Conscious and mystic hip hop buzzed on my headphones with K-Os’ new release, Atlantis: Hymns for Disco. More introspective, rich beated and lyrically impressive than his first two, this album immediately seduced me. Appearances by Buck 65, Sam Roberts and Kevin Drew (of Broken Social Scene) are also a treat. I think it’s safe to say that K-Os has cemented himself at the forefront of the hip hop world, and it’s hearting to have some “Knowledge of Self” pulling folks up.

I’m entirely in love with Metric, Broken Social Scene and the other projects Emily Haines has worked on, and her solo debut, Knives Don’t Have Your Back is on the same level as those. Intimate, graceful and exquisitely crafted, it’s become a perfect fit for this autumn. It’ll no doubt be accompanying me during my walks through dead leaves throughout November.

I loved the albums The Gin Blossoms released in the 90’s and was pleased to find their new album picks up where those left off. Major Lodge Victory is everything I’d expect from the band, with wonderful rock, alt-country and pop tunes that easily become a soundtrack to lives. The band hasn’t lost any of their sharpness and offer nostalgic hints and sweet hooks that had me from the first listen.

Over at Lists of Bests I’ve been working my way though Pitchfork Media’s “Top 100 Albums of the 1990s” (I’m at 90/100) and discovering many artists and albums I was unaware of before. His Name Is Alive has been one band that has completely captured my attention. Diverse, beautiful and surprising, this music was well described as “Like dating a star-crossed werewolf behind your parents’ back.” I’ve been enjoying each of their albums, with the recent Detrola being my favourite. It’s a superbly produced, moving and fresh album that has been in my headphones for a couple weeks now. “Sometimes Screw” is the highlight for me and I’ve had the erotic chorus stuck in my head for a while now.

I’ve become an admirer of Saul Williams through is talks at Integral Naked, his brilliant hip hop and mind-blowing poetry. Strangely, it took me a long while to finally see his breakout performance. Though it was overall a great movie, it was Saul’s performance that absolutely gripped me, pulling me deep into the heady mix of hip hop, crime and mysticism. A hip hop film with the assertion, “I am before, I am before before. Before death is eternity, after death is eternity, there is no death – there is only eternity,” couldn’t have been more surprising or more right.

Ken Wilber has created a philosophical framework that includes more truth than any other in history and is, I believe, the most important thinker of our time. You get a dose of his unparalleled cognitive brilliance in One Taste, but also are exposed to a highly realized spiritual practictioner, an art fan, a lover and much more as you step inside Ken’s head. One Taste is a beautiful, intimate and radiant expression.

I’ve been reading The Immense Journey: An Imaginative Naturalist Explores the Mysteries of Man and Nature for the past couple days and have been enjoying it a great deal. Loren Eiseley wrote in a manner that brought evolution and related studies to life as an enjoyable read rather than the dryness many treatments of naturalism and evolution carry. I was heartened to find such a creative voice and even more so to share in his love of the Mystery, however limited the scope of inquiry. Though dated, it’s a compelling and worthy look at evolution, including some comical early interpretations of it.

Yesterday I read through Davy Rothbart’s The Lone Surfer of Montana, Kansas and had my heart broken, lit up and left dizzy. It was everything I had hoped for from the creator of Found Magazine; the stories collected in Davy’s first book resonate with those same emotive vibrations that Found conjured with its collected lost pieces of lives. Though this was fiction, the stories were so raw, real, strange and beautiful that they might as well be the stories of our neighbours.
There were many moments in the stories I was moved deeply by. The first time I had to stop and wonder for a second if he’d been seeing into my own life was in “A Black Dog,” during which I had to scramble to jot down “77” so that I could return to one passage that reminded me of my own experiences so eerily I couldn’t shake the feeling.

I hardly cared what we were talking about, I just enjoyed watching her face. At night, close in bed, she’d chatter like a giddy teenager, then turn soulful and wise as we shared tales of sad things we’d seen. She felt everything deeply. Like me, she never fell out of love with anyone. She kissed with great feeling.

And so it went through the rest of the book, culminating in “Elena,” a gritty, wrenching, ugly and at times tender story of a young man tied up in low organized crime across the US and Mexican border, with beatings, prostitution and theft in contrast and entangled with a sweet young girl and the children she cared for.
Don’t skip the precious few hours of these raw and beautiful stories. The reward for me was so great that I would rank it as the most densely pleasing and moving read I’ve had this year. If any book can reveal the inner turmoil and hope of America in 162 pages, this is it.

This is by far my favourite Jones Soda flavour. I go through far more of these than I should, but it’s hard to resist such a wonderful taste.

Grace and Grit is simply beautiful. It combines a radiant human story with the unequaled insight Ken Wilber possesses. This is the one book I will be recommending to everyone I know for the next year.