Bechet, Johnny Hodges are 3 of them.

And when I was going to London on a regular basis, I always threw those huge British pennies into a pot when I got home ...

I save any old penny that lands in my pocket...

Brand names: Cyber Acoustics (speakers) Fantom (drive) Kodak (Camera) 3Point (iPod base)

Chuck Nessa: "Might be Steve Jobs' favorite color." None of the equipment I named was made by Apple.

Has anyone else noticed that things are turning blue? My telephones and base have blue lights, my computer speakers have blue lights, there is one on my most recently acquired hard disk, my iPod charge/speaker station has 2 blue lights, and my digital camera has 5! A year ago, all my equipment lights were either green, red, or amber--not a single one was blue. Has anyone else noticed this trend? Have the Chinese lowered the cost of blue LEDs?

Has anyone else noticed that things are turning blue? My telephones and base have blue lights, my computer speakers have blue lights, there is one on my most recently acquired hard disk, my iPod charge/speaker station has 2 blue lights, and my digital camera has 5! A year ago, all my equipment lights were either green, red, or amber--not a single one was blue. Has anyone else noticed this trend? Have the Chinese lowered the cost of blue LEDs? Sorry for the duplication--"Delete this topic" didn't work.

I thought that dubious honor went to Everest. (Monmouth Everest?) (Evergreen?) Come to think of it, Babs Gonsalez had the venal vinyl market sewed up--I have seen more delicate pot lids.

Interesting that Bonnie Pointer couldn't make it--she seems to have distanced herself from the family a few years back. Anyone know what happened? Note to Conrad: To avoid including all that extraneous text in your pasties, click on "print this" or "printer friendly" and you will get the headline(s) and main text of the story only. That's what you copy and paste. Try it with this story http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews....NTER.xml&rpc=22

April 11, 2006 The Long-Distance Journey of a Fast-Food Order By MATT RICHTEL SANTA MARIA, Calif. — Like many American teenagers, Julissa Vargas, 17, has a minimum-wage job in the fast-food industry — but hers has an unusual geographic reach. "Would you like your Coke and orange juice medium or large?" Ms. Vargas said into her headset to an unseen woman who was ordering breakfast from a drive-through line. She did not neglect the small details —"You Must Ask for Condiments," a sign next to her computer terminal instructs — and wished the woman a wonderful day. What made the $12.08 transaction remarkable was that the customer was not just outside Ms. Vargas's workplace here on California's central coast. She was at a McDonald's in Honolulu. And within a two-minute span Ms. Vargas had also taken orders from drive-through windows in Gulfport, Miss., and Gillette, Wyo. Ms. Vargas works not in a restaurant but in a busy call center in this town, 150 miles from Los Angeles. She and as many as 35 others take orders remotely from 40 McDonald's outlets around the country. The orders are then sent back to the restaurants by Internet, to be filled a few yards from where they were placed. The people behind this setup expect it to save just a few seconds on each order. But that can add up to extra sales over the course of a busy day at the drive-through. While the call-center idea has received some attention since a scattered sampling of McDonald's franchises began testing it 18 months ago, most customers are still in the dark. For Meredith Mejia, a regular at a McDonald's in Pleasant Hill, Calif., near San Francisco, it meant that her lunch came with a small helping of the surreal. When told that she had just ordered her double cheeseburger and small fries from a call center 250 miles away, she said the concept was "bizarre." And the order-taking is not always seamless. Often customers' voices are faint, forcing the workers to ask for things to be repeated. During recent rainstorms in Hawaii, it was particularly hard to hear orders from there over the din. Ms. Vargas seems unfazed by her job, even though it involves being subjected to constant electronic scrutiny. Software tracks her productivity and speed, and every so often a red box pops up on her screen to test whether she is paying attention. She is expected to click on it within 1.75 seconds. In the break room, a computer screen lets employees know just how many minutes have elapsed since they left their workstations. The pay may be the same, but this is a long way from flipping burgers. "Their job is to be fast on the mouse — that's their job," said Douglas King, chief executive of Bronco Communications, which operates the call center. The center in Santa Maria has been in operation for 18 months; a print-out tacked to a wall declares, "Over 2,540,000 served." McDonald's says it is still experimental, but it puts an unusual twist on an idea that is gaining traction: taking advantage of ever-cheaper communications technology, companies are creating centralized staffs of specially trained order-takers, even for situations where old-fashioned physical proximity has been the norm. The goals of such centers are not just to cut labor costs but also to provide more focused customer service — improving the level of personal attention by sending Happy Meal orders on a thousand-mile round trip. "It's really centralizing the function of not only taking the order but advising the customer on getting more out of the product, which can sell more — at least in theory," said Joseph Fleischer, chief technical editor for Call Center Magazine, an industry trade publication. McDonald's is joined by the owner of Hardee's and Carl's Jr., CKE Restaurants, which plans to deploy a similar system later this year in restaurants in California. Not everyone is sold on the idea. Denny Lynch, a spokesman for Wendy's Restaurants, said that the approach had not yet proved itself to be cost-effective. "Speed is incredibly important," he said, but "we haven't given this solution any serious thought." Mr. Lynch said that Wendy's would need concrete evidence that call centers worked. For example, could remote order-takers increase sales by asking customers to order dessert? Then there is the question of whether combining burgers, shakes and cyberspace is an example of the drive for efficiency run amok — introducing a mouse where the essential technology is a spatula. "This is a case of 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it,' " said Sherri Daye Scott, editor of QSR Magazine, a trade journal covering fast-food outlets, which refer to themselves as quick-service restaurants. But the backers of the technology are looking to expand into new industries. The operator of one of the McDonald's centers is developing a related system that would allow big stores like Home Depot to equip carts with speakers that customers could use to contact a call center wirelessly for shopping advice. Jon Anton, a founder of Bronco, says that the goal is "saving seconds to make millions," because more efficient service can lead to more sales and lower labor costs. With a wireless system in a Home Depot, for example, a call-center operator might tell a customer, "You're at Aisle D6. Let me walk you over to where you can find the 16-penny nails," Mr. Anton said. Efficiency is certainly the mantra at the Bronco call center, which has grown from 15 workers six months ago to 125 today. Its workers are experts in the McDonald's menu; they are trained to be polite, to urge customers to add items to their order and, above all, to be fast. Each worker takes up to 95 orders an hour during peak times. Customers pulling up to the drive-through menu are connected to the computer of a call-center employee using Internet calling technology. The first thing the McDonald's customer hears is a prerecorded greeting in the voice of the employee. The order-takers' screens include the menu and an indication of the whether it is time for breakfast or lunch at the local restaurant. A "notes" section shows if that restaurant has called in to say that it is out of a particular item. When the customer pulls away from the menu to pay for the food and pick it up, it takes around 10 seconds for another car to pull forward. During that time, Mr. King said, his order-takers can be answering a call from a different McDonald's where someone has already pulled up. The remote order-takers at Bronco earn the minimum wage ($6.75 an hour in California), do not get health benefits and do not wear uniforms. Ms. Vargas, who recently finished high school, wore jeans and a baggy white sweatshirt as she took orders last week. The call-center system allows employees to be monitored and tracked much more closely than would be possible if they were in restaurants. Mr. King's computer screen gives him constant updates as to which workers are not meeting standards. "You've got to measure everything," he said. "When fractions of seconds count, the environment needs to be controlled." Speed and sales volume are not the only factors driving remote order-taking. CKE Restaurants, for instance, wants to improve customer service. It plans to start taking remote orders in September at five Carl's Jr.'s restaurants in California, with a broader deployment after that. CKE said its workers were strained doing numerous tasks at once — taking orders, helping to fill them, accepting cash and keeping the restaurants clean. Accuracy problems at the drive-through "are a result of the fact that the people working them are multitasking to the point they forget details," said Jeff Chasney, head of technology operations for CKE. Mr. Chasney said the new system could help lower barriers in language and communication. Often, in California in particular, he said, the employee may primarily speak Spanish, while the customer speaks only English — a problem that can be eliminated with a specialized call-center crew. "We believe we raise the customer-service bar by having people who are very articulate, have a good command of the English language, and some who are bilingual," he said. Some 50 McDonald's franchises are testing remote order-taking, some using Bronco Communications. Others are using Verety, a company based in Oak Brook, Ill. (also the home of McDonald's), that has taken the concept further by contracting workers in rural North Dakota to take drive-through orders from their homes. A spokesman for McDonald's, Bill Whitman, said that the results of the test runs had been positive so far, but that it had not yet decided whether to expand its use of the technology. The system does sometimes lead to mix-ups and customer confusion. The surprised customer will say to the cashier, "You didn't take my order," said Bertha Aleman, manager of the McDonald's in Pleasant Hill. For the last seven months the franchise has used the Bronco system to help manage its two drive-through lanes at lunch. Ms. Aleman said that, over all, the system had improved accuracy and helped her cut costs. She said that now she did not need an employee dedicated to taking orders or, during the lunch rush, an assistant for the order-taker to handle cash when things backed up. "We've cut labor," she said. The call-center workers do have some advantages over their on-the-scene counterparts. Ms. Vargas said it was strange to be so far from the actual food. But after work, she said, "I don't smell like hamburgers."

I always thought that was Urbie Green in drag.

Sounds a lot like sour grapes. BTW, I have, as a child, experienced all the inconveniences you list--we did have water in the summer, but no electricity, ever. Big deal.

I agree that we cannot simply blame it all on rap. Rap represented an interesting turn in pop music, and some of it is, IMO, very good. Sad to say, most of it is pure crap, and there is so much of this crap because we have decision-makers at the top who are, basically, business people. You have people like Clive Davis--to take this back to a pivotal period--who came to the music business by way of an expertise that had nothing to do with music. In my Columbia days, Clive was very good to me, he was fair and above board, but he did not know diddly about the music--he clapped on the wrong beat and based his musical opinions on the ears of others, etc. But he rose to power and artists saw in him someone who could pave the way for them, so he became a beloved executive. He, in turn, loved the attention he got from artists and, hence, from the press. I mention Clive, because he is someone whose rise I personally observed--there are many Clives and many big corporations running this business. They often care little for the music, because it's all about that bottom line and the PR. Look at Wynton, he is a good sample of what happens when non-musical factors determine artistic judgement. I bring up Wynton, because here--again--is someone whose image I saw being molded by PR and furthered by people with twisted priorities. Wynton got a good start with Blakey and I, for one, saw him as a strong contender for future greatness--it didn't happen, because the Madison Avenue mindset took over. Instead of leading to a shining star on the jazz firmament (which, I think, could have happened), it brought us Dizzy Gillespie's Coca Cola™ club at a music complex that best can be described as a tourist trap. If Wynton were the only drop of water in this soup, there would not be a problem. He, at least, has talent and there are times when it still surfaces, albeit briefly (let's put aside his personality--which, BTW, was also affected by the Columbia-generated makeover). The question posed by Kenny Drew, Jr. was: "What happened to black popular music?" Yes, the knee-jerk answer is "rap," but the proliferation of that style is only a symptom of a much deeper problem. I think most of us can agree that it American pop music has been seriously diluted (think of any recent Grammy telecast), but we should not blame the non-singers who painful vocal graffiti assaults our ears or the self-named composers who wouldn't recognize a melody if they could hear it--we should, instead, point a finger at the accountants who encourage mediocrity (possibly because they don't recognize it), and at the tin-eared press (ever in need of advertising revenue) that blissfully believes press releases. There was a recent time when "bad" was good, but now "bad" is really bad and the ring of the cash register is to the industry's corporate ears the only true music. That is the crux of the problem, as I see it. Let's face it, were it not for re-issues, there would be very little of substance with which to fill the CD bins. Reissues don't bring in tons of money but, accumulatively, they help to finance performances that cannot stand on their own and they give record companies a semblance of being more than a Twinkie factory. Oh, yes, the crap that hits the charts also generates big bucks before it takes a quick path to oblivion (future reissue producer will have a hard time, I suspect)--think of all the weak performances you have heard on SNL and the daily nighttime shows, people you never heard of before and are not likely to hear again. Think also of the enthusiastic whoops and hollers these performers generate from the audience. That brings us to another important factor: the dumbing down of music fans. Here we can put much blame on the corporate-operated media, not least of all the payola paying, playlist dependent radio stations that dot the country, and the satellite hubs that feed their audio grub to the ears of millions. Madison Avenue proved long ago that excessive repetition can be like a drug, and what is Madison Avenue if not a corporate culture (vulture?). Young audiences are constantly being fed inferior music and told that it is "cool." They are eating it up just as readily as they buy into brand name sneakers and clothes--ah, we're back to Mad Ave, aren't we? People in the record industry like to tell us how music that feeds the intellect doesn't sell. Well, have they tried to market it? No. Just as Wal-mart and Home Depot is killing off the mom and pop stores, so the music business conglomerates have all but eliminated the local disc jockey who played that great music and loved to listen with you. Gone, too, is the little record store where the man behind the counter knew what you liked and often shared your love for it. And let us not forget the small, independent record label whose owner collected records, just as you did, who recorded the music as a labor of love--hey, these are the guys to whom we owe most of the good stuff that re-emerges with every small advance in audio reproduction technology. So, all this ramble to say what I think: when it comes to the current pop famine, we should not put the blame on those who create the crap as much as we should put it on those who create the atmosphere in which it thrives. I am not asking for the return of the "good old days," but I wish we had maintained the level of taste that once almost routinely produced enduring music, and that encouragement of artistic development had not been stifled by corporate and individual greed (as well as the RIAA). This is too long and rambling for me to re-read it, so I hope it ended up making a modicum of sense.

Brownie, here we call that person a Super (as in supervisor). Here a Concierge usually sits behind a desk while the doormen stand at the door. At least in New York. I have been in NYC apartment buildings where there were more doormen and concierges than there are tenants in a 4-story brownstone. We used to have a building staff of 24 (not very good at Christmas time ), but now we only have 1 super, 3 maintenance men, and 6 doormen.

We have had snotty tenants who feel a need to be "serviced" beyond reason, but they did not appear until my building went co-op. That brought in the yuppies and their precocious kids. Mind you, some of these people were nice, but there were a great number of horrible people. No sooner did they appear before the started forming committees--for everything, the front lobby, the rear lobby, the elevators, the laundry room, everything! And they had their meetings, all feeling ever so important. Before they came, this was a fun building. People used to assemble on the roof (a garden, of sorts, back then) for drinks after work, and there were lots of great parties. Everybody got along, tenants, doormen, etc. Personally, I have always maintained a friendly, first-name relationship with the doormen. If I go to the store, I always ask them if they want anything, I help them with their computer problems, etc. In turn, they go out of their way for me, they call when I have a package and put it on the elevator so I won't have to go to the lobby, they let me know when the mail is in (it used to be delivered to our doors twice a day--those days are gone forever), etc. When Babs Gonzales was around, he lived down the street from me and he had a bad habit of showing up in the middle of the night--the night doorman always diplomatically turned him away. "The gentleman with the wooden shoes was here," he'd tell me. Since drugs all but took over the city, I have especially appreciated having a doorman there when coming home late at night. Do I hear occasional gossip from their lips? Of course, but I take that as a bonus.

Do you have a doorman? Are you sorry you do? Do you wish you did? I guess most of you live in places where they are not needed, but my building has them, and I have lived here since May of 1963. Sure, they know who comes to see you, how late you stay out, etc. I don't care about that, they represent a great convenience. My building, for example, has a Taxi button on the elevator and by the time I reach the lobby that cab is either there or about to pull up. When it comes to packages or other deliveries, they are worth their weight in gold? I never had them walk my dog, but I can see the advantage that might represent. Security? Well, that's self-evident. Have a doorman experience you wish to share?--CA Doormen April 9, 2006 Why Some Say 'No Thanks' to a Doorman By TERI KARUSH ROGERS NEW YORK is in the midst of an epidemic of new buildings that promise to deliver every service known to man, woman, child or pet. Central to all of that, of course, is a doorman. But to some people, the presence of a doorman is seen as a negative, not a benefit. Yes, a doorman can put the newspaper outside your door, walk your dog when you're sick, make you feel important, keep an eye on your children (or your babysitter) and haul your shopping bags to the curb. But he is also privy to some of the most intimate details — and moments — of your life. "Doormen know everything," said Stephen C. Brandman, 42, the chief operating officer of Thompson Hotels, a luxury boutique hotel chain. Until recently, he lived in a doorman building on Park Avenue, and he lived full- and part-time in his hotels that had doormen before and after his marriage. "The challenge becomes when you have overnight guests; sometimes the doormen share their thoughts about that," said Mr. Brandman, referring to unsolicited remarks garnered during his bachelor life. "Sometimes they wanted to know why ex-girlfriends had come back into the picture, so there would be running commentary." Even while married and living on Park Avenue, he chafed at the extra sets of eyeballs. Returning from the gym, "I would be drenched and I didn't want to see a soul," he recalled. "I didn't want to face the doorman and elevator operator. When you're not at your best, that's the time you wish you could just sneak in and disappear." No one understands this better than a doorman. In fact, most doormen would apparently rather live without a doorman even if they could afford it, according to Peter Bearman, a Columbia University sociology professor and author of "Doormen" (University of Chicago Press, 2005), a study of the profession. They perceive the insular, elitist boundaries created by their presence as unnatural, Professor Bearman said in an e-mail message, and they are loath to jeopardize their privacy. "Doormen know how much they know about tenants and would prefer not to have someone know that about them," he said. To doorman detractors, deliveries are a doorman's sole raison d'être. "The biggest utility of having a doorman is that there's someone to accept the packages," said Andrew Rosenblatt, 33, a bankruptcy lawyer at Chadbourne & Park. Several years ago, he and his wife, Courtney, left a full-service theater district high-rise for a nondoorman co-op on the Upper West Side, with a live-in superintendent to handle most deliveries. He much preferred the new arrangement. "We just felt like they really didn't do anything for us," Mr. Rosenblatt said of the doormen. "If anything, you sort of feel obligated to engage in idle chitchat. And the whole tipping thing presents another moment of tension. Our doormen weren't too helpful, but if you were carrying a bag you wanted to take yourself, and they'd come and take it, did you tip them?" Holiday tipping is an exacerbated exercise in misery for those already ambivalent about their doorman. And for others, the need to make conversation is so annoying that it alone is enough to drive them into nondoormen buildings. "I had one young guy who moved from a fancy condo doorman building in California where he had a very cheery doorman," said Hy Rosen, a senior vice president at Bellmarc Realty. "He wanted a building without a doorman, and his biggest reason seemed to be he didn't want to have to say hello to someone twice a day." Michele Golden, another broker for Bellmarc, lived in two luxury buildings before buying a Chelsea loft that came with just a full-time superintendent. She doesn't miss the constant socializing, which she found cloying. "It's like a really good restaurant — the lower key the service, the more I like it," she said. "When they're fawning all over me, I'm not enjoying that. I don't want service to be intrusive in my life." According to the conventional wisdom, doormen make buildings safer. Many people believe that to go without is practically an invitation to being menaced — or even dispatched — on one's very doorstep. And isn't it a truth universally acknowledged that a single woman would sooner give up her colorist than her doorman? Sort of, said Edward Herson, a vice president at Halstead Property. "If they come in from out of town, from anywhere west of the Hudson River, they definitely want a doorman," he said. But once they live here for a while, "if they are price conscious they want to give it up, because they feel safer in the city." In fact, "Doormen" reports that while doormen and residents emphatically cite security as a major benefit, few could recall any security incidents at their buildings. (Of course, as the book points out, it is possible that the mere presence of a doorman deters miscreants before trouble breaks out.) Able defenders or not, doormen add as much as 10 to 15 percent to the value of an apartment, according to Miller Samuel, a Manhattan appraisal firm. But the annual cost — around $80,000 per doorman ($37,315 in salary, plus overtime, benefits, training and other expenses), according to the Service Employees International Union Local 32BJ — can put a disproportionate burden on smaller buildings, which have fewer units to share the expense. Last year, after his divorce, Mr. Brandman moved into a new six-unit condominium building in Chelsea, which he found with the help of Anna Shagalov, an associate broker at Halstead. The modestly sized building's original plans called for a doorman. But with only five other owners to share the cost, Mr. Brandman and his new neighbors decided to do without. They put in a security system, and arranged for a neighboring business to accept deliveries. His only regret now, he said, is having to be home for Fresh Direct. No one is saying that the doorman's day is done, and certainly not developers of larger-scale properties, for whom luxury and doormen go together like glass and steel. But some smaller developers are sensing a happy convergence of technology with a shift in the doorman zeitgeist. Mick Walsdorf, a principal of the Manhattan-based design and development firm Flank, said that he and his partner conducted a "dinner party survey" before hiring Virtualservice.net to install a virtual doorman system in Novare, an eight-unit condo conversion of a church near Washington Square Park. "Everybody was just kind of ready to pass on the doorman concept," Mr. Walsdorf said. "If you consider all the intrusions into your personal life these days, whether at work or in the city in general, you start to understand why people feel like they may not necessarily want to talk to somebody every time they come into the building. In a smaller building like ours, it's a no-brainer."

I know what you mean, Chris, we should all have Snora Nora's problems.