Stephen Mejias

I still sometimes forget that the year is 2008. It'll take me a few more months to get used to it. No doubt about it, though: 2007 is old news. I can tell by the copyright dates on my new CDs. It's 2008. The birdies are making all sorts of happy racket outside my kitchen window; the high temperatures are creeping up, up, slowly up; Opening Day is less than a week away.

The Solo Mini Mini Cooper. Vroom vroom.

Art Dudley reviewed the original Arcam">http://www.stereophile.com/amplificationreviews/705arcam/index.html">Ar… Solo CD receiver in our July 2005 issue. Art was impressed. He wrote:

The sun is almost all gone now and the streetlamps along Newark Avenue are just beginning to take on a sort of greenish glow. The sky has become a shadowy mess. We're trying to postpone something. Who would want the day to end like this?

They're opening a Starbucks and a Duane Reade directly across from the Grove Street PATH station, where I catch the train to work each morning. This will certainly bring more people to my growing neighborhood. This morning, the train was so crowded that I couldn't read my book, Murakami's colorful Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman. So, instead, I did what I always do when there's no room to read:

Back around Christmastime, when everyone around me seemed to be receiving iPods and gift certificates to the iTunes store, I thought I should give my loved ones The">http://blog.stereophile.com/stephenmejias/123107talk/">The MP3 Talk. Now, John Atkinson, has prepared another version of The">http://www.stereophile.com/features/308mp3cd/index.html">The MP3 Talk&#151live and in color with all sorts of cool graphs and stuff!

Like John">http://stereophile.com/thefifthelement/208fifth/">John Marks and my uncle Omarhttp://blog.stereophile.com/stephenmejias/021308sing/">Omar;, I am prone to enthusiasms. It's not unusual for me to hear some new piece of music and wind up feeling that I need it&#151neeeeeeed it. So what? Music is great. It is unusual for me, though, to hear some new piece of music and be so moved by it that I leave work early, race up Madison Avenue, charge down into Grand Central, take the 4 to Union Square, and face the many temptations of the vast Virgin Megastore to buy that new piece of music.