Living in the Mid-Atlantic region, I keep thinking I ought to be used to opening the door to days that hit you in the face like opening the door to an oven packed with wet sweat socks, but the last week’s been beating the usual records of outside oppressiveness. There’s some part of me that wishes to live like a lungfish and just burrow into a muddy riverbank to wait out the glaring gloom, but the best I can do is hide inside, which puts me in a rather nice position to work on all the little fiddly computerized tasks I ignore during the rest of the year.

I’ve started a new podcast, just a twelve-part series of twelve minute wordless ambient pieces for meditation, distraction, deep listening, and basic daydreaming, predictably titled 12 Minute Travelogues. There’s a little page for it at sonacast.com, or you can link direct, via iTunes, by clicking this sentence fragment encouraging you to click this sentence fragment (I’m in one of those whimsical moods, alas). The first piece came out last week, and each succeeding episode should appear on Sunday or Monday until the 12th and final installment. All twelve parts will be released with Creative Commons licenses instead of traditional copyrights, specifically under an Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States license. What this means is that you can copy the music, share it with your friends (and link and promote freely), use it in your own (non-commercial) projects (films, theater, etcetera), remix it or make derivative works from it (but not for sale), as long as I’m credited and this site is linked somewhere. If you hear something you’d like to use in a commercial setting, please contact me directly for more information.

If you hear something you enjoy, and are an iTunes user, please review me (even a few words would be nice). It helps to get more click-through traffic online, and should bring in a few more listeners.

I’ve also set up a page on last.fm, which appears to be a neat way of finding a broader audience, though I’m still a neophyte at managing my music there (I can’t seem to get album cover art to “stick,” and some of the track titles stay stubbornly in e.e. cummings lowercase even after I’ve changed them and saved changes over and over—sigh.) The three albums of quiet music there, 126 N Madeira Volumes 1-3, chronicle three successive years of annual ambient sets I performed at the studio gallery space of my friend, Maxine Taylor, during the Open Studios Tours. I think they are some of my best work in the ambient form, and they’re yours for the price of a free download right from this site, or you can listen online at last.fm.

I’ve been stalled on the manuscript to Scaggsville, my collection of essays including my narratives about growing up in Scaggsville, Maryland, dealing with a difficult friend, and looking for a fairy godmother, but it’s been an issue of available time more than anything else, and I’m getting a little better at scheduling my chores and responsibilities, so the project is once again staggering forward. I had to put my fiction writing on pause for the moment, and it will resume once I clear a few key hurdles. I suspect, somehow, that I’ll one day just publish a dozen things all at once, having sat on them for ages, unless I procrastinate long enough to become a posthumous author.

Things continue apace at the museum. There’s a new director of exhibitions coming in, and it’s an exciting, dynamic time to be there. I’m still working out how to not work six and seven days a week, and to have a life outside of the mirror-covered walls of the Visionary, but that’s something that’ll be resolved soon, I hope. We have an interesting new show in the works, and I’ve been shoehorning a few pet projects into my free moments, particularly in our lovely wildflower garden.

That’s the key stuff. Keep on reading, listening, and making it worthwhile!

- Joe