Tom Storer

I don't have an editing program, and every time I've tried to download an animated GIF it becomes a non-animated GIF on my hard drive.

I don't have any philosophical objection to using technology any way one wants to, and the idea of live electronic performance of multiple parts isn't brand new by any means. My fear is that it will turn out to be gimmicky--that it will be impressive not by what he plays but that he can manage to play so much at all. But he's a virtuoso and a deep thinker, so here's hoping it will be a brilliant tour-de-force and not a self-indulgent display of gadgetry. Could go either way, though.

My wife, who's Irish, makes a killer Christmas pudding, usually making it before Christmas in year X to be eaten in year X+1. For those unfamiliar with the practice, the pudding is hermetically sealed, steamed for hours and put in storage. Every couple of months she takes it out and steams it for hours again. It stays sterile all year round and develops delicious flavors by the time it's eaten. My father-in-law has traditionally made a wonderful Christmas fruitcake, also prepared months in advance and regularly splashed with Irish whiskey. He's been ill this year, so I don't know if he was up to it. Here in France the customary holiday fare includes champagne, oysters, smoked salmon, and foie gras with a sweet wine. This year I'm preparing my own foie gras for the first time. Also I like to make a good old-fashioned egg nog.

This is only a problem if: a) the girlfriend refuses to allow the boyfriend any time to himself at his own convenience, insisting that his attention to her be constant ("Jane, we've had a great time this weekend! Your suggestions for redecorating the living room were a challenge but I think I did a pretty good job. I'm glad your best friend Judy has decided against suicide--those four hours we spent listening to her talk it out were well-spent. And I was delighted to have you rehearse your part in the amateur theatrical society production for me all morning. I think I'll just relax and listen to a CD now. Can I get you a drink before I put the CD on?" "Joe, you selfish bastard, you only think about yourself! What about my needs?"), or b) the boyfriend refuses any compromise or flexibility in taking that time to himself ("Joe, I'm so distraught! I think I'm going to be fired from my job, plus my best friend insulted me and said she never wants to see me again, my parents have cancer and I'm pregnant!" "Come on, Jane, I just put on a CD! Give it a rest for once, would ya?")

Your roommate does have the right to mope in the living room, and your girlfriend is certainly within her rights when she wants to talk to you instead of just having sex or watching you read while records spin. But not all the time. You also have the right to listen to records in the living room and to spend time alone. You can legitimately tell your roommate, "Hey, I really need to listen to music right now. I'd like you to shut off your audiovisual laptop output for a couple of hours, OK?" Or "Say, the guys from the band are over here all the time. I want to spend tonight with no company, just listening to music. You can all go to one of their places for once." It will no doubt be more delicate to tell your girlfriend, "I love you very much but I need to listen to my music, it's very important to me, so let's agree that the next couple of hours is going to be my time to listen. In fact, I need to do this regularly. It's not that I'm not interested in you, it's just something I need to do for myself." Maybe you could spin it (maybe not inaccurately) as an appreciation of beauty that brings you spiritual reinforcement--like meditation or something. That could be more convincing than "Uh-huh. What? Yeah, whatever" as you snap your fingers or gaze into the middle distance.

Carlos Ward on alto sax. Billy Kilson on drums (has that boomy, fusiony thing that I can't stand). Overly brassy trumpet sounds--Leo Smith, for example.

Fer Chrissake, do you want idle theoretical speculation or don't you? Asking a man to take the real world into account... I never. Well, maybe they could. Someday. Why not, after all? We sent a man to the moon, didn't we? See, I have no idea how "real" CDs are made. Maybe that explains why people keep rudely trying to overrule me.

As a kid, I just read whatever I could get my hands on. I didn't read Tom Swift or Hardy Boys type stuff, though, it seemed stodgy and old-fashioned. I was fond of biographies of famous people written for children. Around age 10, I guess, I realized that the "Young Adult" section of the library had more interesting books than the "Children" section. I would trawl through it and pick out fiction based on the "blurb + first three pages" test that has been my lifelong method of choosing something new to read. When I was 13 I read all of Steinbeck, one after the other, after my 8th-grade English teacher assigned "The Red Pony." My mother was a big mystery fan so I read those, too, including countless Ed McBain novels with titles like "Axe" and "Shotgun," referring to murder methods. I recall reading an awful lot of Kurt Vonnegut, too. This was in the 70's. Also "The Godfather," and "Catch 22." Henry Roth's "Call It Sleep" made a big impression on me, so did Claude Brown's "Manchild in the Promised Land." Now that I think of it, my reading material was either library books culled in a non-methodical way or stuff my parents happened to have around the house. Newspapers and magazines were also important. Communal reading of the Sunday New York Times, with everyone passing each other different sections, was a ritual in place since earliest childhood and I grew into it. My parents got New York magazine, the New Yorker, Time, Life, the local Gannett daily paper, Ms. Magazine, etc. etc. My brother and I also got Mad Magazine, Cracked, floods of comic books, Science Weekly. When bored, pick up the nearest printed matter... a maxim I have lived by. As a senior in high school I read "Swann's Way" and that really threw me for a loop. It was completely foreign--turn-of-the-century bourgeois France was really very far from my experience of life--and yet the way it was written was instantly congenial to me. Although difficult, it felt natural. I still read in random patterns. Classics, modern, high-, low- or middle-brow, historical, potboiler, pornographic, mainstream literary, experimental... whatever I find myself wandering toward.

I repeat, I wasn't talking about CDRs, I was talking about on-demand CDs.

When was that, six string? The last time I remember there being a jazz-only record shop in Paris--other than second-hand, that is--was back in the eighties when there was a shop called Pannonica on the rue Racine, near the Odéon theater. I think they were gone before the CD age arrived.

The same logic applies, though. What is cost effective depends on what you can sell the CD for. I have no idea what kind of investment is required to even set up a print-on-demand system, but there might be a niche market out there of music geeks willing to pay a sufficiently high amount for otherwise OOP titles to make it feasible in the medium or long term. People will bid for old copies on ebay and get up to ridiculous prices; won't the same people shell out a certain amount for a new copy printed on demand? That doesn't apply to brand new CDs, though... I'm glad I'm not a businessman. But if I were, it wouldn't last long anyway. But that's thinking as the "older generation" (or at least music "collectors"). I think as we're dragged into the future, if one can't buy the original (oop/expensive) disc/LP that one covets one will be more likely to simply download a copy or burn it from a friend than to pay pay a greater-than-CD-price for what's essentially a CDR. It does come back to what you are buying: the music or the medium. For many of us (speaking for myself), there's still great "value" in the manufactured CD that isn't there in a CDR. So I wouldn't pay much to get a CDR - especially if I could get a legal digital copy/download. While I see a great future in CDs-on-demand (essentially "official" CDRs), I don't foresee it as a viable business model if they cost *more* than a manufactured CD. But as Chuck gently reminded me, "read carefully" and you will see that in the quoted post I was talking about real CDs instead of CD-Rs. People such as yourself who covet real CDs would pay more for them than for either a download or a CD-R. Although I confess I don't understand what the big deal is about a CD-R versus a "real" CD if the music itself is lossless and the packaging is good. Is the shorter life of CD-Rs the only problem? And how long do they last, anyway?

Open-mindedness is the first step on the road to CHAOS and ANARCHY! Before you know it people would be playing just whatever they felt like!

I hope he learned his lesson.

The same logic applies, though. What is cost effective depends on what you can sell the CD for. I have no idea what kind of investment is required to even set up a print-on-demand system, but there might be a niche market out there of music geeks willing to pay a sufficiently high amount for otherwise OOP titles to make it feasible in the medium or long term. People will bid for old copies on ebay and get up to ridiculous prices; won't the same people shell out a certain amount for a new copy printed on demand? That doesn't apply to brand new CDs, though... I'm glad I'm not a businessman. But if I were, it wouldn't last long anyway.

Cost effective cds are in quantities of 1000. Cost effective booklets/tray cards are minimally 2500. Most issues deleted sell below 200 a year. You do the math. None of this takes into consideration the expense of warehousing, etc. That's cost effective, I assume, at the normal price of a CD release. I'm thinking on-demand CDs would be able to get a higher price because they're on demand and therefore purchasers would have considerably higher motivation. Warehousing, obviously, would not be a factor since they wouldn't be warehoused, they'd be printed on demand and shipped at once. BWTFDIK?

I think it's time we recognized "message board argument" as a bloodthirsty sport. Connoisseur series500 and Dan Gould are vying to destroy one another's very manhood!

I also got the right field treatment. My brother characterized me as standing there saying "I don't care a row of buttons whether it's fair or foul, nature alone is beautiful."

You're just being literal-minded. Psychologically, it's gory stuff.

My nephew, age 12ish, plays hockey, and scored in a game not too long ago. My brother was so excited jumping up and down cheering that he fell over his seat backwards in a hilarious pratfall.

I don't much care about either. This was always a sore point with my teammates in gym class sports... They felt I should be far more concerned with winning! My older brother is fiercely competitive in games and sports. As a child, if his team lost the baseball game he would weep with rage and be impossible to live with. Later he moved to chess and from there to backgammon. He made a living for a while as a backgammon hustler but has mostly given up tournament play in favor of deep, ponderous study of the game. Anyway, once I suggested he take up role-playing games--I don't like those either but I thought they could only be more fun than backgammon. He looked at me like I was crazy and patiently explained as if to a child that he played in order to win, not to dream up fantasies.

I have never played any organized sports at all. I was talking to a friend recently who runs in marathons and things, and he was talking about the fraternity of runners and also their fierce competitiveness. I said I have no competitive spirit whatsoever and he didn't believe me. But it's true, I have no desire to compete or to win out over others. I have pride, but that's not quite the same thing. I think it's my lack of competitive desire that explains my complete lack of interest in organized sports. What time do you go to sleep?

Wow, I don't even know what those are.

Wow, I don't even know what those are.

I got Sinatra's Complete Capitol Singles Collection. Thanks for the tip!

Had a similar situation with Watkins Glen. I was eleven when Woodstock happened, but fifteen for Watkins Glen. I asked my father's permission to go off with a bunch of friends for it - purely a formality in mind - and was rather offended when he laughed in my face. So now here I am at age 50 and I've never attended a huge rock festival! Not that that strikes me as a terrible loss at this point.