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Fourteen Words

Out of habit now more than anything else, I keep my cell phone on the floor beneath my bed while I sleep at night. In the morning, when I wake, I still check my cell phone for any messages.

This morning, I found a text message from Omar:

"Dude," it began, "I have 14 words for you...."

Only fourteen?

"Hurry up and get your turntable so you can listen to Paul Simon's Graceland!"

Fourteen words. I counted just to be sure.

"That's a lot of words, dude," I wrote back.

"Sometimes it takes a lot of words," he replied.

A Better Personal Listening Experience

They're opening a Starbucks and a Duane Reade directly across from the Grove Street PATH station, where I catch the train to work each morning. This will certainly bring more people to my growing neighborhood. This morning, the train was so crowded that I couldn't read my book, Murakami's colorful Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman. So, instead, I did what I always do when there's no room to read:

I counted the number of people listening to personal digital players. From where I stood in the middle of the car, my hand grasping a stainless steel pole along with ten other morning hands…

Places Shape Lives

The sun is almost all gone now and the streetlamps along Newark Avenue are just beginning to take on a sort of greenish glow. The sky has become a shadowy mess. We're trying to postpone something. Who would want the day to end like this?

"Do you want to get some fancy beers?" I ask Omar.

A shrug of shoulders.

"Sure," he replies.

We make a left at the corner of Newark and Jersey and look into the windows at Ox, the expensive new restaurant with the great sandwich board. With its exposed-brick and weathered-steel exterior, Ox is strangely out of place…

SXSW Part I

Although the brain pall caused by four solid days and nights of music has yet to lift entirely, I will attempt to begin to dissect South by Southwest 2008.

For starters, let me take on those pathetic souls who would rather wallow in dissension and what's wrong with SXSW. For all the hating, blogosphere jerk-off's who whine and cry and condemn all SXSW's shortcomings—I refuse to mention them because publicity is what these Me! Me! Me! publicity hounds live for—it remains the vital once–a–year coming together of the tribes. If there's one thing the music world could use more of, it's any…

Ornette!

Heads up. Ornette Coleman’s group is playing at the Town Hall in New York City on March 28. If you have any interest in modern jazz (or modern music, period), you should buy a ticket now before they sell out.

Coleman is not merely among the last survivors of the post-Parker revolution in musical affairs (along with Sonny Rollins, Lee Konitz, Paul Bley, Paul Motian, Roy Haynes, and Charlie Haden, himself the last surviving cohort of Ornette’s breakthrough quartet of 1958-60). He was also, along with John Coltrane, the progenitor of that revolution. And yet his music sounds as fresh as…

Rage Against The Machine

In Aural Robert in the April issue of Stereophile, Amoeba owner David Prinz and I discuss his label, Amoeba Records, and his ongoing program to reissue Gram Parsons live sets. Needless to say however, I also talked with him about the ever more bizarre situation that the record business now finds itself in. As the owner of the biggest and best independent record stores on planet Earth, his opinion carries more than a little weight. Here's a sampling of what he said about the biz and the specter of iTunes.

"I feel like it [the record business] is in really dire straights right now, but it…

The Mini Mini

The Solo Mini Mini Cooper. Vroom vroom.

Arcam's Solo Mini

Art Dudley reviewed the original Arcam Solo CD receiver in our July 2005 issue. Art was impressed. He wrote:

Arcam's new Solo is the rare audiophile product that swims with, rather than against, the flow of mainstream consumerism&#151toward simplicity, convergence, and relative smallness.

With the new Solo Mini ($999), introduced in the US at January's Consumer Electronics Show, it seems as though Arcam is looking to take those values even further.

Simplicity: The Solo Mini is an all-in-one music system, combining a CD player, AM/FM tuner with an alarm clock…

Little Beats and Sighs

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I knew nothing about high end hi-fi. Hard to believe, I know. But true. I didn't even know that the high end existed. My Magnavox boombox worked just fine. As a person grew older and gained the responsibilities and markings of an adult, I knew that his or her speakers and amplifiers grew larger and flashier and more expensive&#151like their houses and cars and debt&#151but I didn't equate those changes with better sound. I didn't even think about better sound.

I was lucky to find this job. I didn't know what I was getting…

Showing Up at a Car Show with a Listening Room

Visitors to the 2008 International Auto Show, currently taking place at NYC's Jacob Javits Convention Center, might discover something different at the Bentley display: a high-end audio listening room. Bentley Motors and Naim have teamed up for the "Naim For Bentley" program, which will be offered as a sound package upgrade for all Bentley models by year's end.

"Bentley wanted to demonstrate the value of a real audio system to its customers," Naim's managing director Paul Stephenson told me. "So we suggested that we set up a real Naim system and allow people to hear what it is we…