Slow jam.
[Photo Via: This Isn’t Happiness]
Saturday
February 28, 2026
Since 2002
Category: Arts and Culture
Put the Needle to the Groove
Dust & Grooves interviews Jeff Gold, a record collector out in L.A.:
Q: In one sentence, can you define your record collection?
A: Years ago I read an opinion piece in the New York Times–the writer talked about how collecting doesn’t have to be just about accumulating, it can be about editing, about collecting only the most essential examples of something. That’s how I look at my record collection. If I’m not going to play a record, don’t need to own it. So I only have records I truly love and play.
Q: Do you remember your first record?
A: The first album I remember owning was Mister Ed, The Talking Horse, which I got as a gift. But the first one I chose myself was Beach Boys Concert. I was given a children’s album as a gift and made my mom take me back to the record store to exchange it. I have a copy, but unfortunately not my original one. The first 45 I got was The Beatles’ “I Want To Hold Your Hand,” which my parents gave me as a gift. I think I’m pretty lucky that these were my first records. I loved records as soon as I knew what they were. My parents had a few Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass albums that I loved and played constantly. Many years later I had the good fortune to work for Herb at A&M, and we’re still friendly. It blows my mind. Still.
[Photo Credit: Eilon Paz]
Taster’s Cherce
Calzone, anyone? This one actually looks good.
Morning Art
Drawing by Franco Matticchio via This Isn’t Happiness.
Afternoon Art
R. Crumb.
Million Dollar Movie
From Black Book:
“It’s been a favorite feeling in my whole life to be able to communicate without talking,” Harry Dean Stanton once said. “Communicating in silence in a powerful thing.”
Afternoon Art
Rothko.
Back to School
Mental Floss takes us Reagan babies back with the history of the Trapper Keeper.
New York Minute
Over at the New York Review of Books, Charles Simic gives us Spaghetti Lessons:
Italian restaurants produce not only epicures but also aspiring cooks. I bought cold cuts, cheeses, and olives for years in Italian groceries on Bleecker Street until one day I started cooking pasta, grilling sausages, and inviting friends over to my place on East 13th Street. In the 1950s and 1960s almost no one in literary circles knew how to cook, so these modest efforts of mine received extravagant praise. From then on, each time I tasted something in a restaurant, I’d wonder how it was made, what spices were used, and recollected other occasions when the same dish had come out differently. Now that I live in a village in New Hampshire, cooking Italian is a way of carrying on that comparative study. This may be a tautology, but a meal that does not cause an outpouring of memories is not a memorable meal. I don’t know how other poets imagine their muses, but mine is an Italian cookbook.
It is their unhurried air that makes most Italian restaurants congenial to everything from flirting to a rambling philosophical discussion. You linger over a glass of red wine and a plate of cheese at the meal’s end, alone or in the company of friends, while the place empties. Outside, there may be the lights of Manhattan or the tugboats in Portsmouth harbor. The waiter or the owner may bring a grappa eventually to remind you of the lateness of the hour, but he does not rush you. When you finally get up and leave, it’s out of consideration for him, but also out of genuine panic that you might be crazy enough to ask for another bowl of pasta or some of that grilled squid on a bed of white beans you enjoyed so much.
Morning Art
“The City” by Edward Hopper (1927)
"This ain't football. We do this every day."
--Earl Weaver
--Earl Weaver