LATEST ADDITIONS

<i>Grinderman 2</i>, by <a href="http://www.grinderman.com/">Grinderman</a&gt; (don’t click that link), is October 2010’s “Recording of the Month,” and it’s available today. Go out and buy it, before it buys you. Bwhahahahahahahaha.

<a href="http://stereogum.com/507781/neil-young-angry-world-video-stereogum-prem…; premiered the video for Neil Young’s “Angry World” from his upcoming solo album, <i>Le Noise</i>.

The two Big Eye IPAs I had enjoyed with dinner were doing the trick. I was feeling weightless even before stepping onto the ferry. Beautiful people crowded the front, holding onto railings and each other, while some sat inside the old, wooden frame. Lower Manhattan was soft, quiet, and blue, and two towers of light shot high into the night sky. Suddenly, imperceptibly, the unreal city became smaller and more distant: I hadn’t noticed that the ferry had departed. We could just as easily have been riding a magic carpet. Robert Baird and I were on our way to see John Prine at Governors Island, just a short ferry trip away from Ground Zero in Manhattan.

I'm a basically a tube guy, but I've never warmed up to most lower-powered integrated tube amps. Although I quite enjoyed the time I spent with the Cayin A-50T, which I <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/integratedamps/308cay">reviewed</A&gt; in the March 2008 issue of <I>Stereophile</I>, over the years I've typically found I'd rather spend time with mid-priced, solid-state integrateds from Creek, Musical Fidelity, or Simaudio than deal with the loss of definition at the frequency extremes that I've heard from many lower-powered tube models. So it was with a bit of trepidation that I approached the VSi60, a 50Wpc integrated amplifier from Audio Research Corporation.

The cover is cracked. It is time to rip it off, look directly at the inner workings, and begin to fix things for ourselves.—Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work

On the flip side to last week's question, what product have you purchased that gave you the <I>least</I> bang for the buck?

A few thousand jazz fans are feeling lightheaded this morning. They saw Sonny Rollins’ 80th-birthday concert at the Beacon Theater in New York City last night, and they’re still marveling (especially those too young to have witnessed giants walking the earth in great number) that, finally, they’ve seen a concert that made them tremble and that people will be talking about years from now.