Mark Fleischmann

Should the Motion Picture Association of America add a sixth rating? The current set of five includes G, for general audiences: PG, parental guidance suggested; PG-13, parents strongly cautioned; R, restricted; and NC-17, no one 17 and under admitted. Pressure is building to subdivide R into two new ratings, one for fleetingly racy material, and another (already informally known as hard-R) for extremely graphic horror pics. There are precedents for subdivision and name changing. After all, before there were PG and PG-13, there was a single M rating, for mature audiences. And X changed its name to NC-17 when the terms obscene and pornographic became "legal terms for courts to decide," as the MPAA notes in its explanation of ratings (a comic masterpiece of hairsplitting and equivocation). Now pressure is building from parent groups who feel, as Variety explains, that the current R "is too broad, encompassing everything from a few swear words or brief flashes of nudity to repeated scenes of stomach-churning mutilation and disembowelments." Hollywood is listening, but doesn't want to shove hard-R titles into NC-17 because exhibitors shun films in that ultimate category almost completely and Blockbuster won't stock them at all. My suggestion: Rather than complicate the system with a sixth rating, keep the hard-R material within R, and move soft-R material down into a broadened PG-13. The MPAA's rating guide already uses 306 words to describe PG-13 versus a mere 65 words to describe R. I say add another hundred words of fork-tongued bureaucratese to PG-13 and call it a day. (The illustration is facetious, not a serious proposal.)

MQA is coming to CDs, with the first releases arriving from Ottava and Chesky. Master Quality Authenticated is a form of “audio origami” that folds down hi-res audio into more manageable file sizes and streams. It can travel in a “CD quality” stream, so why not release it on CD?

Plant a seed, grow an iPod docking system.

My first impression of the mStation was that it had grown out of the ground. Having just uncrated it, I knew it hadn’t really sprung out of the carpet, of course. Yet somehow it seemed more like a young stand of trees than a floorstanding iPod docking system. If I waited long enough, would this self-contained trio of cylinders erupt in branches and leaves? No, and yet there was something organic about it. The pair of metal speaker tubes seemed to rise up from the base, while the subwoofer drum suspended between them seemed to levitate in midair. In addition to having a whiff of the arboreal, it also resembled a headless robot.

My favorite LP-hunting story takes place in a Lower Manhattan store sometime in the 1980s. For several years I had been looking for The Compleat Dancing Master, a compilation of English Morris dance tunes charmingly mingled with spoken-word material. The only copy I'd ever seen was an unsealed one and I wanted a virgin sealed copy. So there I was in this record store, when a guy walked in and asked the manager if the very album I was seeking was in stock. The manager said yes and I went into a collector's frenzy. I had one advantage over the competing shopper--I knew what the jacket looked like, with its distinctive graphics against a hunter-green background. I began scanning the tops of the rows of LPs, looking for a slim stripe of hunter green. It took me less than a minute to find my prize, a sealed copy with a price sticker that read $2.49 (a lot less than online prices today). As I took it to the cashier, I made no attempt to lock eyes with my vanquished rival. Actually, I was half triumphant for my accomplishment and half embarrassed for my greed, if the truth be known. But I still remember that day whenever I see that hunter-green spine on my shelves. Perhaps we live in a better world now, a world where shoppers needn't compete for collectibles because downloads can reach vast numbers of people if the artist is lucky. But this item remains hard to find in any form--and downloads are never this much fun.