I'm so confused. Somewhere after 'Just Blaze, Bleek & Free', M.A.D.E. very much stops sounding like a Roc-a-Fella album. I miss New York!

They have a chef?!?

A note on Derrida upon the occasion of his passing, by someone actually eminently qualified to write such a note, Alex Thomson.

This Stylus review is a nice piece of thematic criticism; I slightly enviously wondered how they came up with the connection to Francis Bacon before realizing the obvious (that it shows up in the onesheet or some such). This of course does nothing to invalidate the work done in the review.

This review of this year's four-hour Panasonic album Kesto focuses on the group's industrial predecessors to the exclusion of the high-art minimalist ones (slightly odd by itself since their earlier records, whatever noises occurred on them, cried out 'minimalism', but odder since two of the tracks are dedicated to Alvin Lucier and Charlemange Palestine) and so its capping point, that Panasonic have somehow made the industrial album to end all industrial music, goes slightly awry.

I doubt one need even to restrict the glance backward to the high-art minimalists, given the number of one-or-two-track drone albums that have passed through my stacks of CDs in the past ten years, without my even really trying.

Now, the thing, though, will be to actually hear the damn thing. I hope to do it all at once at first. But I'm not feeling up to it yet. Maybe next week.

A note to myself: I'd like to read this book, not to mention the others Christgau refers to.

I randomly encountered Desrosiers while walking through Seward tonight.

It is part of my method of working to set down in a place, say my office or a coffeeshop, only to leave it a while later to walk elsewhere. I can't remember how I ever stood working on papers and homework when I did so by remaining in one place.

Derrida dead at 74.

I'm not terribly fond or unfond of Derrida's work but the letter of protest against his honorary doctorate mentioned in the obituary still irritates me as small-minded and parochial. If I hear one single member of my highly-analytic department doing anything like gloating next week, I don't know if I'll be able to withhold my opinions on the humanity of those doing the gloating.

A moment where it seems the tracks may not have lasted as long as the train.