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What Happened In Puerto Rico?

A Round of Shots
Friday, October 23, 9:35pm

Fritzy walks over to me and asks, “Are you going to talk to them or what?”

“I’m working up to it.”

“I’m gonna buy them a round of shots,” he says.

“Oh shit.”

Aleida laughs at me. My heart is beating so hard I can feel a bruise forming on my chest. Fritzy walks over to where the Vivian Girls are sitting and asks if he can buy them a round of shots. The girls shrug their shoulders and nod their heads.

Oh, god. I sigh, take a deep breath, and set down my drink.

“Okay, I have to go…

As soon as I walked in the door...

I saw this prominently displayed...

The Loft aka the room we all want but never get

If just seeing a room can make you mouth water...well, this was it.

Spanish Admirers

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery...or maybe not!

Barcelona in Hi Fi

Casa Werner During my Barcelona sojourn, I made a trip to the leading high end gear store in that beautiful city, Casa Werner, which is downtown, on the Ronda Sant Pere. Open since 1933, this former music store which began selling Victrolas along with 78’s, before moving entirely from content to gear, has been in the same family now for about a decade.

I had a good feeling about the place when, as soon as I walked in, there were Stereophile reprints of Bel Canto gear displayed prominently. The owner of Werner, Vicente Viguera, who was a sly fox and a world class character/…

Grizzly Bear Is Ready, Able

Well, here’s another great video from Grizzly Bear. The band is like a bottomless cup of creativity. How do they do it? Don’t they have record reviews to write? Don’t they have issues to ship to press?

Gah!

This one is for “Ready, Able,” off of the band’s excellent Veckatimest, an album sure to be at the top of many year-end lists, including my own.

Now on Newsstands: <i>Stereophile</i>, Vol.32 No.12

The December 2009 issue of Stereophile is now on newsstands. Our final issue of 2009 includes our annual “Products of the Year” feature. People love this feature. We’re already receiving fun complaints from manufacturers whose products are not pictured in the article, complaints from readers because we only vote on products we’ve actually listened to, complaints from angry moms because we didn’t pick their children to play one of the lead roles in “A Christmas Carol.”

Complainers! They are so silly!

For an explanation of our voting process, check out John…

Going Rogue: An American Amp

We can’t let Sarah Palin have all the fun.

In an upcoming review, new contributor Erick Lichte talks about the inherent coolness of tubes and the “transitive property of coolness,” by which owning tubes makes you cool, and it got me thinking:

What the hell am I waiting for? I’m always waiting around for something that never comes. Why don’t I just go out and grab it?

All of my cool friends have tubes in their systems. And don’t I want to be cool like them? Why, yes! Yes, I do want to be cool like them.

I have had some experience with tubes. I…

Nellie McKay does Doris Day

Nellie McKay’s Normal As Blueberry Pie: A Tribute to Doris Day (Verve, CD and LP) is the unlikeliest delight of the year. Who’d have thought that the snarkmistress of Get Away from Me (her 2004 debut double-album, with its “Explicit Lyrics” label, downtown cool, and sharp-wit irony, to say nothing of the title’s savage slash at the then-raging darling, Norah Jones) could produce such gentle covers of hits once sung by the queen of wholesomeness?

And yet that’s what this is. Yes, there’s a whimsy to the arrangements (nobody these days could sing the lyrics to “Send Me No Flowers” straight…

Kind of Blue Barcelona

There was fast food like Catalonian baguette pizza with chorizo. Tapas like flash fried baby squid or crispy potatoes with olive oil mayo and tomato sauce. And then of course there was that robber baron Rupert Murdoch and his damnable tabloid The Sun which every morning has a half–naked twentysomething smiling at you from page two! Danni, 23, from Coventry was my personal favorite. Yes, Europe does have its advantages! And then there was the music, right, right, the music. A mini-theme of the 41st installment of the Barcelona Jazz Festival was the 50th anniversary of Kind of Blue. The…