Indiana Jones? Batman? Fox Mulder? Meet the smallest summer blockbuster - Maxwell Lin Mikunas, aka Special Agent Max.

Born on July 3d, he's already a prolific and prominent figure in the international baby force. Follow his adventures here!

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After several years of musical mumimity, I have finally finished recording a new cd's worth of songs entitled, Quietly (dissecting the discord).

The songs represent broad sweeping moments of the last several years of my life, and musically it changes quite a bit from moment to moment. I am really happy with the sound I was able to achieve with my new "studio", and I will be distributing all this songs on iTunes/etc very soon. If anyone cares to hear more profound insight into the machinations of this project, I will be happy to chat over drinks….

As a side note, the cd was printed/duplicated at discmakers and I provide fair warning to anyone using their self service process. Although I was pretty happy with the end result, it took one complete batch of misprints and several angry phone calls, overnight shipments (at my expense, no less), and general days of grief to get this order fulfilled. You can tell that you are not important the moment you call their customer service - a person immediately asks you, "how many cd's will you be purchasing?", before putting you in the appropriate queue. Obviously I am not Bono, but shouldn't you make every customer feel like they are important? I mean, I still spent several hundred dollars here.....

After several years, I've finally got around to re-visiting one of my life long passions. Recording and song-writing. Over time, I have forsaken music. I don't know if it's the process of aging or just general apathy, the weight of the world, etc., but I kind of gave up music several years ago. Even came close to selling all of my gear. Now, as Catherine Zeta Jones would aptly put it in High Fidelity, I think I am "going through one of those things". Introspection of a different sort than usual. Wondering what happened to the me that used to spend most of his free time hidden away in a dark, smoky room programming or recording music that no one was to hear. Somehow I began to miss those days.

read about my home studio/see the photos

Finally got around to adding digital push pins around the globe to mark where we have tread.

Obviously this is ongoing, so I may make a seperate page with this link since with our "frequency" of posts, this may get bumped to the second page of listings by next year.


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I had a teacher in high school named Mr. Carlson. He taught Social Studies and was very fond of the past. I can’t blame him really since he was sort of a relic. By the time I was in his class, he had been around forever and was on the verge of retirement. He was one of those teachers that liked to reminisce about the good old days from a sweet sepia bygone era. And he did that a lot. I would always space out during this time and picture a classroom full of blond, letter-jacket wearing boys who said stuff like “Aw shucks, Mr. C.” and were considered to be “real men.” This was quite a different landscape from where I sat then since the classroom was filled with students who could have spontaneously risen up to perform a collective rendition of “Children of the World Join Hands.” So it was quite unfortunate that I sensed that Mr. Carlson was anti-immigrant and also, yes racist. Again, he was a relic but perhaps he had overstayed his welcome a tad. I wasn’t a fan.

One thing that stands out during my class with him was the fact that there were two old desks in the front of the class draped with ribbons. No one ever sat there and they weren’t reserved for guests of honor. One didn’t have to wonder long about them since the history of The Desks was his most beloved and thus most frequently told story. The first one belonged to a young man (and I spaced out here so this is just the outline) who was a great athlete and student. The athlete part was a necessary attribute for all young men, you see, so I remember that well. One day Mr. Carlson recommended that he goes to a summer camp somewhere to do something and to make a long story short, the young man died there what was no doubt a heroic death. I couldn’t shake the irony that it was Mr. Carlson who sent him to the camp and that perhaps he should revisit the angle from which he told the story class after class, year after year. But no matter.

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