BEEN A WHILE SINCE I RAPPED AT YA

The Hedonist Jive's taken a bit of a snooze of late, as literally dozens of people all over the globe have taken note of the past two months. I had to pause for a bit as I adjusted to a new job in Silicon Valley, if you can believe it – but I've come up for air enough that I reckon I can commence to posting here again. It's not like we haven't been busy in other forums since mid-July: nay, in that time period I've starting a whole new music-focused "Tumblr" called DYNAMITE HEMORRHAGE, and continued posting beer-related ephemera on BEER SAMIZDAT. So the return of this thing makes three.

There's a lot we missed discussing over the past eight weeks, haven't we? Here's what we've been keeping tabs on and entertaining ourselves with:

• Like I said, the new blog-like Dynamite Hemorrhage Tumblr is for those of you whose musical taste slides inelegantly toward the underground, the punkish, the girlish and the weird. I like the format of Tumblr, somewhere between Twitter and a blog. I'm posting songs, quotes, reviews, pictures of old 'zines, scans and the like, and doing it semi-regularly at that.
• I have only had time to read two books since we last spoke: John Steinbeck's "Cannery Row" and Sai Gaddam & Ogi Ogas' "A Billion Wicked Thoughts". Enjoyed both, particularly the former, but we'll shelve the book reviews this time. I'm currently reading "Cheesemonger" by Gordon Edgar and "Thinking The Twentieth Century" by Tony Judt, and should have a book report filed on both this time next month.
• Film has been really, really paltry for me and a decided casualty of my lack of free time. While I've watched a few things on Netflix, I'm going to guess that my review of the "21 Jump Street" remake isn't going to add too much to the film criticism canon.
• Been catching up on the NEIL HAMBURGER discs I hadn't yet heard - "Raw Hamburger", "Laugh Out Lord", and the latest one "Hot February Night". I might put together a post on Neil, whose "career" we've been closely tracking since the early 90s, sometime in the next few weeks.
• Made two mixes for listening RIGHT NOW over on The Hedonist Jive's 8Tracks page, which you can also take with you on your smartphone: "Stoneage Testosterone" (60s punk) and "Psychelico Ultima" (raw, heavy 60s psych). I've got another one coming real soon.
• An amazing half-season of "BREAKING BAD" came and went. Wow. Who will Walt inadvertantly kill next – Hank, Skyler or Baby Holly??
• How about those San Francisco Giants, hunh?? The Hedonist Jive preseason baseball predictions, wrong as many of them were, were less dead-wrong than they usually are. I still feel pretty good about that Texas vs. San Francisco World Series matchup I prognosticated back in March.

Happy to be back. Hope you're still out there.