bwilder

I hate Excel, so I am doing this thing that raysimoto is spreading around. I probably won't filter your interests for comments though. Sorry, but bandwidth is scarce these days. :(

astrology An ancient means of making/finding meaning that I got really into somewhere around the 12th grade. Some of that is based in the seemingly uncanny truths that I found in Linda Goodman's Sun Signs. Some of it had to do with the awesome-regardless-of-astrology wisdom of my birthday buddy Rob Brezsny's Real Astrology column (now Free Will Astrology) in the Baltimore City Paper. The more I learned about astrology, the more I felt that there was something there, that looking at it was a valuzble use of my time. Sure, the Sun Sign horoscopes in most daily newspapers and websites are arbitrary, broad, and largely inaccurate, but I always felt like thinking about people's personalities through various lenses was helping me understand them better in real ways. Then, while reading an issue of Finder, I got some insight. The protagonist, Jaeger, is sitting around at some point, just throwing stones in a circle for divination, and a young girl challenges him on it. She argues that there's no way that those stones can tell the future. His reply, as I recall it, is basically that by interpreting a set of symbols in an arbitrary system, it holds up a picture of reality. He can then determine what his true feelings are depending on his reactions to that picture of reality. I find that to be true. Every once in awhile I still do an online tarot card reading about something that I'm stressing because looking at an arbitrary picture of reality is still the fastest way to clarity sometimes.

circuit bending This is the destruction of a piece of consumer electronics in order to modify the types of sounds it makes. It's really fun, and I hope to get more into it sometime. I've attended a workshop or two, but I need some gear and time. I kind of wanted to get some c-b music into The Wasteland, but I needed to level up seriously. Oh well. Maybe splatterbone and I will make a c-b band this winter. :)

David Bryne The man seems to be a complete asshole in person, and yet I find pretty much every artistic endeavor he persues to be inspiring. He also wrote, in the liner notes to "Sand in the Vaseline" that the widespread use of drugs is the sign of a sick society, which I still pretty much believe.

existentialism When I was clinically depressed freshman year of college, I took a class on this lil' philosophy, and it definitely changed me for the better. While I had long thought that religion might be for suckers, it wasn't until I started reading the existentialists that my thinking got organized enough to figure out what I believed. Sartre's "Existentialism as a Humanism" is in the top three for "Piece of writing I would take on a desert island."

indie rap Boy, do I hate the excesses of most mainstream hiphop. Some of it is so insane it makes me laugh, or has production that I love enough to ignore lyrics, but for the most part I am barking up the tree of El-P, Dilla, Mos Def, MF Doom, Aesop Rock etc. etc.

mix tapes I don't even know what to say. I've moved onto CDs because I no longer have the time or the equipment for tapes, but I sure do love playing DJ. When I lived in Austin, I used to participate in Extravaganza with llcooljoanna and a couple of other awesomes and it was the most fun. I learned so much, and got to share some of my thoughts and favorites and...it was just really amazing. I'm long past the notion that the music like makes you cool. Having something you love and want to share with other people makes you cool. And so does having an open mind about what other people have to show you.

new things I'm kind of like an interest shark. I have to keep moving. Some things will stay with me, but a lot of things fall away. Once I had directed Neutrino for a year and a half, I got a little bored once I understood the system. There are still challenges there for me, but I had to find a new place to dump my curiosity juggernaut - thus, The Wasteland. God knows what the hell mess I'm going to get myself into next.