The Moogis Wanee Debacle

Having spent the latter part of yesterday and much of last night facing a feeling of impending doom, if the news that Moogis won't be webcasting this year's Wanee Festival is the worst thing I hear all week I won't exactly be a happy camper but I will be more than a little relieved.

In the big picture, compared to earthquakes, cyclones, floods, nuclear disasters and impending financial meltdowns the failure to deliver a webcast is pretty small beer, but serves as a timely reminder that things aren't as close to done and dusted in the wonderful world of digital downloads as they might be.

Now, I'm the first to admit that my experience of Moogis has, overall, been a positive one. Sure, there were issues at the start of last year's run, and I really should have checked that I had the latest versions of Firefox, Safari and Flash Player before the first show this year, but overall things have, at least from where I'm sitting have run reasonably smoothly.

At the same time there are a couple of substantial elephants in the room when it comes to issues like delivering what you commit to and customer support, and I suspect that the overnight announcement re. Wanee is probably the death knell as far as next year's New York run is concerned.

Irate Stateside customers will probably find my perspective on these things  at least slightly alien, but then again I'm faced with a situation where I'm not going to get much change out of a thousand if there's a concert I want to attend and Madam decides she wants to go too.  

Even as a solo effort, at a minimum of hundred for the ticket, another hundred for a return flight to the south, another hundred at least for overnight accommodation and the same for meals, transfers and incidentals I'm not going to get out of a concert for less than $400, and that's assuming an air fare from Whitsunday Coast to Brisbane is available at $49 one way.

On that basis $233 for thirteen nights of Moogis looked good value.

But it's all about what you're asked to pay, what you're willing to pay, how much of what you pay for actually arrives and whether you're happy with that delivery.

It seems obvious that anybody who wants to start up a business that is going to require customer support is going to have to spend a substantial sum in staffing and training those working in that department and ensure that there are enough people on hand to handle incoming issues.

Try to do that on the cheap with minimal resources and you're literally begging for trouble.

Now, I've had no need to call on Moogis customer support, and I get the impression that I may have been lucky in that regard, but I've had enough issues with similar institutions to know what I'm talking about.

My experience with Australia's largest telco, Telstra, suggests that a call for customer support that's answered by someone with a subcontinental accent almost never leads to the issue being resolved.

Those nice voices that ask you to describe the problem you're experiencing before they pass you on to the appropriate department never seem to get it right, and, in my experience, you find yourself slowly stating that I … need … to … talk … to … a … person.

No, Moogis is, when you look at the big picture, very small beer.  

We're currently having a number of issues down this way that have large numbers of Chicken Littles running around crying that the financial sky is about to fall on our heads.  

Those Antipodean cries of impending doom variously involve the Carbon tax, the National Broadband Network, the cost of water reform (which seems crazy given recent flood events, but is going to need to be tackled some time), the fate of the Australian wine industry and rural communities in the areas that would be affected by those reforms, Australian retail outlets threatened by overseas on-line merchants and so on.

And on, and on.

But the key issue is that all these things, from Moogis up, cost money, and if they're going to survive in the short term and prosper in the longer term they're going to need to persuade people to shell out the relevant quantity of readies.

To me, the most significant thing about Moogis was the chance to catch a glimpse of what's possible a bit further down the path in the digital domain.

Now, there's absolutely no doubt that there are a large number of people with a substantial investment in traditional media and retail outlets who really should be wearing their brown trousers as things shake out along the line.

It's obvious that as things shake out there are big changes on the way, and that people are getting accustomed to getting a swag of stuff for not much money in an environment that's not going to be sustainable in the long term.

The problem is, however, that eventually there are bottom lines that have to be met, and doing that is going to mean a lot of people will be asked to shell out a lot more than they have been.

In the meantime, of course, there's the very real danger that a mixture of arrogance, incompetence, consumer reluctance and technical issues will see the baby going out with the bathwater.

Odds on Moogis in 2012, anyone?

New Postings to April 5, 2011

New samplings from The Little House of Concrete Wine Rack:

Fermoy Estate 2009 Yallingup Vineyards Margaret River Semillon Sauvignon Blanc

Hay Shed Hill 2008 White Label Tempranillo

Pfeiffer 1999 Reserve Marsanne

Pikes 2009 The Assemblage Shiraz Mourvedre Grenache

Pikes 2009 Gills Farm Mourvedre

Whiskey Gully 2005 Upper House Cabernet Sauvignon

and while the most recent musical treats that've attracted my attention have been almost exclusively Allman Brothers concerts from the 2011 run at New York's Beacon Theatre, though I also commented on the passing of former Grateful Dead sound man Owsley 'Bear' Stanley

Allman Advisory 1

On the off chance that anyone's interested, I've posted the first part of my preview of the Moogis webcast of this year's Allman Brothers run at New York's Beacon Theatre here.

New Posts February 21 - March 7, 2011

New on the Little House of Concrete Bookshelves:

Garry Disher

Dominic Knight "Comrades"

New samplings from The Little House of Concrete Wine Rack:

Baileys of Glenrowan 2009 Rutherglen Petot Sirah

Fermoy Estate 2009 Margaret River Sauvignon Blanc

Fermoy Estate 2009 Yallingup Vineyards Semillon Sauvignon Blanc

Lenton Brae 2009 Cabernet Merlot

Lenton Brae 2010 Semillon Sauvignon Blanc

Lenton Brae 2009 Southside Chardonnay

Tahbilk Everyday Drinking 'Limited Release' 2009 Zinfandel

and while the most recent musical treats that've attracted my attention haven't generated a review yet, Friday should see the first Moogis webcast from this year's Allman Brothers Band Beacon Theatre run.

New Posts February 14-20, 2011

Rather than posting everything here, now that I've split the various strands off onto separate themed blogs, I'm thinking in terms of using this as a sort of index, with links to the new content rather than publishing everything here, and duplicating the content on the other sites. Comments on how this works welcome, but I'm not holding my breath...

So, to see if it'll work out that way...

New on the Little House of Concrete Bookshelves:

Graham Hurley "Deadlight"

Magdalen Nabb "The Inspector Makes His Report"

Fred Vargas "Seeking Whom He May Devour"


New samplings from The Little House of Concrete Wine Rack:

Baileys of Glenrowan Founder Liqueur Muscat

Baileys of Glenrowan 2008 1920s Block Shiraz

Baileys of Glenrowan 2009 Rutherglen Durif

Tahbilk 2010 Everyday Drinking Riesling

and the most recent musical treats that've attracted my attention:

Gregg Allman "Low Country Blues"

Various Artists "The Amazing ZigZag Concert"

A slight readjustment

First there was the actual Little House of Concrete, a masonry block structure that derived its name from a suggestion from The Woodman on the Elvis Costello Mailing List circa 1997, along with subtitle A Very Fashionable Hovel.

EC afficianados would, of course, recognize the Little Hands of Concrete as a self-derived descriptor of EC's guitar technique, and the quote from Beyond Belief in the subtitle.

When Australia was being filmed in downtown Bowen in 2007 i wanted to write a blog about the shooting and related matters, and figured that the LHoC was a suitable blog title. That Telstra BigBlog went the way such things go when I changed ISPs, but the text and photos ended up here.

By that stage I'd already signed up for .Mac to give email continuity in the event of a change in ISPs, and a copy of iWeb had me thinking about a website, and the LHoC concept again came to the rescue when I was looking for some sort of structure for the thing.

That Little House of Concrete is still there, but, like Topsy, it just growed to the extent that I had to spin off a number of sub-sites dedicated to, among other things, Books and Reading, Music, Travelogues and Wine.

Another spin-off from that website is the bi-monthly Little House of Concrete newsletter, which, with a distribution list of fifteen of my friends and acquaintances, mightn't have set the digital publishing world on fire but virtual arson was never the point of the exercise.

Investigating the blogosphere, I thouight that the easiest way to keep track of wine blogs, for example, was to have a blog yourself and read the ones you're interested in from the Blogger dashboard, which explains the decision to start this one, but again it hasn't taken long to discover t the original notion needed refining.

The result is the following redistribution of content from this particular blog to:

The Little House of Concrete Bookshelves

The Little House of Concrete Music

and The Little House of Concrete Wine Rack.

The original Little House of Concrete's going to be sitting right where it is for the forseeable future, though I've relocated some of the older posts to the relevant newer versions.

Pfeiffer 2008 Chardonnay

A visit to the cellar door at Pfeiffer Wines at the end of 2006 left us extremely impressed, and apart from signing up for the C2 Wine Club (two shipments a year, a dozen at a time) there have been regular reorders of the Gamay and Ensemble Rose. Apart from the fortifieds, which are very much in the mould you'd expect a regional trademark to be, the rest of the range is generally more than acceptable and the C2 parcels usually throw up a few other order possibilities. 


Pfeiffer 2008 Chardonnay (4* $17) Pale straw in the glass, some varietal character on the nose and across the palate, and a touch of oak as well. Workman-like style that's pleasant enough drinking but wouldn't have prompted a reorder, and, in any case, the winery's sold out of this vintage. Maybe there are others out there who liked this more than I did.

Gregg Allman Low Country Blues

Gregg Allman Low Country Blues (4.5* if you're a Gregg fan, 4* otherwise)
A glance at the track listing for Gregg Allman's first album of new material since 1997's Searchin' for Simplicity might have the average blues fan scratching his head with a What? This lot again? Floating Bridge? Devil Got My Woman? I Can't Be Satisfied? Checking On My Baby? Rolling Stone? 


Sure, the album's largely comprised of covers that may or may not have been done to death already (mileages will vary on that, of course) but there's a warmth to the performances that has me putting another large tick beside the name of producer T-Bone Burnett, who's done a wonderful job of matching Allman's world-weary drawl to classic material that fits him like a well-worn overcoat. 


Cut in L.A. studio with a classy assembly of musos (most notably Dr John/Mac Rebennack on keys, Doyle Bramhall II on guitar and Dennis Crouch on upright bass) there's a comfortable retro warmth to a set of performances that were recorded live in the studio and sound that way. Crouch, in particular, shines (as he did on the most recent Elvis Costello waxings, also Burnett-produced). Can’t beat that slap bass. Watch your back Danny Thompson...

Brown Brothers 2004 Shiraz Mondeuse & Cabernet

Some things stick with you.


On my first visit to Brown Brothers in January 1980 I ran across this blend with the helpful and very informative bloke in the cellar door giving me the drum on Mondeuse. I'd already let him know I was interested in varietal wines, and Brown Brothers seemed, at the time, like Varietal Central. That's changed a little over thirty years, but the changes have largely taken the form of other people heading down the varietal path rather than Brown Brothers changing direction.


Inquiries as to the possibility of tasting Mondeuse on its own produced an explanation that the variety was far too muscular as a stand alone proposition unless you were going to give it an extended spell in the bottle to settle down, but in a blend it adds intense colour and substantial tannin. I haven't run across this one all that often over the intervening decades, but I managed to fit a bottle into an order placed in May '09 and while it could have sat quietly in the wine fridge for another couple of years,


(a) I needed the room for a Houghton C.W. Ferguson;


(b) It's coming up to seven years, not optimal perhaps but it's had some time; and


(c) I was disinclined to wait much longer.


Brown Brothers 2004 Shiraz Mondeuse & Cabernet (4.5* $40) Deep full-bodied red, complex notes on the nose, focussed, smooth and balanced across the palate with everything playing nicely together. At just over 50% Shiraz, with the other two sharing the rest close to evenly you can taste what the Mondeuse brings to this rather wonderful blend. I would love to have the wherewithal to try one of these at fifteen, twenty or twenty-five years.

Tahbilk 2000 1927 Vines Marsanne

Back in November 2009 Tahbilk was offering a Marsanne Trophy Six Pack for $115, three wines, two bottles each and remarkable value with two $45 bottles included. The day after the order arrived, this one appeared in Halliday's Hundred, which may explain why it took me so long to get to it...


Tahbilk 2000 1927 Vines Marsanne (5* 20 points $45) Almost transparent pale straw colour, but there's nothing pale or insipid about the nose or the flavour of this one. Complex notes of honeysuckle and citrus up front and a long finish mean that in Marsanne terms this is probably about as good as it gets. Still another bottle to go, probably somewhere around 2015....

Rick Koster "Louisiana Music"

Under normal circumstances you'd expect to be finished a book before you set about writing a review, but I doubt that I'll ever be finished with Rick Koster's Louisiana Music.


With an interest in the music from around the mouth of the Mississippi that dates back to a various artists' compilation called Another Saturday Night, and Dr John's piano-powered R&B revival Gumbo, and progressed through the Meterfied fonk of In The Right Place and Robert Palmer's blue-eyes Sneakin' Sally Through The Alley, Professor Longhair and assorted bits and pieces, I've always wanted to explore the subject more thoroughly. There are gaps in the collection that could accommodate a transitory Mack truck.


The problem, of course, is always where to start, how to separate the wheat from the chaff, and if it's all good, sorting the stellar and sublime from the merely excellent.


Louisiana Music may not be the only reference volume out there, but it's the only one I've run across to date and certainly offers plenty of jumping off points for further investigation.


The subtitle: A journey from R&B to Zydeco, Jazz to Country, Blues to Gospel, Cajun music to Swamp Pop to Carnival Music and Beyond says it all really, as Koster, who's also the author of Texas Music, takes the reader through the genres one by one, starting with Jazz, as one might expect and moving through Rhythm & Blues, The Blues, Music of Southwest Louisiana (Cajun, Creole and Zydeco), Louisiana Rock and a final section labelled The Wondrous Sounds (Voodoo, Swamp Pop, Mardi Gras and Carnival, Gospel Country, Rap and Hip-Hop, Classical and World Music).


Within each section, he starts with the major names and then trawls back through their antecedents and successors, influences and legacy, linking each into the tradition they've emerged from and referencing the cross pollination you're going to find in a musical environment like Louisiana. At $9.99 for the Kindle version it's remarkable value as a reference and will be sitting on the iPad for the duration.


Unfortunately, 2000's Texas Music isn't available in the same format yet, but I'll be on the lookout for a copy (after I've got into tackling the backlog of music from Louisiana that needs to be explored, of course). 

Stephen Booth "The Kill Call"

If there's an official checklist of things to do when you're embarking on a crime fiction series the first two items on the list probably involve finding an appropriate setting and a couple of characters whose interactions can give the author a constant subplot to work the investigations around.


As far as settings go, Stephen Booth has struck gold in Derbyshire's Peaks District, a jumble of villages and moorland with enough lanes, walking tracks, disused mine shafts and other under and above ground features to allow a plethora of ways in and out of crime scenes,means to dispose of bodies and so on.


On top of that, in a rural area close to major cities a constant stream of day-trippers and other passers-by provides plenty of potential suspects, victims and red herrings, and a mixture of well-heeled landed folk, wealthy refugees from the urban sprawl and secretive, cloistered villagers who more than likely have something to hide means that you’ve got plenty of potential on the ground regardless of blow-ins from outside.


Booth hasn't done too badly with his core characters either. Start with edgy city girl with nasty things in her past Diane Fry, who’s landed the Sergeant’s position local boy son of much-loved copper Ben Cooper was aspiring to, and throw in if it moves I can probably eat it bloke Gavin Murfin who mightn't add much to the investigative action but serves as a constant source of irritation for Fry as he does a lot of the foot-slogging associated with an investigation and you’ve got plenty to work with.


By the ninth story in a series you'd expect those elements to be more or less down pat, and might suspect the author's going to have difficulty adding new elements to the mix, but Booth manages it well, intertwining contemporary issues about fox hunting (plenty of room for conflict and potential suspects and motives there) and recent historical factors most of the population have conveniently forgotten about.


The discovery of the body of a man whose head has been crushed in one spot along with an anonymous call reporting the same body half a mile away is enough to get things off to a racing start, particularly when you've got a nearby gathering of the local hunt and horseshoe tracks all around the corpse.


As is the way of these things there are a couple of issues that muddy the waters. For a start there's an enigmatic diary that must have something to do with things, but it's not clear what that something is (at least, not at first) and a youthful loner who makes off with the dead man's wallet and mobile phone, but has nothing to do with the presumed murder.


The most obvious motive lies in the confrontational and occasionally violent world of hunting and hunt protesting saboteurs, and investigations reveal that the dead man is involved in shady dealings that probably involve horse theft and the meat trade. It would help greatly of Fry and Cooper were able to track down the dead man's accountant, but he seems to have gone to ground, and in the end, that's the way it turns out to be.


So, as the investigation meanders down a complex trail we have the odd entanglement creeping in there as well. Cooper's cat dies and needs to be replaced, and he's growing increasingly distant from the surviving members of his family. Diane Fry continues to have trouble with her past, which refuses to quietly recede into the background, and we get an introduction to the 'plague village' of Eyam (pronounced 'Eem', just to provide another means to underline the Diane Fry doesn't fit in with the local yokels theme) which is a contemporary tourist attraction. 


Then there's the secondary theme that shows the oft-remembered sixties through a different perspective, a time as much about the threat of nuclear warfare and four-minute warnings as it was about Swinging London, Carnaby Street, peace, love and understanding.


As a series, this doesn't quite rate up there with my favourites, but it's good enough to warrant a check through the 'B' shelves at the local library and is something to watch for when scouring the el cheapo display at the local newsagent. 


Not, in other words, the greatest thing since sliced bread, but a definite cut above a lot that's out there.

Houghton 2007 C.W. Ferguson Cabernet Malbec

We weren't planning on getting to the Swan Valley when we headed west, so visits to Sandalford and Houghton were a bonus. I first encountered this wine in association with a Vinturi, and based on that experience was more or less forced to buy a half-dozen of these. The Vinturi prompted the purchase and the purchase in turn prompted the subsequent acquisition of a Vinturi.


Houghton 2007 C.W. Ferguson Cabernet Malbec (4.5* 19 points $41.25, at least that's what I paid) Deep purple-red colour, Cabernet varietal notes in the nose modified by the Malbec element. Massive. magnificent, still very young and in ten years time may well be rated at 20. Memo to self: There are five bottles left, get them into the wine fridge.

Pfeiffer 2004 Riesling

Pfeiffer 2004 Riesling (4* $n/a) Arrived in the October 2009 C2 Club Dozen and stuck at the back of the wine fridge since, a check with the ubiquitous Halliday suggested that January 2011 was a bit past the drink-by date for a well-made but unremarkable Riesling, probably made from King Valley/Strathbogie Ranges fruit. Seven years in the bottle had certainly rounded out the youthful apple and tropical fruit notes he'd remarked on, and the aged Riesling characters weren't up there with some I've tried recently, but an interesting drink that suggests it's worthwhile sticking a few well-made Rieslings away even if they're not from a premium region. Provided you've got the cellar space, of course.

40: A Doonesbury Retrospective

I can't think of a better argument for the iPad as a reading platform than this hefty volume which at around 4.3kg moves the wrist-breaker descriptor into a whole extra dimension, and the colour portion of the contents would probably come up rather well on the iPad screen.. 


I've been following Doonesbury from the early seventies, not always with the consistency I'd like as the strip appeared and disappeared through various newspaper incarnations, and over the years I've picked up a fair collection of paperback collections from various stretches of the saga of this bunch of college students and their associates as they've meandered through forty years of American life. 


As is invariably the case with these things, there are gaps in the collection that need to be filled, which goes part of the way to explaining the decision to purchase this particular tome.


On the other hand, ever since those first roughly-drawn depictions of early seventies college life with their wry take on the quirks and foibles of late adolescents as they move inexorably towards adulthood, I’ve been a firm fan of Trudeau’s work, and the prospect of consolidating the cartoon collection into one volume was not to be missed.


Forty years of cartoon strips, with six daily four-panel black and white strips each week and a page-sized panel for the Sunday colour supplement means that we were always looking at a hefty compendium, and if you're looking for everything this ain't quite the place to go, folks.


Or maybe it is, since you don't expect 100% genius and perspicacity over forty years, and as I browse trough the close to seven hundred pages it seems like most of the major themes are there and crucial episodes and plot lines get reasonably detailed coverage.


For the uninitiated, Mike Doonesbury, your common or garden nerd, starts off at Walden College sharing a room with footballer B.D., an arrangement that morphs into an off-campus communebeside Walden Puddle, drawing in the other long-term key figures, arch-slacker Zonker Harris, student radical Mark Slackmeyer, B.D.'s girlfriend Boopsie, runaway housewife Joanie Caucus and the rest of an extended family who've all headed off on their own tangents tat allow cartoonist Garry Trudeau to focus on a wealth of issues over the past forty years.


Along the way Mike moves from college student through a career in advertising into software and e-commerce while B.D.'s involvement with the R.O.T.C. military program gets him to Vietnam and subsequent involvement in both Gulf Wars in between a career as college football coach and manager of Hollywood starlet and third girl in shower Boopsie (a.k.a. Barbara Ann Boopstein).


Various factors bring media personalities into the mix as well. Mark Slackmeyer moves from college radio DJ into current affairs talk-back and gay activism, while Roland Hedley Jr turns up to collect details of the student mood early on and meanders through various plot lines as he moves from foreign correspondent to would-be celebrity journalist tweeter and Rick Redfern, heavyweight political journo starts off covering a political campaign, marries Joanie and produces a son who ends up working for the C.I.A. in Afghanistan and tweets his own personal mythology as Sorkh Razil (Red Rascal), bane of the Taliban.


That's the briefest skim over the surface of a cartoon strip that has delivered some of the most biting and insightful coverage of American socio-political and cultural issues, neglecting, among others, the zigzagging career of Zonker's Uncle Duke, archetypal wheeler dealer who appears in various guises from Governor of American Samoa, Ambassador to China, to proprietor of orphanages and bars and skipper of Donald Trump's personal yacht.


40: A Doonesbury Retrospective hasn't quite rendered that pile of paperbacks redundant, but will be occupying a prime piece of shelf space beside mys reading chair for some time to come....

Leeuwin Estate 2005 Art Series Riesling

When we visited Leeuwin Estate in August $260 for a dozen Art Series Rieslings across six years seemed like a reasonable way to build s small stock of older Rieslings while I waited for the stocks of Holm Oak and Grosset to round out. We've got through the '03 and '04 and this was the last of the...


Leeuwin Estate 2005 Art Series Riesling (4.5* 19 points $n/a) Near-sparkling pale gold, aromatic with developed Riesling character in spades through the nose and across the palate, youthful acids have rounded out into complex elegance with a lengthy finish. Delicious, and a powerdul argument for keeping a couple of bottles in the cellar (assuming you can keep your hands off them).