in the beginning there was pan. a flute he played.

tonight i’m seeing the connections between all of the dots in my stratosphere. what seemed once like elements far and disparate, have come together in stunning ways this past week.

word started trickling back this week. people have been receiving my christmas letters and cards. the postal service has become suddenly efficient. where normally it would take at least four days for a letter to reach far flung places — this week it only took three. a package sent to me from a far took a very little amount of time to arrive.

the big news of course being that this is a big news year. maybe i’m becoming older or maybe i just wanted more christmas mail. at any rate, it seemed like a good year to send cards to friends far and wide. the farthest west they went was california and the farthest east they went was the mediterranean.

the news this year is multi-fold. first, i received a graduate degree in may. grad school was a wonderful trip. the next news is that i’m buying a place on the east side. i move in less than a week! friends and family are coming by to help me move. i’ve been in the same apartment for over four years now. i’m ready to move to my own place. third, i’ll be an adjunct professor. lots of opportunities and excitements are happening this year.

of course the events of sept. 11 have affected many people. i started the healing with a new series of mix tapes sent to many called the duality of lovers mix series. actually they’re mix cd’s. recorded to 80-minute blank cd’s, they contain 54 songs and over 4 hours of music. the series is three part: “love builder” and “seekers who are lovers” and “soft as fire.” the first, love builder, is the most aggressive. it contains contemporary rock and r&b. the second, seekers, takes a step back — transcendental, reflective — an exploration of the inner self. the third, soft as fire, is an all out amazing mix of contemporary avant garde classical music including steve reich, kronos quartet, brodsky quartet, philip glass and many others. i listen to it all of the time. i designed the booklets with this pieces and they’re quite, quite fine everyone is saying. if you’d like to get a hand on the duality of lovers mix series send me an email.

a guy i knew from college, faust gertz, has his own domain, leemarvin.com. who is lee marvin? he’s actor (i.e. the dirty dozen). this is like his previous domain diotima (a socratic dialogue). no front page. mostly just a front for email and his voluminous perl scripts. after being such a philosopher, he’s turned into something of a computer guy. funny what age brings us. my twenties have brought many great things to me: travel on five continents (north america, europe, africa, asia, and australia), a undergrad degree from a private college, a graduate degree for a big ten university, and many interesting, profound times.

i realized the other week that i have over 1,000 songs on my computer, and strangely the one that was playing right now i felt as though i had never heard — or maybe the artist seemed obscure. that’s not that unusual i listen to a lot of obscure music. one thing i’ve noticed over the past couple of years is the evolution in the music i listen to. as a dj in college (kwlc) and grad school (krui) i got to hear a lot of up and coming bands, but these days i’m more likely to put on some philip glass more than anything else. the only radio station i listen to with any regularity is the local classical station. i’m getting ready to write them a letter. the peruse the greatest hits of classical during the week and shift to jazz on the weekends. i want to write them that they don’t play much contemporary music — in fact none at all. what’s the matter. where’s minimalism? where’s atonal? where are all of the great composers of the past half a century? even if they had just a two-hour show at 10 pm on sunday nights i’d be happier about it. they’re stuck in the 1840’s and haven’t a clue what’s happened since then. kronos quartet, for example, has been around for over twenty years, and plays this town nearly every season, and yet they never get airtime on the local station. what’s the matter with this picture?

so that’s the news. thanks for visiting and drop me a line if you’ll be in town for new year’s.

(signed) daniel