People are complicated

I dunno, I just wrote this Slayer review and I don’t want to be condescending or dismissive of any part of the metal scene. Unless I feel like it? I’m pretty much writing to myself here. Hey, you misspelled “aggression” in the goddamn title, genius. Well, I fixed it. Everything’s fine. Now that’s crazy talk.

[I do not want to disrespect the music or the people that make it, only an aspect of the scene. —OK.]

Politics in music

A great Billy Bragg/Marc Maron interview went up of the wtfpod. Choice quotes (which I did not post on twitter b/c it seemed too trollbaity) “Music can’t change the world.” and “The Clash were poseurs.” You’re gonna have to listen to it all. I think he’s a great guy. Never listen to his music tho. I like it when I hear it, but it’s just not for me. I’m not sure art is supposed to have a coherent message. But I am sure I like that people are using the word ‘poseur’ again. Everybody was using ‘hipster’ for everything for while there. There’s a difference! I don’t know if I would call The Clash poseurs. I mean, compared to Billy Bragg, on consistent political stance, yes. Do I care about that? No. I’m more interested in artists who use a particular framework to create their art and commit to that but are able to step out of that. Someone like Varg Vikernes can make compelling music, but he actually thinks he’s the fucking dungeon master. And the thing that gets me about that is, if you say of bunch of crazy shit, and burn shit and murder people, later on, you can take back the crazy shit you said. You can change your mind and all the shit is still burnt and the people are still murdered. And people are more upset about the words, which are entirely outside of the music in that case. (The words are pretty bad, if you didn’t know.) But the other thing is, if people like you, certain kind of people, no matter what you say they can twist it around to whatever they already believe themselves. If you can make art that exposes this, that to me is interesting. Billy Bragg isn’t a big enough pop star to reach those people so he never gets misinterpreted like that, but I bet it could happen.

#PRFM

Worked the Punk Rock Flea Market again. Things went even better than last time. I didn’t sell quite as much stuff this time b/c I think I’m running out of good, easily sell-able shit like the giant box of comic books I had last time. Some stuff I had that did not sell last did not sell again, like language courses on CD, can’t believe what I paid for those things, couldn’t give em away. Except I did the next day, to Goodwill. One guy went through all my $1 paperbacks with a scanner app looking for things he thought he could get more than a dollar for I guess. Good luck on that. I also saw Rodney Anonymous again but I didn’t have anything that caught his attention so he just strolled past. The guy I was sharing a table with clearly didn’t recognize him and I almost said something but if he also didn’t recognize the name, he would have felt dumb and I would have felt old. Lose/lose. I let it go.

Old podcasts

I deleted the links to the old podcasts on the tumblr. The old url, which I say repeated in the thing has expired. I moved some of them to this server. Then there were the podcasts before that that I am not putting anywhere. There were a few cool ideas in them (very few) that I might edit together one day, or reuse. if I do another talking podcast.

I wish I could have preserved the needlessly complicated tagging system I used. For example. You can kind of get the idea with the numbers but there’s no higher directory that shows you all the tags you’ve used.

Oh shit, right, tumblr got bought

I dunno why people are upset that facebook or google didn’t buy it cause it was gonna be one of these big companies. All of these free platforms are made to be bought.

Right, and flickr updated

I’m still gonna pay for mine to be ad-free, but it changes what I’m doing with it. Btw, I thought I had changed my flickr url but I only changed the display name. So I changed the url of my facebook page to match it. I’m only telling you in case you bookmarked the page without liking it, which you might have done. I’m not judging.

Press!

The Louisville Insider calls this blog “amusing but positive”. Not really, that’s just William Benton of the Phantom Family Halo who noticed my review of their Philly show opening for Acid Mothers Temple last year. (I had not checked the pingbacks in that long.) But technically, I think I can say that. Check out that post anyway for some links to recordings of some of the AMT shows on that tour. Cotton Casino showed up at one gig, pretty crazy.

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Oh man.

News

Sorry to anyone directly affected by various horrible events. I was not (this time) so don’t feel I should comment.

Categories

• Obviously, there is a new category for the J-pop vs. Metal podcast. This gives it an mp3 only feed that I’m going to try to send to iTunes.
• ［ｍｅｔａ］ —> ドッグチーズI’m not explaining this.

Inbox Zero

Deleted about 5,000 e-mails. Most of it from various mailing lists that never get read or unsubscribed from. It just builds up. I don’t see any reason to archive most email but I haven’t done a full cleanout in awhile. I was feeling pretty good until I got towards the end and there’s Beastie Boys list stuff and then there’s stuff about Adam Yauch dealing with cancer. So here’s this great dude, dying, and being kinda nice about it…and what have I done, read some email?

Postcards

Last month I forgot to mention I started doing quarterly postcards. Next one goes out June 21st. I can explain later.

Lang-8

I’ve had to take a break blogging on lang-8 to even out my correcting ratio which is not really enforced, but they remind you about it every time you try to post now. Which is fair. If you’re learning Japanese or any language you should try it out.

Other

• Kyary Pamyu Pamyu played NYC. Was I really going to that? Could’ve been fun. I think if I really apply myself at this blogging thing, like if I spent 16 hours a day online instead of 12, eventually, I could probably score some tickets to shows. What if I got to see a show like that every month? Let’s see…16 x 30 = 480 hours a month, so…a ticket is maybe $48…I could make 10 cents an hour!
• The Hummingbird Notation project is something I’d like to get into. I’ve always had a problem sight-reading. I don’t know if it can be integrated with my idea for naming the notes with numbers but I keep coming back to that. Need to write something up longer about that.
• Watched Dave Grohl’s Sound City doc, which is worth it. This guy runs down a problem with part of the underlying ideology of recording being presented. (He has a higher opinion of the music itself.) I was a little disappointed at the level of musician banter. Everybody’s so “about the music” they forget to say anything interesting outside of that context. The only good line in the thing is from Paul McCartney. Grohl says he wishes recording vocals was always easy to which Paul replies, “it is”. Of course it is for him, he’s fucking Paul McCartney. That’s the joke. Jokes, guys? Everybody’s complimenting each other, he compliments himself. It’s f— ah, forget it, musicians don’t get jokes. You guys are like math teachers.
• This blog has a facebook page, but it’s mostly what I post on twitter, which is mostly what I post on tumblr. Whatever.

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• WFMU Marathon

  Really good this year. The station seems to be getting back on track.

• J-pop vs. Metal: Full Site Edition

  I’ve been working on jpopvsmetal.com. Which was just the tumblr version of a running thing that taken various forms but I’m taking it up a notch. There’s no need to over-explain it. Or at all.

• Copyright issues: Unexpected

  I received an email that one of the Wub Machine auto-remixes I posted on Soundcloud was infringing copyright and was taken. This was to be expected. But it wasn’t from major label act Kyary Pamyu Pamyu or infamously litigious Greg Ginn, but my one of Herman Cain ad background music. It’s political! Not quite, even dumber. It was this guy who thinks he invented the wub wub thing (which is just a computer synth setting or whatever), or more likely his record label does, or most likely a computer algorithm just thought the songs matched enough. I will have more on that on the Hakujin blog when I get to it. I will probably just post all the remixes there and move on to something else cause I’m not dealing with that nonsense, dubstep is kinda done right?

• Google Reader: Not Dead Yet

  Oh boy, I have a bunch of notes here about some old blogs. I think it can wait until this thing dies for good. People are questioning the decision to kill Google Reader but it’s got to be an increasing strain on their system because of the way it worked. Most people do not even realize that the RSS for every dead blog is stored on their servers. It’s probably a healthy thing to clean out.

• Other things

  I watched the doc Life After People finally and the thing that struck me most was how it maybe could have been better but the people working on it must have been like, “fuck it, who cares, all this bullshit is turning into dust in 1000 years”.

  Comics artist Eddie Campbell has an interesting and totally depressing view on posterity, but he also thinks he’s not a comics artist. But he is.

  This article on Alan Moore vs. Hideki Anno is also interesting, and old. I was researching some stuff. More on that later maybe.

  The new David Byrne book How Music Works not only looks and feels great, it’s a pretty good read. Some of the chapters were straight from his blog, one of them was one of the first things I linked to on my old blog. That was a moment. Whatever. It’s not whatever it’s a great book. It’s soft and velvety smooth.

  This very long interview with Steve Albini and Tim Mid(g)yett of Silkworm makes an interesting point (of many) that indie bands of Silkworm’s level are like outsider artists. It seems like the 90s was maybe a period where it seemed like that wasn’t the case and it was all an illusion that there was some kind of common ground among all bands.

  So you’re going have to see the Silkworm doc if you haven’t.

  And read this great Robert Crumb interview on record collecting.

  And I missed that Camille Paglia was in Vice magazine a few months back. Doing the thing she does. I was not smart enough to get in her class at UARTS or whatever. (It fills up fast, I’m not bitter about it.)

• Bowie/Momus

  That new David Bowie song had a full-blown Momus reference. But you caught that.

• Amu making real videos again

  I mentioned how Namie Amuro doesn’t seem to care about making decent videos anymore (somewhere). But she is back with a new one. Somehow,
  one of the videos where she looks bored and nothing happens is nominated for MTV Japan video of the year. (None of the amazing Perfume videos were as you can see.) check it that video yourself. Oops, you probably can’t. The videos are blocked outside of Japan. I do not understand what it is they think they are doing. Taste aside, they put non-Japanese acts the whole world has seen in their awards, but actively prevent Japanese acts from going international themselves. I think there used to be some kind of business reasoning behind this, like they would lose money shipping CDs worldwide or something, but I dunno. I don’t get it.

• Momoiro Clover x Go! Team

  This happened over a year ago but I wasn’t paying attention at the time. Before this I had singled out Go! Team as the closest Western musical equivalent to groups like Morning Musume. I’m not even sure about that statement myself, but someone else must have thought so. (The audience apparently didn’t and the single bombed, but what can you do.)
  I’m just gonna end with this cause you gotta end somewhere.
  

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This month was a bit stressful but things seem to be working out. I got extremely sick and bottomed out my bank account, and credit. (Not in that order.) It’s not really important, except as an excuse for not getting anything done. But I’m feeling better, and I did my taxes way early so I just got my rebate. Just in time for my insurance to be raised again. But shouldn’t I get another job anyway? I should. Somewhere in there I found out I almost passed the JLPT, which is a big improvement over totally bombing it, but still not something you can put on a job application. A bigger failure is not being able to keep up a regular blog in Japanese. Definitely said I was going to that. Sleep and keeping up with everything else has gotten priority. Altho getting sick has kinda hit the ol’ reset button in the ol’ brainpan. Maybe not all of those things I have been keeping up with are worth the constant hyper-caffeinated hyper-vigilance. Yes, I could even exclude things I have no interest in. Wow, what a concept.

Big news:

MBV vs. AKB

Two things happened early this month I’m glad to have had a few weeks to think about before commenting on. First, My Bloody Valentine announced after 20 years their new album was suddenly done and was being self-released immediately. That was a shock. But I wasn’t as excited as other fans of the group because I still hadn’t gotten their other albums. It’s this problem I have with focus—sometimes, for years at a time. It’s why I require so much caffeine. (But not so much as I thought, right.) So with my rebate money, in a generic DayQuil haze, I bought the new album (download and vinyl, being shipped to me as we speak) and a copy of that Loveless album I’ve been hearing about and meaning to pick up for two entire decades. So yeah…it’s good. Pretty good group. Make great music.

Then a member of girl group AKB48 revealed that it sucks to a member of AKB48, which was not so much of a shock. They are not a pretty good group and they do not make great music. It’s a little more complicated than the usual “guilty pleasure” and “showbiz is hard, big deal” arguments. AKB is, one commenter bluntly put it, “the most cynically formed group in pop”. (In part of a series of posts debating idol culture on the Clear and Refreshing blog.) The fact that the group has ridiculous rules and makes ridiculous music is not so much the issue for me, it’s the underlying shittiness of it all. This head-shaving video—which, it’s gotta be stressed, is not her walking into a barbershop and saying “gimmie a 1”; she looks like a crazy person or a P.O.W.—was posted of the official management youtube channel. It wasn’t even a scandal that leaked out, it was presented as part of the entertainment package. When you consider instances in obvious parallel group Hello Project which has the same dumb rules, the girls get simply dropped and in some cases product was actually pulled from the shelves. There’s no appeal process and they even choose to lose money rather than benefit from the negative publicity. (New AKB single out now!) This is almost too principled a stance but at least it’s based in some kind of principle. I believe the people behind AKB are so warped this was their attempt at trying to look “better” than other agencies by giving the girl another chance. Just has to go through a standard Yakuza punishment, I mean, she’s still got all her fingers guys, it could be worse! That’s before any of the feminist or other political arguments that makes this event generally disturbing that other people have already covered better. I was kinda joking in the past about this group vs. Hello Project because of course they’re superficially very similar and I really don’t give the music any chance but life is too short to give everything a chance, and I was right. Let us never speak of of this group again, until they put them on an island to kill each other or wherever you can possibly go to after this.

Small news:

Site changes

Since I registered in a fit of paranoia, jimhaku.com has redirected to this blog of indeterminate purpose. I’ve been meaning to make a decent front page for a while, but instead I just pointed it at my main tumblr, which then links here. It makes a kind of sense that way. And it gives you something decent to look at from a phone because I’m not changing this blog layout for that. The design is almost more the point than the writing. I don’t think writing is ever gonna be my main gig.

Also I got rid of that old last.fm “quilt” thing:

But I just couldn’t let it go entirely you see. It’s no longer supported by the site anyway. It keeps on working but the code is a trainwreck by current standards. And it’s silly but it just feels like something should go there on the page so I put a mixcloud widget there instead:

Follow jimhaku on Mixcloud

While I’m embedding a bunch of nonsense, why don’t I try out this new gallery feature. Here are some other obsolete last.fm chart thingys (that I designed):

Well, that’s a mess. You have to click on these to see the whole thing and read the caption. This random list of bands would have been a generated RSS of whatever last.fm data, like a personal or group top artists or tracks. It was kinda cool until it stopped working. If you found a good spot for it. It’s pretty limited really. Most people used them for really obnoxious sig files.

What else

I had something I started about the decline of music coverage in the Village Voice but I’m gonna save it until it gets worse cause there might to a way to make it funny instead of just sad.

But former editor Maura Johnston has her own thing now. You’ve probably heard about that already if it’s the kind of thing you care about but I’m going to risk it.

Also there’s a new Marc and Tom show, similar deal.

And while I’m mentioning some things and not mentioning other things ever again I have a suggestion: if you cover the culture of another race of people, maybe you should not make racist jokes. Like, not as in I’m the PC police or something, but maybe as if your audience might possibly include people of that race and the whole world is not just a bunch of white people laughin’ it up at that other planet over there that can’t even see or hear us? Cause that ain’t true. Just a thought. Happy Black History Month. Listen to En Vogue. They are good at singing.

Oh, I said something like “politics should be more like the internet” which was a joke.

But there is
this and this. TTFN. %

I’m gonna continue these posts at the end of each month but keep them shorter.

Haven’t gotten much writing done, been working on backup and cleaning. Keeping up with Anki. Catching up on podcasts. This WTF with Dave Grohl is pretty great. That reminds me, the SubGenius Hour of Slack had a nice run this past year with the Ol’ Rev. Stang pretty much completely dropping character for several episodes, (#1350-1360) just talks about life. It’s back to the usual stuff now, which is still fun if you haven’t heard it a million times. Which also reminds me, I’ve gotten into repeating myself a bit at times. Like, am I doing a bit? There’s not even a joke in them. Rehearsed bits with no jokes, repeated to the same audience. That’s no good.

• Followups

  In my end of the year post, I said Perfume didn’t put out an album, but Spending All My Time had two great B-sides (available on iTunes), which should count for something. (Remember FAKE IT was a b-side from 2010.) Also I didn’t mention the Kyary Pamyu Pamyu album but I don’t think it was that great as far as having new songs on it. (Her first EP was surprisingly solid for what seemed like a one-off joke act.) On the album, only Drinker was up to the standard, I thought:
  
  (Hopefully the fan that made this video was just taking a break from some kind of paid work.)

  It’s cheap on Amazon right now. Got most of the good songs on there. I’m not liking the newest stuff. This music is like a butterscotch sundae at it’s best; the aesthetics of it is like the syrup and the good songs are like some quality ice cream. If the songs are not all the way there it’s just like eating a bowl of wet sugar.

  Also I mentioned Koda Kumi’s Lay Down and Crytal Kay’s Delicious na Kinyoubi almost randomly. I realize this is an almost embarrassingly transparent confession of my fantasy of wanting to be dominated sexually by a Japanese woman who does not quite entirely know English, and then go bowling with and African-American/Korean woman who does. This is a relatively benign fantasy, but it’s not only racist, it’s waaay too specific. I’m not going to apologize for subconscious urges, but I can’t believe I was just putting that out there like that.

• Instagram

  I’ve started getting comfortable with this thing. I like the square format, and I used to be uptight about the filters but you can get a good effect, depending. It feels like I can take pictures that feel more a drawing or painting I would do. I haven’t felt like that about digital photography before. I like how I can make it more about just the photo, Flickr I’m still gonna use but with all the metadata and everything it’s just like blogging, documentation.

• Facebook

  Using fb to deal with people you could deal with in any other way is nuts. Great for keeping in touch with message board buddies and that’s about it. I have a page now (I renamed the Hakujin page) for whatever. It’s more like “the label” page, but I don’t even want to call it that anymore. I keep trying to bring everything under one…thing. And keep bringing it back to music (and related art.)

  I’m working on a new podcast too that won’t have anything to with any that stuff. I might make a another new general podcast after that. I was trying to put all those ideas together before and that did not work obviously.

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