eBay has provided a Sansui CD x111 to go with the AUG11X amplifier. Neither are anywhere near the top of the marque, but at £25 to £30 each I’m not complaining. Just to check they work, I hooked up the old, cheap speakers from the old cd/radio combo. The good news is they work, and better news is they sound good with el-cheapo speakers, so should sound better with decent speakers.
The quest is on 🙂
In episode 3 of The Deuce, there is a scene in which Maggie Gyllenhaal is in her kitchen listening to messages on her answer phone. She does nothing except stand there and smoke and react, and yet, by her face and her posture and with every fibre of her being, she tells us everything.
Three episodes in, and The Deuce is must-see TV.
Nearly 2 years ago, in January 2016, I posted about a Link Wray album. I said I hoped I still had it because it would cost £££ replace. My old copy seems to have disappeared and that’s a bummer. But I finally have a copy again after a period of waiting patiently for one to crop up on eBay at a reasonable price.
Hoorah!
35+ years ago, when I was a student the first time, I had, from new, a Pioneer PL-120 turntable. I ran it through a Sansui AU2900 amplifier I bought from a friend. I can’t remember now what speakers I had, but they would have been cheap.
I still have that turntable in a cupboard. It had a new drive belt at some point, and has a new-ish cartridge on it, but it hasn’t been used since I got a Rega Planar 2 (original model) from my brother-in-law. Unfortunately, I no longer have the Sansui amp., and for the life of me can’t remember what I did with it. I really wish I did still have it, but if wishes were fishes we’d all cast nets in the sea, as they say.
Anyway, even though the turntable is nothing special in the great scheme of things, it’s OK and could be put to useful labour in the shed. So I’ve just been on eBay and bought a beat-up Sansui amp., sadly not an AU2900, but an AU-G11X for £30. I reckon for £30 it will do for the shed but it’s not a disaster if it needs to be replaced sometime.
Of course, I’ll need to tidy the shed properly and sort out some kind of stand, but that all gives me time to think about some reasonable 8ohm speakers…
Always late to the party, I watched Wonder Woman. And… I enjoyed it but, on the basis of the reviews, expected to be overwhelmed. As it happens I was neither over- nor under- whelmed; I was merely whelmed.
You tell him Diana
The film is clearly important in breaking with the testosterone-fest aspects of the superhero genre, and the female leads are all excellent, as is Chris Pine. Gal Godot is an obvious talent who carries the whole 2 hour+ movie, seizing the chance to shine. The cinematography is excellent, though the way the tonal palette shifts with the setting–the events in the ‘human world’ are graded to a desaturated blue-shift after the sunshine of Themyscira and shifts to rich warm tones as our heroine comes into her inheritance–is getting a little formulaic with each passing movie.
Yet Wonder Woman seemed to me to fall short of the rhapsodic reception it received. To be sure, it is leagues ahead of the other Warner Bros./DC fare, and I am not blind to either the importance of the movie in breaking the male gaze or the feminist origins of the character (and message of the movie) but I’m not sure that’s enough.
My touchstone for superhero movies remains The Incredibles, which was pitch-perfect, although it benefits from being animated. The best of the live-action crop, for me, is Logan, which succeeds as a fine super-hero movie by dint of being a fine movie by any standard, rather in the way Jessica Jones was streets ahead of the TV equivalents. Logan also, and notably, largely avoids big set up CGI fests and concentrates on character and personal tragedy. The fight scenes in Wonder Woman worked well for me when it was Diana being badass, much less so when the CGI got involved to create spectacle (something I find off-putting in other movies too).
Oh-oh, shit’s getting real
There is a deeper problem with Wonder Woman, though, as an origin story, one that will have repercussions for the franchise, the same problem that underlies Superman and the same problem Marvel had to deal with in the X-Men comics with Jean Grey/Phoenix/Dark Phoenix: once your lead is established to have God-like powers, or to be a God, you are boxed in because the stakes always have to be higher and the villains ever more powerful, with diminishing returns. Drama requires vulnerability, and that is undermined if the hero/heroine always wins because they are virtually all-powerful.
You might think it unfair of me to contrast Wonder Woman with Logan, as they are very different movies. But that is also my point. Wonder Woman is a good superhero movie; Logan dared to be something else.
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