Mine In Mono

Our town’s only movie theater just closed. I wasn’t a regular, but my son was.

Sam Tornow writes about Thurston Moore and The Smell of Vinyl for Discogs. Moore is a famous vinyl aficionado who stuffs his apartment with records.

“I kind of have to draw some limitations with my responsibility toward my own budget. I can’t just be living, building furniture out of records. I [still] have a pretty healthy Wantlist on Discogs, though. I continue to buy records all the time. I’m always interested in going to record stores, and I get my Discogs alerts for records I want. I would say I purchase on Discogs at least two or three times a week.”

This happened to a friend of mine, who was once named by the News & Observer as the biggest record collector in Raleigh. He eventually ran out of space for his collection and moved on to clothing.

I found the position Moore now takes on CDs interesting. 

Originally sticking to vinyl and cassettes, CDs have also made their way into his collection. At first he was apprehensive of the medium when it initially exploded in popularity, but now he thinks they aged well.

This sounds a lot like the conclusion I have come to. With the right DAC, CDs can sound fantastic. The most recent CD I was looking at (an upcoming Pains of Being Pure At Heart collection) was also half the price of the record. That’s hard to beat, especially if you’re on a budget.

Just finished reading Shogun - Part 1 by James Clavell 📚. I don’t want to sound like a snob and say the book was better than the show. Especially because the show was amazing. The novel did have some differences, though, and a bit more of the political machinations.

The only social networking site my brother has ever been on is Miitomo.

David Saavadra writes for El País about the rise and fall of the Stone Roses, a band many had pegged as the saviors of britpop at the end of the 80s.

Why did U.K. music critics place so much hope in them in the late 1980s? “Everything was exaggerated, because it was a time when the media was looking for someone to occupy the throne that the Smiths had left vacant,” notes music critic Carlos Pérez de Ziriza. “They had the merit of fusing, like no other group, the British pop heritage of the 1960s and its most exquisite melodic tradition with the new rhythms emanating from Manchester, favoured by the rise of rave culture, acid house, and that new lysergia that had driven the second summer of love, that of 1988.”

The Stone Roses, perhaps most notably, at this point, were a huge influence on Oasis, in style as well as substance. Of course, my link to the article isn’t anything less than encouragement to read it, but if you want to save a click, the downfall of the band can be mostly attributed to old-fashioned rockstar hubris.

Austin Kleon has a post on Dave “Big Dutch” Nally, whose deceptively amateurish art looks like a cross between something that would have been created by Daniel Johnston and the liner notes of a Pavement record.

I especially love the reference to Ezra Jack Keats' exquisite children’s book The Snowy Day (bottom left).

A little quiet storm feels perfect for this Saturday morning after a busy week.

I disclosed my most fondest Christmas wish list item to my lady friend last night — a FiiO DM13 portable CD player. She laughed at me. You want a discman for Christmas?

How can I explain my love of single-purpose devices and high-fidelity to someone who lives on their iPad and sees no problem with lossy streaming music? I want something that doesn’t have a screen with which to focus on music and, for goodness’ sake, some time to part with my phone during the day.

Bluetooth codecs have progressed, but Apple hasn’t seen that as a priority in their annual device updates.¹ Their hardware can’t even output the high-fidelity audio that you can stream from their Apple Music service. One could probably successfully argue that Apple is more of a mass-consumer device manufacturer now than the company that used to cater to creatives.

Save, help, and protect us, O Virgin Theotokos.