I'm back from the trip. The return to Melbourne felt like coming home off a tour. Melbourne > Sydney > Brisbane.

The new El-P record, I'll Sleep When You're Dead, leaked thanks to one Matthew Snider (from Pop Matters, I think?). That guy's an idiot (as if DJX is ever going to send him anything ever again) but the album is pretty incredible. It's not as noisy and jangly as Fantastic Damage and not nearly as funky or simple as Producto's work with, say, Cage but still it bangs like a mu'fucker and crushes heads when it needs to. Too bad El-P can't really rap well. I'll talk about this one more on the real blog. The new Aesop Rock NIKE workout mix also leaked and it's actually quite good too. Def Jux is back (said in the same way I've been saying it since 2002 always to be disappointed by the next mediocrity they release).

I've nearly finalized the course reader (scholarly mixtape?) for my class on cultural studies and semiotics. It's pretty Raymond Williams and Barthes heavy; I tried to make it quite readable and relatively short and lacking in any Foucault or Derrida. Here it is:

1. Raymond Williams - Culture is Ordinary
2. Ferdinand de Saussure - Nature of the Linguistic Sign (from the Course in General Linguistics)
3. Roland Barthes - Dominici, or the Triumph of Literature (from Mythologies)
4. Roland Barthes - Ornamental Cookery (from Mythologies)
5. Stuart Hall - Encoding, Decoding
6. Raymond Williams - The Technology and the Society (from Television: Technology and Cultural Form)
7. Clifford Geertz - Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight
8. Marshall McLuhan - The Medium is the Message
9. Naomi Klein - Brand Bombing: Franchises in the Age of the Superbrand (from No Logo)
10. Eric Lott - Racial Cross-Dressing and the Construction of American Whiteness
11. Jean Baudrillard - The Gulf War Will Not Take Place (from The Gulf War Did Not Take Place)
12. Lev Manovich - Principles of New Media/What New Media Is Not (from The Language of New Media)