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Mitch Albom's essay on Barry Bonds is so sharply written I can almost forgive him for the two hours I spent reading The Five People You Meet In Heaven that I will never get back.
I'm a total Neil Gaiman fanboy, so I'm giddy with anticipation of the theatrical release of Stardust tomorrow. I just re-read the book and was delighted to find it as charming as when I first devoured it in 1999.
The film will obviously be a very different experience, but I have high hopes that it's going to be a corker. Is there any chance it will be a hit? John Scalzi parses that question and concludes that it might pleasantly surprise its studio, which is close enough.
Manwhile, over at The Huffington Post, Robert J. Elsiberg points out that a lot of "flops" really aren't.
Cafe Aman posts an Antonio Machado poem, thanking Osvaldo Golijov for introducing him to it. I wish I could name drop OG—I think that he and Jennifer Higdon are the most consistently satisfying composers writing today.
It is a nice poem, though.
If you walk by my cubicle here at Stereophile, you'll see me with these strapped across my head. Truthfully, they sound great. Especially for their price of $15. I liked them so much that after my roommate drunkenly stepped on them and split them in half my freshman year of college, I bought them again, but after hours of listening to Pandora radio here at work while editing hundreds of spreadsheets for the Buyer's Guide, I realized two things:
a.) There are other headphones out there
b.) These things pinch my head
I couldn't listen to them for more than an hour…
Jon Carroll has a fine column this morning (no surprise there) that meanders from his thoughts on Die Hard (very Aristotlian) to the making of the Jeep and how the humvee influences our presence in Iraq.
He also mentions a lovely piece by Jon Grinspin on American Heritage on the history of the jeep, which is also very linkworthy.
"I wasn't scared," says Huckleberry. "I've seen Bagheera royally PO'd." Actually, he's generally the cause.
Insider music biz stuff should in most cases stay that way because normal folk, what I like to call "civilians," don't care about who said what to whom in the bowels of some label HQ in Burbank or Manhattan. There's also something pitifully self-indulgent and exclusionary and ultimately pathetic about people who are in the know about the music biz and live to tell you about it.
That all said, here's one that I can’t believe and just have to share. For a feature on Third Stream Jazz in the October issue of Stereophile I needed hi res jpegs of the cover art of two Modern Jazz Quartet…
I am hereby boycotting Keith Jarrett. It’s a shame. He’s one of the great jazz pianists, but he’s just become too big a jerk—and, at a time when America has an ugly image in the world, a dreadful ambassador. Here’s
footage of him cursing Italian jazz fans for taking his picture as he approached the stage, before he even started playing, at the Umbria Jazz Festival. These are people who paid over $100 for what he called the “privilege” of hearing him play. There are polite ways to ask people not to take pictures. You don’t have to treat them like scum.
The YouTube footage comes thanks to…