Live streaming reminds me of many other relatively new technologies. Things go wrong and it is difficult to know where the problem lies. Is the dropout the fault of my modem’s connection to the internet? Is it because my internet provider is working somewhere in the neighborhood? Is Twitch getting overloaded? Is the open source software, so popular among streamers, creating the problem? Or maybe it’s just because I am using a laptop that’s nearly six years old. It’s impossible to know. Today, I decided to reboot my laptop as well as the modem. The stream became better after that… but I had also restarted the computer and modem before I began. (shrug emoji)
It wasn’t so long ago that mobile phones sounded horrible. In 1991, the record company Higher Octave gave me a Motorola brick phone for Christmas. I didn’t know what to do with it and rarely used it. Calls were always expensive and they became ludicrously dear when one crossed into roaming territory. Calls were literally like playing telephone, a game that is also called Chinese Whispers. One rarely understood every word in a sentence and had to interpolate the meaning from the information that did come through.
The brick phone lived, mostly, in the back lounge of the tour bus and was only used in emergencies. I continued doing phoners (phone-interviews) using pay phones along the way. Ah, memories of trying to answer a journalist’s questions while truckers stood around, waiting to use the phone themselves.
Remember when many of us had little phone company cards with a long-ass code we had to punch in so the call could be billed to our account? Yeah, that was a drag, but so much better than using coins or using a hotel phone. Those hotel phone charges were utterly ridiculous. Makes me wonder how much hotels hiked up there room rates once that golden goose of phone charges was slain.
That reminds me of another method for making calls that was the rage in colleges in 1979. As I was leaving to hitchhike back to my apartment in Boston, my GF gave me a small piece of paper with a short list of company names and a row of numbers next to each name. Names like Kodak and IBM were on the list. When I asked her what this was about, she explained that somebody had obtained the phone account numbers of big American corporations and by tapping in those numbers I would be to call her without paying the enormous long distance charges.
Back to live-streaming: it’s a new thing and it will become stable and easy soon enough, but there is also something exciting about the fragility of this new thing. I am starting to think about how I want to stream in the new year. I might set up differently. I might get a new computer at some point. Perhaps it will be able to handle multiple cameras, because it was cool WHEN it worked!
Thanks for tuning into my live streams. It was fun going through my photos to create the slide shows. It was nice, especially in a year without touring, to perform for you. So, big thank you to all of you.
Thank YOU, Ottmar! Your music and performance are thrilling. The slide show was spectacular. Exotic.
I vote for your getting a new computer! Though you always manage the techno blips, it is still painful. It is terrible for you to be distracted by it!
Boy, you took us through quite a telephone history. Did you ever hear about the Agnew? My first husband courted me with this device. I was in Los Angeles and he was at M.I.T. He constructed this thing with the wires, etc., buried in a huge plexiglass brick. Hideous looking. Plugged into our phones, the Agnew enabled us to talk endlessly without the phone company’s being aware any line was in use. FREE PHONE! Not as bad as Mr. Agnew’s crimes. Ha ha. I hope the statute of limitations has run on phone bill evasion!
Many thanks to OL for the livestream performances, definitely one of the best things this year has brought. The livestreams have a personal feel to them and when things don’t go perfectly, it oddly makes them seem even more personal. Great performance today, as always.
I can’t believe I didnt wait to see if you’d return when you stopped just before 11.
I’m kind of stunned. I thought it was over.
Thank you for performing for us this year, Ottmar. Truly.
Continued fortunate blessings in 2021.
Ottmar, thank you for all these magical moments. You are an incredible artist with the essence of your soul that melts my heart. Today I missed the streaming, but I loved the Tibet slideshow on Thursday, beautiful culture, it was very nice and peaceful and the red candle, a sweet detail. When I was young I remember my uncle called me: Tibetan Princess, I always remember that and I loved it :) because my eyes look like Asian and he was very white. There is a theory that America was populated by Asians who crossed the Bering Strait, so the eyes of Native Americans are very similar to Asian people. We are the result of mixture of cultures. God bless you! and happy holidays
Loved the online performance. And the slideshow of Tibet was wonderful. Great photos! I look forward to the next performance.
It is amazing how technology has changed. When we were building our house in Mexico my husband was there for almost a year. It was before Skype and WhatsApp and Facebook. We had this experimental free service that was in pilot called Net to Phone. Luckily it worked and we were able to talk daily during this time. And I remember well having to type in those codes from a pay phone. I traveled for business and used this all the time as it was before cell phones. Funny how now you never see a pay phone.
The streaming is fantastic and it is particularly nice for those living far away and cannot come to one of your regular tours. So please keep it up in some way even when you can do the normal touring again!
Having said this a big thank you also for the performances in Europe in past years. I remember how much I wanted to see you live after I discovered your music in the early and your website in the late 90s (Pandora’s box) and how great it was when I could actually let it happen.