It isn't that there are too many people there just aren't enough spaceships.1) Let the Funk Ride - Aim

2) I Want To Be Evil - Eartha Kitt

3) Wanna Feel It - The Olms

4) Cirrus - Bonobo

5) Space Walk - Lemon Jelly

6) Capture the Flag - Dosh

7) 2 Bit Blues - Kid Koala

8) The Hope That House Built - The Future of the Left.

9) Empty Cup - Thinking Fellers Unions Local 282

Wow (wow) got everything into order and made a poster, showed it at SMBE. Even got some nice compliments from some top tier grads and post-docs. Got a little traction in the form of collaborators - but it looks like I've got a lot more work to do and fast.

Also - hat tip to an old friend, Chicago isn't so bad. And a hat tip to a future friend, "genes come in all sizes and ages"

1. Asaf Avidan - One Day / Reckoning Song (Wankelmut Remix)
2. Johnny Cash and the Avett Brothers - One Too Many Mornings
3. Lorde - Royals
4. Final Fantasy - Song Song Song
5. Cat Power - Ruin
6. Broadcast - Come On Let's Go
7. Two Door Cinema Club - Something Good Can Work (The Twelves Remix)
8. The Whitest Boy Alive - Burning
9. Country Teasers - Golden Apples
10. Santigold - Lights Out

 Image from Gary Larson's Far Side - a fantastic example of me doing anything, at anytime, always.

The end of so many things. I'm a Ph.d. candidate now. A few years ago when I started this as a diary of music that I loved and listened to I was a high school dropout who'd been kicked out of college 5 times. Now it is something different. I lost some people along the way, and they were not replaced - indeed, they were irreplacible. So it goes.

1. Delgados - American Trilogy

2. Jonathan Richman - Can't Talk to the Dude

3. Cornershop - Brimful of Asha

4. White Walls - Elk City

5. Tame Impala-Be Above It

6. Kendrick Lamar-Now or Never

7. Dreadzone - Captain Dread

8. On The Streets - [Kollektiv Turmstrasse's Let Freedom Ring Remix]

9. Robert Glasper-Always Shine

10.  Artifacts - Balthrop, Alabama

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Image from:

Nusantara Tarot: Ten of Staves

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Sunflower Sutra - Allen Ginsburg (1955)

[...]

You were never no locomotive, Sunflower, you were asunflower!And you Locomotive, you are a locomotive, forget menot!So I grabbed up the skeleton thick sunflower and stuckit at my side like a scepter,and deliver my sermon to my soul, and Jack's soultoo, and anyone who'll listen,--We're not our skin of grime, we're not our dreadbleak dusty imageless locomotive, we're allbeautiful golden sunflowers inside, we're blessedby our own seed & golden hairy nakedaccomplishment-bodies growing into mad blackformal sunflowers in the sunset, spied on by oureyes under the shadow of the mad locomotiveriverbank sunset Frisco hilly tincan eveningsitdown vision.

Someone once said- and it was later related to me - that the Books are the choir for Crystal Dragon Jesus. I got into the Unitarian Universalists this month and looking back I see that deep seated ignosticism stretching way, way back. I also started (and kickstarted) re-reading Eclipse Phase sourcebooks. And thinking about things from that other perspective. Its actually been a really good month (or month +, as the case may be). I got a reminder that I'm older and outside but that everyone is anyways. It's not like everything makes sense now - more like, maybe, it doesn't need to. Was I dying of thirst or was the very world pulling a stone cold coup d'état?1. The Books - A True Story of True Love

2. Bonobo - Walk in the Sky

3. Quantic feat. Alice Russell - Road To Islay

4. Rocco Katastrophe - Saturn's Back

5. DJ Nu-Mark - [Untitled Track] (Off of Broken Sunlight LP)

6.Booker T & the MG's - Soul Limbo

7. Motor City Drum Ensemble - All My Life

8. Kendrick Lamar - Dying of Thirst

#! I'm finally ready for what's next

"There's a fool in your future."

A long time ago was a long time ago. ad astra per aspera. The last week was so hard I went round depression and hit happiness again. I missed my friends wedding, my uncle's funeral, so many holidays, so many weekends, palindromic birthdays, my own unconditional passing - pissed away with stress and petty blame. Sacrifices stacked high on the alter of being the only one responsible.

But then again I lack perspective... the world is large, what are the feelings of one man worth compared to the glory of feeling itself? We'd all have a better perspective if only we lived forever.

1. Madeline - Sorry
2. Jamie Stillway - Madeline's Sin
3. Misophone - Nothing Down There But The Trees
4. Curtis Stigers - Things Have Changed
5. Smashing Pumpkins - 1979
6. Pepe Deluxe - Queenswave
7. I Will Dare - The Replacements
8. Wild Flag - Something Came Over Me
9. Spoon - The Way We Get By
10. Donald Fagen - Memorabilia
11. Blue Sky Black Death - Legacy to Fuel

Image from: SMBC

Words are hard.

Strapping Young Lads are hard too.

1. Madeline - This Train
2. The Noisettes - That Girl
3. Oh Land - Heavy Eyes
4. Typhoon - The Honest Truth
5. Barely Legal - The Strokes
6. Harlem Shakes - Strictly Game
7. Rebecca Loebe - High + Lonesome
8. Le Tigre - Viz
9. Phantogram - When I'm Small
10. Sonic Youth - Tunic (Song for Karin)
11. The Slits - Typical Girls
12. Chemical Borthers (Feat The Flaming Lips) - The Golden Path
13. Neil Halstead - Two Stones In My Pocket
14. Ani DiFranco - School Night
15. The Durutti Column - Sketch for Summer

They call it way too rowdy, I call it finally free

So it is spring break and that means I have enough of a moment to put together a couple tracks. Somehow I am able to put together fewer songs each time and still come up against the barrier of space constraints - but so be it.

This last leg of time has seen much puttering around in a confused and exhausted daze, and the track by Okkervil River has been in heavy rotation as a result of said puttering. The unfortunate side effect of that burnt out husk level of life is that two momentous things have occurred directly to me (and two terrifying things have occurred to those close to me, namely heart events and cancer) - that is 1) I realized this year marks the fifth year of this audio time capsule/journal. 

This certainly gives me pause as I think back over what has transpired in those five years and, holy shit, a lot of my life seems to have been terribley recent in vintage. Do you ever have those fears that your longterm self is a fabrication of some nefarious conspiracy constructing a world that never was in order to convince you that the world is other than it REALLY is? I don't actually think that because that is insane (and if I hint that I know the truth then I'll have only forced their hand to take swift action against me) - but sometimes I know the feel.

The second big thing is I got engaged to my longtime life partner Ana. Do you want to hear about ornate conspiracies of minds vastly more intelligent than your own arrayed against you? Nah - it is actually good (and terrifying). 

Last thing, me - my future self - you, you reader - five years ago almost nothing which happens to you now on a daily basis was part of what you expected. It isn't just that the future is hard to predict - it is also that you have really crappy expectations.

• Quantic - Look Around The Corner (Feat. Alice Russell)
• Ruby and the Ribcage - Horror
• Twin sister - All Around and Away We Go
• Avida Dollars - Joseph & The Argonauts
• Francis Bebey - New Track (1982)
• SUNBEARS! - They Think They're So Philosophical
• Okkervil River - Lost Coastlines
• Michael Musika – The Spellbound Traveler Loses all Possession
• Luke Roberts - His Song

Image From: Hyperbole and a Half

Currently Embroiled In: Ingenious Genes by Sansom, which is - maybe changing my mind abou gene regulatory networks.

Let us ring in the year of the wagon with word salsa and duende!

I've been back in school for only two weeks and am fantastically exhuasted - rotating now through a lab (which I think is THE lab) working on ribosome profiling which is some real hot shit. Figured out with my girl that engagement should have a date on the calendar we're going for Valentines day because it needs some authenticity. Having a hard time sleeping at night. We Are So Terribly Excited.

Sweatshop Union - Itchy Rock Saul Williams - Twice the First Time Kraak & Smaak - Keep On SearchingMr Scruff - Ultramagnetic Mc's Ego TrippingMaterial - UnauthorizedThe Mercury Program - Undiscovered Genius of the Mississippi DeltaWild Flag - Something Came Over MeQuantic - Quantic - TransatlanticNeon Indian - Should Have Taken Acid With YouPaper Bird - Lost BoysMarco Benevento - It Came From YouBearsuit - Stay AliveAM - Self PreservationShawn Lee's Ping Pong Orchestra - Old Sweat

Image From: Don't Know - Sorry, Forgot. Currently Reading: Manara's Guiseppe Bergman, well there is a weird piece of literature. Disappearing Spoon, a fantastic piece of non-fiction science history which uses the Periodic Table as it's setting. And Eclipse Phase - an RPG setting book about a transhuman post-scarcity space setting after the singularity goes bad, I haven't actually played it (yet?) but I am falling in love with the world they've built.

Happy 101111 033 to me and my new fangled life. I'd be remiss if I didn't add that grad school is exhuasting and frustrating, note the bookending tracks - but that inbetween bouts of wildly oscillating terrors there are hints of hope and joy. Like a sandwich or something.

1. Blood Sausage - Fuck You and Your Underground
2. AM & Shawn Lee - The Signal
3. Sweatshop Union - Time Machine (Feat. Mat The Alien)
4. Gang of Four - At Home He's a Tourist
5. Carolina Chocolate Drops - Cornbread and Butterbeans
6. World's Greatest Dad - Then Up the Ladder
7. They Might Be Giants - Old Pine Box
8. Young Marble Giants - Brand - New - Life 
9. Withered Hand - Religious Songs
10. SBTRKT - Hide or Seek
11. Gloria Ann Taylor - Love Is A Hurting Thing
12. Grizzly J - TOTORO
13. Nick Lowe - I Read A Lot (welcomce to grad school)

Currently Reading: King City - or more realisticly Brandon Grahams RoyalBoilers.

Image from: same as the above.

If this summer has taught me anything it is that good friends are like physical objects that can be picked up at a later time in life, a time after you put them down to begin with of course, and also that they undergo changes in time, such as may be expected for an object coextensive with one's self. That is they exist in both space and time, and in a manner where, even if you do not observe them directly, they continue to persist.

1. Sweatshop Union - Oh My
2. Holy Fuck - SHT MTN
3. Wire - Outdoor Miner (Long Version)
4. Dick Justice - Cocaine
5. Ty Segall - Caesar
6. Admiral Fallow - Squealing Pigs
7. April Smith - Colors
8. Mekons - Trouble Down South
9. Patrick Sky - Under All Flags
10. Agent Ribbons - I'm Alright
11. Liquid Liquid - Bellhead
12. Wavves - Convertible Ballon
13. Slim Harpo - The Hippy Song
14. Beat Connection - Silver Screen
15. Dom - Bochicha
16. Keoki - Majick (Uberzone Remix)

Image From: Azumanga Daioh Currently Reading: The Scar by China Meiville Lastly: Thanks and well wishes to all my friends and family who so warmly reinvited me back into their lives this summer.