While kicking around the Merge website, I learned about the upcoming album, Volume Two, from She & Him. M. Ward and Zooey Deschanel make some beautiful music together, and Zooey hypnotizes me with her voice and her big blue eyes. The album is scheduled to be released on March 23, and is available for pre-order now.
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The Grammy Awards are that one Sunday night every January, when for a few brief hours, I try to imagine what people on other continents (in not other planets) think of America when they watch this silly, frivolous, super glam display of Las Vegasness come to the Staples Center. How incredibly ridiculous we must look to the rest of the world. During the telecast, I’m liable to claim I’m from Canada. By the end, I want to take a shower and scrub off the sleaze. The whole thing is so bad, so not about music, that I have to change channels throughout the telecast if only to cleanse my palette…
Happy birthday, Lee Ranaldo. The Sonic Youth guitarist turns eternal today. Again.
Here's a video for "Mote," from the 1990 album, Goo. "Mote" is one of my all-time favorite SY songs and the one that defined my appreciation for Lee's work.
And here's the band performing "Mote" live, just a few years ago, somehow still with as much fire as when they first released it.
Many composers, jazz and otherwise, have tried to write pieces inspired by famous artworks, but Ted Nash is one of the few who pulls it off.
His new album with the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, Portrait in Seven Shades, lays out musical equivalents of paintings by Monet, Dali, Matisse, Picasso, Van Gogh, Chagall, and Pollock—a conventional lot (MoMA 101, you might call it), but that makes his task more challenging because most people know these paintings, they know how they feel when they look at them, so they’ll know very quickly how Nash stacks up.
It’s good to see Nash…
The Pioneer CT-W208R double auto-reverse cassette deck plays tapes(!), offers all sorts of unnecessary conveniences (like Fast-Forward and Reverse), costs $194, and is available NOW.
The Onkyo TA-RW255 dual auto-reverse cassette deck plays tapes(!), offers all sorts of unnecessary conveniences (like Fast-Forward and Reverse), costs $199, and is available NOW.
The TEAC W-600R double auto-reverse cassette deck plays tapes(!), offers all sorts of unnecessary conveniences (like Fast-Forward and Reverse), costs $149, and is available NOW.
The Sony TC-WE475 dual auto-reverse cassette deck plays tapes(!), offers all sorts of unnecessary conveniences (like Fast-Forward and Reverse), costs $149.95, and is available NOW.
Perhaps impatience is my fatal flaw, the thing that keeps me forever this close to complete and undying happiness, but never quite there. I’m impatient. About certain things. I’m impatient, for instance, about acquiring a cassette deck. My cassette collection is growing large. My colorful cassettes sit on my little footstool, waiting to be played, looking at me like what the hell. What the hell?
My friends tell me to wait for a Nakamichi CD-1. It’s got that thing you need. And it’s really good. It’s, all things considered, the only deck to get. I almost had one, too. On a…
I love my job, I love my office, I love a whole lot of other things. But, when the sun is shining through my living room windows the way it was this morning, it is very hard to leave home.
Home.
Here you can see some compact discs, some records, some books, some pictures, and some other stuff. The system:
DeVore Fidelity Gibbon 3 loudspeakers on Target stands (Because my first love remains my true love.)
Rega P3-24 turntable with RB301 tonearm, Elys phono cartridge, and outboard power supply
Exposure 2010S CD player
Exposure 2010S integrated…