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Hello Grado

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…

Starring Bruce Willis as the Jeep

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.

Reelin' In the Years

Skunk Baxter has a new gig. After all, Steely Dan goes for years between tours.

Welcome to Our Alien Overlords

Oh, it's just Bagheera.

No Worries Here

"I wasn't scared," says Huckleberry. "I've seen Bagheera royally PO'd." Actually, he's generally the cause.

Lo Res Labels

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…

Keith Jarrett, Go Home

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…

Stephen King on Harry Potter

Now that the dust has settled on The Deathly Hallows, Stephen King weighs in on the series and on J. K. Rowling. King, of course, is one of the few fiction authors who can write about Rowling's success without bitterness, and his thoughts on Rowling's craft are sharp. He also knows just a little bit about toiling in the genre-novel wilderness.

Minor spoilage for those of you who haven't completed Hallows—which King justifies by observing that if you haven't read it yet, you must not be that big a fan.

The Language of Homer

How The Simpsons has embiggened the English language.

Brooklyn Overlook

As Jeff Wong and I took our daily constitutional along Brooklyn's Greenbelt this morning, we spotted these colorful boulders along the shore. You never know who you're going to run across in this borough.

Photo credit: Jeff Wong