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Music Matters Jazz, a new audiophile label, starts up this month, reissuing classic Blue Note albums on 180-gram virgin-vinyl LPs pressed at 45 rpm. The test pressings I’ve heard sound extremely promising. The people involved in the company certainly know what they’re doing (Joe Harley of AudioQuest, Steve Hoffman and Kevin Gray of AcousTech, Michael Cuscuna of Mosaic Records, who is more familiar with the Blue Note vaults than anybody).
But here’s an irreverent thought: Rudy Van Gelder wasn’t the only great jazz recording engineer of the 1950s and ‘60s. Here’s another: He wasn’t the…
Jay Allen Sanford describes his horrifying descent into crack addiction and homelessness. It's not a pretty story, except that he did make it back.
"I guess I should be glad I was so bad at being a crackhead."
Jeremy Paxman argues that the last lines of "Dulce et Decorum Est" were not meant cynically.
That's certainly how I'd always read them.
Scientists say your brain does it for you. Now, I'd like them to reverse the experiment to see if that's why okay home theater can be "good enough," but so-so hi-fi seldom is.
My wife gave me a copy of The Complete Persepolis for my birthday and I've been devouring it greedily. Satrapi's graphic novel uses a charmingly primitive visual style to tell a horrifying story of growing up in revolutionary Iran.
So, if I've been greedily devouring it, why haven't I completed it yet? Because it so powerfully portrays events—such as sending the ill-trained children's army to be slaughtered in WWI-style human wave assaults by promising them paradise—that I frequently have to put it aside and just think for a while.
I'm used to that response with print (cf Chet…