I've somehow managed to survive the semester, have written and submitted 40ish pages for end-of-semester assignments at NYU, hit up Wisconsin to visit family and eat far, far too much, and close the year with good people and good victuals.  2011 was challenging but fruitful and found me playing music on four continents, releasing a record, relocating, changing my primary vocation from saxophoning to reading, and moving from painfully skinny jeans to slightly less skinny jeans.  Oh, and I got a bass clarinet. 

I can't thank you all enough for whatever part of my life you've played.  2011 has been quite a net positive - thank you.  Let's read more and write more and learn languages more and travel more this 2012, eh? 

I just read Elizabeth Grosz's Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism.  Question: How does ANYONE still cling to Cartesian Dualism as a viable model of consciousness?  Anyone?  You there in the back?  Any ideas?  Yeah, I understand that It's difficult if not damned near impossible to talk about the practicalities of lived experience in non-dual (mind/body) language but, it's so damned far from the reality of lived experience.  How's this going to play out?  Is everybody going to read Merleau-Ponty's The Phenomenology of Perception and a mess of Nietzsche and then hug it out?   

Also - Google image search this: Codex Seraphinianus

Also - Briane Greene wants to answer all of your questions about the universe and everything.  Do so here: http://worldsciencefestival.com/blog/topic/ask_brian_greene.  The more I learn about theories of consciousness and ontology, the more they fit with current theories of physical reality.  It seems that at the quantum state, scientific descriptions of matter become plastic and poetical.  Metaphysical duality becomes not either/or, but both/and.  Reality hinges now on a chiasmic unity, an invaginated and self infolding dual/unity.  Wave/particele.  Tiny vibrating strings?  Gah! 

Also - go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  Go NOW.  It's amazing. 

Hey you guys - Yo-Yo Ma, fiddler Stuart Duncan, bassist Edgar Meyer, and mandolinist Chris Thile made a record.  For real.  I've been on a bluegrass tear recently and this record is not helping.  Not only is this a great album, it's perhaps my new favorite term.  Check it out.

Goat Rodeo - definition courtesy of Urban Dictionary: "About the most polite term used by aviation people (and others in higher risk situations) to describe a scenario that requires about 100 things to go right at once if you intend to walk away from it."

So, this week finds me knee deep in esoteric readings about embodied experience, race, gender, Nietzsche and his influence, history of Psychological systems, pre-Socratics, etc.  I feel like I’m keeping up with the bulk of readings and references bandied about in my classes at NYU but am actually really feeling the fact that I’ve not read Derrida, Deleuze, or Foucault.  Damn.  Now that I’m actually in a graduate program I’m stuck trying to figure out why the hell it’s relevant.  Don’t get me wrong - world class professors and access to the entirety of NYU’s Graduate School or Arts and Sciences is wonderful.  It’s just dawning on me now that the onus of responsibility for doing anything worthwhile with this embarrassment of riches now rests squarely on my thin shoulders.  I feel like I’m running from this responsibility back to the arms of music, practicing clarinet etudes when I should be reading “The Will To Power”.  The good news is that I’ve just bought a bass clarinet.  The bad news is that I’ve just bought a bass clarinet.  What’ll I do with all of this?  
I’m beginning to find myself drawn more to neuroscience and cognitive psychology than I am to music and it’s relationship to trance as I first was.  Perhaps because I haven’t myself identified with any particular spiritual path for some time, nor have I had a good cathartic artistic experience in a while.  First world problems.  Still, it seems to be inhibiting my interest in studying music and it’s lived experience.  Instead I just want to play and write melodies again.  I want to step away from the esoterically considering things and have a purely (Nietzschian) Dionysian experience/worldview and make and consume music in a pre-conceptual or non-conceptual  sense - if that sort of thing is even possible.  To get away from reference and concept/object relationship to that “given-ness” before conceptualization.  Ugh.  Talk with me in a few weeks.  Hopefully I’ll have sussed this out or at least gotten a direction.