Happy Labor Day. Many of you labored on Labor Day. I hope this wasn’t the case, but if it was, I hope you had a good soundtrack. It’s not quite the end of summer, but it might as well be. Hence a playlist that transitions from hyperpop to neo soul. Sure, it ends with some forgotten funk, but something reclaimed from the dustbins of the early 80s is bound to contain some wistfulness that’s settled into the sound. We start with a six song block of Kero Kero Bonito, spanning the entirety of their output. The first tracks are as poppy as possible and the final two tracks give us a glitched social media freakout (“Only Acting”) and visions of wildfires fueled by human carelessness (“When the Fires Come”). That’s certainly a summer to fall arc. KKB hasn’t released a major project since 2021, so hopefully they’re in their winter stage and not permanently closed. Lemuria’s “Christine Perfect” feels like the perfect fall throwback sound. Something Letters to Cleo never released. Let’s throw “He...
No posts since October 2024 and then four since August 24? One of these posts is a random playlist and another is review of a Conan the Barbarian eBook? What’s going on around here? What’s the point of this blog? Practice is the point. I love writing, and I never write. I love creation, and I never create. So this is an exercise in commitment. Not that I have commitment issues. Rather, what I regularly commit to rarely fulfills me. I commit to my job, but if I didn’t have to work it, I wouldn’t work it. Two hours a day on the commute circuit? Two hours a day of poisoning the atmosphere and wearing down my body? No thank you. I commit to cleaning the house. To building habits and routines. To feeling productive. But that’s all a racket. True commitment is creating. It’s loving. So here I am, in a hotel room outside of Princeton, New Jersey typing these words and learning more about myself than I knew five minutes ago. I need to commit less often to the arbitrary. I need to commit less ...