I’m most likely moving to Kansas City in August, perhaps June.

I’ve started classes in my MA for Library Sciences. Hopefully PhD but who knows.

I’ve read John Paul II’s  Theology of the Body and I think I might be a Catholic sort, after all.

Still writing for film   .   com. I like it a lot and they send me loads of Criterion dvds.

my resolutons:

1. to continue learning/reading everything I can about Africa, i.e. Isak Dinesen, Beryl Markham (just finished a pretty good biography about her and ordred one about) Denys Finch Hatton, and all that crew.  Get the feeling I was supposed to be a British aristocrat in Kenya in the early 1900’s.

2. visit Iceland, get white iceland tattoo on my forearm like a sailor.

3. not to buy any new clothes at all. not to look at Anthropologie all the time, and hence not to buy any new clothes.  Only clothes from thrift stores.  We’ll see how I do.

4. make a better Almanac, always.

You?

OK, I want to hear from everyone who posts here, no matter how sporadic. 

My radio show is going well, if you’ve been forgetting to listen, that’s ok.  Listen to the last two shows, African Skies and The Women, both are good. 

I’ve acquired a second Hammond organ, I don’t know if I already shared that with you guys or not.  I’m sort of vaguely working on this and that, painting, I want to get back into embroidery, exercising every day, I set up my sewing machine and created a workspace for cutting and sewing.  I still write for film.com, and I’m just sort of drifting.  Worked pretty hard during college, and still feeling a bit exhausted after that enormous effort.

Been reading an insane amount, my very favourite new find is Beryl Markham’s book about growing up in 1910’s Africa, West With the Night.  Markham was the first person to fly solo from England to North America, and she was an accomplished aviator, horse trainer and sort of woman-about-town.  Hemingway called her a “high-grade bitch,” which is praise enough for me.

Started on the David Foster Wallace behemoth, Infinite Jest.  Not impressed, 100 pages in.  I do very much like Alice Munro, sometimes called the Flannery O’Connor of Southern Ontario, (!), and very much a feminine writer.

Music-wise, I’ve had some local bands, Eureka, Pocahaunted and Sun Araw on the old record player a lot.  The new Smog album comes out in April 2009, and once that happens, all else will fade into blissful obscurity, as my discovery of Smog ranks right up there with Bob Dylan, and possibly higher in terms of personal impact.  Simply put? Wow.

…just bought her second Hammond organ of the year.

is baaaack.  Third season, kiddos.  It’ll be better cause I have more time every week.

By better, I mean more structured, less precious.  Whee! 

In the air, I suppose. I’m not quitting my regular full-time job and moving to Iceland, as per my original plan, but I am cutting down to half-time. I’m scared, because this means I will lose my benefits, and I’ve grown accustomed to, oh, say, going to the doctor when I’m sick, or… visiting the dentist. I know, I live such a luxurious life. Aside from stepping up the freelancing (which I hope to pursue more vigorously, I thought about what I really wanted to do, the only thing that affords me any freedom or happiness, and it’s beginning work in earnest on the lingerie line that a few friends and I began in 2006. Since then, it’s been nothing but hopes and dreams and something nice to talk about on those morning drives to the office, but as of September, Lo and Behold is my new focus, and I hope it will be successful. Just like to keep you all updated. I’m so scared.

Now I’m going to go watch Sarah Silverman and try not to feel too guilty for laughing.

What is your favorite book, right now, this moment?

Come on folks, let’s get back into it!  Where’s the gender discussions! Where’s the debates on Church history? Where’s the inevitable questioning of Jeremiah’s motives, beliefs, and mental stability?

Nico Muhly, minimalist composer, has a fantastic post about the concept of “full” and how that corresponds to a life, check it out here.

Alright kids, nominations are in.  Obama or McCain, and why?

Living in Los Angeles has it’s perks, especially when Beirut comes to town.  I saw them on Saturday and it was a delight.  I’ve loved Beirut since I got ahold of their initial offering, recorded almost solely by frontman Zach Condon at the age of 19(!)  Condon dropped out of school to wander Europe and came back to his home state of New Mexico with a rabid taste for the sweeping Balkan music he’d heard while in Eastern Europe.  This stuff is wonderful, and incredible when you consider the scope of the talent on stage.  Seven people, switching instruments at nearly every song, tons of brass, and Zach Condon recorded most of it all himself playing each instrument (or so the stories go.)

From the L.A. Times article on Friday’s show.  “Backed by a seven-piece mini-orchestra, Beirut’s sweeping, romantic visions channel the sound of pensive French pop and the swooning, sad strains of Balkan brass bands.

Preternaturally confident in both his stage demeanor and his abilities, the New Mexico-raised troubadour alternated between the role of conductor and lead singer, lifting and raising his arms with each symphonic flare of the ukuleles, accordions, trumpets, euphoniums, violins, organs and trumpets backing him, rocking and swaying as though mystically attuned to the vibrations and rhythms.”

Mp3’s for you!

The thing I love best is how happy Condon seems when playing.  As if he couldn’t imagine anything else being as great as that moment.

MP3: Mount Wroclai (Idle Days)
MP3: Postcards from Italy
MP3: Sunday Smile

We don’t have a TV tag, y’all!  High-fives all around.

I just finished Season one of The Wire, which is a show that ran for five seasons on HBO, and is no longer on air.  Everyone talks about The Wire as if it is perfection, it is idolized, lionized, immortalized, you name it, people talk about it that way.  The show pulls no punches, offering a look at Baltimore as corrupt, dark, and the way that so many people must live.  At a basic level, the show is cops and robbers, only the cops are no idolized heroes, and the robbers are drug dealers born and bred into “the game.”  Some cops are good cops, but it’s a job like any other job, filled with politics and lazy people.  The drug dealers are that way because there is no other way that makes any sense for them, they have always lived this way, generation to generation.  In one telling moment, one of the main drug characters is helping a younger kid with his math, and finds that the kid can’t follow a word problem involving buses, but if it is put in terms of a drug count, he gets the math immediately.  When asked why, he says that if you mess the count up, they mess you up. The lesson is clear, when it’s worth your life and means something to you, you learn quickly.

The show is entrancing, a sprawling character drama that unfolds upon itself, taking it’s sweet time to get where it’s going.  There is a tendency to like it just because it is so foreign, but the show is compelling for other reasons.  Give it six or seven episodes, which is how long it took me to get everyone straight, and you will find yourself awake at 2 in the morning, unable to go to sleep until the disc ends and all is quiet.  The first season is basically an 11 hour movie, full and complete, no shortcuts.  It can be somewhat daunting to launch into a five season show, but just give yourself the first season.

A must see, complex and haunting.

I might be applying for a job with this website, doing audio and video production type things.  Can you guys take a look and give me some feedback about this?  It’s run by the Oxford Centre for Religion and Public Life, which is in England.

getreligion.org

Looking for some advice from my green-minded friends.  I am considering joining this community (Yes, I need to research more, make sure they’re not a CULT cult.)

Twinoaks.org

If anyone wants to take a look and give me some thoughts and feedback.  I really like the way the community is structured, as far as I’ve read, and many of the beliefs resonate with me, especially the egalitarian stuff.  The one thing that confuses me is the idea that everyone will live in peace in any way that they wish, and that somehow this works.  I don’t know how that would ever work.

• Still applying to different radio shows, I’m kind of waiting for the big NO from This American Life before I turn elsewhere.
• My film that I wrote, directed, shot, and edited got nominated for best experimental film in our school’s festival.  As they say on the Office; “it is literally the highest honor a salesman in a mid-sized paper manufacturer in the northeast can achieve.” 
• I’m thinking about moving to Iceland, in September?  Really.
• I only need to pass two classes to graduate (much to my shock, I’m managing to graduate Magna, which is like a 3.9 gpa?) but they’re Theoretical math, and advanced Spanish grammar.  Yeahhh, right, we’ll see how that turns out.
• I’ve been working on my screenprinting, hours and hours a day. I’ll let you know when some of it’s on sale, or just up in general.  There’s nothing so relaxing as burning screens, mixing your inks into glorious blues and greens, carefully cutting papers to the right size, down from 24 X 18, setting the screen and pulling print after print, long into the night, MFDOOM blasting on the surround sound.
• Been building the old record collection, grabbed The Church’s Starfish, which is good, some Joanna Newsom, some Panda Bear, oh glory.
• Loving Los Angeles more every day.  I will miss the city when I go, there’s nothing like Hollywood.   There’s so much light pollution where I live, the birds sing all night, because they think it’s dawn continually.
• I’ve been totally into Karaoke, I go every Friday.  The other night night I sang Blondie’s “Heart of Glass” and Loretta Lynn’s “One’s on the Way”, at this dive bar in the city.
• I saw a train that had just hit a car, yesterday.  The car was completely crushed.

I have a new radio show posted on my, take a listen if you care to.  You can even skip the interviews if you don’t like them.  Here, you can even right click here and save it to your computer.  It’s a mixture of awesome music and discussion.  I’m pretty happy with the most recent episode.  They got weird for a bit there, but they’re back to normal.