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Saturday, November 23, 2024

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: Written by: Jason Thorpe; Category: For the Record; Created: 01 March 2022

My neighbor and fellow audiophile, Ron, let slip that he had a busted Shelter 901 cartridge sitting in a box. Seems that the cleaning lady was dusting his turntable a bunch of years ago, and she got a little too aggressive with the cloth. Ripped the cantilever clean off.

: Written by: Jason Thorpe; Category: For the Record; Created: 01 January 2022

About 40 years ago, I used to hang out at the Harkness house after school. It was the kind of place I want my daughter to be able to hang out in when she gets into her teenage years—a house full of creativity, music, art, and positive energy. There were five siblings, one of whom is still an extremely close friend and another who is now the musician known as Harkness.

: Written by: Jason Thorpe; Category: For the Record; Created: 01 November 2021

My neighbor Rob is a vinyl guy. He’s always been a music guy, but over the past few years, the vinyl resurgence has really energized his love of physical media, and he’s enthusiastic and happy to chat about the format—both about LPs and the means by which to store, clean, and play them.

: Written by: Jason Thorpe; Category: For the Record; Created: 01 April 2021

During the long, grinding lockdown here in Canada, so many have had and still have it way worse than our family. All four of us (including the dog) are healthy, and Marcia and I remain gainfully employed. I thank our lucky stars that we’ve been, so far, unaffected by anything other than boredom and monotony. All I have to gripe about are the first-world problems of the affluent.

: Written by: Jason Thorpe; Category: For the Record; Created: 01 January 2021

I remain conflicted about my Vault subscription with Third Man Records (TMR). Four times a year, TMR ships me a release for around $70 (all prices in USD). The title is generally announced a month or so before it’s shipped, so there’s never really a surprise when it arrives. The albums are beautifully pressed and of exceedingly high quality, and the packaging is truly deluxe. The package usually includes at least two LPs, often with a 7″ 45rpm bonus disc, and some sort of glossy booklet. For some inexplicable reason, TMR often includes a DVD of concert footage. Given that I haven’t had a DVD player hooked up for years now, I don’t get much satisfaction from this inclusion.

: Written by: Jason Thorpe; Category: For the Record; Created: 01 November 2020

You’d think the Great Pandemic of 2020 would create the perfect conditions for getting some writing done. Well, if you lived in the Thorpe household, you’d be wrong. Back in July, we decided to invite risk, expense, and chaos into our lives and start some major home renovations. We bashed down some walls to make our first floor into one large open-concept space, re-doing the kitchen at the same time. The second-floor bathroom became a full-on gut job, and the basement powder room (a small room with a toilet and sink, in case that euphemism isn’t shared by the rest of the world) also got some love.

: Written by: Jason Thorpe; Category: For the Record; Created: 01 June 2020

“You’re the writer I want to be when I grow up.”

That’s how I introduced myself to Art Dudley when I first met him, in 2005, at Le Festival Son et Image de Montréal.

: Written by: Jason Thorpe; Category: For the Record; Created: 01 March 2020

The moment I heard of the death of Neil Peart (1952-2020), sorrow set in. That Peart was the drummer and lyricist of one of my favorite rock bands, Rush, would have been enough to set me into a spiral of introspection, but there’s more to my connection with Peart than the music of Rush. Like me, he was an avid motorcyclist, and many of his explorations of this continent mirror some of my own choices of bike and road. I’ve read a number of Peart’s books, many of which center around motorcycle riding and the mindset it engenders. His memoir Ghost Rider is a painfully honest description of a 55,000-mile motorcycle trek throughout North America, during which he tried to outrun his grief over the deaths, within ten months of each other, of his daughter and his wife.

: Written by: Jason Thorpe; Category: For the Record; Created: 01 January 2020

Way back when, before the age of computer audio, about the time of the ascendancy of the Compact Disc, my expanding collection of records became unmanageable. Milk crates no longer cut it. I ended up buying a five-by-five Expedit shelving unit from IKEA and proceeded to at last sort my records.

: Written by: Jason Thorpe; Category: For the Record; Created: 01 November 2019

As I write this, it’s back-to-school time at the Thorpe household. Little Toni is starting third grade, and Marcia the special-needs teacher is heading back to her class. The house gets a little crazy the day before school starts. Tensions run a touch high.