Christmas Storms 4. New York Holidays

Thank you very much for your honest review. I know that methods of music reproduction are not as important to some as to others. My editor forced me to cut the time devoted to audiophile music by about 2/3, so the original was much worse from your standpoint. Still, as I pointed out to him, had I trivialized it all to a paragraph or two, some of my other readers would have complained that it wasn't real. I also went into a lot of detail on Asher's cooking skills, in spite of having very little experience in the kitchen myself. It's not my own interests that dictate what I write but rather the interests of the characters I've created. That said, I think that today there's an expectation that music should be plentiful and free with much less interest in faithful reproduction than in the past. When I was in my teens, my allowance was $5/week and I spent about $7 to purchase a new vinyl album every month. That album would be about $45 in today's dollars. A cheap stereo back in the 70s was around $200, which would be $1300 in today's dollars. The thing is, even the best stereo back then sounded like crap compared to most sound systems today, so naturally most people today are appalled at the thought of spending more than $1 or 2k on and entire home theater. Plus for $10 a month, one can practically stream the entire world's library of music in pretty good quality. So why in the world would one every spend thousands on audiophile equipment, and why would they spend $20 or $30 just to download a high-resolution version of one measly album? However, for those who are passionate about music, trying to reproduce the experience of a live performance is a worthwhile pursuit. Enough said about my characters' passion… and mine.

Regarding the access to wealth of these teens - remember that some of my Naptown Tales teenagers also had significant access to wealth. Jeremy was flat-out rich and was given a Porsche for his 16th birthday. Trevor was merely affluent and he only got a Jetta. However, David's dad lost his job and so there was significant belt tightening and Kurt was flat-out poor. Fast Forward to this series and welcome to the economics of Manhattan, where people spend over half their incomes to live in tiny apartments. I'm aware of no other city in America where some much affluence exists, side-by-side with so much poverty. Seth has access to fantastic wealth because his parents have invested wisely, and because they're trying to make up for lost time spent with him, but his father represents a district where the majority of his constituents live in housing projects. Asher's parents own their own take-out restaurant but they live hand-to-mouth with him in a tiny 2-bedroom, 1-bathroom apartment that cost about a half-million to buy and with a maintenance payment of cost to $1k/month. That's considered affordable housing in Manhattan! Yet as poor as Asher feels he is, he avoids having anything to do with the kids in the housing projects that surround his apartment complex. That the spending of these guys seems skewed is a reflection of relative prices in New York. When your parents are spending so much on housing, spending $25 per person at a diner seems ridiculously cheap. In fact, if you know where to shop as Asher and Seth both did, food, clothing, entertainment and high-end stereo equipment are no more expensive in New York than anywhere else - it's only housing that's expensive.

Expect to see more of these guys in the coming months - and I have no further plans to get into high-end stereo stuff.