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Two '59 Les Pauls, courtesy J. Menza

  Two Airlines

 Three Strats, courtesy Lark Street Music

  Old Golds-ES-295 & '54 Les Paul, courtesy Lark Street Music

 The '60 Cherry Les Paul, courtesy J. Menza

 Moserite Double & Selmer Zodiac,  courtesy Lark Street Music

Bacon & Days anyday, courtesy Lark Street Music

  Firebirds, courtesy Lark Street Music

 EPI EMPEROR & AMP
 
 2 Centuries of Progress!
 
more to come....

 
   
OUR FIRST, AND SO FAR ONLY, TV COMMERCIAL----
featuring Buck Malen, Johnny Rabb, Kevin Maul, unknown banjo phenom & Frances

 or
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Teaneck-NJ/Lark-Street-Music/46986714380
 
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Before  After .....
We often get asked  "where do these guitars come from" ??? or "who buys these things" ??
So here's an interesting picture of the quite rare White ES-345 (that we had for sale for about a year) with both it's original ( c. 1964), and current (April'06)  owners.

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IF YOU HAVE TROUBLE VIEWING THESE PHOTOS, SEE BELOW 
Some have complained about bad pictures.  If this is happening to you or your PC, let me know.  We have Macs and the pictures are large and clear, so we'd like to know figure out why this problem is happening
  
An answer from my brother Rick-
  
By default, Internet Explorer will shrink pictures to fit onto one screen. That's probably what people are complaining about. Usually, if they hold the cursor over the picture for a few seconds, a button will appear and they can click it to restore the pic to full size. I hate the feature, so I just turn it off and always see the photos full-size:

From the IE menu bar, click Tools | Internet Options
Click the Advanced tab
Scroll down to the Multimedia section
Remove the check from "Enable Automatic Image Resizing"
Click OK to save settings


For you who don't know, we do all manner of guitar repair and restoration.  We do most of it here but also give some work to Dom Ramos -repairing and building since working in Dan Armstrong's shop in the '60s.  We've also been a Martin Warrantee Center since 1985 before Martin closed down all 5 NJ Centers because of a tax dispute between NJ and Martin


  Political sentiments
Turn back before it's too late!\\
  
5/14/26
by Peter Himmelman
 
Last night I promised to post my new essay. Here it is: "The New York Times and the Shape of the Modern Blood Libel."
There is a pattern emerging in the coverage of Israel that should trouble anyone who still believes there is a moral difference between accusation and proof, between proportion and false equivalence.
Again and again, grotesque allegations, emotionally overwhelming imagery, and accusations of barbarism and genocide race across the globe before the underlying facts have settled into place. By the time corrections, qualifications, or deeper reporting arrive, the emotional conclusion has already hardened in the public imagination.
The New York Times has been central to this pattern. Let me show how.
On October 17, 2023, near the beginning of Israel’s military incursion into Gaza following the October 7 massacre, the world was told that Israel had bombed the Al-Ahli hospital in Gaza, reportedly killing hundreds of civilians. The claim went world-wide within hours.
Protests erupted throughout the Middle East. Protesters at universities and in the streets across the United States grabbed ready-made placards and hit the streets. Political leaders issued condemnations. Much of the reporting relied heavily on immediate statements issued by Hamas-controlled authorities in Gaza. Not long afterwards, multiple intelligence assessments and forensic analyses concluded that the missile was not of Israeli origin, but rather, a misfire from an Islamic Jihad rocket launched from within Gaza.
But by then, the emotional conclusion had already hardened into place for millions of people: “Israel had bombed a hospital full of civilians.” Many of the people I discuss Israel with still believe it. Dozens of similar editorial errors followed, their corrections barely noticed.
Take as another example the photograph of a grieving mother holding her skeletal child, an image used as symbolic proof of genocidal starvation in Gaza, only for subsequent reporting to reveal that the child suffered from severe preexisting medical conditions unrelated to starvation itself. Again, the image remained. The emotional verdict remained. The subsequent clarifications drifted by like moths.
The reputational damage done to Israel and its supporters is impossible to fully measure.
Despite the later revelations, the photograph —along with the larger body of Gaza imagery surrounding it—was later honored with journalism’s highest accolades, including Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage for Breaking News Photography. By then, the emotional narrative attached to the image had already settled permanently into the public imagination.
I should add that the image itself is beautiful, though in the same unsettling way that much of the visual propaganda of Nazi Germany or the Stalin era was beautiful. Beauty, after all, has never been a guarantor of truth.
And now comes Nicholas Kristof’s recent article in The New York Times, describing allegations of sexualized abuse and humiliation involving Palestinian detainees. Among the more sensational details circulated through activist reporting and repeated in public discourse were allegations involving dogs allegedly used in acts of sexualized abuse.
But the more grotesque and emotionally explosive the allegation, the greater the journalistic obligation to verify it rigorously before presenting it in ways that invite moral conclusions of systemic barbarism.
The specific allegation involving so-called “rape-trained dogs” is especially difficult to evaluate seriously. There is no recognized military or scientific practice of systematically training dogs to commit sexual assault against human beings. Dogs have tragically been used throughout history for intimidation, attack, tracking, torture, and terror. That is well known. But this particular allegation belongs less to the realm of recognizable military practice than to the realm of atrocity mythology — imagery so grotesque and emotionally overwhelming that it bypasses ordinary skepticism altogether.
And once such imagery enters the public imagination, it becomes almost impossible to dislodge, regardless of later qualifications, ambiguities, or evidentiary problems.
To be clear, all wars produce criminal acts, breakdowns of discipline, sadism, vengeance, and moral collapse among some individuals. This is true throughout every military conflict in human history. Some of the allegations described in the article may in fact prove true. Some may already have evidence behind them. They must be investigated seriously, and any guilty parties should be punished.
The question is not whether abuses occur. They can and they do. The question is whether such acts are state policy, culturally celebrated, strategically organized, or morally condemned and prosecuted.
That distinction matters enormously.
There is a profound moral difference between a military confronting allegations of criminal misconduct among individual soldiers, prison guards, or others, and an armed movement whose ideology, media ecosystem, educational culture, and operational planning openly sanctify massacre, kidnapping, rape, and eliminationist violence against civilians.
The atrocities of October 7 were not hidden. They were filmed. Celebrated. Distributed. Integrated into the operation itself. Hostages were dragged into Gaza while crowds cheered. Women’s bodies were paraded. Civilians participated. The attack was not merely tolerated by Hamas and allied movements. It was central to their vision.
It was also not some spontaneous eruption of rage. It was planned. It was supported by a wider ecosystem of Islamist violence and state sponsorship, including the Islamic Republic of Iran.
And yet in much Western coverage one increasingly encounters the suggestion — sometimes explicit, sometimes more opaque — that Israel and Hamas represent morally equivalent actors trapped in a symmetrical cycle of barbarism.
That is the real distortion. The true obscenity at the center of this entire narrative.
Clearly, not every allegation against an Israeli soldier is false. Not every report of abuse should be dismissed. That is not my argument. Not at all. My argument is that the framing matters. Sourcing matters. Proportion matters. And when sensational allegations are placed beside the planned atrocities of October 7 without a careful distinction between criminal misconduct and strategic barbarism, a false parallel is created.
That false parallel is not incidental. It has shaped and sustained public perception.
Much of the reporting and amplification surrounding these allegations traces back, directly or indirectly, to Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, an advocacy organization founded by Ramy Abdu, a Palestinian political activist whose public posture regarding Israel is neither neutral nor difficult to discern. Euro-Med presents itself as a human-rights monitoring organization focused on documenting alleged abuses in the Middle East, particularly involving Israel and Gaza. Yet critics have repeatedly raised concerns regarding the organization’s sourcing methods, ideological activism, inflammatory rhetoric, and the circulation of claims prior to independent verification.
Activist organizations and professional investigative journalistic institutions are not the same thing.
Advocacy groups exist, by definition, to advance moral and political causes. Journalism, at least in its highest form — the form The New York Times purports to aspire to — is supposed to function differently. It is supposed to apply skepticism evenly, especially toward emotionally explosive allegations emerging in the middle of war. In the case of Israel, that distinction appears to have nearly collapsed.
Organizations like Euro-Med are now routinely treated by major journalists and media outlets as though they were functionally equivalent to neutral investigative bodies or forensic institutions. Allegations originating within highly ideological ecosystems are elevated almost instantly into mainstream discourse with insufficient scrutiny, particularly when the accusations concern Israel.
Somehow, the more grotesque the accusation against Israel, the less proof seems required. And the more monstrous the claim, the faster it travels.
At a certain point, one no longer knows whether to respond with outrage, disbelief, or a kind of exhausted grief at what journalism itself has become.
I have no problem with legitimate criticism of Israel, that is, criticism on par with that directed toward any nation engaged in war, conflict, or morally fraught political decisions. Israel, like every other country, is capable of error, excess, confusion, internal disagreement, and ethical failure. Serious people understand this. Serious people also understand that war itself is horrifying and destabilizing.
What troubles me is something else entirely: the increasingly reflexive willingness of major media outlets, prestigious journalists, and influential commentators to circulate the most grotesque accusations imaginable against the Jewish state with remarkably little evidentiary restraint— and then to place those accusations inside a moral frame that suggests equivalence between Israel and those who carried out October 7.
Is it wrong to suspect that this is no longer accidental?
Again and again, emotionally overwhelming claims race across the globe with astonishing speed. The accusation arrives fully formed, morally cogent, and socially contagious. Then later, sometimes within days, sometimes weeks, the clarifications emerge, each buried beneath the tropes and memes of the original outrage. The correction, if it comes at all, feels like someone quietly filed the necessary legal paperwork.
Like you probably did, I grew up believing that the great newspapers, however imperfect, were at least attempting to honor a serious distinction between accusation and proof. That distinction now feels frighteningly unstable where Israel is concerned. At this point, the pattern itself becomes impossible to ignore. This is where the matter becomes darker than journalism alone.
These are the very same features in the moral imagination that have surrounded Jews throughout history: the readiness to believe accusations of extraordinary cruelty; the fascination with an assumed hidden perversity; the lowering of ordinary standards of proof once Jews occupy the role of the accused. The imagery changes with the centuries, but the mechanism feels strangely familiar.
The blood libels rush to mind.
None of this is to deny the reality of Palestinian suffering. Real civilians have died. Real grief exists. Real tragedy exists. And at the same time, genuine suffering does not absolve journalism of its obligation to distinguish carefully between verified fact, activist amplification, emotional inference, and mythologized blame.
Nor does moral seriousness permit the collapse of all distinctions. War, horrible as it is, is not automatically genocide. Civilian suffering, however catastrophic, is not itself proof of eliminationist intent. Criminal acts by individual soldiers or prison guards, however odious, are not the moral equivalent of a terrorist movement whose foundational vision openly embraces the murder, rape, abduction, and destruction of civilians.
We are no longer entering dangerous territory; we are already there. Poorly sourced accusation has too often become sufficient. Verification has become secondary to emotional utility — or worse, to the need to promote one’s brand — and the world’s oldest fantasies about Jewish monstrosity are reappearing daily in the language of modern human rights discourse.
An entire civilization seems to have lost the ability to distinguish allegation from proof, spectacle from hard evidence, and criminal misconduct from strategic evil.
I’ve begun to feel like the boy with his finger in the dike, holding back the floodwaters.
If you have a bucket, please come and help. See lessUPDATED JULY 16

  https://www.facebook.com/reel/685997670609240

AND THIS TOO-  https://www.facebook.com/reel/1440054026935399
  and this-  https://www.facebook.com/reel/3623986564575308


 by David Horovitz, Editor of Times of Israel  2/11/26
	 
 
It’s not remotely surprising that President Isaac Herzog’s visit to Australia is being met with protests by “pro-Palestinian” activists falsely alleging Israeli genocide in Gaza.

After all, “pro-Palestinian” activists in Australia, and pretty much everywhere else on the planet, have been demonstrating against Israel’s resort to war from almost immediately after Hamas invaded southern Israel from a Jew-free Gaza Strip, massacred some 1,200 people amid unspeakable brutality, abducted 251 to Gaza, and vowed to keep on killing Israelis until the world’s only Jewish-majority state is destroyed.

These are not demonstrations regarding Israel’s prosecution of the war, or focused on the pro-annexation policies of a hawkish Israeli government, by activists genuinely concerned for the well-being of non-terrorist Palestinians and noncombatants in any and all conflict zones. Rather, these are concerted protests transparently designed to demonize and delegitimize Israel and Israel alone, in its entirety and its essence — to render Israel a pariah state with which no decent country should interact in any field, to deny it not only the right to defend itself but the weaponry and practical capacity to defend itself, and thus to aid Hamas, Hezbollah and the Iranian regime in their declared mission to wipe us out.

So the demonstrations against Herzog’s visit are anything but surprising. But they are particularly revealing, horrifying and despicable.
Anti-Israel protesters gather in front of a police station in Surry Hills in Sydney on February 10, 2026. (Saeed KHAN / AFP)

Twenty-seven months of orchestrated global activism have relentlessly spread a narrative in which the Jewish state, uniquely, can do no right, and calculatedly created a bedrock of empathy and support for regimes, terrorist groups, and individuals who seek to murder and maim Israelis and Jews wherever we are found.

And in that deliberately created climate of murderous hostility, in Sydney, Australia, on December 14, 2025, father and son Islamic extremists Sajid and Naveed Akram massacred 15 people at a Hanukkah party on Bondi Beach.

This was not a case of direct cause and effect. Naveed had links to a pro-Islamic State network in Australia dating back to 2019.

But you might have wanted to believe that the deadly and terribly predictable turn of events in Australia would have given the country’s “pro-Palestinian” activists pause.

The victims of the December 14, 2025, Sydney Hanukkah terror shooting: top row (left to right) – Reuven Morrison, Rabbi Yaakov Levitan, Dan Elkayam, Alex Kleytman, Rabbi Eli Schlanger; middle row (left to right) – Edith Brutman, Peter Meagher, Tibor Weitzen, Marika Pogany, Matilda [last name withheld]; bottom row (left to right) – Tania Tretiak, Boris Tetleroyd, Adam Smyth, Sofia and Boris Gurman. (Composite: Times of Israel; Images: Courtesy/social media, used in accordance with Clause 27a of the Copyright Law)

Fellow Australians were gunned down on the beach for being Jewish. Now, the president of the nation-state of the Jewish people is visiting to try to bring the devastated Jewish community a little solace and comfort. And the protests are targeting him?

You might have wanted to hope that, if there were to be demonstrations to coincide with Herzog’s visit, they would have been held to demand that the Australian government take more effective measures to protect the Australian Jewish community, that it take more effective measures to tackle the ongoing stream of antisemitic attacks, that it take more effective measures to prevent the dissemination of hate materials online.
Israel’s President Isaac Herzog, right, and his wife Michal Herzog, second right, visit Bondi Beach, where two Islamic terrorists killed 15 people at a Hanukkah event on December 14, 2025, in Sydney on February 9, 2026. (AP Photo/Rick Rycroft)

In truth, you would not have expected anything of the kind. We all know better than to be so naive. But that’s what should have been happening on Herzog’s visit.

For that matter, those “pro-Palestinian” activists who purport to care for innocent lives, in the Middle East and beyond, should also have been out on the streets demonstrating on behalf of the people of Iran, who have been risking their lives — and losing them in the thousands if not the tens of thousands — to try to bring down their repressive, misogynistic, warmongering Islamic death cult leadership.

These were innocent people ruthlessly massacred by their own oppressive government, to widespread international indifference.
Anti-Israel protesters gather in front of a police station in Surry Hills, Sydney, Australia, on February 10, 2026. (Saeed KHAN / AFP)

But, of course, in Australia as pretty much everywhere else on the planet, the “pro-Palestinian” activists are not actually “pro” freedom for Palestinians, or Iranians or anybody else, nor “pro” the right to live peaceably, in safety, under humane leadership.

They claim to be opposing ostensible genocide by the Jewish state. In fact, they are seeking to enable the destruction of the Jewish state, and championing the mass murder of Jews — even, if not especially, because it has been unfolding in their own country.


10/16/25  From "The Tablet"  
  What are the cool kids chanting these days, what with “ceasefire now” being, like, so three days ago?

 We hardly expected a “Thank you, president Trump!” or a “good job there, Bibi.” We’re not crazy. But it’s the fall, and the leaves are turning colors, and everyone is enjoying pumpkin-spice-everything and dreaming about the holidays, so we hoped that maybe we’d get just a few days of basic human decency focused on sentiments like “let’s rebuild!” or “time to heal!” or “gee, it’s sure good to see the hostages back home with their loved ones.”

 Forget it, Jack—this is Palestine, and the cool kids have a new war cry: “Death to all collaborators.”

  That chant ain’t theoretical: it’s praising the very real murders of very real Palestinians, executed in the streets of Gaza by panicky Hamas terrorists in the aftermath of Trump’s deal.

 Just who’s doing the chanting? That would be our pals over at Students for Justice in Palestine, or SJP, America’s premiere “pro-Palestine” organization. You know SJP, right? Zohran Mamdani sure does: He founded the hate group’s local chapter at his alma mater, Bowdoin College.

 We know what you’re thinking: Don’t be mean! Just because someone supported something in college doesn’t mean he supports it still! I mean, it’s college, and people do stupid things in college, like grab that eighth beer, or hit on their TA, or pledge allegiance to a genocidal group dedicated to getting Jews thrown off campus, the Jewish state destroyed, and the American “empire” eradicated, by any means necessary. You know, exuberant, youthful stuff!

 But hard as Mamdani may try, he just can’t quit hatin’ on the Jews. This week, his own wife, the artist Rama Duwaji, took a break from her constant stream of anti-Israel screeds to post a mournful note bemoaning the death of Sale al-Jafarawi, killed this week by Palestinians in Gaza.

 If the name doesn’t ring a bell, perhaps you know al-Jafarawi by his nom de bullshit, Mr. Fafo: As Liel Leibovitz wrote in Tablet two years ago, al-Jafarawi emerged as perhaps Hamas’s most effective propaganda artist. He died on camera several times only to be miraculously reborn the very next moment, sired a (plastic) baby and lost it in (fake) Israeli air raids, posed as a doctor and a patient and a foreign correspondent and a combatant, always grinning widely because the grotesque, obvious lying was precisely the point.

 “Why do we love him so?” Leibovitz asked. “Why has he become the subject of so much attention, on social media and in the press?” The answer, he argued, was as simple as it was searing:

 Because he is the pure embodiment of a greater truth: We live in an age that has progressed beyond rational argument. It should be obvious by now that so many of the creeps who purport to weep for Palestine don’t really care about Palestinians, dead or alive, or about Israelis, or about the historical and moral intricacies of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. What they want is an excuse to indulge in something deeper, more libidinal, ancient, and indeed erotic—hating Jews. They cheer for #MrFAFO not despite the fact that he’s so obviously faking it but precisely because of it. His performances promise liberation from the annoyances of a fact-based reality whose contradictions are inherently troubling, and instead affirm that old motto coined by Hasan-i Sabbah, the 12th-century founder of the Hashashin, or the Order of the Assassins—nothing is true, everything is permitted. 

 That this is the person the very likely next first lady of New York City mourns as her “beloved” is troubling. Just ask the young New Yorkers who opened their hearts to TV writer Yoni Weinberg this week, telling stories of how former friends and fellow progressives turned on them the moment they dared supporting Israel, and wondering whether it was time to get out of Dodge.

 “When I saw Mamdani win, it was really difficult,” one film director told Weinberg. “I spent time in Paris growing up and experienced hardcore antisemitism there, so I know what it looks like outside America. To see that kind of hatred reach the one place that, in my mind, was safe from it is too much to bear. It breaks my heart.” 

  Is your heart breaking, too, when you see the largest Jewish community outside Israel littered with vile anti-Semitic slogans and about to be seized by a Third World blowhard terror enthusiast? We have the perfect prescription: Pack your bags and run right up to the Magic Mountain. As David Mikics writes in Tablet today, Thomas Mann’s classic, itself now the subject of a brilliant new book-length study, is modernism’s most humane novel, a masterwork that has a thing or two to teach anyone wondering why seemingly normal people become engrossed by absolutely crazy ideas.

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