9.26.2008
Return Of The King
New Bohren Und Der Club Of Gore album out in October on CD / 2xLP. Rejoice mortals!
9.08.2008
All Of New England's Fears Unleashed...
A few years ago this would have made me happy. Now I'm kinda bummed. Dude definitely makes the game more exciting... Courtesy of the New York Times.
Brady Done for the Season
By LYNN ZINSER
Published: September 8, 2008
FOXBOROUGH, Mass. — Patriots quarterback Tom Brady’s injured knee will require surgery and he will miss the rest of the season, the team announced on Monday.
New England Coach Bill Belichick said the team has not yet worked out any other quarterbacks to add to the roster, denying reports that Chris Simms was already here for a workout. Belichick would not say what the team would do, but clearly the team needs reinforcements. Behind the backup quarterback, Matt Cassel, is the rookie Kevin O’Connell.
“We feel badly for Tom,” Belichick said. “No one has worked harder or done more for this team than Tom. It’s a big setback for him.”
Brady’s injury came midway through the first quarter of the Patriots’ season opener against Kansas City, when Chiefs safety Bernard Pollard lunged at him after being blocked to the ground by Patriots running back Sammy Morris. Brady’s leg was extended forward as he let go of a pass when Pollard hit him.
Pollard said he heard Brady scream, so he knew immediately the injury was serious, but the Patriots waited until Monday’s official news to react. Team officials knew Sunday night that Brady was most likely lost for the season, but Brady underwent a magnetic resonance imaging test Monday morning to see how extensive the damage is.
By Monday morning, Cassel was on a radio show proclaiming himself ready to fill in for Brady as long as necessary and Simms, Tampa Bay’s former quarterback, was reportedly already on his way in for a workout, although Belichick denied that.
Tim Rattay has also been mentioned as a possibility, talked about often in New England during the preseason when Cassel’s preseason performances lagged and Brady’s health was questionable.
Complicating the Patriots’ situation, though, was their performance in Sunday’s game against the Chiefs, a rebuilding team with little hope of winning much this season. The Patriots won, 17-10, but the Patriots needed a defensive stand in the final minute to keep Kansas City from tying the game. The Patriots left the game feeling like they had escaped.
Since he took over as New England’s quarterback three games into the 2001 season — replacing an injured Drew Bledsoe — the now 31-year-old Brady has been the face of the Patriots. He has led them to three Super Bowl titles and has been one of the N.F.L.’s crossover celebrities, dating supermodels and landing in gossip columns everywhere.
That scrutiny had focused on Brady’s right ankle and foot since a photographer caught him in the off week before the Super Bowl outside his girlfriend Gisele Bundchen’s apartment in New York wearing a walking boot. The Giants hounded him with a relentless pass rush in the Super Bowl victory and Brady was still not healthy enough to play in any of the Patriots’ four preseason games. They went 0-4.
So all eyes were on him on Sunday. During the Patriots’ first drive, he was given only short-drop, quick passes. On the next drive he took full drops, and on the second one, Pollard ended his season.
Brady Done for the Season
By LYNN ZINSER
Published: September 8, 2008
FOXBOROUGH, Mass. — Patriots quarterback Tom Brady’s injured knee will require surgery and he will miss the rest of the season, the team announced on Monday.
New England Coach Bill Belichick said the team has not yet worked out any other quarterbacks to add to the roster, denying reports that Chris Simms was already here for a workout. Belichick would not say what the team would do, but clearly the team needs reinforcements. Behind the backup quarterback, Matt Cassel, is the rookie Kevin O’Connell.
“We feel badly for Tom,” Belichick said. “No one has worked harder or done more for this team than Tom. It’s a big setback for him.”
Brady’s injury came midway through the first quarter of the Patriots’ season opener against Kansas City, when Chiefs safety Bernard Pollard lunged at him after being blocked to the ground by Patriots running back Sammy Morris. Brady’s leg was extended forward as he let go of a pass when Pollard hit him.
Pollard said he heard Brady scream, so he knew immediately the injury was serious, but the Patriots waited until Monday’s official news to react. Team officials knew Sunday night that Brady was most likely lost for the season, but Brady underwent a magnetic resonance imaging test Monday morning to see how extensive the damage is.
By Monday morning, Cassel was on a radio show proclaiming himself ready to fill in for Brady as long as necessary and Simms, Tampa Bay’s former quarterback, was reportedly already on his way in for a workout, although Belichick denied that.
Tim Rattay has also been mentioned as a possibility, talked about often in New England during the preseason when Cassel’s preseason performances lagged and Brady’s health was questionable.
Complicating the Patriots’ situation, though, was their performance in Sunday’s game against the Chiefs, a rebuilding team with little hope of winning much this season. The Patriots won, 17-10, but the Patriots needed a defensive stand in the final minute to keep Kansas City from tying the game. The Patriots left the game feeling like they had escaped.
Since he took over as New England’s quarterback three games into the 2001 season — replacing an injured Drew Bledsoe — the now 31-year-old Brady has been the face of the Patriots. He has led them to three Super Bowl titles and has been one of the N.F.L.’s crossover celebrities, dating supermodels and landing in gossip columns everywhere.
That scrutiny had focused on Brady’s right ankle and foot since a photographer caught him in the off week before the Super Bowl outside his girlfriend Gisele Bundchen’s apartment in New York wearing a walking boot. The Giants hounded him with a relentless pass rush in the Super Bowl victory and Brady was still not healthy enough to play in any of the Patriots’ four preseason games. They went 0-4.
So all eyes were on him on Sunday. During the Patriots’ first drive, he was given only short-drop, quick passes. On the next drive he took full drops, and on the second one, Pollard ended his season.
8.28.2008
Chinese Democracy
Seriously, how can anyone really think the new Guns N Roses album is going to be any good? I don't understand all the hype and build up. Does anyone actually care, or is it just the media licking the hand that feeds it. Chinese Democracy. WHO CARES!
7.30.2008
New York Times Declares The Death Of The Cassette Tape
From today's New York Times:
Say So Long to an Old Companion: Cassette Tapes
By ANDREW ADAM NEWMAN
Published: July 28, 2008
There was a funeral the other day in the Midtown offices of Hachette, the book publisher, to mourn the passing of what it called a “dear friend.” Nobody had actually died, except for a piece of technology, the cassette tape.
Hachette’s audio department recently held a “funeral” for cassette tapes; an invitation is above.
While the cassette was dumped long ago by the music industry, it has lived on among publishers of audio books. Many people prefer cassettes because they make it easy to pick up in the same place where the listener left off, or to rewind in case a certain sentence is missed. For Hachette, however, demand had slowed so much that it released its last book on cassette in June, with “Sail,” a novel by James Patterson and Howard Roughan.
The funeral at Hachette — an office party in the audio-book department — mirrored the broader demise of cassettes, which gave vinyl a run for its money before being eclipsed by the compact disc. (The CD, too, is in rapid decline, thanks to Internet music stores, but that is a different story.)
Cassettes have limped along for some time, partly because of their usefulness in recording conversations or making a tape of favorite songs, say, for a girlfriend. But sales of portable tape players, which peaked at 18 million in 1994, sank to 480,000 in 2007, according to the Consumer Electronics Association. The group predicts that sales will taper to 86,000 in 2012.
“I bet you would be hard pressed to find a household in the U.S. that doesn’t have at least a couple cassette tapes hanging around,” said Shawn DuBravac, an economist with the Consumer Electronics Association. Even if publishers of music and audio books stopped using cassettes entirely, people would still shop for tape players because of “the huge libraries of legacy content consumers have kept,” he said.
As long as people keep mix tapes from a high-school sweetheart up in the attic, Mr. DuBravac said, there will still be the urge to hear them. “People have a tremendous amount of installed content and an innate curiosity when coming across a box of tapes to say, ‘Hey, what’s on these?’ ” he said.
The tapes started to really take off in 1979, the year that a radical new cassette player — the Sony Walkman — was introduced, enabling people to listen to Donna Summer and the Knack’s “My Sharona” while they were jogging (remember jogging?). The heft of the early Walkman — slightly smaller and lighter than a brick — is comical by today’s wispy iPod standards, but during the Carter administration it seemed sleek.
Nowadays, listening to music on cassettes is a dying pastime. None of Billboard’s Top 10 albums last week were issued on cassette, though half were released on vinyl, which has been resurging. Last year, only 400,000 music tapes were sold, representing one-tenth of 1 percent of all physical and digital music sales, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. In 1997, the figure was 173 million, and that was when cassettes were already getting a drubbing by CDs. (The iPod wasn’t introduced until 2001.)
“I would not expect to see a revival of cassettes like we’ve seen in the LP market,” Mr. DuBravac said. While vinyl records have always been prized artifacts for their devotees, the plastic cassette tape has little sex appeal.
Such was the case for the eight-track format as well, which was popular in the late 1960s and ’70s. It died relatively quickly with the advent of cassettes because eight-tracks were not widely used for personal recording or mix tapes, Mr. DuBravac said.
While the chances of finding cassette players in a dorm room today are slim, they are still available for sale: on Amazon, Sony alone offers 23 tape players, from the Walkman to boomboxes.
Popping a cassette in the car tape deck is also passé. Only 4 percent of vehicles sold in the United States during the 2007 model year had factory-installed cassette players, according to Ward’s Automotive Yearbook. As recently as the 2005 model year, 23 percent of vehicles had them.
Given that the median age of a car in the United States is nine years old, said Alan K. Binder, the editor of Ward’s yearbook, it is most likely that the majority of the 200 million cars and light trucks on America’s roads have cassette players (though how many have had the same Bob Seger tape lodged unplayable in them for 11 years is impossible to determine).
Cassette tapes’ tendency to hiss — and to melt in the summer and snap in the winter — turns off audiophiles. But for audio books, the cassette is an oddly elegant medium: you can eject it from your car, carry it home and stick it in a boombox, and it will pick up in the same place, an analog feat beyond the ability of the CD.
Cassettes accounted for 7 percent of all sales in the $923 million audio-book industry in 2006, the latest year for which data is available, according to the Audio Publishers Association. While many publishers, like Random House and Macmillan, stopped producing books on cassette in the last couple of years, there are holdouts.
At Blackstone Audio, which produces cassette versions of its roughly 340 annual titles, Josh Stanton, the executive vice president, said there was still demand from libraries and truckers, who buy them at truck stops. But he could forecast only that his company would produce cassettes through 2009.
Recorded Books, whose authors include Philip Roth and Jodi Picoult, still issues cassettes of all its titles, roughly 700 a year. Retailers like Borders and Barnes & Noble have essentially stopped ordering them, but libraries have been slower to abandon them, said Brian Downing, the company’s publisher.
The Web sites of Barnes & Noble and Borders, however, indicate that they still offer some cassettes, though publishers say the stores’ buyers have expressed little interest in ordering more in the future.
At some point, the cassette will go the way of the eight-track, Mr. Downing acknowledged, and his company will publish only in other formats.
“I would guess it would be pretty much gone in three years,” he said.
Say So Long to an Old Companion: Cassette Tapes
By ANDREW ADAM NEWMAN
Published: July 28, 2008
There was a funeral the other day in the Midtown offices of Hachette, the book publisher, to mourn the passing of what it called a “dear friend.” Nobody had actually died, except for a piece of technology, the cassette tape.
Hachette’s audio department recently held a “funeral” for cassette tapes; an invitation is above.
While the cassette was dumped long ago by the music industry, it has lived on among publishers of audio books. Many people prefer cassettes because they make it easy to pick up in the same place where the listener left off, or to rewind in case a certain sentence is missed. For Hachette, however, demand had slowed so much that it released its last book on cassette in June, with “Sail,” a novel by James Patterson and Howard Roughan.
The funeral at Hachette — an office party in the audio-book department — mirrored the broader demise of cassettes, which gave vinyl a run for its money before being eclipsed by the compact disc. (The CD, too, is in rapid decline, thanks to Internet music stores, but that is a different story.)
Cassettes have limped along for some time, partly because of their usefulness in recording conversations or making a tape of favorite songs, say, for a girlfriend. But sales of portable tape players, which peaked at 18 million in 1994, sank to 480,000 in 2007, according to the Consumer Electronics Association. The group predicts that sales will taper to 86,000 in 2012.
“I bet you would be hard pressed to find a household in the U.S. that doesn’t have at least a couple cassette tapes hanging around,” said Shawn DuBravac, an economist with the Consumer Electronics Association. Even if publishers of music and audio books stopped using cassettes entirely, people would still shop for tape players because of “the huge libraries of legacy content consumers have kept,” he said.
As long as people keep mix tapes from a high-school sweetheart up in the attic, Mr. DuBravac said, there will still be the urge to hear them. “People have a tremendous amount of installed content and an innate curiosity when coming across a box of tapes to say, ‘Hey, what’s on these?’ ” he said.
The tapes started to really take off in 1979, the year that a radical new cassette player — the Sony Walkman — was introduced, enabling people to listen to Donna Summer and the Knack’s “My Sharona” while they were jogging (remember jogging?). The heft of the early Walkman — slightly smaller and lighter than a brick — is comical by today’s wispy iPod standards, but during the Carter administration it seemed sleek.
Nowadays, listening to music on cassettes is a dying pastime. None of Billboard’s Top 10 albums last week were issued on cassette, though half were released on vinyl, which has been resurging. Last year, only 400,000 music tapes were sold, representing one-tenth of 1 percent of all physical and digital music sales, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. In 1997, the figure was 173 million, and that was when cassettes were already getting a drubbing by CDs. (The iPod wasn’t introduced until 2001.)
“I would not expect to see a revival of cassettes like we’ve seen in the LP market,” Mr. DuBravac said. While vinyl records have always been prized artifacts for their devotees, the plastic cassette tape has little sex appeal.
Such was the case for the eight-track format as well, which was popular in the late 1960s and ’70s. It died relatively quickly with the advent of cassettes because eight-tracks were not widely used for personal recording or mix tapes, Mr. DuBravac said.
While the chances of finding cassette players in a dorm room today are slim, they are still available for sale: on Amazon, Sony alone offers 23 tape players, from the Walkman to boomboxes.
Popping a cassette in the car tape deck is also passé. Only 4 percent of vehicles sold in the United States during the 2007 model year had factory-installed cassette players, according to Ward’s Automotive Yearbook. As recently as the 2005 model year, 23 percent of vehicles had them.
Given that the median age of a car in the United States is nine years old, said Alan K. Binder, the editor of Ward’s yearbook, it is most likely that the majority of the 200 million cars and light trucks on America’s roads have cassette players (though how many have had the same Bob Seger tape lodged unplayable in them for 11 years is impossible to determine).
Cassette tapes’ tendency to hiss — and to melt in the summer and snap in the winter — turns off audiophiles. But for audio books, the cassette is an oddly elegant medium: you can eject it from your car, carry it home and stick it in a boombox, and it will pick up in the same place, an analog feat beyond the ability of the CD.
Cassettes accounted for 7 percent of all sales in the $923 million audio-book industry in 2006, the latest year for which data is available, according to the Audio Publishers Association. While many publishers, like Random House and Macmillan, stopped producing books on cassette in the last couple of years, there are holdouts.
At Blackstone Audio, which produces cassette versions of its roughly 340 annual titles, Josh Stanton, the executive vice president, said there was still demand from libraries and truckers, who buy them at truck stops. But he could forecast only that his company would produce cassettes through 2009.
Recorded Books, whose authors include Philip Roth and Jodi Picoult, still issues cassettes of all its titles, roughly 700 a year. Retailers like Borders and Barnes & Noble have essentially stopped ordering them, but libraries have been slower to abandon them, said Brian Downing, the company’s publisher.
The Web sites of Barnes & Noble and Borders, however, indicate that they still offer some cassettes, though publishers say the stores’ buyers have expressed little interest in ordering more in the future.
At some point, the cassette will go the way of the eight-track, Mr. Downing acknowledged, and his company will publish only in other formats.
“I would guess it would be pretty much gone in three years,” he said.
6.29.2008
This Heat
Olympia has reached California levels of heat scorched hellishness this weekend. 90 degrees doesn't seem like much, but here it is too much to bear. Oh lord if you're listening, bring back the 70s...!
6.17.2008
6.13.2008
RIP Tim Russert
I was really bummed to find out that Tim Russert of Meet The Press died suddenly today. Russert was literally the only mainstream TV journalist I had any respect for. He always asked tough (enough) questions and you could tell he was genuinely enthusiastic about what he was doing. Covering the election the guy looked like a kid in a goddamn candy store. I've been watching Meet The Press since I became interested in politics and they were pretty good about not skewing the news one way or the other. There is no one at NBC that will even come close to being an adequate replacement for the guy. Possibly the final nail in the coffin of any decent network journalist integrity. RIP.
How's It Hangin Your Majestliness
Wait, What Did He Just Call the Pope?
By PATRICK J. LYONS
Um, those fellows back there with the red caps are the “eminences” . . . (Giancarlo Giuliani-Vatican Pool/Getty Images)
Seven years into his tenure, it will no longer surprise many people to hear that President Bush is not the most formality-minded person ever to hold the office. The irreverent nicknames he makes up for the people around him are legend, and it is not unusual for him to err a bit on the casual side in diplomatic encounters that, in other presidencies, might have been protocol-ed to a fare-thee-well.
Even so, an eyebrow or two arched today at the way Mr. Bush addressed Pope Benedict XVI on meeting him in Rome:
“Your eminence, you’re looking good,” Mr. Bush said, the A.P. reported.
We’re not talking about the Fernando-esque second clause, which was unobjectionably friendly if perhaps a tad over-familiar in tone. It was the “your eminence” part. That’s supposed to be how you address Catholic cardinals. Popes are “your holiness.”
(It isn’t the first time Mr. Bush has put a foot wrong in pontifical etiquette. At a meeting last June, Mr. Bush appalled the Vatican heirarchy and created a small stir in the media by addressing the pope several times as “sir,” which was taken by some as a failure to show appropriate respect, though a blunder rather than an intentional slight.)
In any case, the pope evidently did not succumb today to any temptation to respond to Mr. Bush’s errant greeting with a hearty “So are you, Governor.”
By PATRICK J. LYONS
Um, those fellows back there with the red caps are the “eminences” . . . (Giancarlo Giuliani-Vatican Pool/Getty Images)
Seven years into his tenure, it will no longer surprise many people to hear that President Bush is not the most formality-minded person ever to hold the office. The irreverent nicknames he makes up for the people around him are legend, and it is not unusual for him to err a bit on the casual side in diplomatic encounters that, in other presidencies, might have been protocol-ed to a fare-thee-well.
Even so, an eyebrow or two arched today at the way Mr. Bush addressed Pope Benedict XVI on meeting him in Rome:
“Your eminence, you’re looking good,” Mr. Bush said, the A.P. reported.
We’re not talking about the Fernando-esque second clause, which was unobjectionably friendly if perhaps a tad over-familiar in tone. It was the “your eminence” part. That’s supposed to be how you address Catholic cardinals. Popes are “your holiness.”
(It isn’t the first time Mr. Bush has put a foot wrong in pontifical etiquette. At a meeting last June, Mr. Bush appalled the Vatican heirarchy and created a small stir in the media by addressing the pope several times as “sir,” which was taken by some as a failure to show appropriate respect, though a blunder rather than an intentional slight.)
In any case, the pope evidently did not succumb today to any temptation to respond to Mr. Bush’s errant greeting with a hearty “So are you, Governor.”
6.10.2008
Vinyl Resurgence
Some retailers give vinyl records a spin
By SARAH SKIDMORE
Associated Press Writer
PORTLAND, Ore. -- It was a fortuitous typo for the Fred Meyer retail chain.
This spring, an employee intending to order a special CD-DVD edition of R.E.M.'s latest release "Accelerate" inadvertently entered the "LP" code instead. Soon boxes of the big, vinyl discs showed up at several stores.
Some sent them back. But a handful put them on the shelves, and 20 LPs sold the first day.
The Portland-based company, owned by The Kroger Co., realized the error might not be so bad after all. Fred Meyer is now testing vinyl sales at 60 of its stores in Oregon, California, Washington and Alaska.
Other mainstream retailers are giving vinyl a spin too. Best Buy is testing sales at some stores. And online music giant Amazon.com, which has sold vinyl for most of the 13 years it has been in business online, created a special vinyl-only section last fall.
The best-seller so far at Fred Meyer is The Beatles "Abbey Road" album. But musicians from the White Stripes and the Foo Fighters to Metallica and Pink Floyd are selling well, the company says.
"It's not just a nostalgia thing," said Melinda Merrill, spokeswoman for Fred Meyer. "The response from customers has just been that they like it, they feel like it has a better sound."
According to the Recording Industry Association of America, manufacturers' shipments of LPs jumped more than 36 percent from 2006 to 2007 to more than 1.3 million. Shipments of CDs dropped more than 17 percent during the same period to 511 million, as they lost some ground to digital formats.
The resurgence of vinyl centers on a long-standing debate over analog versus digital sound. Digital recordings capture samples of sound and place them very close together as a complete package that sounds nearly identical to continuous sound many people.
Analog recordings on most LPs are continuous, which produces a truer sound - though, paradoxically, some new LP releases are being recorded and mixed digitally but delivered analog.
Some purists also argue that the compression required to allow loudness in some digital formats weakens the quality as well.
But it's not just about the sound. Audiophiles say they also want the format's overall experience - the sensory experience of putting the needle on the record, the feeling of side A and side B and the joy of lingering over the liner notes.
"I think music products should be more than just music," said Isaac Hudson, a 28-year-old vinyl fan standing outside one of Portland's larger independent music stores.
The interest seems to be catching on. Turntable sales are picking up and the few remaining record pressers say business is booming.
But the LP isn't going to muscle out CDs or iPod soon.
Nearly 450 million CDs were sold last year, versus just under 1 million LPs, according to Nielsen SoundScan. Based on the first three months of this year, Nielsen says vinyl album sales could reach 1.6 million in 2008.
"I don't think vinyl is for everyone; it's for the die-hard music consumer," said Jay Millar, director of marketing at United Record Pressing, a Nashville based company that is the nation's largest record pressing plant.
Many major artists - Elvis Costello, the Raconteurs and others - are issuing LPs and encouraging fans to check out their albums on vinyl. On Amazon.com, one of the best-selling LPs is Madonna's latest album, "Hard Candy".
Some artists package vinyl and digital versions of their music together, including offers for free digital downloads along with the record.
"We've definitely had some talks with the major retailers about exclusives on the manufacturing end," Millar said of United Record Pressing, which focuses primarily on independent recordings.
An avid music fan himself, Millar says he has moved to vinyl in recent years.
"Once I got my first iPod ... I'm looking at my wall of CDs and trying to justify it," Millar said. "The things I like - the artwork, the liner notes, the sound quality - it dawns on me, those are things I like better on vinyl." He welcomed back the pops and clicks, even some of the scratches.
"I like that fact that it's imperfect in a lot of ways, live music is imperfect too," Millar said.
Independent music stores, which have been the primary source of LPs in recent years, say many fans never left the medium.
"People have been buying vinyl all along," said Cathy Hagen, manager at 2nd Avenue Records in Portland. "There was a fairly good supply from independent labels on vinyl all these years. As far as a resurgence, the major labels are just pressing more now."
In this game, big retailers aren't necessarily competing head to head with independent sellers' regular clientele of nostalgic baby boomers, independent label fans and turntable DJs.
"I cannot see that Best Buy or Fred Meyer would order the same things we would," Hagen said. "They aren't going to be ordering the reggae, funk, punk or industrial music."
By SARAH SKIDMORE
Associated Press Writer
PORTLAND, Ore. -- It was a fortuitous typo for the Fred Meyer retail chain.
This spring, an employee intending to order a special CD-DVD edition of R.E.M.'s latest release "Accelerate" inadvertently entered the "LP" code instead. Soon boxes of the big, vinyl discs showed up at several stores.
Some sent them back. But a handful put them on the shelves, and 20 LPs sold the first day.
The Portland-based company, owned by The Kroger Co., realized the error might not be so bad after all. Fred Meyer is now testing vinyl sales at 60 of its stores in Oregon, California, Washington and Alaska.
Other mainstream retailers are giving vinyl a spin too. Best Buy is testing sales at some stores. And online music giant Amazon.com, which has sold vinyl for most of the 13 years it has been in business online, created a special vinyl-only section last fall.
The best-seller so far at Fred Meyer is The Beatles "Abbey Road" album. But musicians from the White Stripes and the Foo Fighters to Metallica and Pink Floyd are selling well, the company says.
"It's not just a nostalgia thing," said Melinda Merrill, spokeswoman for Fred Meyer. "The response from customers has just been that they like it, they feel like it has a better sound."
According to the Recording Industry Association of America, manufacturers' shipments of LPs jumped more than 36 percent from 2006 to 2007 to more than 1.3 million. Shipments of CDs dropped more than 17 percent during the same period to 511 million, as they lost some ground to digital formats.
The resurgence of vinyl centers on a long-standing debate over analog versus digital sound. Digital recordings capture samples of sound and place them very close together as a complete package that sounds nearly identical to continuous sound many people.
Analog recordings on most LPs are continuous, which produces a truer sound - though, paradoxically, some new LP releases are being recorded and mixed digitally but delivered analog.
Some purists also argue that the compression required to allow loudness in some digital formats weakens the quality as well.
But it's not just about the sound. Audiophiles say they also want the format's overall experience - the sensory experience of putting the needle on the record, the feeling of side A and side B and the joy of lingering over the liner notes.
"I think music products should be more than just music," said Isaac Hudson, a 28-year-old vinyl fan standing outside one of Portland's larger independent music stores.
The interest seems to be catching on. Turntable sales are picking up and the few remaining record pressers say business is booming.
But the LP isn't going to muscle out CDs or iPod soon.
Nearly 450 million CDs were sold last year, versus just under 1 million LPs, according to Nielsen SoundScan. Based on the first three months of this year, Nielsen says vinyl album sales could reach 1.6 million in 2008.
"I don't think vinyl is for everyone; it's for the die-hard music consumer," said Jay Millar, director of marketing at United Record Pressing, a Nashville based company that is the nation's largest record pressing plant.
Many major artists - Elvis Costello, the Raconteurs and others - are issuing LPs and encouraging fans to check out their albums on vinyl. On Amazon.com, one of the best-selling LPs is Madonna's latest album, "Hard Candy".
Some artists package vinyl and digital versions of their music together, including offers for free digital downloads along with the record.
"We've definitely had some talks with the major retailers about exclusives on the manufacturing end," Millar said of United Record Pressing, which focuses primarily on independent recordings.
An avid music fan himself, Millar says he has moved to vinyl in recent years.
"Once I got my first iPod ... I'm looking at my wall of CDs and trying to justify it," Millar said. "The things I like - the artwork, the liner notes, the sound quality - it dawns on me, those are things I like better on vinyl." He welcomed back the pops and clicks, even some of the scratches.
"I like that fact that it's imperfect in a lot of ways, live music is imperfect too," Millar said.
Independent music stores, which have been the primary source of LPs in recent years, say many fans never left the medium.
"People have been buying vinyl all along," said Cathy Hagen, manager at 2nd Avenue Records in Portland. "There was a fairly good supply from independent labels on vinyl all these years. As far as a resurgence, the major labels are just pressing more now."
In this game, big retailers aren't necessarily competing head to head with independent sellers' regular clientele of nostalgic baby boomers, independent label fans and turntable DJs.
"I cannot see that Best Buy or Fred Meyer would order the same things we would," Hagen said. "They aren't going to be ordering the reggae, funk, punk or industrial music."
5.30.2008
The American Idiot
I think the most amazing about the Rachel Ray scarf debacle isn't that it was news at all, but the real story, that a few rabid bloggers can actually effect change with misinformation on a national scale. That they actually managed to make a large corporation alter its course, regardless of the actual merit of their claim, is something to be praised. If the left could manage to achieve these kind of results this quickly this country might start to feel like something different then a place where a few fundamentalist fanatics dictate what people wear in advertisements. I have to think this story played huge to the "I don't like Hussein, I don't want no more Hussein" crowd in West Virginia.
5.29.2008
5.13.2008
Figures
Tomorrow I leave Olympia for the eastern US and immediately following my departure the weather here is supposed to get into the high 70s with sunny skies. It better fucking be like that when I get back.
5.05.2008
Kimya Dawson
I saw Kimya Dawson at the post office today.
But I didn't say anything to her.
And it was at the Westside post.
I woulda pegged Kimya for the downtown office.
But I didn't say anything to her.
And it was at the Westside post.
I woulda pegged Kimya for the downtown office.
5.04.2008
Cinco De Mayo? Who Gives A Fuck.
Seriously, who fucking cares about Cinco De Mayo? I mean I guess Mexicans should care, but why are white Americans so obsessed with it? Easy. Another excuse to drink and party, wooooooo! woooooo! If one more person asks me what I'm doing for Cinco De Mayo, I'm going to punch them in their retarded face. Oh and while we're at it, fuck St. Patrick's Day too. I DON'T FUCKING CARE. If I want to party, I can do it any day I want, I don't need some other culture's holiday to give me a reason.
4.29.2008
Obama Is Right On This One Folks
The proposed gas tax holiday put forth by the Clinton McCain junta is a complete joke. Anyone fooled by this "wonderful gift" from those candidates is living in a dream. An 18.4 cent reduction in gas for the summer will not save anybody any money - especially taking it away from federal road projects (or diverting money there from elsewhere).
Think about it, if you have a 12 gallon tank like me, it saves you about $2 per fill up. Even if you fill up 50 times this summer, a ridiculous amount unless you're a touring band in a gas guzzling van, you only save $100. That's 6 times less then George Bush's $600 band-aid bribes he's sending out to most families.
Why don't they just combine the two and give everyone a $700 gas credit?
But seriously folks, don't be fooled into thinking these candidates are doing something noble and Barack doesn't want to because "he doesn't understand average Americans". This is a psychological proposal only, not a helpful one.
Think about it, if you have a 12 gallon tank like me, it saves you about $2 per fill up. Even if you fill up 50 times this summer, a ridiculous amount unless you're a touring band in a gas guzzling van, you only save $100. That's 6 times less then George Bush's $600 band-aid bribes he's sending out to most families.
Why don't they just combine the two and give everyone a $700 gas credit?
But seriously folks, don't be fooled into thinking these candidates are doing something noble and Barack doesn't want to because "he doesn't understand average Americans". This is a psychological proposal only, not a helpful one.
4.19.2008
4.14.2008
4.13.2008
4.11.2008
Jimmy Carter And Hamas
Next week former President Jimmy Carter plans to meet with Hamas leaders in Palestine. This is an outrage to many in the government and in the media. Especially as candidates are "courting the Jewish vote". As a Jew, I fully support Carter's attempt at discussion with "the enemy". If there's no direct talk, just chest-beating and violence, how will progress ever get made? Cheers Mr. Carter.
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