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It looks like most of the insanely great prices are gone. The Mosiac Selects are back at a price where it doesn't make much sense to order from them rather than direct from Mosaic. There may still be some savings on the boxes but not a huge savings. I'm seriously disappointed as I was going to buy the Chu Berry set but wanted to wait until I wrapped up three papers as a incentive to get these done. Well, the papers are done but the reward isn't that inticing anymore. Guess I learned my lesson (normally I jump on these sales but really held back this time).

I think you have to know your audience. My wife knows I find used books/CDs perfectly acceptable (generally preferable). I have gotten a couple of used DVD sets for my dad that were too good to pass up. For pretty much anyone else in my family, gifts ought to be new. That's probably the case for Dan as well.

I can't believe people missed out on this -- Chess-Boxing! http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1821639,00.html Not to get too Veblenesque, but a society that comes up with things like this, or paying people to play video games, or snowboard (and now off-road unicycling!) just doesn't have its priorities in order.

Thanks. This set seems to be less "hit" focused, unlike the earlier massive set. Obviously room in the universe for both, but if I could only have one, I would want the hits. I do have the Atlantic R & B set, and it is terrific.

I guess this isn't the most original thing out there, but twice now in the last month, a virus has gotten past the first line of spam filters at work. It gets caught in the second fortunately. The real issue is that the subject line is "Your confirmation number" or "Your tracking number" and the sender is cloaked so it looks like it is coming through info@ups.com I can imagine a number of people would think this is legit, so watch out.

I don't though I think the Amazon review was apt. It looks interesting but far less essential than Atlantic Rhythm & Blues 1947-1974 (which has twice the music for roughly half the cost for a used copy). If you already have this set, then you might consider the Rhino.

Took 5 minutes for the site to come up Sunday, but I did get my address in (at least I think I did). Not even the biggest fan of Dr. Pepper (nor G'n'R) -- but free, is FREE!!! (The site was up for free coupons on Sunday ONLY.) Can't believe after all the hubbub, I missed the coupon. I did have the excuse that I was watching the kids almost the entire day on Sunday and was barely on-line. At the risk of ruining what little cred I have, I will admit that GNR is a piece of my musical DNA and I listened to them extensively through college, co-existing uneasily with my deeper appreciation for New Wave music. Perhaps the most interesting review yet, talks about Axl as the Howard Hughes of rock. That intrigues me. Anyway, critical opinion is split, but I expect that I would find it interesting and I ordered a copy. I didn't even have to schlep down to Best Buy as they are selling it cheap on their website (well, relatively cheap for a brand new CD - $12) with free shipping.

I saw a copy and flipped through it. Pretty neat. I may order one, but be warned, it is huge (14 x 11). I don't think I have any shelf it would fit on.

If a DVD is manufactured without regional coding, then it is considered region 0. This definitely does happen. (Actually a number of jazz DVDs are region 0.) Sounds like you will probably be ok. Worth a shot anyway.

They are different issues, but still linked in this sense. If we look to the US at the most successful expansion of the middle class which took place from roughly 1950 through 1970s, this was largely due to government policies that expanded educational opportunity, as well as a system of official and unofficial policies that allowed working class folks to share in the middle class lifestyle (suburban housing, etc.). This was only possible because a vibrant manufacturing sector supported this lifestyle. Sure there was growth in the white collar occupations, and kids that took advantage of increased educational opportunities made that move. Now manufacturing has been hollowed out, and there are very few things that will replace it. Those that made it up the ladder in time into a slightly enlarged professional class have benefited by all the global changes in the economy. Those that were left behind have moved into very transitory service type jobs. (This is sort of a synthesis of Reich's Work of Nations though he isn't quite as class conscious as I would like.) The goal of course is that we all suddenly upgrade our skills (becoming IT engineers I guess) and thus leaving manufacturing to others will result in everyone being better off. Well, of course that is a pretty fantasy but is clearly a false one, and we pay almost no attention to those left behind by increased competition. In any case, if a dispassionate study showed that removing trade barriers accellerated wage inequality, then I think it would be worth revisiting the issue. My feeling is that we (the US) did go too far in outsourcing the bulk of our manufacturing capacity, and the benefits of free trade are often overstated and certainly not distributed in such a way to make up for the serious pain inflicted upon blue collar workers.

I would be a lot more inclined to agree with you if upper management ever took a hit, but they don't and never will as far as I can tell. So Thatcher broke the unions and the miners and now you have an anemic labour movement (and how Labour can justify calling itself Labour is beyond me when Blair gloated about keeping the unions under his heel). And to what end? Manufacturing has still left the UK. You've moved to a service economy. Vast stretches of the country have low standards of living. The question for me is whether this really was inevitable, either in the UK or the US. Certainly the economists like to claim it is, and that adhering to an industrial policy is just protectionist. I think the findings are clear that overall countries are better off with lower trade barriers and without tariffs. However, the US and to a lesser extent the UK are so lousy about spreading the benefits of globalization around (rather than letting them accrue to the top 5%) that I think maybe we would have been better off following the protectionist path. If things get much worse economically, we will probably try it eventually and maybe it would have been "better" to have done it while unions still existed.

It's really hard to tell. Many of these DVDs are made for the grey market in the US (as well as China), so they are Region 0. The subtitles should be removable. The PAL/NTSC is probably the biggest issue. I think you might as well try to play it and see how it looks. I've had pretty good luck with these things (not that I have more than a handful) but I own a region-free DVD player that is PAL/NTSC interchangeable.

I don't know about the grounding in economics, but you could check out David Kennedy's Freedom from Fear, which is part of the Oxford History of the US. Also, if you are going for the epic, you might be interested in Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate, which is about the Battle of Stalingrad. I just finished Oscar Wao and was really disappointed in the ending, which while foretold early in the book, seemed so utterly pointless. That's probably all I can say without giving too much away.

So you think in about 15 years, we can have an 8-CD set from Lonehill called the Cadena Collection?

In addition to Armistice 1918, he has a CD called Ghost Ships on Sketch (and maybe yet another -- I don't recall). I like Ghost Ships -- kind of moody. I was just looking at it the other day and will try to spin tonight.

Don't think I have heard any of these Hubbard's but I do have a nice copy of Highway One and I like it. Not nearly as crazy about Conception though.

I imagine that is possible, but with all these execs crying for loans, I think it is worth asking everyone of them if they were willing to do any heavy lifting when Clinton made the big push for health care expansion early in his tenure. There is no question it was an overly complex plan and that it could have been made better if Hillary had been more open to genuine debate on the topic, but the business elites turned against Hillarycare with a vengeance rather than finding a better solution that would move us toward universal health care (or even a mixed system). Pretty short sighted if you ask me. So I don't feel too sorry for them. I feel sorry for retirees who had been promised benefits and now find themselves powerless as these decisions are being made. Clearly "times are different" and few if any new workers get pensions, but business contracts are more or less inviable, but the contracts made between an employer and the former employees are worthless. And so after these seniors get screwed, they'll end up relying more on the federal government. Rather than having a decent support network in the first place, like many European countries, we just have a total neoliberal patchwork system that lets tens of thousands of people fall through the cracks. And yet if my fears are correct*, the US will end up paying more in its half-assed efforts to prop up this group of people, then this one, as they get media attention, than if we just bit the bullet and put together a meaningful safety net. (* While this is about Italy and postwar hardships, I find myself thinking that US retirees will be following in the path of Umberto D sooner than anyone thinks.)

So I am halfway through Oscar Wao. On the whole I enjoy it, though I can see where Sal is coming from in terms of a lot of Dominican Republic history squeezed into the footnotes. The overall tone/approach reminds me of Vargas Llosa, but with footnotes inspired by David Foster Wallace (nowhere near as many, however). It's got a lot of kick, and I should be done by the weekend. One thing I don't like is the frequent use of spanglish. I'm never that fond of it, but if used sparingly and in ways that that the meaning is clear, I can accept it. If I need to try to go translate whole sentences which is the case from time to time, it annoys me. This was written for the US market, not targeted at bilingual readers. (One could say the same thing of Russian novels with large chunks of French in them, but when they were written virtually anyone who was literate enough to read also read French (not the case for today's US readers vis a vis Spanish). It does introduce dilemmas for today's translaters, however.) By the way, I saw the most amazing production of The Brothers Karamazov in Chicago. They (Lookingglass) seemed to capture everything important in just over 3 hours. By contrast, while I enjoyed it, large pieces of the plot are missing from Murakami's Kafka on the Shore in Steppenwolf's recent production. I suspect this is because Murakami's novel is far more plot and dialogue driven, while Dostoevsky (and Tolstoy) have long philosophical asides that are important but can be removed as far as plot.

I find that I have downgraded a lot of CDs lately. Most of them are free-blowing sessions (from the late '60s and '70s) that didn't grab me too much the first time around and haven't improved for me with time and repeated listens. On a personal level, I just feel even more strongly that this was an artistic dead end, though of course some good and even great albums emerged from it. So I don't try as hard as much as I would have in the past (to find some redeeming feature) and am letting them go. On a more philosophical note, I am thinning the shelves and need to clear out nearly 300 CDs. This makes me far more brutal about these decisions, but then (to reverse Simmel's argument in The Philosophy of Money) to help myself feel better about the decision to part with a CD, I must also turn strongly against it.

Sure, ten years ago it was $6.99. And indeed I picked up a used copy 3 years or so at $6.99. But the letters OOP do induce a fever trance in some people. And relatively few people bought 32 Jazz issues so when they went OOP they really were scarce. I've seen some crazy prices on the OJCs that were dropped by the new owners, though here at least nearly everything in the OJC series is still on emusic. And the fact that everything was kept in print for so long tends to keep the prices down.

I have to disagree. I think they will close all the Michigan plants and Toyota/Honda/etc. will expand plants elsewhere in the US, mostly Tennessee. If GM does go under, Southeast Michigan is f***ed even more than it is now. I think what bugs me the most about this idea that in the long run we will all be better off in some post-industrial economy is that it ignores the truly wrenching dislocations that happen -- large parts of the country have never recovered from deindustrialization (the same is true about the North of England and most of East Germany for that matter). Second, most people have gone from decent blue-collar jobs to truly shitty, temporary and unstable service work. Ultimately, if we can't provide jobs that pay a living wage, then we can't keep the economy stable. The rich keep too much in savings and the growing numbers of people sliding down the economic chute have been putting it on credit, and that is what has led us to where we are today. (Ironically, if everyone really started living within their means then the US would be in a Depression within a few days.) The winners out of the globalization sweepstakes have simply paid no attention to the losers, and they are legion.

Yeah, a bit extreme. As it happens, I have this as well, and would be happy to part with it for $50 or so (shipping extra).

I know there is a lot of respect for Gerald Wilson, but I do wonder if/when his skills as a composer began to degrade. That's pretty controversial, so let me explain. I think his individual pieces are still pretty interesting, but he has no idea of how they should fit into a large suite and he ends up repeating himself ad nauseum to the point where I do feel nausea. I've been listening to Monterey Moods, and he plays 7 variations of the same theme for roughly 50 minutes. My ears are just exhausted and I had to stop. This was a very similar experience to his concert at the Chicago Jazz Fest where they did about 7 or 8 variations of his new theme for Chicago. 5 would have been amazing and left us wanting more, by 7 or 8 I just wanted to leave the park. I know his earlier albums aren't constructed this way (or not the ones I've seen) so how did this come about? Does he just need a good editor to tell him less is almost always more?

(Surprised I'm the first to post this, as we covered it in some detail a couple of months back.)

Have never seen this album before There was a copy of it at the Music Exchange's recent liquidation sale of its 1 million albums, at a warehouse in Kansas City. Unfortunately, the vinyl was scratched up beyond any repair. I know none of us support the Andorrans, but there's something called the Brubeck Classic Album Collection, which is a 3 CD set covering 4 albums, including Jazz Impressions of the USA and Dave Digs Disney.