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A Stable Medium

Chris Sommovigo sent out a message this morning:

Interesting article today in The Globe and Mail about the impermanence of archival formats... Except vinyl.

Got me curious. Calling upon the author to explain, we learn:

In Britain, media have been reporting a strange mould affecting audiotape and videotape. Thousands of kilometres of magnetic tape have already been destroyed by the dust-like substance...

It seems, dear music lovers, that nature is rebelling against our inferior audio and video formats! It's almost like some summer blockbuster with that wonder…

A hand-written cookbook of 58 dishes, meticulously hand-written and illustrated by Corporal James Abraham Harrison will be auctioned next month. The gimmick to this cookbook? Harrison was one of Montgomery's Desert Rats and served as mess chef in the North African desert.

They say an army travels on its stomach and Harrison served his mates a mixture of familiar fare (boiled beef and carrots) and more exotic grub (okra, for example, which is ubiquitous in Berber tagines, wasn't found in Old Blighty).

I'm a huge fan of "practical" cookbooks, so I'd love to get a look at this one.…

<i>Blood, Looms, and Blooms</i>

Tighten the laces on your Vans and jump on your skateboard, strap on your helmet and hop on your scooter, pump some air into the tires of your cruiser, do whatever you have to do, dudes; Dash, sprint, leap, fly like Olympians to your nearest record shop and lay down the $19.99 for the new Leila Arab album.

Blood, Looms, and Blooms.

Do this. If I were Sam Tellig, I would say, "You want it." If I were Kal Rubinson, I'd say, "It's mandatory."

If I were Jon Iverson, I would say, "Ah-ah ooh-ooh ee-ee!"

The album is available as a compact disc, but the…

On a Dissecting Table

AlexO's response to Leila's Blood, Looms, and Blooms made me chuckle. AlexO wrote:

I listened to the album on MySpace. What a weird musical style and the whole album is so unusual. I see a pattern developing: As with most of your musical recommendations, I walk away confused: not quite sure whether I really love the album or not caring for it at all. It's the most unsettling feeling.

This is a very interesting response. On one hand, I feel that I've succeeded at something (or perhaps it's that Leila has succeeded): If someone were to tell me that an album is weird and…

As Lovely and Troubling As

Which brings me to my latest recommendation: Xiu Xiu's Women As Lovers takes its alluring title from a novel by Austrian author Elfriede Jelinek. The album, Xiu Xiu's sixth full-length, was released much earlier this year, but I only got around to it this weekend, during a trip to Vintage Vinyl in good ol' Fords, NJ, along rich and wild Route 1.

The album is similarly rich and wild, with gorgeous, captivating sound throughout and a wonderful collection of instruments&#151everything from the more traditional guitars, bass, drums, and sax to the more unusual harmonium, metal…

Vinyl Record Day

Today is/was/forever will be remembered as: Vinyl Record Day. August 12th, the day Thomas Edison blessed us with the phonograph.

Vinyl Record Day is not limited to one age category, race, gender, ethnic background, or any other special group. Vinyl Record Day (VRD) is because we love vinyl. It's more than just the music. As Jimi Hendrix said, LPs are like our personal diaries. A primary goal of VRD is to establish a national day when we all enjoy the music most personally important to us. It's for our own individual enjoyment, and collectively, it is for society to have…

A Private Function

After the driving was complete, Bentley got us an after-hours tour of the Isabella Stewart Gardener Museum. Nice place—especially if your taste runs to Venetian Renaissance palazzos filled with fine art. The tour was eye opening and afterwards we retired to the cloisters for adult beverages and a catered affair, complete with chamber music in the courtyard.

Bentley certainly impressed me with the Continental Flying Spur. Yes it's expensive, No, I could never afford one, but I can't afford a lot of the stuff I write about. But a man can dream, can't he?

Besides, with the…

More Weight!

I walked over to Giles Corey's cenotaph—he is of course, the sole "witch" not hung, but rather pressed to death by heaping large rocks upon him until he was crushed. It took three days. As Arthur Miller memorialized in The Crucible, his last words were, "More weight."

Salem Witchcraft Trials Tercentenary Memorial

Salem is full of New Age and Wyccan shoppes and it has an overabundance of "museums" that are more wax museum than serious repositories of history—heck, the place even has a statue of Elizabeth Montgomery in her role as Samantha on Bewitched. But it also has the Salem Witchcraft Trials Tercentenary Memorial.

The memorial reminds me of the Vietnam War memorial in DC, since rather than being a heroic bronze casting, it is about negative space. It is surrounded on three sides by a hand-built wall of New England granite. Inscribed into the threshold of the fourth side are the…

The Bunghole

Of course, any city with a maritime history has pirate history, too. In recent years, Salem has skewed more towards witches than pirates, but some traditions remain, including Beavis and Butthead tavern—or in this case, liquor store—names.