Dave Garrett

I may have posted this here before, but this thread shouldn't pass without a mention of Chris Wilcha's docu about working there in the 1990s: https://archive.org/details/vimeo-58192159

I joined here in 2005, about the same time that I joined the Hoffman board after a friend pointed both out to me. Was never on the old BNBB, but had been following the Usenet group rec.music.bluenote (which was a general jazz-related discussion group, rather than a Blue Note-specific one) for some time prior to that. First got on Usenet around 1991, several years prior to the advent of the web, and still check in there occasionally from force of habit even though the text-only discussion groups have been all but dead for a long time now.

Google has gotten so enshittified that I have been searching (pun fully intended) for a decent replacement for some time. I use DuckDuckGo a lot of the time, but we're pretty far removed from the days when there seemed to be multiple high-quality search engines to choose from. Much as it pains me to think of yet another subscription, I have been seriously considering trying out Kagi, which is a paid search engine that touts its absence of ads, tracking, and SEO-gamed search results. I'm skeptical as to how well they can deliver the high-quality search results they promise, but I've seen comments from more than a few users that claim they'll never go back after having used it for a while.

Well, that's unfortunate but I can't say I'm too surprised. I thought it was too good to be true when they first said they'd continue to offer repair services after Oppo USA was otherwise shut down.

I think this is most likely. He is a member of a group that I'm also in on FB, and has posted on FB fairly recently. I'm not going to post a link here as he uses what I assume is his real name there, which as far as I know he has never disclosed here.

As @mr jazz mentioned, new transports are still available from what's left of Oppo USA: Oppo blu-ray parts and as far as I know, for those who aren't inclined to attempt a DIY repair on their players, Oppo has continued to offer repair services for their players. Out-of-Warranty Service They don't list any parts for my older 95 at the above link, so I'm not exactly sure how much service they'd be able to provide should I need it, but most of the major parts likely to need replacement eventually are readily available on eBay. Still, I'm hoping I don't have to find out how feasible a repair is any time soon.

Interesting. I haven't kept up with developments in the universal disc player space since Oppo quit manufacturing players, so I was unaware of the Magnetar players, but at first glance they definitely seem to hit the same sweet spot that the Oppos did. I have an Oppo BDP-95 with a region-free mod and I'm likewise hoping it lasts a long time (I was a late adopter of Blu-ray, and I'm obviously going to be a similarly late adopter of 4K/UHD), but the Magnetars address one of my biggest issues with the BDP-95, the inability to handle digital video files which use the H.265/HEVC codec. I had the opportunity to purchase an Oppo UDP-205 from one of the last production runs Oppo did, but passed as I couldn't really justify the cost due to being in a financial pinch at the time. Will definitely investigate the Magnetar players further for future reference when I'm ready for a new player. It looks like they're already sold out of the UDP800 entry-level player.

It's always said whenever someone of his stature in any discipline passes, but it definitely seems like the end of an era. I only saw him once, in 1999, and envy those who had opportunities to see him multiple times. RIP.

I order loose leaf green tea from a Japanese vendor near Osaka which uses DHL for international orders. The cost for trackable express international shipping is extremely reasonable even by domestic shipping standards, let alone international ones. They usually say orders will arrive in 4-8 days, but in my experience average transit time from Osaka to Houston is 2-3 days.

They seem to be available on the site. And if that goes away, it's already been archived and is accessible at the Wayback Machine.

A VPN will allow you to watch the vast majority of geoblocked videos no matter where you're at, but unless you do so regularly, it might be hard to justify paying for yet another service even though decent VPNs don't cost very much (the free ones all suck, or at least they did the last time I had a reason to look into them).

NxNW was indeed shot in VistaVision. The original VV negative was scanned at 13k and that scan was then used to create a new 65mm negative, which the 70mm print that was screened at TIFF was then printed from. Looks like it will be screened in Beverly Hills next month and in NYC in February: “North by Northwest”: The 70mm Presentations

I think Schrader's a contrarian indicator for a lot of things, and he'd probably be the first to admit it!

Paul Schrader, who is reasonably active on Facebook, posted that when he first heard about the remake, he thought it was a fool's errand. After seeing it, he thought that Lee had proved him wrong, and that it compared quite favorably with the original. A lot of the followup comments disagreed quite strongly with that assessment, characterizing it in terms ranging from a mess to flat-out terrible, but there were also quite a few people that loved it.