Friends, M. Ward, the source of the new CD "The Transfiguration of Vincent" has complete sway over my life -- what little sway there is left. Blue blue windows behind the stars. Yellow moon on the rise. Big birds flying across the sky. Throwing shadows on our eyes. I'm completely helpless. Helpless. Helpless in its presence. I downloaded the shit with the help of Soulseek. I've written here before about Ferdinand de Saussure and I'm convinced that I know nothing about love but the new M. Ward CD is Cimply Delightful. I am nothing without love and apparently M. Ward is love. Under the moonlight. The serious moonlight.

I don't know who will read this. It's been soooooo long since I wrote. I still have to put it down for posterity. Posterity. In voluntary. Search the google for soulseek. It's my new favorite secret. Jake Keklikian told me about it at the Mountain Goats show. I said, "Shit, yeah, the internet is ok but you can only get fucking Led Zep or Beatles on that shit. You can't find the good stuff. And he said "I have one word for you: Soulseek." And damnit if he wasn't right. In the last 3 weeks I've downloaded over a thousand songs. I pretty much have all I want and the fact that I could find some rare Aphex Twin or some Fall or even the new Smog or M. Ward discs before they were even released says everything. To me that is. What did I get, The Shins, Fucking Coachwhips for crissake! The old Drive Like Jehu! Woven Hand and Quasi and The Thermals. Fuckin-A Minor Forest and Kelly Stoltz.

It is the holy land and you've got to come up with something that's better than this or I will never leave my computer.

Well, It turns out that PRIMCO Radio is not working right now. Constant re-buffering. I'm going to look into this as soon as I can. Now I see why everyone who tries to listen is turning it off after about 30 seconds.

Since I made the Squidsheet I've been talking with Scott Beale about calendarizing the Squid List in a more formal manner. Well, looks like he really went for it and got a developer to make his system database-backed. I think his calendar eliminates the need for mine and my calendar has been somewhat unreliable and inaccurate in the past.... I'm going to kill mine soon.

One thing that I think people don't appreciate about the squid list is that Scott compiles this thing manually every day by himself and has for years. He hand-edits every post and translates the stuff people type into his submission form into readable email. I truly appreciate this after programming my little squid page. He is single-handedly responsible for a lot of good things that happen in SF.

http://laughingsquid.org/squidlist/calendar/

Here's the email he sent out to me:

The calendar is generated directly from the posts that are sent out to the list. My primary focus is still on the email list itself and the calendar is supplemental, adding additional functionality. One of the nice features is that all of the event listings are stored in a database and this calendar will server as a historical archive of the list (right now it only goes back a few weeks). If you accidently delete a post or if you are traveling and do not have access to your email, this calendar will really come in handy. Like the list itself, the calendar will only have information through the current week and is not an advance planning calendar.

In order to protect event producer's email addresses from spambots and other forms of email harvesting, we have removed all email addresses from the calendar listings. If you need the actual email address associated with a post, please reference the orginal email that was sent to the list or the online list archives (you need to be subscribed to the list to access the archives).

Kudos to John McDonnell, Laughing Squid's newest sys admin, for all the great coding that went into the creation of this calendar. For you geeks, it is written in PHP pulling data from a MySQL database which is populated via Mailman, our email list program (yeah, we really dig open source software).

I have not officially announced the calendar yet. I kind of want it to be passed around word-of-mouth, just like the list itself was when I started it. So you guys are the first to know about it and if you want to tell others your little secret, that is up to you as long as they know the secret handshake. It's really not that secret, but people always like to think that they have access to information that other people do not know about, so just like Mr. Rogers used to tell you, "You're special".

As always, you can find all the list specific info, such as how to subscribe/unsubscribe or submit a post to the list, in our FAQ, so please direct all of your questions there: http://laughingsquid.org/squidlist/faq.html

Enjoy,

Scott

I'm streaming my mp3 collection (currently 3700 songs) to the internet for one lucky listener who can listen to a random selection from my library. I don't have bandwidth to do more streams than this. Tune in to PRIMCO Radio!

Here's some of the first songs the shuffler has picked

Radiohead - Optimistic
The Mountain Goats - Noctifer Birmingham
The Papercuts - untitled
Mogwai - helicon 2
the magnetic fields - the dreaming moon
Elliott Smith - alameda
Coachwhips - I Put It In, Way Down South
Hayden - Street Car
Kalyanji,Anandji - Fists of Curry
Aphex Twin - Xtal
Massive Attack - Black Milk
Black Box Recorder - Goodnight Kiss
Modest Mouse - The Stars Are Projectors