Multi-colored Classical Box Sets (Sexist)

"Great Men of Music" + Lana Del Rey, with a Little Engines update

Hi! Box set shopping below, but first:

🗣️ Many of you originally landed here via Little Engines. If that’s you, please note: The magazine is now publishing on Substack. Issue Nine is coming very soon, available with or without a subscription. Back issues are there for you now, along with the archive of Mike Nagel’s “The Unintentionalist.”

Sign up: Little Engines on Substack

Your paid subscription helps keep the print issues free and puts money in the hands of writers & artists. You’ll get exclusive work only found on the sub’, too.

I’ll grieve for the Little Engines website I built during the pandemic with my basic-ass Photoshop + HTML skills from 1998, but I’m thrilled to leave it behind. I’m psyched on how the back issues work on the new platform. Gonna have fun rolling out Issue Nine there.

Come on, it’s nice: Little Engines on Substack

Thanks as always,
Adam

---

Multi-colored Classical Box Sets (Sexist)

Cole was in Nashville recently, and wanted to hit McKay’s, a massive store on the far west side selling second-hand everything. They’ve got used books, CDs, LPs, and DVDs, video games and every console going back decades, loose Lego pieces, dusty stereo receivers, electronic drum sets, and cartoon figurines.

I flipped through the new-arrival LPs and took a half-hearted stroll through one aisle of fiction, but I’ve got limited patience for this sort of shopping, and I’ve been trying to curb my bonkers buying of books and records. After I got bored, I shadowed Cole for a few racks of CDs until he got the hint.

“Okay, fine,” he said. “I just want to go back and look at one thing again.” He led me to a floor-level cubby, under the proper record shelves, where a colorful stack of boxes sat.

“It was a TIME LIFE series,” Cole said. “Classical. These things are insane. Look at this. They’re in perfect shape.”

Cole had dabbled in classical before. I remember a compilation album he was into for a while, various well-known pieces, but these fancy-pants boxes focused on a single canonized composer in depth. Each had four LPs of their greatest work, performed by world-class symphonies, and included a nice booklet of history, commentary, photos, and drawings.

“This would be like me saying ‘Hmm maybe I’ll give heavy metal a try,’ and then getting the discographies of Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, Slayer, Pantera, Metallica, Motörhead, Iron Maiden, and Megadeth all at once,” Cole said. “And they’re ridiculously cheap.”

He would’ve purchased them all, except that as he opened a couple of them and showed me what’s inside—mispronouncing the names, guessing the timeframes and countries of origin incorrectly—I got interested, too.

The series was called Great Men of Music, priced at $0.95 each. I picked Brahms and Tchaikovsky at random, and bought them along with a Lana Del Rey LP ($34), a counterweight to the classical series’ title.