books being read // music appreciated

​    I’m going to ask a question here. How many books have you read so far this year? What are you reading? If you are reading, where do you get your books? As a student, I am constantly reading my textbooks, and I’m also pretty constantly (sometimes to my own detriment) “monitoring the situation”. So I read quite a bit of non-fiction. I also try to throw fiction or historical fiction in there just to keep my brain active and my imagination running. This is what I’ve been reading lately:

• For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway - about an American who volunteers to fight for the Spanish Republic during the Spanish Civil War. This book was declared "non-mailable" (censored...) by the US Post Office in 1940 and is considered one of the best war novels of all time. Hemingway does not disappoint...
• The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by Max Weber - A pretty hefty read of sociological theory that people haven't stopped talking about since it was published. It theorizes on the links between Protestantism (mostly Calvinism) and industrial capitalism in society during the Industrial Revolution and the early Gilded Age. I will just leave the link for the SparkNotes here if you are at all interested.

EDIT:

    Alright...

    So I started working on this post on 3/25/26. Since then, I have been taking online classes at a community college, majoring in Sociology. I have since finished the semester, taking a Sociology 1010 for my major and a Music Appreciation course to satisfy a Humanities credit. I admittedly enrolled in the music course because I thought it would just be "an easy A". (Narrator: It was not.) I figured, how hard can it be? I love music. I grew up singing hymns in church, have played guitar or some other instrument since I was a teenager, and have owned so many records and CDs that I have scoured the booklets and covers of. I knew this stuff already, or so I thought.

    Although it was difficult, and I am now indisputable hater of the tyranny of McGraw Hill's textbooks, I do have a new appreciation for music as a whole, and understand why symphonies are split up into parts. I know why people hated and still hate Wagner and Stravinsky, and also have a new appreciation for fugues, Impressionism, and Expressionism, as well as Minimalism and the avant-garde.

I wanted to share a few pieces of music here that really stuck out to me this semester.

J.S. Bach - "Little" Fugue in G minor:

Pachelbel - Canon in D major:

José Pablo Moncayo - Huapango:

Milton Babbit - Three Compositions:

Igor Stravinsky - The Rite of Spring (1913):

    I hope you listen to these and find something crazy and interesting that you like. I never in a million years thought that I would find myself looking for symphony orchestra LPs or reading about Stravinsky ballets. But hey, life is long, and every day is new, right?

incoming: postcard pickups

Every year, I go to a military antiques show called Show of Shows. It's a show focused on military collectibles ranging anywhere from antique weapons to US Army patches or Tiger Stripe pants from Vietnam. I used to go looking for old food, MREs (meals ready-to-eat), or just general personal items like forks or prayer books. 

The first year I was there, I happened upon a booth that had binders full of old money, old photographs, and paper goods that were mostly from World War 2. Since them I've made a point to stop and see what the guy has. I've bought coins from the beginning and the end of Nazi Germany (the metals are lighter as the years progressed), and stamps with Saddam Hussein's face on them which I will try to dig up and post at a later date.

This year, I was looking through what he had and I found these postcards. They were in a small photo album with about 20 or 30 pictures that looked like they had been made on an island in the Pacific during World War 2. From the look of them they were made either during or right after a battle. There were photos of Japanese that had been captured and taken as prisoners as well as dead Japanese. There were also photos of what I would have to assume were natives on the island.

I couldn't bring myself to buy the photos. I equally enjoyed and disliked being able to look through them. A few were too gruesome to mention here; I didn't even really feel comfortable holding a few of them. It felt odd and in some way disrespectful. But I did see these postcards. I flipped them over and looked at them; I noticed that they looked like serene places in contrast to the other photos that were in the album. I haven't been able to translate the text on them yet, but if and when I do I will make sure to update this post with it.

The postcards are dirty. They have been handled. Not just bought and put in a box. They look like they were carried, maybe overseas by a soldier to remind him of home, or a place that he wanted to visit after the war was over. They also seem to have some sort of residue on them, like mud or possibly blood. I hope it is only mud. I also hope that whoever wanted to see these places got to see them, but it is quite unlikely. In that case, I hope he is just at peace if nothing else.

sonic adventures: Dead Ex

 At one point in my life about a decade ago (yikes) I was living in Seattle. It had some of the best record stores that I've ever been to. One of the stores I used to frequent was Wall of Sound. It was a super small place in the University District that was highly curated with all kinds of music that I had never heard of, or at least explored at the time: dub techno, acid jazz, free jazz, ambient, industrial, noise, etc. It was one of the few record stores that I could still go into and just buy things to listen to because the album covers looked interesting.

At some point, after frequenting Wall of Sound and perusing their wares like a lost traveler in Skyrim, I ended up getting into noise music somehow. I also picked up a few (free!) copies of a print magazine called Tape Op. I was pretty immediately engulfed in the idea of tape machines (cassette tape recorders) as a means to create music. I already had a guitar and some pedals. I also had a loop pedal, which allowed me to loop sounds over and over again.

I decided to give it a whirl and make some loops with a tape machine that I had lying around. My friend Kyle, who also had interest in making loops and noise music, worked together with me on these two pieces which he posted on his bandcamp account a few years ago. And now, here they are for you to listen to. Maybe I should drag out the Tascam and all of my old tapes and see what I can conjure up...

prayer cards

 These were some of the first items I picked up that got me interested in the idea of ephemera. There was a big stack of them, all one-sided, one color of ink each. I found them at an antique mall and couldn't help but wonder 1) where they originated from 2) what they were given to people for and 3) where they sat for years before they somehow ended up in a booth in an antique store in Nashville.

I wonder if they were given out at funerals? Not too sure. But still on the lookout for more.

incoming: photo pickups

 

    First of all, it was someone's grandma's birthday...

    And then of course, as any grandma would, she wanted a family photo. 

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Then, in some other person's world, they went to a train museum of some sort. The grey engine on the left is what's called a "tank engine" because of the tank of water that surrounds the cylindrical boiler in the center of it. The one on the right...I'm not so sure of what it is. There are two sets of rails. Not sure if its some sort of incline railway or what. No date on the photo, no engine numbers, no way to tell.

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    Moving on...to Central America I believe? Maybe Spain here. I'm not sure. Not sure who these people are. I can't tell if this a party or a riot of some kind. Maybe a procession to a party that turned into a riot?

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This is most definitely a god that we quit listening to somewhere along the way. I wonder what he thinks of where we're at now.

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And finally, here we are, at a New York Mets game in 2004 (it was written on the back of the photo). Somebody is warming up for something. He doesn't quite look like a pitcher. More like an outfielder. Ya think the Mets won that day? I hope they did, but probably didn't.

all good things...

    Posted below are some pretty cool first day covers (FDCs) from St. Vincent and the Grenadines featuring stamps from one of the best TV shows of all time, Star Trek: The Next Generation. I don't generally advocate for television shows, but this is one of the few times I'll say it: go watch it. Go watch all of it. Watch some of the original series as well and see where that gets you.

    I bought these at a local record store for next to nothing. The guy behind the counter didn't know what they were or why someone would be interested in them besides the fact that they had to do with Star Trek, which he had to know at least a little about.

    

    What's so cool about these FDCs? Well, I think they're pretty sweet because they've been preserved, kept from the mail room, kept from someone's mailbox where they would sit until they were eventually ripped open and thrown away. They're kinda frozen in time (and space).

telephone pole genesis

​I’ve been using a camera (called myself a photographer?) for roughly 6 or 7 years now. An ex partner of mine had cameras and I was given access to a 35mm Minolta. I really had no idea what I was doing. I remember really liking the mechanical, physical aspects of the hobby immediately. I was close to train tracks, and have always been slightly infatuated with freight trains in general…so I was off to the races 

Most of the rest of the rolls developed at that time were my first foray into “benching”, which is a term used in graffiti and railroad culture that means to sit and take photos of shit you see in trains, whether it’s tags, throw ups, monikers, Simpsons characters, an array of expletives, or anything else. Some benchers you can find on Instagram have massive collections of tags from each artist that they’ve seen and captured with a camera of some kind. 

Anyways, that was my original aim, to take photos of trains, which I did. But I also took some photos of other things out of curiosity. And out of one of the first batches of film that I had developed at Dury’s Photo (rip), I got this one back.

I was obsessed with this photo. I think I took it because that day felt like a scene from Twin Peaks. The clouds were a swirling mix of grays and whites. I think it was about to storm too - it might have been the last shot I was able to get before I went inside for the night. I couldn't get over how the power lines looked against those clouds, either. I still pull over sometimes just to get shots of power lines or telephone poles like this. There's usually not much vegetation in them these days. Its just not as satisfying for me to look at and click a button over, I guess.