When Marty Met Mick'n'Keef
Who knows? <A HREF="http://www.shinealightmovie.com/">This</A> might be good.
LATEST ADDITIONS
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What The Wire Reveals About Urban Journalism
Lawrence Lanaham <A HREF="http://www.cjr.org/cover_story/secrets_of_the_city.php">goes to Baltimore, Maryland</A>, as well as <I>Bodymore, Murdaland</I> to discover if David Simon's dyspeptic portrait of newspapers in crisis in this season's <I>The Wire</I> is realistic.
Jazz and Radiohead
I was listening to Radiohead’s new album, <I>In Rainbows</I>. It’s really as great as all the rock critics say. More than that (from this blog’s angle), it’s as harmonically and rhythmically sophisticated as just about any work of modern jazz. (I’m not saying it’s <I>like</I> jazz; rather, that on any musical level, the purest jazz purist has no grounds for looking down on it.) The album sent me to my music closet to take another listen to Brad Mehldau’s cover of Radiohead’s “Knives Out,” from his trio’s 2005 CD on the Nonesuch label, <I>Day Is Done</I>. I listened through all 10 tracks—which include, besides two Mehldau compositions, Lennon & McCartney’s “Martha My Dear” and “She’s Leaving Home,” Burt Bacharach’s “Alfie,” Paul Simon’s “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover,” and the title tune by Nick Drake.
Define the word "audiophile."
Is it how much you spend or how you spend it? Is it how you organize your priorities when it comes to audio? Is it only a state of mind? Define the word "audiophile."
Deluxe Edition
I think it was the only album my parents owned on both cassette and vinyl. So they could listen at home, and in the car. I remember looking at it and thinking I don't know what. This young black man in a gleaming white suit with a look on his face that says what. Looking all confident and comfortable and strange.
Sour Honey
Blues movies, movies about the blues, continue to be a treacherous swamp for filmmakers; For some bizarre reason, they just can’t get it right.
Benchmark DAC1 USB D/A processor & headphone amplifier
In his July 2003 "The Fifth Element" column, John Marks enthusiastically wrote about the Benchmark Media Systems DAC1 D/A processor and headphone amplifier. Comparing its sound playing CDs with that of a three-times-more-expensive Marantz SA-14 SACD player, he concluded that the DAC 1's "Red Book" performance was at least as good as that of the Marantz, being "slightly more articulate in the musical line, and slightly more detailed in spatial nuances, particularly the localization of individual images in space, and in soundstage depth."
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Huck Hangs Out
"What's the problem? It's warm and out of the way—I could do this for hours!"
Vegas Cat
On my travel day <I>to</I> Vegas, I awoke at 3am and flew six hours to the desert city. When I checked into my hotel, I stripped off my outerwear and napped.
So Long, Flashy
For many years one of my most beloved guilty pleasures has been reading George MacDonald Frasier's books. Not just the Flashman Papers, which I have found delightful and from which I have learned a lot of 19<SUP>th</SUP> century history, but also his McAusland novels, his <I>Mr. American</I>,his spirited adventure novel <I>Candlemass Road</I> (which, at a taut 181 pages, is one of the finest examples of economical action writing ever), and his masterful history of the Scottish boarder wars, <I>The Steel Bonnets</I>.