Five favorite things (outside of hifi) from Stephen Mejias, AudioQuest Director of Communications:
1. The New York Mets
2. Levi Weaver of The Athletic
So now you know I’m obsessed with baseball. Levi Weaver, beat reporter and columnist for the Texas Rangers, is my current favorite baseball writer. In his column, The Weaver Wire, he writes about the Rangers, of course, but also writes about music, passion, and love. And he does so brilliantly. He’s brought me a lot of joy and somehow managed to turn a lifelong Mets fan into an ardent admirer of a team from Texas. He’s made it easier for me to be a Mets fan, in fact, which is saying a LOT.
3. Canco Lofts
This is where we live, in the Journal Square neighborhood of Jersey City. I fall in love with it a little more every day. I daydream about taking Veronica to jazz performances at nearby Mana Contemporary and sitting in the backyard at Square 1 Community Eatery and exploring the many colorful shops and restaurants of India Square (I hope she enjoys Indian food as much as I do! Sapthagiri, your flavors blow my mind.) and trips across the magnificent Pulaski Skyway which is right outside our living room window and walks to the park with its fountains and buffalo statues and cuchifritos from the Puerto Rican bodega and this is where your mommy and I got married (it used to be an Italian restaurant) and Sunday afternoons at the pool on St. Paul’s: City life with my girls.
4. Two print magazines and a book publisher: Jacobin, Poetry, and Riverhead
5. Effects pedals
If the 1970s was a golden age forhifi, today is a golden age for guitar effect pedals. Companies like Old Blood Noise Endeavors, EarthQuaker Devices, Mr. Black, Caroline Guitar Co., Catalinbread, Walrus Audio, Chase Bliss Audio, Montreal Assembly, Alexander Pedals, Dr. Scientist, and, gosh, so many others, are making (by hand, many right here in the United States) beautiful, powerful, inspiring little music machines. They are the coolest.
