The world continues to whirl on at maddening new speeds. As Paul Virilio wrote in The Art of the Motor, ”Required to locate himself beyond screens that have vanished, in an artificial world peopled by imperative signals, the man of tomorrow will not for long be able to escape an envirinmental control that will dog his every step.” This man will have a smart phone and will be subject to a contextualized reality that is possibly beyond virtual because it incorporates both a virtual stratosphere and a moving, shifting physical landscape. Welcome to virtual reality on the go. Jetsetbf can now blog from anywhere!
Albums and Releases to be Excited About This Year:
February

2/17 Sholi “S/T” on Touch & Go
March

3/10 Mirah “(a)Spera”
TBA March

Note: Album/release art not pictured; this is a portrait of the artist
- Bell — new single/EP as yet untitled
TBA 2009 (Unconfirmed/Unofficial Supercosmic Jetset Wish List!)

- Diane Cluck new full length
![]()
- Dirty Projectors new full length
Other Mentionable Releases
1/20
The 1900s: Medium High mini-album [Parasol]
A.C. Newman: Get Guilty [Matador]
Andrew Bird: Noble Beast [Fat Possum]
Matt and Kim: Grand [FADER]
1/27
Of Montreal : Jon Brion Remix EP [Polyvinyl]
2/3
Heartless Bastards: The Mountain [Fat Possum]
2/17
Alela Diane: To Be Still [Rough Trade]
Beirut/Realpeople: March of the Zapotec/Holland [Pompeii/ Ba Da Bing] [U.S. release]
3/3
Marissa Nadler: Little Hells [Kemado]
3/10
Arbouretum: Song of the Pearl [Thrill Jockey]*
3/17
Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy: Beware [Drag City] [U.S. release]
3/24
Dan Deacon: Bromst [Carpark]*
4/7
The Thermals: Now We Can See [Kill Rock Stars]
*Baltimore Artists
Posted in Art, Baltimore, Music, Seasons: Leaves Snow Flowers Sand, Snow | Tagged Dirty Projectors, Mirah, Music, Olga Bell, Sholi | Leave a Comment »

Batted my eyelashes and one year slipped away into the next. All that was left of the yesteryear was smudged eyeliner on my cheek and this charcoaled best of 2008:
Jetset’s TOP 3 ALBUMS
1. – Ra Ra Riot “The Rhumb Line” “Too Too Fast” by Ra Ra Riot
2. – Fire on Fire “The Orchard” “Hartford Blues” by Fire on Fire
3. – Bell “Bell EP” “Echinacea” by Bell
While we love wordpress in so many ways, it is a little limited. We wish we could paste our imeem player in this post for you to hear, but we’ll have to settle for a lil link instead. So jetset yourself here to listen to our mix of the year’s best cuts: 2008: The Year in Songs **HINT** If you wave your mouse cursor over the linked songs in the above list like a magic wand, a pop-up player will appear for your listening pleasure!!
TOP FOUR AND SO ON…
(cannot be numbered for reasons unmentioned)…
- Thao with the Get Down Stay Down “We Brave Bee Stings and All”
- Fleet Foxes “Fleet Foxes”
- Ida Maria “Fortress ‘Round my Heart”
- Laura Marling “Alas, I Cannot Swim”
- Girl Talk “Feed the Animals
- Ponytail “Ice Cream Spiritual”
- Vampire Weekend “Vampire Weekend”
- Jolie Holland “The Living and the Dead”
Where are the diamonds of yesteryear? Where is this year’s “Rise Above”? There just isn’t.
Still looking for that shining masterpiece for the year… there are plenty of solid choices,
but nothing that stands up by itself outright and promises to be timelessly classic and shattering!
OTHER BESTS
Best concert of ‘08 is a two-way Balto-tie:
–White Williams, Ecstatic Sunshine, and Rings at the O-Bar
–F-yeah Tour with Death Set, Team Robespierre, Matt & Kim, and Monotonix
Best New Artist: Olga Bell!!
Classically trained pianist with sweet Russo voice and a penchant for
sparkling electronics — oh how it does befit her surname!
Best Guilty Pleasure of the Year: Those Dancing Days (I love Swedish teenie boppers, I really do!) and Ben Folds with Regina Spektor (of course, of course) — these songs truly tested our virtuous fortitude!
Too much productivity this year (Best of the Prolific): Herman Dune (minus the sexy umlaut)
– how many EPs and a full length this year? How do I even begin to sort through it all?
Best Anachronistic Anthem of OhEight: “Our Friends Appear Like the Dawn” by Bodies of Water
(how come I didn’t discover them earlier? Why am I not so pleased with their contemporary release?)
Best Contemporaneous Anthem of OhEight: “Swimming Pools” ?? (Or is it still too early to tell…?)
————————————————————————————————————-
OVER-RATED
Once excited about yet overrated? -Lykke Li “Youth Novels”
Even more overrated — MGMT… ugh… Can we live that down yet?!
Near hits (near miss): -Santogold? (poppy goodness, but warranting top ranking stature?) She & Him? (Cute but solid enough?)
Still not sure about: -Johnny Flynn and the Sussex Wit? Larkin Grimm’s “Parplar”?
Disappointed about: Josephine Foster’s new album
Nifty Gifty! Amnesia by Fire on Fire
Posted in Art, Baltimore, Becomingness, Moo-sick!, Music, Seasons: Leaves Snow Flowers Sand, Snow | Tagged Baltimore, Bell, Best of 2008, Ecstatic Sunshine, Fire on Fire, Fleet Foxes, Music, Ra Ra Riot, White Williams | 2 Comments »

Rachel Bernstein and I have made it to the midpoint of NaNoWriMo. While we have not actually made it yet to the midway in word count, the golden 25,000 words, we are not far behind and I am confident that we will make it within the weekend. Much has transpired through the course of this NaNo nebula. Social lives have suffered, rational judgment has suffered, sleep has suffered, resistance to caffiene has suffered, friends and lovers have suffered together, emotions have suffered, stability has suffered, money has suffered, my poor Jetta (Gemma) has suffered. Yet, we are doing it, we are perservering, we are sticking to it. Character depth and development has suffered, but the words are there. The ideas are there. Plot has suffered. But, even in their inactivity, our characters are living — and living as recklessly and dangerously as we are in the moment. This is the essence of immediacy in writing. This is the midpoint of the nebula. Let’s take a moment to breathe, to congratulate ourselves, to pat our backs and fix our fenders, and then let’s move on to the next half, the next 25,000 words and beyond. Let’s finish these damned forsaken albatrosses around our necks and free ourselves!
Sufferance

Her grill may have been stolen while she was at rest and her fender might have been cracked when she braked, but she moves on, Gemma moves on and so do I! We shall not be dissuaded!
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

NaNoWriMo is so quickly approaching and, at the same time, can’t seem to come fast enough… it’s a conundrum, I know, but here’s how it happened: I am so afraid I’ll fail at this that I can’t stop planning. I’ve done everything next to actually writing the thing (again, the thing here is my novel — it isn’t flesh yet, but it is a terrifying unrealized/imaginary monster hiding under/above/around and extending beyond my bed and closet and automobile and desk and computer monitor). I’ve outlined it, loosely. I’ve practiced writing. I’ve named my main characters and written a list of all my jumbled thoughts. I’ve read up on successful WriMos’ tips. And yet I do not know where it will start. I do not know my first sentence or opener. My outline only contains what I view as the middle and as I reported my fears to a co-counselor at work she said, well then why not start in the middle and work your way out? Well, I hadn’t actually thought of that. That used to be my best tool for collegiate writing — loosely structured outlines, well-structured and bold section headers, and always save the beginning for the last. And when a beginning idea strikes you, well thank the thing that hit you and be sure to write it down by returning to the beginning and starting an openers list. Yes, that is what I’ll do, I’m certain. It takes the fear out of just starting. Out of just writing. And in the mean time, I’ll try to live inside my town and write in the voice of my narrator(s).
On my way home from work, I began thinking about all the fragments of stories and songs I’ve abandoned, but, worse still, all the fragments that somehow abandoned me. Through the course of every failed relationship, no matter how blunderous or brief they tend to be, I’ve lost pieces of myself or blindly given them away. And, generally, I do not realize what I have lost or given away for months or years afterwards. And just like tangible objects, I do not realize I have lost my intangible ideas and creative fragments until I begin to miss them and search haplessly for them on my harddrive, in saved scrapts in my bedrooms and drawers, and in my notebooks. Through the course of my interpersonal history, I have lost countless recorded songs and song fragments, perhaps even enough to make an entire album. It’s odd to think of them now, wistlessly or even with anger – because to do so catalyzes thoughts about recorded versions of my creative output, extensions of myself, in other peoples’ possession for them to do what they will with them. A very odd and fearful thought indeed. Yet not only have I lost songs and poems and recordings, too, I have lost these things:
- a jar of coins and dollars earned while playing shows at small venues with my old band, which I had collected and saved up for a rainy day much to my partner’s chagrine
- a used accordion purchased from a retired Japanese tailor moving to the west coast, whose piano I helped sell and whose hurricane wreckage I sifted through in a dark and damp basement to find, though I did not find it, a mandolin
- art prints of innocent fawns and birds among raspberries gifted by my adopted aunt, which even in retrospect remind me of their once strange juxtaposition against the taxodermied heads of buck hung up in her den
- my first copy of The Good Soldier with my penciled annotations in the margins and a lover’s quoted e.e. cummings inscription on the inside flap of the cover
- a few disparate, but essential cords for my Sega Genesis
- a few cds and dvds
…. and countless other objects I may not ever realize I’ve lost, perhaps because they are not missed, and perhaps because my memory simply does not serve them.
I can’t and won’t ever ask for these things to be returned. I and my belongings have moved on. I suppose we no longer need these things in our collection. And here, in any story, is where we would usually include a clincher – a strong and brief standalone sentence that encapsulates all that has preceded it. But not in this blog, for this blog is of my thoughts, and I will continue to think… and so this blog shall end with an ellipsis…
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

The guillemot (a European bird much like Bernsie, herself) hurls itself off a precipice before it is fully fledged, not as a test of will or wings, but as an instinctual following act just a few steps behind its mother. And the fledgling guillemot doesn’t stick the landing. It doesn’t even fly. The guillemot feels weightless in plummet just moments before it crashes to the rocky beach below. But even as it crash-lands in the grit, the guillemot is not unsteady. It dauntlessly, haplessly perhaps, picks itself up and continues its relentless waddle to the water.
What mother leads its young into a hopeless crash dive off a cliff that doesn’t end at the sand below, but continues to drive forward into the great blue deep?

Each morning I wake up hoping to have grown in my flying feathers, and though I have what appears to be feathers growing in, I still can’t fly!
I have my own nest. I even have a flock of young creatures (not of my own species or procreative efforts, of course) to look after — think Jean Piaget flock of ducks. And, yet, I continue to feel unfledged. I can’t save a dime. Alright that isn’t exactly fair, I have managed to save a few dimes with my save the change account that rounds off my debit purchases and puts the extra pocket change into my savings account. But it doesn’t ever seem to amount to much. Because all I ever do is move my money around to delay its expenditure until it is appropriately allocated. Then, by month’s end, I’ve nothing more than a few spare dimes to save. I don’t know much about credit, but what I do know is that it is very difficult to build and very easy to obliterate. I’ve bombed my credit off the map! And it isn’t as fun as you might think it sounds. I only have one credit card and has a very modest credit line. Trouble is, my credit card has been my emergency safe and I’ve had more emergencies in my young adulthood than I had ever planned on. So even though my actual debt is fairly minimal, I’ve only one credit line and it’s close to max. I can’t seem to pay it down because my interest rate is horribly astronomically bound (we’re talking black hole big). And the credit company won’t offer much to help. So I slowly pay pay pay pay pay what little I can here and there throughout the month. It’ll work. It just takes time. A slow drip drip drip of time into a tiny bucket of dimes. All the while, I spend my time practicing to be a fledged adult. I try to keep a responsibly clean and organized apartment, and I try to get my oil changes regularly, and I try to forecast a future for myself at my job. If I squint hard enough at the horizon, I can envision a doable future of flight. I can see it! But how the hell do I get there, do I just keep hurling myself off the precipice hoping to either fly or make it to the bottom in enough pieces to walk myself to the water?
It isn’t a new theme. It isn’t a new question.
You see, like the guillemot, women are born with sea legs and have to learn to walk on the land of men.
Maya Deren, “At Land” (part 1 shown), 1944.
As Maya Deren wrote of feminism in her films, “I think that the strength of men is their great sense of immediacy. They are a “now” creature. And a woman has strength to wait. ‘Cause she’s had to wait. She has to wait 9 months of the concept of a child. Time is built into her body in the sense of becomingness. And she sees everything in terms of it being in the stage of becoming. She raises a child knowing not what it is at any moment but seeing always the person that it will become. Her whole life from her very beginning it’s built into her a sense of becoming. Now in any time form, this is a very important sense. I think that my films, putting as much stress as they do, upon the constant metamorphosis. One image is always becoming another.”
Time is built into my body in a sense of becomingness. But what am I to become? What is to become of me?
That is a question that can only be answered in the air drift en plummette. That can only be secondarily confirmed by the sea. If I can make it to swim in the kelp, even if I become enmeshed and tangled, I’ll know, like the young guillemot, I have made it at least so far.

Photo Credits: “A guillemot swimming over the kelp beds” by Jonathan Wills
Posted in Becomingness, Feminism, Film, Fledging Process, New beginnings, Ramblings on life, Sea legs, Seasons: Leaves Snow Flowers Sand, Self-reflection, World travel and wanderlust | Tagged At land, Becomingness, Guillemot, Maya Deren, Sea legs | Leave a Comment »
“A child looking at ruins grows younger
but cold
and wants to wake to a new name
I have been younger in October
than in all the months of spring
walnut and may leaves the color
of shoulders at the end of summer
a month that has been to the mountain
and become light there
the long grass lies pointing uphill
even in death for a reason
that none of us knows
and the wren laughs in the early shade now
come again shining glance in your good time
naked air late morning
my love is for lightness
of touch foot feather
the day is yet one more yellow leaf
and without turning I kiss the light
by an old well on the last of the month
gathering wild rose hips
in the sun.”
- W. S. Merwin, The Love of October
There are many thoughts rumbling through this ol’ brain o’ mine today as we approach the first of October.
We are in October’s eye. I can’t stop thinking of these things: homophones, growing my flying feathers, time time time, calendars, Halloween, Rosh Hashanah, mistakes of Octobers of yesteryear, blisses of Octobers of yesteryear, and pumpkins. October’s eye can be a homophone for “October Sky,” which is allatonce these things: the name I’ll call our sky tonight at midnight, a film starring a young Jake Gyllenhaal as a young and poor amateur rocketeer, and a clunkly wistful clarinet chorus song by the Belle and Sebastian off-shoot the Gentle Waves. To continue with this stream of consciousness, this blog in an earlier draft (yes, my blogs do have drafts, at times) was titled “Autumn Leaves,” which is the title of a Vashti Bunyan acetate demo. Yet, though the demo is titled “Autumn Leaves” on paper, Vashti’s whispery voice introduces the song on tape as “Autumn Tears.” Here I am word gardening, again, and yet I cannot help but marvel at these lovely literary accidents — all these sounds — I pretend my fingers can read and my eyes can hear! October October October. Just might be my favorite month of the year. I can’t wait for the orange joy it brings, the joy of pumpkin innards, apple cider, crisp leaves, costumes, saints, and the fun and adventurous aspects of fear. As an added bonus, October is a three pay-check month! How will I spend the unexpected extra chunk of pocket change? Sensibly, of course (as a fledged one would). Or, perhaps, on a splurge (says the fledgling)! Here we’ve made a list for both!
Sensible
- Invest the money in savings for rainy days, sunny days (and real estate), future vacations, school, or other future big ticket items or ventures
- Buy a wardrobe and organize mine and the moondawg’s clothes by season
- Purchase some supplies to reorganize and create the “office” space in the spare bedroom (it’s a cluttered heap, though we did reduce the dinge in the space)
Splurges
- Get an expensive, but amazingly chic haircut!
- Buy some appropriately priced fashionable new clothes for fall — I happen to love the comfortable and brightly colored t-shirts at H&M!
- Purchase an xbox 360! Yea, we’re way behind the curve, but at least this splurge is much more sensibly priced than perhaps it once was!
And what ever should I be for Halloween?
Colby and I toyed with several couple costume options like Laura Palmer and Detective Cooper. But even if that is my actual costume du jour (of that all hallowed eve, anyhow), I’ll still need a kid-friendly costume. I was Flower Power Frizzle last year — yay Magic School Bus! But I’d also thought of these in the past: an elephant (with a really awesome paper towel roll trunk with fabric sewn around it and big floppy paper and felt ears) or a mermaid with lots of sparkles. I definitely want something crafty where I’m able to repurpose or recycle something and be earth friendly and kid friendly altogether! Thoughts thoughts thoughts?
Posted in Baltimore, Getting Organized!, List-making, Seasons: Leaves Snow Flowers Sand, Self-reflection | Leave a Comment »
Finding your top played tracks in iTunes seems to be a really fun game this week and how could I not want to play along? Trouble is, I share my computer and my iTunes with the moondoggy. So, as you might imagine, many of the top tracks are actually his selections. Not that I’m truly bothered by this phenomenon as many of these songs I too enjoy, but I wanted to find the one song on the list whose placement thereupon I contributed to in my incessant listening. So here it is: “Japanese Candy” by Little Teeth !
I really love Dannie Murrie’s cat-cawl/warble-howl/pinchy-cute voice, but to be honest I’ve been mildly disappointed by the band’s other output. BUT, my initial disappointment aside, I must truly be fair: the band has yet to release a full-length so here’s hoping that’s worth waiting for! And, in the interim of the present, Wiretap has gifted us this promise of tiny chompers:
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »













