LATEST ADDITIONS

I’d say on average that about 85 percent of the people I ask, hate Christmas music with an undying passion. I am one of a crazed minority who actually like the stuff and have long cultivated a collection of the stuff. Although I usually begin the season with the two volumes of <I>Billboard Greatest Christmas Hits</I>, both of which are now out of print (C’mon Rhino!), but are easily found used on Amazon, my general rule with Christmas music is: the weirder the better. And God knows when it comes to weird, Bob Dylan’s new collection of guttural holiday croakings is truly amazing.

This is what I want from music:

On Friday, I promised myself that I would spend no more money on records until after the New Year. On Saturday, I found myself at <a href="http://www.othermusic.com/">Other Music</a> with three LPs in my hands. Gah! I brought them up to the counter, where the cute girl with the black hair was waiting. I felt despicable.

Oh, the aptly named <a href="http://importantrecords.com/index.htm">Important Records</a>, one of my favorite sources for outstanding experimental, noise, and otherwise out-there recordings, is having a <i>crazy</i> holiday sale, yo. Check it out: You can buy 44 <a href="http://importantrecords.com/releases/44_66_sale.html">compact discs</a> for just $44. Or 66 compact discs for just $66. Finally! And your purchase comes with a sweet tote bag. You’ll need it for hauling around all those compact discs.

I’ve published two music articles elsewhere in the past couple weeks.

I dreamed that I was back <a href="http://blog.stereophile.com/stephenmejias/what_happened_in_puerto_rico/… Puerto Rico</a> with the Vivian Girls. They asked me to work on a new song with them. We decided to set up a rehearsal space at my aunt’s beach house. It was taking us awhile to get the instruments properly set up, and Katy was becoming anxious, but I soothed her nerves with a stunning spread of snacks and candies: finger sandwiches, kiwis, grapes, pomegranates, baskets of popcorn, bowls of pretzels and chips, towers of Twizzlers, tall pyramids of Almond Joy…

It began when my oldest brother, 13 years my senior, returned from military service and told me about "hi-fi." Until then, all I'd known was our ancient tabletop radio-phonograph with its insatiable appetite for osmium styli. Back then, in the early 1950s, audio componentry was scrappy, still evolving from World War II military electronics and public-address systems. I began reading the electronics magazines and learned that, to get started, I needed a record player connected to an amplifier and a speaker. I toured the shops and stalls on old Cortlandt Street, before the building of the World Trade Center, and made my selections based on appearance, reputation, and specifications rather than on sound. Still, compared to what we were used to, the results sounded hair-raisingly good.