Been quiet lately.

Shallow Rewards deleted

Bummer.

Podcasts

J-pop vs. Metal is at rest, which may or may not be eternal. It could theoretically go forever, but it does take almost a whole day out of my week, and I will eventually run out of server space, and, if it was very popular, bandwidth, and, money because I would be sued. (It is not very popular.)

I have deleted all of the old talking podcasts from the server.

• The Requiem Metal podcast is still my favorite. Wish they did it more often, but it’s more about the depth they get into, so it’s worth it to go through all the old ones maybe multiple times.
• All of Benjamen Walker’s shows are great.
• The Metal Asylum is a really good show on Radio Valencia, which I think I found looking for the podcast version of the SubGenius show Ask Dr. Hal. But they’ve got a lot of good shows as podcasts. I’m stuck on this one right now tho, even tho it’s on hiatus or maybe done for good, but all those old shows are available. Some killer playlists.
• Hymns to the Dead Goddess is another Metal show on hiatus by another SubGenius, Popess Lilith. It features all bands with at least one female member. Maybe for more open-minded fans of the Female Fronted Heavy Metal project, it’s mostly more recent and more extreme stuff, mostly Death, Black and Grind. Some out-there experimental stuff too, love it.
• Vernon Reid & W. Kamau Bell tackle the question I dare not.
• I don’t always love everything on the It Came From Japan podcast but if you follow J-pop fandoms at all you hear so many crazy opinions and statements the most recent one was really good for my sanity.
• In Skeptics Guide to the Universe 424 they interview someone from the HuffPo which they’ve been really critical of. Which was fair, but I think that’s one of those things that’s alienated people. I think a lot of psudoscientific beliefs are a social or cultural thing where people don’t really believe them, but want to be the kind of person that does. I think they need to get more into the psychology of that. In SGU 426 they have a bit about Ayn Rand who I feel like was getting a pass before. Situation corrected.
• Boing Boing’s Gweek 111 had some interesting stuff about Mark Twain and Atheism.

Postcards

I didn’t forget the Equinox postcard; I’m not doing it anymore. Only doing End of Year/New Years cards now, except for exchanges if anyone still does that. Email for address.

Movies

• The Grandmaster
  I love Wong Kar Wai. I love Tony Leung. I love Bruce Lee. It’s a movie about Bruce Lee’s teacher in China starring Tony Leung. The pieces fit together even better than I thought they would. Seemed like a bit of a sellout move on WKW’s part to make a more or less straight up biopic that is more or less a straight up Kung Fu movie, but it works. Also Zhang Ziyi is still pretty cool. Why are people gonna pretend they don’t like Zhang Ziyi now? Almost half the movie becomes about her character and there’s less than a minute about Bruce Lee but it’s WKW so it just doesn’t matter.

• The Wolverine
  Another movie with Japanese villainry. I just enjoyed this as a dumb action movie and how close Hugh Jackman (+cgi claws) got to looking like the comic book character. Didn’t work in every scene but it was pretty cool when it did.

  I personally hate what they’ve done to the character’s origin with the bone claws and exaggerating the healing thing to where he’s like a vampire. It makes him more like a fantasy character. I used to like him as the hard sci-fi element of the Marvel Universe, where he had these mechanical claws installed somehow. (Finally explained in Barry Windsor Smith’s Weapon X—everything after that is garbage.) Not really the movie’s fault tho. Actually there was a bunch of other stuff that made no sense. The Viper went way too far, giving her random powers…whatever I can’t even think about it anymore. Random point: some people said Huge Jackman is too tall for the character who is supposed to be 5’3″ but did you notice they chose really tall Asians? (Tao Okamoto and Rila Fukushima are models more than actors.) He’s only a few inches taller than them. And most of his bodybuilding was making his upper torso wider; check out how his arms are not that big comparatively. It’s the exact stout kinda look of the character. Pretty impressive. (Yes, I’m ignoring all the previous movies.)

• Life in Japan
  
  Just a doc from the youtube. Reality! Different viewpoints.

Books

David Bryne’s How Music Works is now in paperback. I just finished the (lusciously soft) hardcover. I’m told the paperback has some extra and updated stuff. I guess he talks more about Spotify and stuff like that. Seems like a detail to me. It’s more about a way of thinking about music. It’s not a technical book, it’s for everyone, altho if you aren’t a big Talking Heads/David Byrne fan the details of how he recorded every album he’s done might get boring.

This horse_ebooks thing was fucking bullshit

It’s weird how with the internet making it a million times easier to fact check and remember things people still don’t bother, or even get more forgetful. The New Yorker tracked down the real horse_ebooks guy last year. Now they cover this new story like the old one never happened.

Reporter Gaby Dunn has the insider scoop on this thing. The whole buying out someone’s idea in a non-transparent fashion and using it to market your whatever dumb thing is pretty standard ad world scumbaggery and its the kind of thing you expect to happen more often. But turning it around to where they’re saying they personally planned it that way as “Art” from day one is NOT ART. It’s just lying. That’s like Duchamp saying he designed the toilet. It’s not the point. This other thing they made as “the end product”, sure that could be art, but they’re just some ad dudes so it’s not that interesting by itself. I don’t know what the hell it is, so if it’s not anything else, it must be “art”. Why not.

But they compare it to “a painting”. Gimme a fucking break. I think you could compare a twitter account to a career in stand-up: a never-ending series of performances. Even that’s a stretch, but what stand-up works for a few years, puts all his bits on youtube, stands back and says, “That’s it. There it is: My Painting”. You’d tell that dude to fuck himself in a heartbeat.

Now that I look into it more, I was thinking how lame it was that this Buzzfeed article left out the part where Pronunciation Book started posting joke pronunciations which seemed critical to the “storyline” of the dude behind it all having some mental breakdown, but now I see that was a parody account by someone else (with a better sense of humor):

Moving on.

Numerical notation project

Something I continue to work on. It could be more of a teaching tool than something useful. Is is Art? No I just told you.

New tumblr I already gave up on

I dunno, trying to organize things differently. Might use it again just for reblogs. I’m locked into this weird reblog idea I gotta get out of. Might be Art!

Digital Drums

Highly recommend this course if you are into that kind of thing. It’s changed my mind about working directly into a DAW (ProTools or whatever). I have been recording into either tape or digital recorders and assembling it into Adode Audition and that works so I wasn’t planning an upgrade. But I’ve kinda been planning my whole living situation around having to have a room with real drums setup that I can record, even tho it’s not a great drum room and I don’t have very good mics or know how to use them. Worth learning but if I can get some ideas down that sound good for less than the price of better mics (and I can do this in my own apartment) that’s gotta be the way to do it. Game changer.

What is Rock?

Thing in Sterogum about decline in guitar rock. Makes sense. Meanwhile Billy Corgan says “fuck music”. Is it really music, or Rock Music that kids don’t care about? Or just the idea of “Rock”.

What is Loud?

This thing on the new NIN gives you way more insight than any normal person might care about. BTW, when I make my J-pop vs. Metal mixes, if I have to raise a level it’s almost always on the Metal songs. (In the early ones I didn’t change any levels and you can hear it.) Even the loudest NIN song from the 90s doesn’t get to 0db, but a Perfume ballad does. When I finish the fix, I normalize the whole to -3db and it’s still really loud. If I don’t do that it distorts because I’m making an mp3 of mp3s. It doesn’t sound louder unnormalized, just distorted. When you keep the overall volume lower you can still turn it up and I think it still sounds good.

What is Good?

Nicholas Payton and Zac Brown try to deal with this one in their respective genres. Also, Patrick St. Michael on the music writing game in Japan.

Random followups

• It should be clear that I am only doing “better” financially than some other people because I’ve managed to hold onto my (mostly maxed out) credit cards. I kind of admire people saying fuck it and continuing at full speed ahead but I just made a different choice. If I were trying to be a part of the local music scene (which I’m not even sure I’m trying to do) and I was shitting on other people when I myself am not that big a deal, this would surely and rightly equal my doom. I am not even talking in general, I’m seeing some real specific, bizarre behavior which should not be stood for and if I’m doing 1% of that or if it even seems like it I have to change things up because I might be a total failure but I cannot be THAT guy.
• It should also be clear that I only do self recording right now. That’s all I’ve ever done. Other people are doing a great job recording other bands. I don’t have that setup. Don’t wanna make it sound like I’m doing something that I’m not.
• So anyway the other day I’m listening to myself tell my bullshit story about how I used to be in this band, and it’s not a bullshit story, but it’s bullshit that I still have the feelings and excuses about certain things but it’s like I can’t stop myself in the middle of the story. Gotta watch that.
• This is pretty dumb article for the Guardian. I thought it was supposed to be one of the only good news outlets left. Not worth refuting.
• The new Perfume video is a lot like the those lyrics videos that guy who I said should get paid for making videos made. I’m guessing he did not get paid.
• That course on digital drums reminded me about what I was saying about female drummers. The loudness setting for the drums is called “velocity”. Not “hardness” but “velocity”. That’s because to get the loudest sound out of a drum you don’t just hit it harder, you hit it faster. If you can’t simply crush the drum with muscle power, you can’t make the mistake of doing that. I realize of course that there are female bodybuilders with huge arms, but I’ve never seen one of them play drums. They would be susceptible to the same dude mistake of just slamming the stick down, which chokes the drum. In general it’s more about what they don’t do. I stumbled onto this series on youtube, but it’s pretty random. I’m thinking more like Sleater-Kinney’s Janet Weiss.
• Turned off the follow feature on my facebook profile. I never got public posts to work without making it all public which is not happening. It’s the worst. My “page” (also mostly useless) is here.
• Dungeons & Developers may offer a way out of my Shadowrun obsession that could led to an actual job.
• I said something about how I was mostly into the nihilistic side of Punk, but wasn’t thinking about how much I used to listen to The Clash. Definitely not nihilists. My life did not really make any sense for a number of years, which I recommend, but sometimes it trips you up when writing a retrospective blog post. On the whole I think it’s worth it, and so is listening to Rat Patrol from Bragg which is the demos and outtakes from Combat Rock. (I have lost track of where I got it from but it’s not hard to find.) Only if you already know the album tho, some of the versions are pretty bad. Hearing really bad versions of stuff that a band’s gotten right later is always inspiring to me anyway, probably not fun for everyone.
• I think the period I didn’t listen to Metal at all is now pretty short in a longer view tho.
• “Yelling at the TV” in the real or metaphorical sense is not the same as heckling. Heckling is always intended to be heard by the performer. On the internet it is not always clear what people are intending to do because it is not clear if people are hearing them or not.

Anyway

The official cover to the new M.I.A. single is an animated gif. What, that’s cool. %

Rough month. Don’t wanna make it seem worse than it is, but August is the worst, the way I’ve been working the last couple years. At least I made a realistic effort to break out of it this year instead of just thinking about it and doing nothing or hoping for some kind of long shot that might never happen. I could still get a call from the places I applied, but I made it through summer so I probably won’t think about that again for another few months.

Checked out the makeshaft recording studio of a fellow local musician/recordist. I’ve mentioned him before by name, but given the current state of internet privacy, don’t think I should again for the time being or any further details of his operation as he’s dodging some bill collectors. Nothing too drastic, but it was somewhat…nice to talk to someone in a similar situation to me but slightly (or much) worse financially, because he still manages to do things like breathe and walk around. Which is inspiring. He also still gets some things done with music. Remember getting things done with music? Hm.

• Something with music

  A small piece I made for a project George Korein came up with called One-Finger Piano. I guess if enough people do one it’ll come out as a comp.

• RIP Jon Cook

  I wrote about Jason Noble of Rodan dying before and going through a backlog of news I found that Rodan’s bass player also died in February. I don’t know what to say about it except I’m going to listen to his other bands I didn’t know about.

• Youtube, Vimeo & bookmark management

  Cleared out my “Watch Later” list. I had to make a point of it. Vimeo wasn’t as bad but it’s the same thing, it gets like hoarding. Stuff from over a year ago, sometimes really random bullshit. I’ve tried to make it a regular practice to clean out stuff. I was using Pocket (f.k.a Read It Later) but I was a little too obsessed with cleaning that out cause it tells you how long each item has been there so if you got something from 10 days ago you feel like a total failure even tho it’s like 10 Ways to Hack Your Toothbrush and none of that shit is important or you would have read it right away. Gotta be some middle ground. And it wants you to sign in now so it’s backing up your bookmarks in “the cloud”. How bout NOPE. And Pocket is a dumb name. Can we have no dignity? I’m going to tell people I’m “pocketing” blog posts? Fuck you.

  Anyway, sometimes I upload things to Youtube. I had a problem with the sound not syncing so I deleted some and put them on Vimeo. There’s a bunch more I haven’t bothered with. But now I tried with a longer one and it tells me I need a pro account and I’m not dealing with that right now so I tried Youtube again and it seems to work better now.

  Here’s one from the Trail of Dead at Maxwell’s:
  

  I should get to the others. I don’t usually bother trying to do videos anymore because every motherfucker does it now and they’ve probably got something better than me. But sometimes I can get something good cause I’m not looking at the screen.

• Shadowrun Returns

  Played this all month since I had no money to go anywhere. Backed the Kickstarter last year and I was excited then but it took them way longer to finish they originally said and I almost didn’t care anymore. I just thought the idea of Shadowrun was so cool when I used to play the RPG from the books, I was OK with giving them money to make something new with it and I don’t even need to play the thing. Finally got to it and they did a great job. It’s on Steam but I got the downloaded desktop version with the first campaign on it and played it to the end. I never played the console game and don’t get into RPG console games in general so to me it seemed like a mix of the ideas from the tabletop books and the really good old Sierra games like Police Quest. Loved it. I hope I can use my character in future campaigns. I’ve thought about Shadowrun more than I’ve played it, I could go on all day about the different character archetypes. It was really good to be able to get back into it. I went with a Human Adept this time. More of a sane thing to identify with. I’ll stop.

• Podcast roundup

  Last month I mentioned that Marc Maron interviewed some musicians and it was a little awkward, but I really hadn’t listened to the Thom Yorke one yet. I just assumed that would be the worst, but it might be the best Thom Yorke interview ever. He just did Maynard James Keenan too and that went pretty well too, totally down to earth. Man these guys have mellowed out. Not in a bad way, but some of the old interviews with these guys were actually hilarious they were so difficult. The John Cale one great too, altho he seemed to think that one was awkward went it wasn’t I don’t think. Maybe he read my post and started getting self-conscious. I still tend to think of writing on the internet like it’s yelling at the TV sometimes. This is a good filter to install in your brain, famous people: “Is this person talking to me like I’m supposed to hear it or are they yelling at the computer with their keyboard?”

  I’ve been catching up with the Black Tribbles podcast and went all the way back to May. They did a cool episode about Ultraman and Frank Miller’s Martha Washington series. I read the original Give My Liberty series when it came out and thought it was great but then I gave up comics for a while. That’s one I need to go back to. Too bad Miller has lost his mind but what can you do. I like all their movie episodes too, but I have not see one movie all summer. I don’t know if I’ll ever catch up with TV shows so I haven’t listened to most of those episodes.

  The MetalSucks podcast with Greg Puciato of Dillinger Escape Plan got into some stuff. Interesting that the site is based in NYC where most of the writers live but they got these guys from Texas to do the podcast. Get some different perspectives.

  Also Mike Hill’s Everything Went Black needs a general mention. I might not agree with everything on the show, but I’m over boycotting everything I don’t agree with 100%. Like I had this period where I was into some crazy stuff and I had friends who are even farther out and it got too much and I had to go full straight science, nothing else. Couldn’t deal with anything. Now that things have settled down—I said this about Buddhism too, which may not have been clear—I’m not part of another religion now, I’m just not angry about it all the time. You can’t put people that go to a chiropractor or an acupuncturist or who read their horoscope in the same category as people who want to teach creationism in schools. It’s not that big a deal. It also comes up in the WTF with Maynard that people who make art worth paying attention to usually believe in some non-rational things. I’ve just been getting back into agnosticism, not formally but just being able to see it from that perspective again. And I’ve been inspired to get into shape by some of these Metal dudes. It’s really been positive, getting back into Metal. I was really more into the nihilistic side of Punk. There’s a lot of Punk vs. Metal discussion on this show. He’s a little older than me so it’s a little more real for him but it’s something I think about a lot. Younger kids might not think about it at all, I dunno.

• So I logged into the new Myspace

  I actually tried to delete some the old songs I had posted, but there seems to be no way to do that? So I updated the profiles. So what. If it seemed useful again I would use it, but it does not look that way, and it doesn’t seem like anyone else is really using it. I don’t know what they’re going for. But anyway, my old profile mix came back. That’s something. So they only deleted all of the blogs and pictures and videos. So I was wrong. Sorry, Myspace.

• More final words on Maxwell’s

  Uh, Justin Timberlake played a show at Maxwell’s even tho it’s closed, just cause he can. Apparently, that guy can just do whatever he wants. He’s got some money or something. I had no idea. Whatever, I don’t hate him. Anyway, here was a nice Yo La Tengo at Maxwell’s retrospective post that didn’t get reblogged over on tumblr. I had some other thoughts about all this I can’t really sum up right now. But I mentioned the Maxwell’s closing to my recordist friend and it barely registered with him. I was surprised it didn’t seem like that big a deal to him but he’s a little younger than me and I think it might be like when CBGB closed for me. I never actually went to a show at CBGB. I had been to the place and I would have liked to see the last shows there, but I didn’t make it and wasn’t really devastated. I understand the historical significance but it was never my place. Maxwell’s wasn’t really my place either, but it seemed like it could be my place. Like I was going there as a newbie in the early 00s, but I was going to go back, and it was going to be “my place”. The regular hangout. That’s what it felt like. Then I’d be just like the rest of the regular crowd. Now I’m never gonna be like that regular crowd. There could be a new hangout, but that’s a different dream. There’s nowhere to back to for that particular thing. That’s why I’m a little mad about it. But I didn’t really fit anyway, I’m wired different. It was like I was trying to sit at the wrong lunch table and I’m too old to keep trying to do that. But it was a good distraction for a few years, I don’t know what I would have done. %

OK

I feel pretty comfortable not weighing in on the news events of the month at this point unless I’m clarifying something I said already.

Maxwell’s

I wrote a little about Maxwell’s in this White Stripes review. People did remember the White Stripes played there, of course:

If you did not know about Maxwell’s…well, it’s not that important now, is it? I think it’s kinda bullshit to close it completely this way. I can see the point that the neighborhood has changed and whatnot. But I don’t see how the next phase of that property could be less tragic than it still being “Maxwell’s” but being run a little different. Like, “Have you been to Maxwell’s lately, it’s a little different.” vs. “Have you been to where Maxwell’s was, it’s now a Walgreen’s.” Or whatever.

There’s no really any reason someone couldn’t start up a similar place in a better location. The main bar was pretty swanky and old-fashioned, and the food and beer selection was great; that’d be tough to top but, uh…as a music venue? That back room is tiny. If it’s really about the people and the music…why, there’s new people being made all the time. Many of them start bands. And the swank is perhaps not important to them at all. There can and will be other venues, just not in Hoboken, 12 blocks from the train station. There’s similar venues in Brooklyn of course. It’s a little harder for me to get to Brooklyn. Maybe I can move to Brooklyn. Does anyone want to give me a job in Brooklyn? How about…anywhere? Lately I’ve been applying to old jobs I’d swear I’d never do again. Jobs where I got multiple promotions with raises and they begged me not to leave. No response. So I’ve got some gaps in my resume. I wasn’t in jail or anything, just working some stuff out. I have attended bartending school. I’m serious.

I cannot teach English in Japan without a Bachelor’s if you were curious about that. I’ve been trying to dig through my stuff for the info that will allow me to get my college transcript. I didn’t think I would need it I guess. It’s got to be at the bottom of one of these piles.

Podcasts & links

No one really cares about my ocd linking system but I link to the stuff I have RSS subs to and I’m using it less, esp. for podcasts. I’ve been using MediaMonkey to sync my iPod and it’s not perfect but it’s better than having to have iTunes installed on my main machine. Anyway, instead of the the links on the sidebar probably no one looks at I’m just going to tell you my favorite episodes. This month it’s the WTF with Doug Rushkoff. Yes, he just interviewed Nick Cave, Thom Yorke and Iggy Pop. You can listen to those too but it feels a little awkward to me when he interviews musicians. And his life seems to be going pretty well now, which makes his monologues infuriating. Who am I supposed to bask in misery with? Tumblr? It’s not the same.

Also the FNGTAC has been pretty good lately. Their website lapsed and got taken over by an anime torrent site. Pretty random.

Apologies to Varg Vikernes?

So…this happened and it turned out to be just a big overreaction to his years of hateful rants, past history of violence, and multiple gun ownership. But somewhere in there was a fact I had got wrong before, which was that he thought the Andre Brevik massacre was actually a bad thing. I thought he dug it. I guess I tapped out reading his essay about it where he was praising the ideology of the guy or maybe when he started blaming Jews for everything which had nothing to do with anything. Apparently he went on to condemn the actual act of killing a bunch of innocent people. Altho there’s the implication that he wasn’t cool with it because the people killed were fellow Norwegians and possibly killing a bunch of innocent people from another country would be totally reasonable. Hopefully he doesn’t take the next logical step and move to America because that would get complicated. A Burzum t-shirt would no longer be a ‘fuck you’ to hypocritical Bourgeoisie morality, it would be a statement of solidarity with the current status quo! Which may have already happened!

Oh shit

I forgot I had published this post this morning to get it in on the right time and didn’t notice I was updating it live each time I saved it throughout the day. Now it’s almost midnight. I’m sure I’m forgetting something but it can’t be more important than a proper post ending but

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