As promised, I am doing this. Behold!

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So in my spare time lately (I'm underemployed at the moment) I've been tinkering a lot with my Film Viewing database.

Basically what this means is "doing data entry"—entering and rating more and more films. It's fairly tedious work but somehow it's also engaging and engrossing. And the database as a whole is starting to get "robust"—it's starting to reach that sweet spot where I can command it to produce certain types of output, and get results that I feel are reasonably accurate. For instance, just as a test, I asked it to show me all the movies from the 1980s that I've given a rating of 8 or higher to (out of ten). I'm pretty pleased with the results, a list of 30 films which I think I could defend as the "best films of the 1980s."

Anyone want to have a good-natured argument about it? Anything I've left out? Anything I've wildly over-rated?

I chose the 80s more-or-less at random, and will happily present the results of a different decade upon request.

First full day of the 2009 AWP conference begins today; I'm going to head downtown in the next hour or so. I'm primarily there to promote a new project, the Vivarium Review of Books. Fans of innovative writing (poetry and experimental fiction) may want to check this out.

Handing out Vivarium flyers is my main goal, but I'll be doing lots of other conference-related stuff, too. Predictably, three of the panels I'm the most interested in (for today) occur at the same time (1:30 pm):

R155. Multiformalism: Postmodern Poetics of Form. (Susan M. Schultz, Hank Lazer, K. Silem Mohammad, Annie Finch) Language poetry meets new formalism at last, and the poems fly! Editors and contributors to a daring new multicultural, multiaesthetic anthology talk about where poetry is headed now.

R169. The New-Media Novel: The Intersection of Film, E-Lit, & Story. (Steve Tomasula, John Cayley, Tal Halpern, M.D. Coverley) New authoring tools are allowing a new kind of novel to emerge, one that resides between print and independent film. Often created by a team of collaborators working in sound, animation, and language, these new-media novels involve many of the same challenges and pleasures of working in film or theater. This panel will take up several aspects of this exciting new genre, including its writing, creation, collaboration, and publication.

R172. The Age of Invention: Innovation and Experimentation in Middle-Grade and Young Adult Fiction. (Mary Rockcastle, Liza Ketchum, Anne Ursu, E. Lockhart, Anita Silvey) Very innovative work is being done today in middle-grade and young adult fiction—innovative in form, style, point of view, design, and subject matter. These books boldly satirize and comment on the human condition; they take on taboo subjects; and they interweave fiction, poetry, drama, and visual art. The panelists will discuss artistic innovation in their own work and in the work of writers they admire. They will set this work in a context of the larger field of fiction for young readers.

In any case. Anyone interested in meeting up sometime in the next three days is welcome to contact me at editor@vivariumreview.org. If you simply want to track my movements, try here. Twitter users may wish to note that lots of AWP-ers are using the #AWP09 hashtag; you can see the whole feed of them here.

Those of you who have logged into Facebook in the last few weeks have very likely witnessed the wildfire spread of the "25 Random Things" meme / virus. I wasn't going to do it, and then last night I abruptly caved in and did it. I was fairly happy with the results so I thought I'd post them here as well.

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I'm currently in the throes of executing a cross-country move, from Chicago to the Greater Boston Area, and my days these past... two weeks or so have been pretty consumed with packing, purging, and lugging. Thursday (the 31st) I drive halfway to Boston and Friday (the 1st) I go the rest of the way, and this blog will update again not long afterwards.

This post is part of Culture Snob's "Self-Involvement" Blog-A-Thon, running July 9-13th. For this Blog-A-Thon, Jeff's asked film bloggers to blog not so much about movies, but about oneself, as seen through the lens of movies. As an example, he linked to an old piece of his writing, "My Movie Life," sharing some key personal details about, well, his life and the movies. That proved too irresistible a model not to follow steal. So without further ado, here's a cool thirty fragments of my own movie life.

1. The first movie I remember seeing was Star Wars (1977), which I saw with my parents at the local drive-in theatre. I remember items in the car (in particular, a Styrofoam cooler) more than I remember anything about that particular viewing of the movie.

2. I feel fortunate to have had that drive-in theatre as a place to hang out in my adolescence, an experience that nothing else really substitutes for. Movies I can remember seeing there: Jurassic Park (1993), Total Recall (1990), Mom and Dad Save the World (1992). The site of the drive-in is now a Target.

3. I can remember having to leave the theatre early during a viewing of Superman (1978), because I was sniveling and crying. (I think the reason for this was because the non-Superman parts were too slow and boring, but I cannot really recall the incident.)

4. The first cinematic nudity I ever saw was on videotape; a friend showed me Risky Business (1983) and the nearly-forgotten My Tutor (1983).

5. The first cinematic nudity I saw in the theatre was Revenge of the Nerds (1984). (I was with a group of young men who went for a friend's birthday party; we were accompanied by his father.)

6. The only R-rated movie I can recall being turned away from at the box office was David Cronenberg's The Fly (1986); it is still one of my favorite movies.

7. I can remember seeing a videotaped copy of Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) in around sixth grade, and I remember the first murder in that film made an astonishing impact on me. I still can't watch that movie without feeling a mix of anticipation and genuine dread as that scene approaches.

8. In the wake of this, I spent maybe five years watching as many different 80s slasher or monster movies as I could get my hands on, most of them not very good.

9. The films that mark the end of this phase, for me, are Bloodsucking Freaks (1976) and I Spit on Your Grave (1978), both of which I saw in 1990 or 1991, and both of which left me feeling depressed and more than a little unclean. My relationship to horror has been love-hate ever since.

10. Around 1988-1990 I saw videotaped copies of Blue Velvet (1986) and Pink Flamingos (1979), both of which, in their own ways, provided the same visceral shock that Nightmare on Elm Street had provided, but both clearly had agendas that were more complicated than mere shock. Each of these dramatically expanded my sense of what cinema could legitimately try to do.

11. I saw Wild at Heart (1990) three times in the theatre. Its prurient mix of sex, violence, and Americana really was pretty ideal for me at age 17. (As an adult, I've come to think of it as one of Lynch's weaker films.) A few years later I saw Pulp Fiction (1994) in the theatre three times. I believe the most recent film I've done that with was The Incredibles (2004).

12. Eraserhead (1977) was a David Lynch film that was legendary in my suburban neighborhood (this was in the wake of Twin Peaks, when David Lynch was getting cover-story profiles in Time) but copies of it were hard to find—there was only one video store in the area that carried it (Southampton Video). That was the first movie that I went substantially out of my way to see. (It is still one of my favorite movies.)

13. Delicatessen (1991) was the first film that I read reviews of when it was still in theaters, and travelled into Philly from my suburban home to see at an art house theatre (the Ritz, where I would later work for a short stint). The second film I did this for was Naked Lunch (1991). (Both of these are still among my favorite movies.)

14. The first film I ever saw that I wanted to watch again the second I finished it was Terry Gilliam's Brazil (1985).

15. Movies I owned, early on: I recorded Yellow Submarine (1968) off of television; I bought a copy of Pink Floyd: The Wall (1982) when the video store was liquidating their Betamax stock; I purchased a copy of Heathers (1989) in 1990 and began to wear a black trench coat almost immediately thereafter. I've probably seen each of these films at least ten times, and I don't think I've seen any of them in the last ten years, although I still own a copy of Yellow Submarine.

16. The first foreign-language film I ever saw was probably Fellini's Amarcord (1973).

17. The first foreign-language film I ever counted as one of my favorite films was Fellini's 8 1/2 (1963).

18. I owe a lot of my film literacy to my years at La Salle University, in Philadelphia, which had a private screening room in the basement of the library that students could use, and a fairly good stock of freely-available films. This was a great resource at a time when I had little money, and I saw an incredible number of important films in that little room.

19. One of the things I watched down there was Fantasia (1940), which also marks the first time I ever took acid.

20. I took a few great film seminars at La Salle, including one on Hitchcock and one on Coppola, Scorsese, and Woody Allen (a course inspired, I believe, by their pairing in the relatively weak New York Stories (1989)).

21. The first film writing I can ever remember doing I did for these seminars: I remember doing a "close reading" on a scene from Taxi Driver (1976) and one on the dream sequence from Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945).

22. Also at LaSalle, some other film geek students and I formed a film club. We were allowed to use one of the screening classrooms as long as we could make the argument that we were using it for educational purposes; to this end, we were required to have a student give an informative lecture about whatever film we'd screened. I can recall personally giving lectures on A Clockwork Orange (1971) and Barton Fink (1991).

23. Also at La Salle, in someone's dorm room, I watched my first pornographic video. The name eludes me but I did not find it especially erotic. (I am pretty sure that on the same day and in the same dorm room, I saw Blade Runner (1982) for the first time.)

24. I am seldom aroused by film (including porn); that may be a side effect of being in my mid-thirties, but I can't remember being especially aroused by any earlier films, either. Perhaps it's the mediating effect of cinema, but movies make sex or nudity seem weirdly abstract or stylized somehow (I think it may do the same thing with violence, only to a net positive effect instead of a net negative effect). In any case, film ranks a distant fourth in terms of its erotic impact on me (behind interpersonal interaction, imagination, and language (either written or spoken)).

25. Along these lines, I mostly don't get crushes on actresses, although there are at least a few who have done a scene here or there that is stored somewhere in my erotic memory. I will confess, however, that in early adolescence I found Wendy Schall's character in The 'Burbs (1989) to be the paragon of female beauty. And there was a period where I probably wanted a girlfriend like Beetlejuice / Heathers-era Winona Ryder. More recently, I wanted a girlfriend like Patricia Arquette in True Romance (1993), and I appreciate every moment of her smokin'-hot presence in Lost Highway (1997).

26. The last movie I can remember feeling aroused by while viewing was Sex and Lucia (2001). If anyone's got a more recent recommendation of something that Worked For You, well, that's what the comments box is for. Bring it on.

27. The last movie that made me squirm in my seat with discomfort was Oldboy (2003), and the one before that was Audition (1999). I found the first Saw (2004) to be laughably tame by comparison. Again I'll ask for recommendations.

28. I went through a period where I didn't watch many movies, roughly 2004-2006.

29. I got re-interested in them through a project where I tried to come up with a "canon" of 100 important films for a friend. The final version, as I came up with it, is here, and the set of posts that documents the entire long process of brainstorming it can be found here. This made me realize how much I liked film, and how many important films I still hadn't seen.

30. I keep track of everything I see nowadays, and export the results to a webpage which can be viewed here. I try to do at least a short write-up of nearly everything I see and many of these get cross-posted to Netflix. My reviewer rank at Netflix, as of this writing, is 36,928, and if there's anything more self-involved than monitoring your Netflix reviewer rank, I don't know what it might be.

Still in the process of [at least theoretically] culling my book collection down to 100 key books. Moving on down the shelf takes us through Drama—my drama selection is pretty patchy and under-appreciated; I'm not sure that any of the scattering of volumes I have would be worth including in the final 100. If I had a good volume of Shakespeare's plays I'd take that, but I don't. Moving on.

The next couple of shelves are religion, "new age"-type stuff, and fringe science. Here are my picks from that area:

• The Grove Press "Pocket Canons" Books of the Bible box set.
  [I should be honest and acknowledge that I'll almost certainly never read the entire Bible, but reading these twelve books every few years is feasible and desirable.]
  

• Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, by Gershom Scholem
  [This book took me forever to get through, but was incredibly rewarding. There are so many strange ideas in the history of Judaism, and this book is a fascinating overview.]
  

• A History of God, by Karen Armstrong
  [Contains just about everything you'll ever need to know about the three major monotheistic religions.]
  

• The I Ching, or Book of Changes (Wilhelm / Baynes translation)
  [Carl Jung claimed that this book was alive. Philip K. Dick claimed that this book could not predict the future, but could rather provide an accurate diagnosis of the present, from which probable futures could be extracted. Anything I could add would be extraneous.]
  

• The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick, edited by Lawrence Sutin
  [If anything, Dick's non-fiction is even more interesting and loopy than his fiction. This book contains a lot of Dick's thoughts on spirituality, synchronicity, and reality: great stuff. I'd also find it hard to part with In Pursuit of Valis: Selections from the Exegesis, the book that editor Lawrence Sutin valiantly attempted to carve out of Dick's 8,000 page journal documenting his mystical experience.]
  

• Cosmic Trigger Volume One: Final Secret of the Illuminati, by Robert Anton Wilson
  [For better or for worse, Cosmic Trigger changed my life, and although I'm a little more distanced from Wilson these days, this volume is still a real gold mine of high weirdness.]

Let's move on down into the science books...

• Metamagical Themas, by Douglas R. Hofstadter
  [Godel, Escher, Bach is more renowned, but this book, which collects Hofstadter's Scientific American columns from 1981-1983, has just as many fascinating ideas, and in more digestible form. Language, self-referentiality, fonts, game theory, geometric art... this thing is like a laundry list of geek interests. Plus it is the book that taught me the game Nomic.]
  

• Emergence, by Steven Johnson
  [A good, readable introduction to the science of complexity and self-organization.]
  

• Chaos, by James Gleick
  [Great pictures of fractals, and still (to my mind) the best introductory book on this particular branch of science. I also own Mandelbrot's The Fractal Geometry of Nature, which is wonderful to look at, but a bit over my head.]
  

• Li: Dynamic Form in Nature
  [A tiny little book—basically an impulse-buy kind of thing—documenting "surface patterns" in nature—crystal designs, cat markings, vascular structures in leaves, etc. Those are the kinds of patterns I'm attracted to, so this book is pretty important to me. Since it's small, I'll throw in its sister volume, Sacred Geometry, a similar-sized volume on the harmonic mathematics of ritual spaces.]

This brings me right up to the halfway point: 50 books, 50 to go.

So in the Red Eye a couple of days ago was an article on something called the "100 Thing Challenge"—which caught my eye at first because I thought it was a spin on my long-running 100 Favorite Things exercise.

It is and it isn't. It's an article on one person's attempt to simplify his life by reducing his personal belongings to 100 things. This appealed to me, probably foremostly because I'm preparing a cross-country move in a few weeks, and so the idea of reducing my belongings has been much on my mind lately.

But 100 items only? Sheesh, I thought to myself, I don't think I could reduce even just my books to 100, much less everything else. (It actually turns out, if you look at the original post from the guy who came up with the challenge, that he's allowing himself books as an exception, so that's heartening.)

But it did get me to thinking: if I tried to reduce down to 100 books, what are the ones I would choose? I have a lot of books that I cart around from apartment to apartment to apartment, more for their decorative value than anything else. Many (most?) of them I don't think I'll ever re-read (and if I was struck by the sudden impulse to re-read them, I could probably go get them out of a library). But there are some that I do refer to regularly, or plan to re-read, or use for teaching, or otherwise just can't bring myself to part with. But is that category larger than 100?

I think I'll make a list of the 100 "must-saves," and see how I feel about the "leftovers." A complete list or list in progress will likely appear here soon.

See also: the LibraryThing Swap this Book feature; BookCrossing; and my own lament, last year, about what to do with all the CDs clogging up my living quarters (a problem I'm still in the process of solving).

Hi there, I'm back.

While away, I did some interesting things (including a one-day vow of silence). But I also did my roughly annual 100-favorite-things list, which, as usual, I'll post here. It is written in long chain of association, which may be decodeable by the astute reader:

• indexes, index cards, card catalogs
  

• taxonomies + lists
  

• notebooks, blank books, composition books
  

• digital search
  

• journals + diaries
  

• weblogs + livejournals
  

• the comic "achewood"
  

• reading
  

• studying
  

• projects
  

• the spring conference
  

• receiving positive attention
  

• giving positive attention
  

• not being bored
  

• feeling competent / feeling powerful
  

• feeling like others perceive me as dangerous / alluring
  

• feeling like others perceive me as caring / kind / nonjudgmental
  

• resisting dichotomies
  

• dancing + dance music
  

• drones + drone music
  

• altered states
  

• listening to music while [in an altered state]
  

• having a beer in the afternoon in an unfamiliar city
  

• travelling
  

• roadtrips with a close friend
  

• the landscape of the american west
  

• forests
  

• trails and hikes
  

• the path between april + thor's driveway and their front door
  

• urban walks
  

• exploring abandoned buildings
  

• tunnels, passages, hidden spaces
  

• mazes + labyrinths
  

• dungeons and dragons + its culture + paraphenalia
  

• games in general: board games, card games, video games
  

• rust, moss, decay, mold
  

• taking photographs
  

• birdsong
  

• the movie "george washington"
  

• the movie "slacker"
  

• conversations
  

• listening
  

• group improvisation
  

• being among a group that is functioning well together
  

• being alone
  

• having ideas
  

• feeling creative
  

• writing
  

• laptop computers
  

• managing my music in iTunes
  

• adobe photoshop + adobe illustrator
  

• del.icio.us, flickr, and other web 2.0-type services
  

• the internet more broadly
  

• katamari damacy
  

• cute shit
  

• the idea of time travel / time travel narratives
  

• grant morrison's comics
  

• the marvel universe + its culture + paraphenalia
  

• jokes and being thought of as funny
  

• fonts
  

• the puzzle-solving elements of graphic design
  

• making everyday activities into a game
  

• self-improvement
  

• receiving recommendations from others
  

• cycles
  

• swimming naked
  

• exhibitionists
  

• touching others
  

• being touched
  

• venus
  

• ganesh
  

• thoth
  

• altars, ritual objects, charms
  

• unitarians + quakers
  

• smokers
  

• greasy spoons
  

• good coffeehouses
  

• free wi-fi
  

• long-form serial narrative
  

• buffy the vampire slayer
  

• subcultures
  

• sleeping next to someone
  

• flirting
  

• long-running relationships
  

• the fundamental variety of other people
  

• sharing food
  

• desserts, esp. ice cream + chocolate
  

• watching movies + having movie-watching projects
  

• being busy buy not feeling behind
  

• having knowledge / the unknown
  

• manipulating data
  

• invented languages
  

• silly songs
  

• coming out of depression / feeling optimistic
  

• epiphanies
  

• good memories / the promise of good things to come
  

• the world
  

More reflections to come in a bit.

I'm off to my annual journey to New Hampshire for Spring, the conference / temporary autonomous zone / adult camp that I've been involved with for the last eight years. Consequently, all blogs will likely be on hiatus until mid-June.

Some of my photos from past Springs are available here, if you want to get some kind of idea of what I'll be up to.

I don't know what this says about me or my career as a writer, but the writing that most inspires me to write is seldom writing produced by other writers, but more commonly by visual artists who write.

This happened in the fall of 2004, when I was reading Robert Smithson's collected writings (some scavengings and related riffs here), and it happened again just yesterday, in the John Cleary Library at the Houston Center for Photography, when I was looking at Spiritual America, a collection of Richard Prince's photography, painting and writings. The exact writings in Spiritual America don't appear to be online, but this bit, at Prince's website, is perhaps indicative of the sort of aggregation of narrative fragments, factoids, aphorisms, and plagiarized bits found there. I read this stuff for five minutes and for the first time in over a year I wanted to write something that someone might call "fiction" or "poetry." Stay tuned.

It's been a little while since the last Film Club viewing, Sans Soleil... the reason for this is that Skunkcabbage's choice of a follow-up, Toshio Matsumoto's Funeral Parade of Roses (1969), has been a little bit hard to track down, given that it appears to have never enjoyed a US domestic release. We eBayed a copy, but it's been taking a while to make it from Bangkok to Chicago, so it may be a while longer before we can continue with our normal progression. (Oh, and it is maybe worth mentioning that Film Club views its non-Region One DVDs on the Philips DVP5140 Multiformat DVD Player, an affordable domestic player easily hackable to be region-free.)

As a placeholder, we will likely watch Mamoru Oshii's Ghost in the Shell (1995) sometime this week, and I'll write it up, even though it may not be an "official" Film Club pick...

And I've got some other non-Film-Club related content which I'll be posting here soon. For now, take care.

Of the last five books I've read (see the reading log here), all five of them are graphic novels. That's the first time that that's happened in the five years I've been keeping a reading log.

I think there are a few factors that might contribute to this, besides the fact that graphic novels are generally pretty quick reads. It's winter, and an especially gray and dismal-looking winter, and the lure of something brightly-colored is appealing. Also, my grading load has increased this semester, and it's hard to want to read more lines of black text on white paper when I'm done with a few hours of reading student drafts. But probably most prominent is that Film Club has begun patronizing comic book / video store / geek haven Brainstorm, and it's one of those local microbusinesses that you just can't help but want to support.

I'm actually pretty happy with the slightly fevered tone of yesterday's Virgin Suicides write-up, and am giving some thought to re-tooling it into a piece for the Bright Lights Film Journal, whose self-described identity as "a popular-academic hybrid" feels like a pretty comfortable fit for the film stuff that I've been writing lately.

I've also been giving some consideration to submitting my "ludic failure" paper to Game Studies.

There's also been some behind-the-scenes activity circulating around "the book" this week, the results of which will be announced here as soon as some paperwork settles. Stay tuned.

Mostly-complete applications went out today to both MIT and Georgia Tech. I was pretty happy with my portfolio, which is a weird collection of things, including my "Ludological Failure" paper, a 2003 syllabus on the topic of "Digital Cultures," a tabletop strategy game ("Treefort Nations") that I designed for Invisible City Productions back in 2002, my old "Information Prose" manifesto, and all of Imaginary Year. I was pretty unhappy with the fact that my grad school transcripts didn't arrive in time to make it out in this packet. I think USPS might have screwed me on that one: I Express Mailed the transcript request on the 4th and paid for the return receipt, which still hasn't shown up at my apartment. Sigh. When the transcripts arrive, if they ever do, I'll send them along, and their absence until then might not matter that much—I know the work sample and letters of recommendation are more important—but I really hate the fact that I sent out incomplete applications, and there's at least a chance that my whole application will just go in the trash because of the missing pieces.

Yes, pieces: the other thing that's missing is my GRE scores, because the ones I earned when I last took the GRE, in 1995 [maybe 1996], are long expired. I'll be re-taking the exam tomorrow morning and having the scores sent along ASAP. I've been doing Quantitative practice sets all week and am consistently getting around 40-50 percent wrong, which isn't exactly putting me in a positive frame of mind.

Sigh.

A busy week here around Raccoon HQ.

The biggest news, I suppose, is that I'm thinking about returning to grad school, and taking some steps in that direction. Those of you who know me well know that I've been struggling, for years now, with the feeling of being in a "rut" with my academic career: although I enjoy teaching Composition, my interests really lie elsewhere.

If I were going to try to pinpoint exactly where that "elsewhere" is, I'd say it's somewhere around the point where technology and narrative intersect, a point I've explored with some enthusiasm ever since at least 2001 (when I started writing Imaginary Year). There are two programs I've found that seem to focus on that precise intersection: Georgia Tech's Digital Media Ph.D., and MIT's Comparative Media Studies Master's program. I'll be applying to both.

They're pretty competitive programs, and there's of course no guarantee that I'll get into either one. And even if I got in there is no guarantee that I would choose to go: there are a lot of variables to take into account. But it feels good to be taking steps to open some doors.

Deadlines are January 15th, so I've been spending a lot of time this week getting my applications ready. This process has not been without some frustration: yesterday I learned I need to re-take the GREs, which wasn't exactly news that made me clap my hands with delight. But preparing my writing sample was actually kind of fun. I took some material I wrote for this blog a while back—my post(s) on frustration in games—and rethought the phenomenon a little more carefully, and wrote it up a little more formally. End result?: a 20-page research paper on the topic of what happens when games aren't fun, called "Frustration, Anxiety, Boredom: Towards A Typology of Ludic Failure."

It's nice, every once in a while, to remember that I actually like being an academic.

As you might imagine, I've accumulated a lot of CDs over the years, enough that storing them has become something of a challenge. This problem is accentuated by the fact that probably 98% of my music listening these days is on the iPod, and so the actual CDs go mostly unused: their cases serve as room decor at best and extraneous wrapping at worst.

At this point, I've run out of room for more CD racks (plus I can't get to Ikea) and so I've been forced to begin the process of packing them up into boxes and putting them into storage. Choosing which go and which stay is something of a challenge, although I'm aided by the fact that since 2001 I've created a top-ten list of albums released that year (for the curious: 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006). This provided a sort of happy solution: there's not enough room to store everything I buy, but there's definitely enough room to store a measly ten a year... plus those are the ones I most want to have at the ready / on display anyway...

But it got me to thinking about those pre-2001 years... the Nineties (and beyond). In order to properly follow through with this project, I should, in theory, need to go back and figure out a list of the Best Nineties Albums.

So I've spent some time, over the last few weeks, looking over the shelves, and trying to make some preliminary list of 100 CDs. It's a decade with a lot of good music: including (for me) canonical college-soundtrack stuff (Nirvana's Nevermind, the Beastie Boys' Check Your Head; Beck's Odelay); landmark electronic / dance albums (DJ Shadow's Endtroducing, Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works, Portishead's Dummy, Tricky's Maxinquaye); a really strong selection of albums from labels like Matador (Pavement; Liz Phair; Yo La Tengo; Cat Power) and, later in the decade, Thrill Jockey (Tortoise; Oval; Town and Country). Then there's the rise of the Elephant 6 Collective, who released some albums that were pretty key for me back then (Olivia Tremor Control's Dusk at Cubist Castle, Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea). Today's track, "If We Can Land A Man On The Moon, Surely I Can Win Your Heart," is from the lesser-known Elephant 6 project Beulah, from their very fine album When Your Heartstrings Break (1999). It's perhaps the best song ever written on the topic of "selling out," a topic which as of today seems, in its way, very 90s.

I'm eager to receive additional suggestions for great 90s albums: feel free to use the comments field.

Cross-posted to Raccoon Audio.

"I'm not ready."
"There is no ready."

(stolen from anaskyfish)

You know you're really an academic when you willingly get up before dawn, on a Saturday, to go participate on an 8:30 panel on "The Internet, Publishing, and the Future of Literature."

Actually I am sure it will be a lot of fun. More later.

The new issue of Signal to Noise (#47, Fall 2007) has in it a long-ish write-up on the Chicago "drone scene," taking as its fulcrum the festival I helped to organize this past summer, Fugue State.

Below are scans of a few pages, for those of you who ever wanted to see my picture in a magazine (click for full size).

Also please note that the Chicago debut of Flux Bouquet, a duo made up of Chicago melodic dronesters Chris Miller and Steve Fors, will be this Thursday night, at Schubas. Over and out.