Chotto matte a minute…. There I fixed it.

• Death

  Sooner or later, sitting or standing, death will come for all. Happy Friday! I have not yet died as of this blog post, which is the first of my new meta-roundup format; who cares…well, I do. I care a lot. About a lot of things. We’ll talk about it. Can you deal with idea of pretending this is like talking? I don’t have to do that whole thing where I explain the concept of written communication, do I? There’s a comment section. I have email, and twitter and all that. It’s not that one-way. But I will be dead eventually, so don’t hesitate too much.

  The guy from the Frogs died, what a freak thing. And Ernest Borgnine died that was not a freak thing. I always liked him cause he seemed to be not really belong in Hollywood at all. Ugly face, ugly name. And he was old since I was a little kid. He was great.

• Crazy, crazy shit

  This Harley Flanagan stabbing thing seemed pretty crazy before the Batman shooting thing. I highly recommend the John Joseph auto-bio, The Evolution of a Cro-Magnonif you are looking more into the background of that and I would also recommend not shooting a bunch of random people but people do what they do.

• Shonen Knife vs. Pizzicato Five

  A recurring theme is the two groups that started my obsession with J-pop in general. I had some thoughts about this SK live show at Johnny Brenda’s vs the Ustream of Maki Nomiya’s 30th anniversary concert thing, but it’s gonna be too long. Seperate posts.

• Cleanup

  A few posts ago, I referred to an unidentified person as “a stupid asshole”. I’m not sure I’m totally wrong in my assessment, but this was a bad idea for two reasons: 1.) When I really think about it, are they stupider or more of an asshole than the average person? Not really. Maybe even less so. This would make me the stupider, bigger asshole. 2.) So this was clearly about some personal disagreement that couldn’t be settled privately but not extreme enough to call for some kind of public shaming. There’s got to be a dozen, at least, of people I know I’ve had some kind of problem with who I would not call stupid assholes, but who probably think I just called them stupid assholes. In fact, it’s possible everyone of those people, except the person I meant, thought I meant them. The person I meant it for would never think I meant them. This is the whole cause of the situation. Or maybe I’m wrong. The truth is, I just don’t get it. I don’t get what they’re doing or why they’re doing it. And I hate to admit that.

  I also mentioned “not fitting in” at art school. I didn’t care about fitting in at art school…fucking…that is the whole point! It’s all people that don’t fit in, everyone thinks they’re the shit, everyone is awesome by they’re own personal definition of awesome and no one else’s. You’d have to be a normally functioning human being to not fit in at art school, and I was not. I fit in perfectly.

  I really liked it for a while. There were no math courses in this school. I hated math. But really I just didn’t get math. All this art bullshit no one gets, I can deal with with any of that. Or if I don’t understand it, I want to. I want to spend time with it. Now I’m seeing I need to spend more time with math. I was wrong to hate math, and I was wrong to hate this unnamed blogger. But only one of these is worth spending any more time on.

  You know, I think I might have taken the whole conceptual thing a little too seriously. Imagine that.

  I also said I didn’t care about anyone more famous than Joe Strummer. I was kinda in rant mode, but I thought about it and everyone I really care about is at most equal in fame to Joe Strummer, or dead. Ernest Borgnine, for example. Or better perhaps, Joey Ramone. Never met him, he’s more famous. I guess it’s subjective. Or Lemmy, or Thurston Moore, they’re all about the same league. Even in art school my idol were like, Frederick Sommer and Chris Burden, or long dead people like Duchamp and Dali, or comicbook people. I think if I met David Bowie or someone like that it’d be cool, but wouldn’t mean as much as Joe Strummer, that’s all I’m saying. Does being obsessed with J-famous people seem like a contradiction? The most famous person in Japan still averages out to something like Strummerfame. My wildest dreams do not include exceeding Strummerfame. Why would you want to be more famous than that? You’d be fucked pretty much. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe to make it, like as a drummer, for example, you need to be Questlove and be on a tv show 5 nights a week. Maybe I’m fucked anyway. We’re all fucked anyway. I still like Questlove. This whole thing is whatever, forget it.

• Japan

  Heard the new Halcali, somehow without paying the ridiculous full price for it. I think if I go to Japan now, I get arrested right off the plane. Was it worth it? I dunno. Some of the new songs are pretty good, (like the song “Questlove”, which I thought was funny at first, cause do they even know who that is? But then I remembered he’s famous for real now.) but the inclusion of the old songs was such a horrible idea and not done well, if there’s even a way to do that well, it’s impossible to give the thing a thumbs up. I really hate how Sony has handled this group. You know their first album is out of print now? Why didn’t they reissue it? They only bought rights to some of the songs? Makes no sense. I think they’re last album also had some pretty good songs, but then if you listened to it back-to-back with the old stuff, it’s like, wow, that was so much better. This album does that work of disappointing yourself for you. No reason for it.

  Btw, I’ve ended my old blog in Japanese at Netlog and started on at Lang-8. The big difference is I’m going to be trying to write more grammatically correct instead of using a lot of heavy wordplay to give the illusion I have a more advanced grip on the language than I actually do. (I don’t see a lot of reason to talk about learning Japanese in English anymore on here.)

  Then there’s still the question of why I keep going with it. There’s a couple articles about how teaching English is not the greatest gig anymore. I hadn’t really thought of that until recently so if that’s really not a good option it’s not a lifelong dream crushed. It was always about translation or something like that. It’s about the 3rd culture thing, just being a part of that.

• Tags

  I need to tag the posts better. Deleted some joke tags, probably’ll delete all the meta tags (and most of the old meta posts.) I am not tagging these roundup posts because who is going to want to read these later. It’s mostly for my own mental health.

• Links

  Google killed the Friend Connect thing but I’m still using the Blogger dashboard for the blogspot…AHHHHH!! Whatever. Some still that way and some don’t. The one’s that work don’t get a direct link. Why do I insist on doing it this way? The damn list would be a mile long. And then there more links on the tumblr that don’t have a working RSS, or I can’t deal with it on a regular basis. It’s a system.

• 2003-2005

  No idea what this note means in my draft. I meant to mention something that happened in these years, but I can’t think of anything relevant to right now. I guess I was doing a lot of postcard mail art at that time. Been meaning to get back into it, maybe that was it. I wasn’t doing much else then except the postcards, so I think that was part of the excitement about it. Probably impossible to recapture now. But I still do have some addresses. Email me to get added to what is right now a very short list because I have lost the old one.

• Olympics

  Yeah, I don’t care about the Olympics. It’s Friday night, I’m home writing a blog post; my tv’s not even plugged in. Been like that a while.

• Fuck this whole thing, maybe

  I need to do these Thursday night, first of all. And I’m going to keep doing short meta posts on individual subjects. (Everything that isn’t a record review or a list is a meta post.) Also, fuck it. Fuck the internet, man.

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