Archive for category Ａｂｏｕｔ

Full Circle in Blackwood, NJ was my 2nd favorite record store in the 90s. If MTV walked up to you and asked about your opinion of a band in the 90s, (a then normal occurrence) you’d tell them you got the shirt at Full Circle first without hesitation, just like the guy in this video. Seriously! Where else were you getting Shonen Knife shirts? It’s where I got mine. Lotta my favorite records too. I started writing record reviews (there’s really drafts, really) and I’m trying to get through them without going off on how great this store was and how I never would’ve found that particular record any where else at that time. (Now I can refer back to this post.) The store itself still sort of exists under a different name as a video game store, with a fraction of the square footage. There was a painful to witness process where they sold off half and then half again to adjoining stores and sold more and more DVDs and games until they just changed the name or sold it completely to game guys, I don’t know.

The greatest thing about this store besides the general selection and huge used bins (thus the name), was the magazine and comicbook section. It eased my transition from comic-buying nerd to music-buying nerd. Now I never leave the house or buy anything, which is not true. But sadly it’s gotten close.

It is (of course) Shonen Knife Day. But I also found this Cibo Matto clip (same youtuber) with drummer Timo Ellis wearing a Third Street Jazz & Rock shirt:

Third Street was definitely my favorite record store of all time. It’s now a real estate office. Essentially the same store exits as AKA Music (really, no site?), but I’ve never gone there as much. (It’s only a block away from the old store, I just never find myself in Old City as much and rarely have record money when I do.) The store itself—separate from it’s inventory—was so cool at Third Street. All Jazz on the ground floor, Rock in the basement. Damn that basement was so cool. I spent the last Record Store Day at a Tunes, which is like a chain store in NJ. It’s indie, but it’s a chain store. You can’t really knock it cause they manage to survive still, but it was always on the edge of lame/cool (like, in my opinion, the idea of Record Store Day itself). I think the name AKA Music is a parody of “Tunes”, because their store is cooler and Tunes is kind of a lame name and both of these things are totally true. But I was in this store thinking, and I can only buy one record, which is ridiculous, to go into a store for an hour and buy one thing, but I’m there supporting this dying idea I still believe in for some reason. And the whole thing doesn’t feel that cool anymore, and I’m wondering how much of it is me, and how much is this particular store and whatnot. Because part of it is nostalgia, which is distorting, so I’m trying to look at it objectively.

But even the lamest CD store in the mall used to seem magical when that was the only place you could get music. It was the portal. The portal is in your room now, on the computer. Piracy is only part of it, cause you can buy all your music online as easily as steal it. I don’t see any way to give kids that magic back to a store. They try to do it with exclusives but it’s such a different thing to go somewhere only to get a limited collector’s item before it sells out. It makes records more like comics! That’s awful! Or maybe it’s not. I just had the illusion at some point in my life when I was getting into music that I was leaving Nerdland. This was it. We used to argue about if The Hulk could beat up The Thing and if Superman could outrun The Flash. Then we got into the “alternative” comics, and the gritty anti-heros. Then we got out of comics and into The Real Stuff. Zines. Punk. These guys are like real superheros doing real things. But they’re just regular guys who made different choices. And we are still nerds. No escape!

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Keeping this account strictly for lulz. It makes even less sense to be under the “hakujins” name than the twitter account it used to be linked to. I had another one under “jimhaku” (I guess) that I’m sure I had excellent and well thought-out reasons for deleting. I think it was one of those sites that didn’t seem like it would last for legal reasons (like the original muxtape) but they seem to have gotten around it by linking mostly to youtubes that get deleted a week later (seems to happen less with more legit accounts/faster deletions you never even see/people wising up and ordering less takedowns). Anyway, I rejoined because a few people kept using the thing pretty decently and bookmarking one of these pages feels pretty dumb (do they even have feeds?). Namely, there’s Sonic Youth drummer Steve Shelly and sometimes Sonic Youth producer John Agnello, who I used to see all the time in Jersey City and never knew who he was but he just seems like one of those guys, “who is that guy? I that guy…some guy? I should know that guy.” Like he looks like a guy from a band you saw once but can’t remember the name. Except he’s not in a band. Or maybe he was but now he just records other bands. One a those guys. Maybe Steve Shelly reblipped him and there’s his pic, I dunno how I figured it out.

So my early blips are all Principle Skinner quotes for some reason, then it became other Simpson characters, but only ones voiced by Harry Shearer, then quotes from other Harry Shearer acting roles, then briefly quotes from his radio show or maybe just stuff he said randomly in an interview or something. Seemed funny at the time. This was before I realized you could post without commenting at all. Most people get pretty silly with trying to be profound or quoting lyrics, I dunno.

You’ve also got Giant Robot’s Martin Wong on here holding things down. Lotta people have ditched the thing, just unfollowed a bunch that were dormant. Seems a lot of people joined just to have an account there but it hasn’t become a big thing so they don’t bother. I think it’s in a steady nerd-niche state. I don’t have it linked to twitter anymore because I think it must be just annoying to people that don’t use it. Why did it even keep working after I changed my twitter name? I guess I won’t use it for RIP posts at all anymore. Better to keep them all in one place. (Is this anything but pure asshole shit with the self-links? Seriously what am I doing.)

Up next, record reviews!

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Added a youtube playlist to the sidebar. It just has one video in it right now: Evelyn Glennie’s TED talk which I used to have embedded in there direct from the TED site. It never really embedded right, but I kinda liked how it looked in there provided the screen resolution was set to whatever. The youtube embed adjusts along with the resolution:

Here the TED version is an obvious win, but it’s pretty zoomed in. What happens the smaller you make it:

I spent a lot of time trying to figure this out. I needed the module to be 300 px across to match the width of the album covers and that mattered more than getting all the frame in there. Everything else distorted the video itself withing the frame. (I didn’t think of screencapping my attempts when I was originally working on this, here is the page with the original code; here is one with my code.) I kept it like that for so long cause I was proud of my half-solution to the resizing problem, because it really seemed like that thing did not want to be resized. If anyone can figure it out I’m still curious. This started as a design issue, but I should really learn more about code in general.

Now that I’ve changed it, I kinda like that the TED slogan isn’t there anymore. But the slight border was nice and I’d like to change the thumbnail. I think there might be a way to change this within the youtube code. I’m going to keep messing with it. And I keep messing with the links, I dunno. Some links I took off if I’m following them through blogger, or twitter. It’s the ones I’ve subscribed directly to the RSS or sites I don’t want to forget. Every time I try to split up the links into more categories it causes a glitch that erases the underlining on the category name, which is awful, just awful! I know. This is all ridiculous. Also I’m keeping the Japan Society donation thing, which is not ridiculous, even though donating to the Red Cross at this point may accidentally be helping Americans hit by tornadoes and such, which you would never do otherwise, obviously. Man, I joke about my record collection and what not being a disaster, but at least it’s only scattered around this room and not over several square miles and/or the bottom of the ocean. Maybe it would be a huge relief losing the ability to obsess endlessly about it. Hopefully it never comes to that.

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Deleted my podomatic account. Second time. The less said about the first one might be the better. It was a futile attempt to stop myself from ruining my old blog, which I started doing something like a podcast on, but it kept derailing miserably. The move to the podomatic site did not improve things. Let’s say it was a learning experience. But the learning didn’t stop there, oh no. After writing the site off completely, I found several people doing interesting shows, and it looked like they were fixing up the site quite a bit. I made a new account, and lost no time turning a whole new show into a whole new complete disaster. I was working through some stuff. But forget about the show, I could now use the site to keep up with all these new podcasts! I can follow 10, 20…no better keep that within multiples of 3 so the grid fills out evenly…yes, yes!

Now, most of the shows I was following have stopped and the site’s updates have stagnated. Plenty of people still use the site, but 90% of them appear to be house DJs* and they’re all friends with each other and they all want to be friends with you if you play even one housey J-pop track (which, I did…nice video). I don’t hate it, but it’s become like the myspace of podcasting sites. It’s a good place to start.

So here are the ones I was following at one point or another:

 
I should really post some stuff to Soundcloud.

*probably not true; probably should be

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