conjectural navel gazing; jesus in lint form

I write to save my own ass, to shove the grip of madness away from me with words."- Charles BukowskiYesterday I wrote about my frustrations and anxiety about finishing the degree. No, wait. Let's call it The Degree. It needs capital letters, you know. It has that kind of place...

I work best under pressure, knee-deep in the mud. It helps me concentrate. The truth is I have never been guided by the kind of strict discipline I see in some people, those who get up at five in the morning and jog for an hour. My priorities are elsewhere. I will rearrange my entire day to have...

This morning, with the requisite fog covering Berkeley, I turned to Last Night’s Fun for some solace and inspiration. I have a lot to do today, e-mails to send, books to pack up in one office and take to another, reservations to make, recruitment kits to create, and a metric ton of...

I am waiting for the music to return, the sonorous graces of laughter and kitchen clinking, of bird call on the hillside.I am waiting for the music to return, the precarious arrangement of hope and memory that uplifts and guides.I am waiting for the music to return, the band, the...

Listening as an act of love, not surprisingly, is often sacrificial.To listen to someone who opposes you, who wishes you to diminish in some way, is a kind of sacrifice. This listening, as difficult as it is however, is no less necessary if we are going to find a to live together that...

The return of tapes, however, is not an isolated or idiosyncratic phenomenon. It belongs with a larger age of retromania, to use Simon Reynolds’ expression: cultural objects from the past become desirable once more. Past technologies are feverishly recycled and sold again. Nostalgia is, in...