Yes, I Am Alive, Thank You

So it has been a while since I've had much energy for this blog. Figured it's been about a year, so I should write an update that I continue to listen to music, old and new. I play in a band called Rapture Clause, which is fun. Build guitar pedals when I have time. Just finished a Tube Screamer clone and am almost done with three Klon Centaurs. Currently listening as of this moment: Guy Clark - Cold Dog Soup.  Don't much feel like writing anymore, not just as a statement on the brevity of this blog post, but as an existential situation of how my life has changed. I don't read much these days, either, which is a shame. Just finished The Collected Stories of Bryce D'J Pancake, which was excellent and moving. I can think of a number of writers who are similar (Madison Smartt Bell leaps to mind), but I think Pancake's fiction came first. I have a large stack of books vying to be next. Maybe I'll drop back by before the year is out to update this again.

I do want to mention this series at the AV Club, which already, in its third installment, seems as bereft of ideas as I was at my nadir of my eight-year-long quest to listen to my entire music collection. There's no real wrestling with the music in this series, just a kind of perfunctory acceptance or rejection and reportage of same. My project was based on Noel Murray's similar run through his music collection in 2008, but Noel gave it an effort to listen and then decide. I also thought I should spend some time with each album before rating it or just deleting it, and I didn't even think much about the physical object of the CD or the record, but instead about the digital music. Modell's goal is different, but his decision-making process appears to be more reactionary than any sort of real consideration. The whole process is just a confirmation of his most conservative aesthetic tendencies, which is a conversation that would be deathly dull with even my most interesting friends, and Modell's tastes - which, to be clear, I often share - just aren't that interesting. Who knew that 40-something rock critic types love Belle & Sebastian and Bedhead? I mean, besides everyone.