Monday, February 19, 2007

Spoiled By the Internet

Last week as I was driving to my friend B's house for dinner I heard part of an episode of The Vinyl Cafe. Normally I'm not a huge fan of music shows (if I wanted to hear music, I wouldn't be listening to NPR) but I was really enjoying this one. It started with some commentary from Stuart Mclean, who by the way has an adorable Canadian accent. Next, it included A Shokan Farewell, which is a gorgeous piece that was written for the Ken Burns Civil War series. Being a bit of a Civil War buff (well more of a Gone With the Wind and North and South fan really, but whatever) I think this music beautifully encapsulates the spirit of that time. Next, Mclean said that he wasn't very well versed in classical music so the musicians put together a tutorial for him, in which they played one piece of music as it would have been written in ten different time periods. I thought this was a cute idea, and although I was already having a "driveway moment" in front of B's house, I stayed to hear which piece they had picked and burst out laughing when I heard the theme to the Pink Panther. I immediately resolved to go listen to the podcast of the show on the NPR website, as anyone in this Internet age would assume was possible.

Oh how wrong I was! First of all you can't find The Vinyl Cafe on http://www.npr.org/, not even a direct link to the CBC show, although they do link to the CBC in general. On the CBC page you can easily search for The Vinyl Cafe but once you get there, this is what you find:

At this stage, the Vinyl Cafe is not available as a podcast for a variety of reasons. When it does become available as a podcast we will be sure to let you know. Thanks so much for your patience.

So this is the specific show I wanted to hear, but there's no way for me to find it on the official site! I assume that I could find a version of it somewhere on the Internet, but I feel (a) bummed that I can't listen to the show, (b) shocked that in this day and age I wouldn't be able to find it online and (c) kind of elitist for assuming that this sort of thing must be available to me whenever I want it.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

http://www.cbc.ca/podcasting//pastpodcasts.html?44#ref44

Unknown said...

Do you happen to have this as a file or a link to youtube or something. The link published by anonymnous dopes not seem to work. Will be forever grateful!