JA, with one of Elizabeth's Orange Drop cookies in his mouth:
I must admit, I'm so nave, on the way to work this morning, I saw some graffiti that said
BUSH SUCKS
and I thought it was referring to the President.
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Over on our eCommerce page, you can now purchase gift certificates. Give as little as $10, and as much as you want. There's no limit to the giving. You know there's that audiophile friend of yours who's wanted that $600 set of every back issue we have in stock.
Now's the time.
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Dear Readers,
Do you have any ideas for new Stereophile merchandise? T-shirts, tote bags, CD holders, chili peppers, punk rock pins, guitar pics, 45 RPM adapters, pocket knives, lighters, bottle openers? Anything? Please let us know.
Possibly not, according to John Gibbens. He says the records we all know (and many of us worship) have always been played at the wrong speed.
I find his evidence persuasive. It's partially based on the technical difficulties posed by playing slide as high on the neck as would be necessary at those pitches, partially based on the single photograph we have of Johnson holding a guitar, influenced by how much shorter Johnson's recordings are than those of other Delta blues singers, and convincingly based on the results of slowing down the recordings by three semitones.
Pitch-shifted,…
On the autumn-colored PATH train, I admire a trio of wonderfully-dressed French tourists, cameras and messenger bags slung around casual shoulders and thick black scarves wrapped around chilly necks. All three own brilliantly long and messy hair. The two men keep disheveled beards. Their eyes sparkle with the excitement of the unfamiliar. Watching them, I think of my sweetheart and me, under some foreign ground, stuffing colorful bills into a slow and stubborn slot, attempting to board the Metro. And where would we go?
It's funny how a morning's commute to work is…
Good music vs evil music.
"After a hard day of work, analyzing classical music can be relaxing."
A tip of the hat to Alex Ross for pointing me toward McJeebie's blog.
What the heck is it? "Cathedral is an on-going interactive work of music and art designed specifically for the Web. Media artist Nora Farrell and composer William Duckworth created it."
What it is is beautiful. And hypnotic.
And addictive.
Steve Reich's 70th birthday celebration is currently keeping NYC concert-goers pretty busy, but you can participate at home, thanks to the Whitney Museum's web-casting of its October 15 performance event.
Thanks, Larry, for pointing this one out to me—and for taking me to hear Reich and Ransom Wilson perform the premiere of "Vermont Counterpoint" 24 years ago.