1902
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THE DILEMMA OF VINYL
Sales of vinyl records are going through the roof, relatively speaking. Around eight million were sold this year — up six million per annum since 2008, two million per annum since last year.
The industry’s capacity to produce vinyl albums has remained relatively flat, however. New pressing plants aren’t being built, nor are new pressing machines, and the supply of old pressing machines that can be refurbished and put back into service is all but exhausted.
Because vinyl sales currently represent only 2% of music sales in America, and because the potential for the vinyl renaissance is unknown, people are not willing to make the large capital investments necessary to expand production.
Hence the looming crisis for vinyl — the rapid expansion of demand for vinyl records is about to be stopped in its tracks by an inability to produce them in greater numbers. In the short term it’s bound to lead to higher and higher prices for LPs, which will in the long term inevitably put an end to the vinyl renaissance, limiting vinyl sales to the small niche market of specialist collectors as it existed twenty years ago.
It’s hard to see a way out of the dilemma.
Thanks to The Wall Street Journal for the information in this post:
A ZIEGFELD FOLLIES GIRL
A LIFE MAGAZINE COVER FOR TODAY
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LUMINA
Lumina, a dance hall by the sea, was still around when I was growing up. It had become a roller rink. In my mom’s youth it had hosted big name dance bands. Folks from Wilmington, about 10 miles inland, would ride out to Wrightsville Beach for the dances on special trolley cars, then ride the trolleys back after the dances were over.
I vaguely remember seeing “movies over the waves” there — which dated back to the 1920s, the era of the postcard above — but I may just be recalling my mom’s tales of same.
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ADESTE FIDELES
Sinatra, like Pavarotti and Dylan, sings Latin like he means it.
MY HEART
. . . goes out this season to all the good cops in America, who do tough, dangerous work — whose families never know if they’ll be home for Christmas.
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WHAT ARE YOU DOING NEW YEAR’S?
A SAMSON POLLEN FOR TODAY
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RUBBER CHRISTMAS
Because Rubber Soul came out just before Christmas in 1965, and because I or one of my sisters got a copy of it from Santa, and because it hit number one in the U. S. charts on Christmas Day, I have always thought of it as a Christmas album.
I was in prep school at the time but home for Christmas vacation when I heard my first cut from the album on the car radio, driving around with my mom on some errand or other. I can’t remember which cut it was. Capitol didn’t release any singles from the album, but radio stations played lots of the songs. I do remember my excitement and joy when I heard that cut.
The album always finds a place in my rotation of Christmas albums, for sentimental reasons.
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BEAUTIFUL STAR OF BETHLEHEM
DEBBIE HARRY MAKES DINNER
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A THOMAS KINKADE FOR TODAY
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WHAT I’M SPINNING NOW
I miss the Stripes. I miss Meg. Nice to meet up with them again on vinyl, where they truly belong.
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THE COLOR OF POMEGRANATES
This movie, by Sergei Parajanov, is an avalanche of beautiful and astonishing images. What they signify individually or add up to collectively is not so clear, but maybe not important, either.
They are so wonderfully and imaginatively composed and lit that they have the authority of brilliant paintings — but they also integrate elegant, stylized movement, which imbues them with the authority of brilliant ballets.
The film seems to point the way towards, and sometimes realize, a radically new vision of cinematic practice. Many avant-garde films have been purely imagistic, conceptually speaking, but few have consistently created images as finished and powerful as those in this film. You forget the concept and get lost in the individual shots.
The images are hard to analyze. They sometimes have the static gravity of religious icons, sometimes the spooky eccentricity of de Chirico’s dreamscapes, sometimes the simple grandeur of Giotto’s frescos. They are unclassifiable but oddly familiar within the traditions of Western art.
The film claims to be the biography of a poet told in the terms of the poet’s imagination, the poet’s imagery. This is not a persuasive claim. No poet sees or experiences his or her whole life in poetic terms, no one can sum up the life of a poet in purely poetic terms. By rights the movie ought to be either a poetic biography or a biographical poem, but it is neither. It’s really just an excuse to make beautiful and astonishing images.
[Photo © Paul Kolnik]
George Balanchine claimed that he never made abstract, non-narrative ballets. He said, “A boy meets a girl, he loses the girl, he gets the girl back. How much story do you want?” The Color Of Pomegranates has even less story than that — it’s just a progression from childhood to maturity to death. But how much story do you want?
(Curiously, both Balanchine and Parajanov were born in Tbilisi, Georgia, though of different ethnic backgrounds.)
The miracle of the film is that it rivets your attention in the absence of a driving narrative — just by virtue of its pictorial inventiveness and cinematic virtuosity. It may not add up to much but pure pleasure — but when have you ever had your fill of that?
[Ironically, this visual tour de force, important to so many important directors of the 20th Century, is only available in a mediocre DVD transfer of a mediocre print — almost not worth watching in that form.]