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Put On Your Red Shoes and Dance the Blues, or: Blend With the M

There's a knock-knock at my door.

"Hi Stephen," ad manager Chris Yuin greets me. "So, I think I'll be moving into Patti's old office today."

Elizabeth and I started a trend. Everyone is moving into an office. With the sudden space created by recent departures and reorganizations, there's room enough for us all to enjoy a little privacy and sunlight. And all the good that comes with a little privacy and sunlight.

Despite fewer occupants, the office has become more alive, cheerier. There's a greater presence than ever before, with more evidence of the fine art we create…

Spirals

John Marks writes: "Peter Sykes, who played the Goldbergs live at HE Whatever in NYC, clued me in to the site www.larips.com.

Which is “spiral” backwards—and which argues for a solution to Bach’s temperament problem. Sykes finds it convincing.

"The short version: the curlicue over the dedication of the WTC is an upside-down memory device of how to flatten a bit, double-flatten a bit, or leave pure the tunings of different note intervals... .

"More perhaps, than most might want to know!"

Not me, I spent tons of time checking out all of Mr. Lehman's examples. Thanks, John!…

William P. Gottlieb, R.I.P.

I just learned that William Gottlieb died last night. Like every jazz fan, many of my images of the jazz greats come directly from his photography. Billie Holiday with her head back, eyes closed; Django Reinhardt, cigarette a-dangle, fretting a run; a skinny Frank Sinatra looking beyond the microphone . . .all are indelible Gottlieb images. You'll probably see lots of obituaries in the next few days, but a visit to the Gottlieb collection at the Library of Congress might be the best place to remember him.

Price Gouging and Retail Sales

One of the most common complaints we see when writing about consumer dissatisfaction with CDs is "price gouging" by greedy corporations. Several Stereophile readers have written that they"know" CDs only cost pennies to make, so $16.98 is a rip-off for a product that should sell for under $10.

It's true that the cost per disc of manufacturing is well under a buck, but there are lots of other expenses that add up to make that disc so expensive—especially for small labels, such as John Marks or John Atkinson's efforts. Yes, labels with acts like Madonna or the dreaded Britney Spears can make…

Didn't Alfred Bester Invent This?

Yahoo reports on the "tongue port," which sort of combines elements on the space-commando neural switching technology from The Stars My Destination with Chip Delany's direct neural jacks from Babel 17 and other early work. Cool—and kind of scary.

Jake Shimabukuro

Walking Down Rainhill
Hitchhike Records

Although this is not his latest disc, musically I like this one better than the new one. Jake Shimabukuro is the Django Reinhardt of the Ukulele (pronounced ooo-koo-lay-lay, not yew-ka-lay-lee), and is an incredible musician, regardless of how some regard his chosen axe. There is some forgettable jazz-lite here, but the solid tracks, like opener "Heartbeat" and his take on "While My Guitar Gently Weeps", more than compensate.

The songs were multi-tracked in a studio in Hawaii, with Shimabukuro often building up layers of uke…

Hard-Wired For Sound?

Are the brains of animals hard-wired to detect the footfalls (or wingflaps) of predators? Dr. Cord Westhoff thinks so.

The Blog Starts Here

Starting this blog has made me feel almost the same way I did when Frank Sinatra died and I wrote in the pages of Stereophile that when I became a music writer, lo those many dark-haired days ago, I knew that someday I'd have to write a Francis Albert obit. When the blog craze first began to gallop, I knew intuitively that someday, I too would be sucked into the immediacy maw and be lured into venting my opinions, valuable or not, in the blogosphere.

What the hell do I plan to say? In my everyday life here in the seething Apple, I end up running my mouth, ah, I mean interacting, on the…

Nobody Somebody Nobody Knows

It's hard for me to believe that all of today's sunshine will soon be replaced by clouds and rain. Then again, there's no reason to trust in whimsical April. The forecast calls for the sky to fall at about 6pm EST. Right now, at 4:55pm EST, the tall, brick buildings outside my window are blanketed in golden warmth. I'm usually not so in touch with the weather's hourly report, but there's a special circumstance keeping me curious.

And then: We're working on so much. Every day there's something new. This afternoon has handcuffed us with IRMA forms and shipping labels. Elizabeth is…

Is Technology Changing Our Brains?

Mark Fleischmann sends us a cautionary link that argues that our immersion in the technological soup of bleeps, blips, and scattershot images is changing us from critters who think in words to ones that utilize pictures.

As thought provoking as the article is, I found the comments even more interesting.