Esoteric Grandioso C1X

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- JASON VICTOR SERINUS

Even as I was admiring some of the handsomest audio gear I’d ever set eyes on, my thoughts kept returning to equipment of a very different sort. Flash back maybe 40 years to my one-bedroom apartment on Elgin Park in San Francisco during the period when I was whistling for my supper and performing Puccini’s “O mio babbino caro” in the Emmy-nominated Peanuts cartoon, “She’s a Good Skate, Charlie Brown.” Cue the constant din of an elevated fourlane freeway, since demolished as a blight on humankind, which I tried to pretend was the sound of water in the accompaniment to one of Schubert’s many “water and fish” songs.

Enter a reporter from the College of Marin newspaper, poised to write a preview of my forthcoming performance at his school. As he set foot in my living room, his eyes turned toward what I affectionately called my “Home Entertainment System”: a carefully arranged, multilevel array of cardboard boxes that held my LP collection and books, with openings in which nestled two nondescript speakers, what may have been a Pioneer or Dual 1019 turntable, and a mass-market receiver. I was quite proud of that setup, which to me looked rather cool in its own starving-artist way.

Forward one week to how crushed I felt when I saw that his preview led off with a hurtful reference to a living room “dominated by an antiquated stereo system held up by dilapidated cardboard boxes.” What to me was my only possession of infinite worth was to him a dismissible relic of a life he hoped to leave far behind.

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