What a total sham. The “grit”, the stupid giant trucks, all of it. None of it is authentic except for maybe 5% of the people doing it. What a joke. Plastic surgery everywhere, the goofy shirts and cowboy hats, big belt buckles. Go read a book if you can. Stupid state.
Wow, this is unreal. The taxes originally imposed on smoking cigarettes as a deterrent due to health risks now extend to nicotine pouches purchased online. This does the OPPOSITE of giving people a healthier alternative to smoking, and is clearly a cash grab because the state doesn’t know how to get back the money lost from people not smoking as much. The data on smokers and young kids smoking supports this. Shame on NY.
Wowww. Was sitting in my grandfathers house for years. It has a super young Raymond Cruz. Production is actually surprisingly good.
I used to watch this when I was a kid. It’s been sitting in my grandfathers house for 30 odd years. Has a super young Raymond Cruz. Pretty great.
My dad bought this piece sometime around 1986, and I’ve had it for years. Unfortunately, I don’t know much about its history or who actually made it.
It’s a large mixed-media/assemblage piece with an incredible amount of detail. It incorporates altered dolls and figures, skulls/bones, wire, rope, flowers, fabric, mechanical-looking pieces and other found objects. There’s also a separate painted panel mounted over the center.
The photos don’t really capture how three-dimensional it is. Every time I look closely, I notice another figure, object or little scene hidden somewhere in it.
I’m hoping someone here might recognize the artist, style, school/movement, or approximate period, or point me toward artists who were making similar assemblage work in the 1980s. I’m especially interested in figuring out where to begin researching its origin.
I can post photos of the back, any signatures or markings, measurements, and additional close-ups if those would be helpful.
Any leads on identifying the artist or understanding the context of the piece would be greatly appreciated.
UPDATE:
My father said that it was an artist name John Hancock. He purchased it from him when they were in Stillwater OK. The name of the piece is “Pervert On 12th Street”. John is now in South Texas. If anyone is familiar with John Hancock, let me know.
Just leaving Aruba, and wanted to document my experience here for some responses from folks that come here regularly.
I travel a lot, and will say Aruba is definitely a unique place. The desert climate mixed with beaches was very interesting to me, and not what I expected at all. We stayed near Palm beach, but not at one of the mega resorts, so I can’t really speak for those. When we travel we like to try every kind of local food and experience available, and generally steer clear of things we could get elsewhere. We did some walking around the palm beach area just to check it out and felt very bizarre. Touristy, but also sort of… not enough stuff to be touristy? Like almost incomplete, if that makes sense. I get it’s a small island, but for all the hype around coming to Aruba, we were kind of unimpressed. Whatever, wasn’t our goal to like that anyway.
The good stuff: local food.
We ate at every local restaurant we could find (some are obviously still tourist traps, but honestly we had NO bad food while we were in Aruba). It seemed like shell fish were mostly imported, so we stuck with whatever the local fresh catch was. Some favorites:
- Zeerovers- delicious fresh fried fish on the water. Long line but who cares, 100% worth it.
- Whack wahoos- very good fresh barracuda and Aruban cornbread.
- BBQ Express- great BBQ food truck
- Lima- fancy and hyped up, but worth it. Great food
- Butcher by the sea- great steak, great service. It’s a new place, worth going
More great stuff: wildlife
The donkey sanctuary, ostrich farm and butterfly farm are all inexpensive and very very cool. Worth going and supporting these folks, all were very nice.
The bad:
There is trash EVERYWHERE. Like in the streets, side of all the roads, in the natural coves. Everywhere.
There are scammers. That’s normal for tourist areas but be careful, obviously. ***UPDATE: since everyone is flipping out about this, someone tried to scam us for $400 lotion in a store. Not a massive deal but is what it is.
Overall, it was definitely a one time visit for us. It’s naturally very beautiful, but it definitely felt a bit like a struggling desert town sprinkled with some extremely isolated tourist mega resorts. I guess if you’re the type to just stay at a resort for most of the trip, it may be totally fine. The water is beautiful. All of this is our own opinion and experience, compared to places we’ve traveled over the years. Aruba by FAR was not the worst “destination” location we’ve gone, but it was not the best. Probably just below the middle for us. But the food… VERY good, especially if you like fresh fish.
Just wanted to share a recent upgrade that has completely exceeded my expectations.
I added a Prometheus transformer volume control (TVC) to my system, and it's been one of the most noticeable improvements I've made in a long time. For reference, I'm not using an standard preamp at all, the TVC is handling volume duties between my phono amp and power amp.
What I've noticed most is that everything sounds more true to the source. Good recordings sound incredible, and not-so-good recordings sound …not so good. It doesn't seem to add warmth, detail, or any particular flavor. It just gets out of the way completely.
The biggest improvements for me have been separation and overall realism. There's a sense of space and accuracy that wasn't quite there before. It’s probably 5% but I immediately noticed it. Records I've listened to hundreds of times are magnifying tiny things I had heard before but not as clearly. not in a hyper-detailed or analytical sense, just more there.
I haven’t heard much TVC talk, I guess because most people opt for a regular active preamp. This has honestly been one of those upgrades where after a few weeks I'm still thinking “yep I can still hear the difference”
Anyone else running a TVC instead of an active preamp? I'd be interested to hear what your experience has been.
I’ve been working on repairing these 3000H diaphragms for my Altec Sevilles. I’m getting a good signal reading across literally everything and OL from post to post after connecting the tensile. The tensiles read fine up to diaphragm, and the diaphragm lead outs (picture 2) read fine as well. It’s driving me nuts, it’s this potentially a microscopic irreparable issue inside the voice coil? If it was in the voice coil why would the lead outs from the voice coil not read OL??
I first got these Altec Sevilles years ago and thought they were cool. I had them playing through a generic amp, not great speakers etc. I’d not really had much home audio knowledge before that. Many, MANY hours of reading later, here’s where they are at. Over the years I’ve tweaked more things than I can remember. All basically built around these speakers. Current signal chain:
- Yamaha YP-D6 with OC9XML moving coil cart
- Luxman LE-117 phono pre (massively underrated but hard to find)
- passive pre (considering going to a TVC soon, not sure. I’m losing negligible amount of quality with a passive good quality pot and adding zero extra flavor)
- MC240 with mullards
- Altecs with horns crossed fairly low so the woofers hit most of the high mids
- Aperion ribbon tweeters handling all the air, barely audible but there.
I feel like with this setup I can get tons of warm realism from jazz and anything with acoustic guitar, and also get good tone from “audiophile” level more modern recordings. The jump I got in this system completely removing an active pre amp (tube) was MASSIVE. It seems like the mc240 colors enough that I don’t need added gain staging or juice before it at all, and it’s more about the signal getting to power amp being as untouched as possible and clean.
I also play my guitar through this setup, the jazz clean tone is bananas. DI converter straight into the Mac and out the altecs. Low end rolled off, highs rolled off.
Thought I’d share, thanks for looking!