Archive for category Ａｂｏｕｔ

…nope. Just the usual. Trying to clean things up. Over on tumblr I’ve been posting mostly links and reblogs with few comments. Thinking about a lot of stuff. Saving things up for real discussions or more in-depth posts. Have a lot of things in the queue I’m trying to clean out by the end of April, but I like to keep the posts in bunches. I’d like to keep to one or two a day. Most people use the site more like livejournal or as an imagedump. I stopped trying to follow everyone back a while ago. Still not that many followers but the amount some people post is crazy. I really keep up with the feed and just check in with the others. Then there’s the fucked up shit. Lotta that. Racism is a real trend. Certain things, it used to punk rock to co-opt, but you can’t really do it anymore. Sad developments. Not for new stuff as much as the old stuff. Some of the kids out there are getting the wrong decoder rings. Hopefully they can figure this out on their own cause most adults are super fucked by this point, I can’t deal with kids, and no one reads this blog.

And people just keep dying.* Try to keep my list relevant to people I cared about. They’re saying Poly Styrene now or maybe not. She’s 53 with some bad cancer either way. I talked about Kurt Cobain a little before, maybe I made it sound like he was a role model to me. I should make it more clear that when I was a teenager I wasn’t looking up to him as someone like me who had “made it”, but someone like me who had remained alive for what then seemed an impressive amount of time. It wasn’t that much of a shock when he went. I’m kinda grateful now I missed out on some of the drama surrounding that. (I made up for it later.) But I should also make it clear I grew out of feeling that way. Instead I looked up to people like Joey Ramone and Joe Strummer. When they both died at 50, this seemed to me a reasonable age to kick it. Not intentionally, but just to live in such a way that it catches up to you right about then. I only stopped thinking like this maybe a year ago. Trying to remind myself of all this because I’ve been getting frustrated with myself and where I’m at in life, I just feel behind other people career-wise or whatever (never wanted my own family) and I just need to remember the whole decade-long nihilistic tailspin of my own creation (well, I had help). Oh right, that. That could be it.

I committed to an artist’s life, whatever that means, pretty early. Most of what I make, whatever medium, sucks. Same as most artists, tho. Even the good ones. But it’s about the life. Been thinking about when I was a kid, I was just a nerd and just getting into music, before the real problems started. I think I can blame religion for some of that. I would hate to be responsible for steering anyone towards religion. I like Buddhism and Taoism as just the bare minimum of something to not be a complete bastard. I think whatever could work if you keep it stripped down, just to check yourself not to be a raging asshole. The Jesus thing does not work for me tho just because of the history (personally and the whole thing really). Seems to also be short-hand for anti-Semitism is some cases. The whole cross thing, I hate it. But I would never use the upsidedown cross cause if you really go into Catholicism, it’s the symbol for St. Peter. It’s different if you don’t know that of course, but I’m scarred for life.

*few more here

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I’m twasking him to twake that twange.

So…my last post about twitter was vauge, frustratingly brief, potentially useless and bordering on intellectual property theft. That’s no good. Been going back and forth how useful and or annoying the service is. I’m on at least my 3rd or 4th account by now, had several at once for different things when it seemed it might replace RSS feeds. Now there’s just one, and I just switched it back the jimhaku handle, because you can still do that, which is nice. I liked the idea of having everything I’m doing under the “band” concept, which makes it a little less personal. But the band really is just me now. A solo project that becomes a band but pretends to be a solo project is one thing, but a solo project that becomes a band pretending to be a solo project that pretends it is a band that is really a solo project gets to be a little much. I never expected the band—or whatever—the music to “make it”, at least at first. There was a window there when it seemed something that far out might be able to generate a little bit of income if handled correctly. Maybe it still can, it’s an ongoing thing. But it doesn’t need it’s own twitter account. And the whole concept is fucked the way it’s going. The ‘Hakujin’ banner is not going to cut it for all music I’m going to want to make anymore since I’ve gotten more back into classical and metal as influences. It just sounds racist. I don’t care if people think it is or not, people pretty much think what they want, but it goes against the original concept. Maybe the original concept is racist, but in a whole different way! Really, the opposite.

Things are getting pretty ugly. I don’t believe in Jesus, but I keep coming back to stuff Alan Watts used to say about how the Bible is just edited really poorly. Just going over my own stuff…def gotta cut some shit outta there if you want a consistent message. Have you ever thought, “what if the The True Word of God is actually the Midnight Special menu at Denny’s? Sure it just looks like a list of terrible food, but if you look with eyes that see, even you can find the meaning of what Moons over My Hammy really means.

Think on that.

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Mentioned the suicide of Kurt Cobain taking place on April 4th a few posts ago. According to the wiki it was the 5th, and he wasn’t found until the 8th. Thought I remembered the day hearing it pretty clearly as the 4th, but I was drugged up pretty good at the time (hospital drugs I’m talking). I’ve had no reason to check the wiki before on this so I must have been remembering reading the Azerrad bio. (Only Cobain book worth reading, imo.) It might say the 4th (time of death is estimated). Or maybe April 4th is just catchier because of that U2 song about MLK.

Call me racist, but I’m pretty sure MLK was more important than Cobain. I like the idea of excluding politics from a music blog, but you can look at King as a spoken word artist, maybe the best ever. Plus you have to admire his ideas as maybe even better. (Preaching equality of races and end to all wars even under treat of death vs. shooting yourself in the head because your stomach hurts… Um, Kurt was an anti-racist feminist of course, but you have to admit that’s barely in his lyrics…holy shit I am not even linking to Nirvana lyrics. What a way to depress yourself even further if you were ever really into them; every reason to like Cobain as a person comes from interviews, he’s the total Anti-Bono, wow.**)

Bonus: When I was doing J-pop vs. Metal I did a MLK Day post, which I just re-upped.

*Btw, did the new Strokes song remind anyone else of Angel of Harlem?
**noobs, get Incesticide

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Look, I can’t keep up with everything. Yes, I’m reverting to some rando blogging. Maybe I’ll delete all the meta posts if I get the reviews going. Maybe this isn’t even a meta post. Maybe this is not even a blog. Is this even the internet? Yes…but…what if, man. That’s all I’m saying.

First, an apology. Back in this post I suggested the following:

Just jump in a stream and soak up something different.

I can’t believe I said that. I mean it’s just corny. Sorry.

We can’t dwell on it, there’s situations to assess. If 2010 felt like at least two years, March felt like at least three 2010s. This can’t go on. Things can always get worse of course, but the series of events has created a whole new kind of mental trainwreck in my trainwreck of a brain. If things even out (say, the world economy stops collapsing and Japan stops exploding) I think some good could come of it. And by good, I mean good for my brain/my own life in general. Sorry, again. That’s why it’s jimhaku.com, not greatestmusic.net, or even goo.d.rev.ie.ws …whatever. Fuck, I need to make a front page or something this blog is a joke. And speaking of jokes, I’m having a hard time taking myself uber-seriously with a name like Jim Haku. How is that gonna look in all caps on a hardcover? Shitty.

So fucked.

Bright side, right…yeah, well here’s how it’s worked: let’s say you’ve got your trains (of thought) going right off a damn cliff. Let’s say the train and the passengers and cargo and what not survive but are stuck at the bottom the cliff. But more trains keep coming. It’s just a pileup of carnage and it all stuck there. It’s intact but it can’t go anywhere. But it turns out the bottom of that cliff is really the top of an even bigger cliff. “Oh shit?” Indeed, but now the bottom of the first cliff is at least cleared out. “What does that even accomplish and that is a horrifying metaphor given the situation.” Point taken. But there’s just so many things I’ve been obsessing over that I can’t do anything about they’ve it’s like they’ve all canceled each other. Instead of having a complete breakdown where I’m just staring down at wreckage, I can think about things like track repair, schedule rerouting, maybe some new upholstery and even on-board refreshments. Is this a steam train or electric? I should find out. Steam or electric, fuck! Japan has goddamn magnet supertrains! Goddamn they are cool.

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Well.

I’ve not only dug quite a hole for myself, I’ve only got about an hour for this title be clever. (No hints.)

• I need to stop doing what I am doing in the way that I am doing it.
• The direction to go in is now forward.
• Japan will survive. I believe in the Japanese-American alliance.
• My first car was built in Hiroshima. (A Mazda. Right under the hood, it said.)
• Forget the list format for creating pseudo-profundity.

I’m wrecked. People are saying a lot of stupid things. I used to be a lot better at hating people. And believing nonsense. Sometimes it gets stuff done. I want to make certain things clear, but it seems less important than doing something, but there’s not much I can do. Everyone says stupid things, but it’s the beliefs under those things you have to change. Everyone needs to get smarter. Our time’s up.

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