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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Maybe this should really be the final monthly post. I could do it it quarterly. I don’t really feel like commenting on events, I’ve stopped doing this on twitter mostly too. I’m just going to be staring in mute horror at my computer screen every so often.

Do I even need to talk about personal stuff? I don’t. I don’t have to do any of this of course. Seemed like a good idea at the time. Took the JLPT again. I did a lot better than last time I think but that thing is still brutal. Zoned out about half way through, like, “What am I doing taking this test? What am I doing with my liiiife?” One a those. I’m taking all that discussion over to the Lang-8 blog entirely in Japanese. Maybe join the site if you’re into that, it’s decent.

Also I had a table the Punk Rock Flea Market that went great. Rodney Anonymous almost bought my old drum machines. Then someone else did. Mostly sold comic books, Japanese tapes, stuff like that. (Had CDs too but didn’t sell many of those.) I will be doing that as often as possible in the future.

Networks

I gotta make a new frontpage with just links an like, I dunno, something. I gotta get back to working on other stuff. Yeah the facebook thing didn’t work, no one cares. If someone cares I’ll try to fix it.

Corrections & Follow-ups

Thinking about Obama. I like Obama. Whenever I see this dude on TV I seriously think, “wow, this guy is President”, but in a good way, not the George Bush way. I think the people that have the most issues with him should be the Progressives and Civil Liberty-types. Which would be where I would put myself. Crazy right-wing Republicans of course will hate almost everyone, but if you’re a moderate Republican, Obama should totally be your dude. Pretty much what he is, like Clinton. If that’s as good as we can get, I guess it’s gotta be good enough. Which maybe it could be if everybody stopped the bullshit. There’s just so much bullshit. Why can’t politics be more like the internet?

I’m just trying to keep doing my own thing, ok. Obama has this thing about him, I feel bad saying anything bad, like I’m going to run into him and it’s gonna be awkward. I feel like I could be at Melvins show and suddenly there’s a voice behind me like, “I hope they do Night Goat”. And it’s Obama. And I’m like, “O-o-o-b-b-ba-ma! W-what—uhm—oh, hey man, you like the Melvins?” And he’ll be like, “Everybody like Melvins.” And everyone turns and looks at me like, of course Obama like the Melvins, you fucking asshole. They’re not even surprised he’s there. It’s totally cool. Except for me. I had to question it. And it’s no random thing, Obama’s totally fucking with me, because of course he reads this blog. Nobody else does, I’m just some jerk who hates Obama, can barely even deal with his sudden omnipresence, which is totally normal. Fine. I can deal. Just me and Barry. Guy with his finger on The Button. Hangin’ out. On the blog, at a show, Punk Rock Flea Market…Taco Bell: He’s gonna be there. I accept it. Alright?

Also, I joined Spotify but I don’t pay for it and I don’t use it much. It’s about as cool as Last.fm when that had most things streaming, but you probably know how that went. It seems crazy to me to think that this new thing is going to be super-permanent and all-inclusive. I don’t get how people can ditch their record collections for it. Don’t you remember when you walked into like a Tower Records or an HMV superstore and the feeling that that was the biggest thing in the world that was completely indestructible? Maybe you don’t…that’s what it was like. Those stores made millions in profits and now they’re gone. Spotify makes no profit yet. (Eventually I think enough people will sign up for paid accounts with reoccurring billing, then gradually use it less as the novelty wears off. This could make them the new Columbia House.) It’s cool, but it doesn’t replace everything. It does replace my old Last.fm playlists, which I’ll redo when I get around to it.

It’s come to my attention that the song Rock ‘n’ Roll Kenchoushozaichi, recorded by Minimoni in 2003, is a cover. This makes my count off, but I’m not fixing it.

I made it sound like all the songs on that Damage Manual album sound the same. They don’t; just relative to the songs on a Pigface album. The compositions are varied but they’re made up of the same components. Get me?

I don’t think that Andes Manta record is totally live. The vocals have gotta be overdubbed.

I don’t know what I’m thinking sometimes.

There’s still an end of the year list coming up because I hate myself. %

I had all these links about the election but screw it, there’s not much I can add. One thing that stuck out to me was a video that was getting passed around of Romney supporters that had some people freaking out when the polls started going that way. Some of those people did seem crazy or dumb, but check out the guy with three teeth and the hillbilly beard. That’s real America. He ain’t buyin’ it. I knew Romney would lose when I saw that. All those polls were bullshit. Most people are not brainwashed. Can’t we agree that all politicians are awful again? That use to unite this country (sort of). I think we’re getting back on track.

There’s kinda a lot of reasons not to like Obama that are not racist or made up. I don’t need to get into it. He’s just a politician. I voted for him if there’s some kind of tragic misunderstanding. Not because I think he will make things better but stop them from getting worse, as much as that is possible. There’s other things to get to.

Rockaway Beach. Pretty fucked up. Closer to home for me literally and figuratively was the damage to the Atlantic City area where I’m originally from, but no indie filmmakers live there. Southwest Jersey had almost no damage. Power didn’t even go out.

The before/after in areas of the shore is almost tsunami-bad. The water didn’t go very far inland of course. I’m not a fan of this area in general, but there’s that.

So what else is going on?

• JLPT SUNDAY SUNDAY SUNDAY

  Just about cleared out the Core 2000 series on Anki and I’m up to Step 3 in the 6000s. Lost some progress botching the update to Anki 2 on the iPod but I was only through Step 1 at that point. I kept the 2000s on my laptop which I didn’t update so I didn’t lose any of that. Been like two years now almost working on those. Guess that’s what it takes. All I’m gonna say so I don’t jinx it.

• Why do I keep doing this bullshit?

  The blogging I mean. Or maybe the Japanese too. I feel like Japan is still important. Blogging is almost definitely less important, but I feel compelled to keep something going. I don’t have a goal of being a full-time paid writer, never did. For a little bit it seemed worth going for but it sure doesn’t right now. I just need to write to organize myself and I need my own space to do it in.

• Facebook, etc.

  I’ve got sharing buttons at the bottom of the posts now, just because I could with Jetpack 2.0. Great post by Warren Ellis on fb pages & Google+.

• Bandcamp

  They’ve just started with personal pages and I think it’s already better that whatever the new MySpace is gonna be. I put my old Hakujin albums on there. Just the ones I felt were real albums, but even those, just barely. Some of it sounds way different because you just upload wavs to the thing and it encodes what you choose when you download. Some of the stuff was available in a severely jacked mp3 mastering to make it more like a noise record. Some of the other stuff I lost the wavs to so I just resaved the mp3s to wavs, which could sound really bad when it’s re-encoded. See if you can tell the difference if you care. To me, it wasn’t worth working on any longer than I have. The point was just to get something out there.

• Where was this going?

  Here’s what what’s been sitting in my draft for a couple weeks, like I was going to start the post like this:

  So I’m sitting here, listening to Elliot Carter and the can of seltzer on the arm of my futon, just drank. The carbonation of seltzer creates a small cave-like micro-environment when the can is just emptied, the bubbled water clings to the inner top of the can and slowly drips down for several minutes. It goes nicely with the harpsichord and all that shit.

  Hey this could be the start of a NaNoWriMo novel! Not this year I guess. I made the album 108 for NaNoWriMo one year. That’s why it’s like that. There’s an official National Solo Album month now but there wasn’t then I don’t think I’d do it again. Not sure I’ll record under that name again. The whole concept was largely based on drunkenness, which I’m kinda over.

• Back to the storm for a minute:

  Recovering Eyebeam’s Archive from DEEPSPEED media on Vimeo.

  Yeah, not to minimize that people died and lost their homes, but the art district also got hit pretty bad. This, along with the last few years seeing how bands and artists have dealt with going digital and whether to have a label or not, had made me think about what’s worth it. I think it’s DIY all the way. This is in line with what Martin Atkins is saying in case you were just blowing that off as something else. Also, in order to do this effectively, it’s important that the artist not die. That’s really the only way to keep control of the stuff. And live away from water. You used to be able to trust other people (and traditional flood maps), but look at this mess!

• Instagram

  Yes I’m on it and there’s profiles there too now. As a site it’s not great and I still think most of the filters are silly, but in the smartphone format it’s a pretty cool way to do photos.

• Blip.fm/FUZZ

  I don’t know why I’m even mentioning this but I got invited to FUZZ a while back. I don’t think either one has a future. It’s cool but there’s too much other stuff that’s doing a better job. I’ll probably expand on some of the stuff I posted on blip as posts.

• Streaming nonsense

  Here’s something else that was sitting in my draft. I think I had a point about streaming music. It’s a nice few songs.
  

• Cloud Atlas

  I didn’t have any intention of seeing this movie in the theater. I wound up seeing in IMAX. It was the first movie playing at the first theater I could find after I couldn’t get into the Rollins show in Trenton. (There’s no way I was paying Ticketmaster charges for a show in a museum auditorium.)

  Whatever. I liked the movie overall. It’s long as hell but there’s no time no notice, and it looked great on the big, big screen. (Except for the, um, makeup. Hold on.) The most interesting idea in the movie was that at some point a fascist government has suppressed all of the world’s philosophies, then it collapses in some kind of revolution which itself eventually fails but the only thing that survives of all that is this one person’s Freshman Philosophy 101 speech. That’s a great concept. I’m not sure the irony of that was fully intentional, those parts of the movie were taking themselves way to seriously. It’s like Monty Python’s Meaning of Life with the funny parts kept to a minimum so as not to distract from the Meaning. (But it reminded me even more of a serious version of The Mighty Boosh. Parts are straight up ridiculous.)

  Then there was the yellowface. I like their quote about “playing both brows against the middle”. But this was taking it a little too far.

  It was weird how they acted like it was not as issue at all in the press. Jim Sturgess went so far as pretending that no one had ever put those two words together before.

  Now, I think within the context of this movie it…kinda made sense? It’s almost like they started with that idea, which is terrible and seemingly impossible to pull off, and made the whole movie to win a bet. Like the part that (*spoiler alert*) folded in ideas from Matrix-themed satire of factory farming The Meatrix). If it’s not even about just humans, how could race be an issue? “Oh, in that case…sure.” I didn’t even get that the Sturgess character was supposed to be Korean OR that it was the same actor as his other characters. He just looks like a different white dude with funny eyes. Has anyone mentioned that the real Asians in the movie all have double-lid surgery? Couldn’t white dudes be getting single-lid surgery a hundred years in the future? Like, it’s ludicrous but in that story it’s possible. But still, you’d think it’d look better.

  Look at these motherfuckers. No one’s eyes look like that.

• Here’s a Korean…

  

  Gangnam Style went double platinum, just before an appearance on the American Music Awards featuring MC Hammer. Which seems backhanded yet somewhat appropriate. Man, people really like that dance.

  But is PSY really phantom horseman of the Apocalypse? What happens when he hits a billion views? Let’s back up for a minute where I have Google “American Music Awards”, because I’m looking at K-pop on this thing. Seems it’s some kind of award show. But check out the “Artist of the Decade”—goes along fine until you hit the 90s. Garth Brooks? How? I think I can make sense of this: in the 50s it became acceptable for white people to perform Rock, a “black music”. In the 60s it became acceptable for British people to perform it. In the 70s, it became ok to actually be black, and in the 80s it became ok to be gay (rounding off ok Jacko to “gay”). But in the 90s it became ok to just live in your own separate reality and pretend like that was the only important thing going on. Thus, Garth Brooks is equally as valid as Nirvana or the Backstreet Boys or Biggie. No one thing really dominated, it’s entirely subjective. They even gave up on it after that. The 00s should have gone to Asians, right? We’re just getting to them now. (Or everyone else is at least.) Things aren’t progressing out of control as much as lagging behind slightly. But it’s a logical progression of increasing acceptance of marginal groups into the mainstream.
  

  Just in time for it all to end or whatever. %

Feel like I gained some traction this month. So much so I almost forgot about finishing this roundup post as I worked on a couple other drafts. I don’t even know what happened this month. This election bullshit is destroying my brain. I can barely write another sentence about it. A possibly deadly hurricane is approaching and not the metaphorical kind. The electric company has just robophoned informing everyone to expect power outages. My first thought: better get that tumblr queue in order.

• I have no idea what I am doing.

  Just gonna leave that there.

• The bright side.

  The conscious awareness of mental impairment is clearly an improvement. After I re-listened to the old podcasts when I transferred the archive to this domain (one of my domains is expiring and it’s not worth keeping), I can’t believe I was just putting those out there like that. I was drinking when I made them but not really that much at that point for it to be the excuse. I really sound brain damaged, and that’s ones I didn’t delete. And I completely forgot I did this, but all throughout the thing, I’m giving out the band email. Because I couldn’t get into the gmail then I guess? Which is probably why I started getting press releases for Japanese bands there. Alright.

• YouTubes

  I finally started straitening out my youtube situation. I made a new account when I was locked out of the old one but now have access to both, same with gmail. Leaving the videos that are still there on the old one but only adding videos to the new one. Moved all the subscriptions over there too. You don’t really “friend” people on there anymore you just subscribe or add them as a contact, which is just the new spam now and totally unnecessary, unless you are a spammer. Why not subscribe? Please. Thank you.

  
  Current BGM. Nothing to do with anything just in my queue. Not exactly calming.

• Beards

  
  

  OK.

  Look, a lotta people got beards now. Whatever. I went on a tangent. You know who don’t have beards? The people in Beardsville, most of them. At least half of them can’t even grow beards, probably more. The rest…well, only a few of them really have to grow beards just to prove it can be done. Having a friend with a beard is fine enough. And I realize this whole thing sounds ridiculous to some people in a argument in favor of guitar solos when so many metal dudes have “metal beards” now. How recent is that tho? (Seriously, I ask these rhetorical-sounding questions to get out of doing the research myself.) Still seems pretty new to me. And, uh, apologies to ZZ Top I guess.

  Oh, and Freeway did a track with Malik B. That’s cool.

• Demise of Hydra Head

  Didn’t get to this last month somehow. Pretty bleak. Worth mentioning. Here’s an interview with Aaron Turner about it and his beard.

• Japanese record industry is really…something.

  I thought there was some news about it becoming the world’s largest, just recently edging out America. Can’t find that anywhere now. According to this article about the horrible new anti-piracy law it’s still number two. Maybe someone read a chart wrong, or there’s some projection that it’s headed there. Again, I want to know and would rather someone just tell me.

• Notation project really a note-naming project

  I need to do a longer post on this. But I mentioned an argument over the key of D#. Take a look at the key of D# with an explanation here. The songs in question are written in the Eb. It’s the same notes. I’m not really coming up with a new way to write out music in any kind of practical way, but it is a more practical and precise way of naming the notes. It’s a more intuitive and direct way of seeing the intervals in a scale.

  Real quick, the Aolian mode or A minor scale:

  A-B-C-D-E-F-G
  0-1-3-5-7-8-10

  It looks like the simplest scale in normal notation only because it’s the first one they came up with. It was most common when they started naming notes. That is the only reason for the entire letter-based note system, it’s completely arbitrary. The notes for the D#/Eb major scale then are 6-8-10-11-2-3-5. %