Tell the ram­bler, the gam­bler, the back biter ‘em that Gods gonna cut ya down! – “God’s Gonna Cut Down,” Johnny Cash

In the midst of research for a side project, I dis­cov­ered that not only is there a new posthu­mous Johnny Cash album about to drop (Amer­i­can V for those keep­ing track), but it’s got a MySpace page. Con­sid­er­ing MySpace’s origin as a music site, this shouldn’t be too sur­pris­ing. Still, it’s taking some time to rec­on­cile itself in my mind.

The page is worth vis­it­ing, as it con­tains two of the sin­gles from the new album — the afore quoted God’s Gonna Cut Down and Cash’s final com­po­si­tion The 309. Both have a stark, stripped down qual­ity that was sorely missed from the over­pro­duced Amer­i­can IV.

The album, Amer­i­can V: A Hun­dred High­ways, hits stores on the 4th of July and I can’t wait.

Also, any musicphiles read­ing this blog should check out The Hype Machine — it’s an aggre­gate blog which draws con­tent from a number of music blogs. Best of all, it takes advan­tage of Flash tech­nol­ogy to stream some of the most diverse and inter­est­ing MP3 con­tent I’ve seen in a bit.

Sorry friends and read­ers, I still have to wait on lots of news. Hope­fully by weeks end things will be set and I can start post­ing about it.

In the mean time, I’m diving very deep into mash-​ups — media were mul­ti­ple "tracks" (typ­i­cally audio, but also video) are jux­ta­posed against each other. Take for exam­ple DJ Mei Lwun’s Sweet Home Coun­try Gram­mar — Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Sweet home Alabama meets Nelly’s Coun­try Gram­mar. This also ties into a lot of the con­tent that’s pop­ping up on YouTube and on MySpace. In par­tic­u­lar I’m think­ing about this in terms of new forms of "literacy" and "writing," as well as their roles as emblems of iden­tity. More to come on all of that.

Update (6/16)
I just found out that the Exchange link was broken. The cur­rent exchange site is: http://​www.​new​cloud.​com/​e​x​c​hange

I just found out that Anthro grad stu­dents at Chicago have started their own online pub­li­ca­tion called Exchange. I gave it a quick look over and it seems pretty inter­est­ing — I guess I should note that inter­est­ing all depends on whether or not you are inter­ested in anthro­pol­ogy to begin with.

As far as my claim of under­stand­ing Peir­cian Semi­otics, per­haps that was a little pre­ma­ture. I finally seem to "get" the notion/relation of object, sign (and the cor­re­spond­ing ground rela­tion­ship betwixt the two), inter­pre­tant, and the vec­tors of deter­mi­na­tion and rep­re­sen­ta­tion. I also now have a better handle on why it fits so well with lin­guis­tics (as well as how it works dif­fer­ently than Saus­surian Semi­otics). The only prob­lem is all of that is cur­rently in my head and I still a ways away from being able to explain it coher­ently. One step closer at least.

Today, at approx­i­mately 3.20pm est, I finally under­stood Peir­cian semi­otics — some­thing that has been vexing me for the better part of a year and a half. Then Dre found out that her job was renewed for another year.

We cel­e­brated these mile­stones with pho and a Hitch­cock movie. Life is good.

Grad­ing is done. And so far I’ve only had a hand­ful of stu­dents com­plain. So that’s a good thing. The weather, how­ever, is atro­cious — hot and sticky — and my office has no air con­di­tion­ing. So research is pro­gress­ing slowly. Today was spent tying up some loose ends and com­pil­ing my "academic" summer to-​do list (which I share with you now — in no par­tic­u­lar order):

• Fin­ish­ing revis­ing thesis for publication
• Finish Google Print & Scholar arti­cle for Conduit
• New Media cur­ricu­lum review
• Faust research
• Trans­la­tion proposal
• Learn Xienet
• CSS/XML con­ver­sion work
• Web­site redesign

I wish I could say more about a bunch of things, but I can’t… at least until I can.