First a little commodity fetishism: I just got The Arcade Fire's debut full-legnth, Funeral, in the mail, and it deserves all the hype it's been getting on pitchfork and elsewhere. I also finally found my copies of the score and The Grey Album (they were on the floor behind my computer,) about which i don't have anything insightful to say other than that "Family Business" and "Zealots" are great songs and that DM's version of "Change Clothes," recut with George Harrison's "Piggies" is about ten million times better than the original. I'm pretty excited about the release this coming tuesday of both Interpol's second LP, Antics, and Talib Kweli's second solo album (and third full legnth since Mos Def and Talib Kweli Are Black Star), The Beatiful Struggle. But what i'm even more excited/worried about is the news, via pitchfork yesterday that Mos Def himself, whose verse on "Respiration" is classic and whose solo debut was absolutely incredible is going to release his long awaited second solo album, New Danger, a mere five years after Black On Both Sides. Some argue that Mos Def has lost it since 1999, as evinced by a somewhat spotty series of singles and compilation tracks - although he still managed to upstage Kweli with the best single verse on Train of Thought, "This Means You"'s meditation on the racialized geography of post-Giuliani New York. Anyway, Alek be damned! (And i even kind of liked Brown Sugar.) I'm excited by this news and psyched to hear this record.



I've been wallowing in Pre-K nostalgia with the release of the star-wars trilogy on dvd and remebering afternoons spent in David Beckman's den in Pennsylvania watching the opening scenes of jedi over and over again and comparing his bearded collie, Sammy, to falco the luck dragon in Wolfgang Petersen's film of the Michael Ende novel, The Neverending Story. I could write a long cultural studies-inflected essay about all the problems inherent in having the bad aliens speak a language based on Quetchua, or about Ewoks as Zerzanian primitivist revolutionaries paradoxically enamored with the promise of capitalism, technology, and robot gods with british accents, but i have too much other stuff i ought to be doing instead.



I'm flying out to San Francisco on Sunday for a training for the job, then moving to Boston for at least the next two and a half months. Meanwhile, the world is ending with a bang, Allawi is stumping for Bush as the heads roll, and Rumsfeld and the state department are feuding over how many people in their second most recent colonial acquisition (i haven't forgotten Haiti even if they have) will get to vote in the uppcoming sham of an election.



Kind of makes one want to move to mexico for a year. But everyone else i know already thought of that, and then they al wind up in DC anyway. Time to go for a walk and do some atoning.