Daily Eclectoid

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 ...

    Now That's What I Call Little Hag  (2024) - Little Hag  Thirteen tracks about being horny, dissatisfied, and resentful. The variety of instrumentation keeps the attention just as much as the lyrics. Different flavors of EDM flares are present throughout tracks. Plain Jane rock 'n' roll powers songs like "Oops!" and "1000 Birds." "Hell Yes," an all time favorite, manages acoustic, power chords, and experimental electronic flourishes. The cover art sums it all up--there's a little bit of everything, and it's all representative of Little Hag. Oh, and the opener, "The Machine" is about singer Avery Mandeville's vibrator and also manages to capture a bit of current cultural milieu. Head over to r/myboyfriendisai for insight. Or don't, if you value your peace of mind. It gets a bit tired in the second half, but perhaps you're not supposed sit down with a modern rock album. Perhaps you pick a few tracks to obsess over...

    It's Sorted  (2024) - Cheekface   Call me a Cheek Freak. Call me an instant convert. This is the album that did activated me.   Clocking in just under a half-hour, this has to be the newest release of any artist I can recite line for line. (Exception: Their 2025 album,  Middle Spoon .)   My children can recite the lyrics. I'll throw a random "Okay, cheesecake" at them and they'll hit me back with a "I saw you at the pharmacy." My seven-year-old listened to nothing but Taylor Swift until I spun this one, and then she ditched Swiftiedom entirely and spends her time begging me to take her to see Cheekface live.   What's the appeal? Everything, really. Every song is catchy. Every lyric is absurd, yet still they find a way to throw the occasional biting commentary at the listener: American chaos, carnage, and death, Nature really is returning, And we really are the virus, dude. This from a song that also includes: "We used to brush our teeth, but...

Ellen Carter, host of the Morning Brew Jazz Notes Edition, kicked my day off with David Sanborn's "Snakes" (1992), highlighting Spaceman Patterson's rhythm guitar. Patterson jammed with Miles, and he's playing at the upcoming DC Jazz Festival. (These are the things you learn on a Monday morning spent with 89.9 WPFW.) This track is new to me, and it's the perfect sound for a recently risen sun on a late summer morning. For this playlist, I let the feel of "Snakes" knock down similar musical dominos. Not stylistic dominos, but dominos designed to elicit a similar feeling. That of a late summer Monday. The start of a good week. The scent of wishful thinking. Take note of the Parliament "Flashlight" interlude on Maceo Parker's swinging version of Cannonball Adderley's "Mercy, Mercy, Mercy." Make sure to queue up the correct version of "Ain't Got No - I Got Life." You want the second version on the "'Nuff...

Conan: Black Starlight (2023) - John C. Hocking Before diving into this series of e-books, which promises to capture the spirit of the original Conan tales, I'd read very little Robert E. Howard. I've since started reading the complete Conan stories, and I've found that this one really did nail it. Firstly, props to Hocking for crafting Black Starlight to be entirely accessible to any reader despite being a direct sequel to his own Conan and the Emerald Lotus . He doesn't include an exposition dump, yet he is able to clue the reader in just enough to keep them from getting lost. What you have is an extremely accessible sword-and-sorcery tale that is riveting from start to finish. In an effort to cross the River Styx undetected, Conan and friends end up in what seems to be a ghost town, but they are soon set upon by zombies and richly described demons that attempt to kill the travelers and steal the sorceress Zelandra's supply of E...