Boom boom boom, as Half Japanese said. Hi. The fireworks are going off, there’s a singer/guitarist on the other side of the lake with a loud amplifier and a middling command of the Beatles catalogue, there’s the lingering scent of corn-on-the-cob in the air: it’s summer.

This coming Tuesday is a bit of an event for me: the release of [*Smooth Sounds: Various Artists Play the Future Hits of WCKR SPGT*](http://www.wckrspgt.com/tribute/), one of the four times I can think of that a recording I performed on has been released by somebody else. WCKR SPGT wrote a whole bunch of songs specifically for their admirers to perform; I got one called “Kurt Cobain Will Have His Revenge on the City of Los Angeles,” which I arranged in a style I like to think of as “Ned’s Atomic Dustbin outtake.”

A few things I’ve written lately: on Jesse Reklaw’s [*Ten Thousand Things to Do*](http://techland.com/2010/06/04/emanata-draw-what-you-know/), [comics that should run forever](http://techland.com/2010/06/11/emanata-ten-comics-that-should-run-forever/), Alan Moore and Alan Davis’s [*D.R. and Quinch*](http://techland.com/2010/06/18/emanata-something-something-oranges-something/), [what digital comics are worth](http://techland.com/2010/06/25/emanata-whats-a-digital-comic-book-worth/), and [supervillain comics](http://techland.com/2010/07/02/emanata-cheer-on-the-bad-guys/), all over at Techland; on [Konono No. 1](http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14314-assume-crash-position/), the [Television Personalities](http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14302-a-memory-is-better-than-nothing/), and [Tender Trap](http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14401-dansette-dansette/), over at Pitchfork; on [a bunch of recent graphic novels](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/books/review/Wolk-t.html), for the *New York Times Book Review*.

And that’s not counting the project that occupied a lot of the last month, which should be surfacing sometime later this summer. Details when they’re public.