Rough month. Don’t wanna make it seem worse than it is, but August is the worst, the way I’ve been working the last couple years. At least I made a realistic effort to break out of it this year instead of just thinking about it and doing nothing or hoping for some kind of long shot that might never happen. I could still get a call from the places I applied, but I made it through summer so I probably won’t think about that again for another few months.

Checked out the makeshaft recording studio of a fellow local musician/recordist. I’ve mentioned him before by name, but given the current state of internet privacy, don’t think I should again for the time being or any further details of his operation as he’s dodging some bill collectors. Nothing too drastic, but it was somewhat…nice to talk to someone in a similar situation to me but slightly (or much) worse financially, because he still manages to do things like breathe and walk around. Which is inspiring. He also still gets some things done with music. Remember getting things done with music? Hm.

• Something with music

  A small piece I made for a project George Korein came up with called One-Finger Piano. I guess if enough people do one it’ll come out as a comp.

• RIP Jon Cook

  I wrote about Jason Noble of Rodan dying before and going through a backlog of news I found that Rodan’s bass player also died in February. I don’t know what to say about it except I’m going to listen to his other bands I didn’t know about.

• Youtube, Vimeo & bookmark management

  Cleared out my “Watch Later” list. I had to make a point of it. Vimeo wasn’t as bad but it’s the same thing, it gets like hoarding. Stuff from over a year ago, sometimes really random bullshit. I’ve tried to make it a regular practice to clean out stuff. I was using Pocket (f.k.a Read It Later) but I was a little too obsessed with cleaning that out cause it tells you how long each item has been there so if you got something from 10 days ago you feel like a total failure even tho it’s like 10 Ways to Hack Your Toothbrush and none of that shit is important or you would have read it right away. Gotta be some middle ground. And it wants you to sign in now so it’s backing up your bookmarks in “the cloud”. How bout NOPE. And Pocket is a dumb name. Can we have no dignity? I’m going to tell people I’m “pocketing” blog posts? Fuck you.

  Anyway, sometimes I upload things to Youtube. I had a problem with the sound not syncing so I deleted some and put them on Vimeo. There’s a bunch more I haven’t bothered with. But now I tried with a longer one and it tells me I need a pro account and I’m not dealing with that right now so I tried Youtube again and it seems to work better now.

  Here’s one from the Trail of Dead at Maxwell’s:
  

  I should get to the others. I don’t usually bother trying to do videos anymore because every motherfucker does it now and they’ve probably got something better than me. But sometimes I can get something good cause I’m not looking at the screen.

• Shadowrun Returns

  Played this all month since I had no money to go anywhere. Backed the Kickstarter last year and I was excited then but it took them way longer to finish they originally said and I almost didn’t care anymore. I just thought the idea of Shadowrun was so cool when I used to play the RPG from the books, I was OK with giving them money to make something new with it and I don’t even need to play the thing. Finally got to it and they did a great job. It’s on Steam but I got the downloaded desktop version with the first campaign on it and played it to the end. I never played the console game and don’t get into RPG console games in general so to me it seemed like a mix of the ideas from the tabletop books and the really good old Sierra games like Police Quest. Loved it. I hope I can use my character in future campaigns. I’ve thought about Shadowrun more than I’ve played it, I could go on all day about the different character archetypes. It was really good to be able to get back into it. I went with a Human Adept this time. More of a sane thing to identify with. I’ll stop.

• Podcast roundup

  Last month I mentioned that Marc Maron interviewed some musicians and it was a little awkward, but I really hadn’t listened to the Thom Yorke one yet. I just assumed that would be the worst, but it might be the best Thom Yorke interview ever. He just did Maynard James Keenan too and that went pretty well too, totally down to earth. Man these guys have mellowed out. Not in a bad way, but some of the old interviews with these guys were actually hilarious they were so difficult. The John Cale one great too, altho he seemed to think that one was awkward went it wasn’t I don’t think. Maybe he read my post and started getting self-conscious. I still tend to think of writing on the internet like it’s yelling at the TV sometimes. This is a good filter to install in your brain, famous people: “Is this person talking to me like I’m supposed to hear it or are they yelling at the computer with their keyboard?”

  I’ve been catching up with the Black Tribbles podcast and went all the way back to May. They did a cool episode about Ultraman and Frank Miller’s Martha Washington series. I read the original Give My Liberty series when it came out and thought it was great but then I gave up comics for a while. That’s one I need to go back to. Too bad Miller has lost his mind but what can you do. I like all their movie episodes too, but I have not see one movie all summer. I don’t know if I’ll ever catch up with TV shows so I haven’t listened to most of those episodes.

  The MetalSucks podcast with Greg Puciato of Dillinger Escape Plan got into some stuff. Interesting that the site is based in NYC where most of the writers live but they got these guys from Texas to do the podcast. Get some different perspectives.

  Also Mike Hill’s Everything Went Black needs a general mention. I might not agree with everything on the show, but I’m over boycotting everything I don’t agree with 100%. Like I had this period where I was into some crazy stuff and I had friends who are even farther out and it got too much and I had to go full straight science, nothing else. Couldn’t deal with anything. Now that things have settled down—I said this about Buddhism too, which may not have been clear—I’m not part of another religion now, I’m just not angry about it all the time. You can’t put people that go to a chiropractor or an acupuncturist or who read their horoscope in the same category as people who want to teach creationism in schools. It’s not that big a deal. It also comes up in the WTF with Maynard that people who make art worth paying attention to usually believe in some non-rational things. I’ve just been getting back into agnosticism, not formally but just being able to see it from that perspective again. And I’ve been inspired to get into shape by some of these Metal dudes. It’s really been positive, getting back into Metal. I was really more into the nihilistic side of Punk. There’s a lot of Punk vs. Metal discussion on this show. He’s a little older than me so it’s a little more real for him but it’s something I think about a lot. Younger kids might not think about it at all, I dunno.

• So I logged into the new Myspace

  I actually tried to delete some the old songs I had posted, but there seems to be no way to do that? So I updated the profiles. So what. If it seemed useful again I would use it, but it does not look that way, and it doesn’t seem like anyone else is really using it. I don’t know what they’re going for. But anyway, my old profile mix came back. That’s something. So they only deleted all of the blogs and pictures and videos. So I was wrong. Sorry, Myspace.

• More final words on Maxwell’s

  Uh, Justin Timberlake played a show at Maxwell’s even tho it’s closed, just cause he can. Apparently, that guy can just do whatever he wants. He’s got some money or something. I had no idea. Whatever, I don’t hate him. Anyway, here was a nice Yo La Tengo at Maxwell’s retrospective post that didn’t get reblogged over on tumblr. I had some other thoughts about all this I can’t really sum up right now. But I mentioned the Maxwell’s closing to my recordist friend and it barely registered with him. I was surprised it didn’t seem like that big a deal to him but he’s a little younger than me and I think it might be like when CBGB closed for me. I never actually went to a show at CBGB. I had been to the place and I would have liked to see the last shows there, but I didn’t make it and wasn’t really devastated. I understand the historical significance but it was never my place. Maxwell’s wasn’t really my place either, but it seemed like it could be my place. Like I was going there as a newbie in the early 00s, but I was going to go back, and it was going to be “my place”. The regular hangout. That’s what it felt like. Then I’d be just like the rest of the regular crowd. Now I’m never gonna be like that regular crowd. There could be a new hangout, but that’s a different dream. There’s nowhere to back to for that particular thing. That’s why I’m a little mad about it. But I didn’t really fit anyway, I’m wired different. It was like I was trying to sit at the wrong lunch table and I’m too old to keep trying to do that. But it was a good distraction for a few years, I don’t know what I would have done. %

OK

I feel pretty comfortable not weighing in on the news events of the month at this point unless I’m clarifying something I said already.

Maxwell’s

I wrote a little about Maxwell’s in this White Stripes review. People did remember the White Stripes played there, of course:

If you did not know about Maxwell’s…well, it’s not that important now, is it? I think it’s kinda bullshit to close it completely this way. I can see the point that the neighborhood has changed and whatnot. But I don’t see how the next phase of that property could be less tragic than it still being “Maxwell’s” but being run a little different. Like, “Have you been to Maxwell’s lately, it’s a little different.” vs. “Have you been to where Maxwell’s was, it’s now a Walgreen’s.” Or whatever.

There’s no really any reason someone couldn’t start up a similar place in a better location. The main bar was pretty swanky and old-fashioned, and the food and beer selection was great; that’d be tough to top but, uh…as a music venue? That back room is tiny. If it’s really about the people and the music…why, there’s new people being made all the time. Many of them start bands. And the swank is perhaps not important to them at all. There can and will be other venues, just not in Hoboken, 12 blocks from the train station. There’s similar venues in Brooklyn of course. It’s a little harder for me to get to Brooklyn. Maybe I can move to Brooklyn. Does anyone want to give me a job in Brooklyn? How about…anywhere? Lately I’ve been applying to old jobs I’d swear I’d never do again. Jobs where I got multiple promotions with raises and they begged me not to leave. No response. So I’ve got some gaps in my resume. I wasn’t in jail or anything, just working some stuff out. I have attended bartending school. I’m serious.

I cannot teach English in Japan without a Bachelor’s if you were curious about that. I’ve been trying to dig through my stuff for the info that will allow me to get my college transcript. I didn’t think I would need it I guess. It’s got to be at the bottom of one of these piles.

Podcasts & links

No one really cares about my ocd linking system but I link to the stuff I have RSS subs to and I’m using it less, esp. for podcasts. I’ve been using MediaMonkey to sync my iPod and it’s not perfect but it’s better than having to have iTunes installed on my main machine. Anyway, instead of the the links on the sidebar probably no one looks at I’m just going to tell you my favorite episodes. This month it’s the WTF with Doug Rushkoff. Yes, he just interviewed Nick Cave, Thom Yorke and Iggy Pop. You can listen to those too but it feels a little awkward to me when he interviews musicians. And his life seems to be going pretty well now, which makes his monologues infuriating. Who am I supposed to bask in misery with? Tumblr? It’s not the same.

Also the FNGTAC has been pretty good lately. Their website lapsed and got taken over by an anime torrent site. Pretty random.

Apologies to Varg Vikernes?

So…this happened and it turned out to be just a big overreaction to his years of hateful rants, past history of violence, and multiple gun ownership. But somewhere in there was a fact I had got wrong before, which was that he thought the Andre Brevik massacre was actually a bad thing. I thought he dug it. I guess I tapped out reading his essay about it where he was praising the ideology of the guy or maybe when he started blaming Jews for everything which had nothing to do with anything. Apparently he went on to condemn the actual act of killing a bunch of innocent people. Altho there’s the implication that he wasn’t cool with it because the people killed were fellow Norwegians and possibly killing a bunch of innocent people from another country would be totally reasonable. Hopefully he doesn’t take the next logical step and move to America because that would get complicated. A Burzum t-shirt would no longer be a ‘fuck you’ to hypocritical Bourgeoisie morality, it would be a statement of solidarity with the current status quo! Which may have already happened!

Oh shit

I forgot I had published this post this morning to get it in on the right time and didn’t notice I was updating it live each time I saved it throughout the day. Now it’s almost midnight. I’m sure I’m forgetting something but it can’t be more important than a proper post ending but

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Lotta stupid shit going on

Gotten way better at filtering. I mean DOMA getting killed was cool. I mean, pop culture stuff. You know.

People still complicated

This whole NSA thing and people’s reaction to it is pretty interesting. I meant to post this Cory Doctorow interview last month but forgot. Covers the whole thing before the fact pretty much. The whole thing just takes what we already knew and turns it into a drama. Most people only respond to drama I guess. Also, this Salon takedown of Christopher Hitchens is one of those things you can’t really give the ol’ facebook thumbs up to without being misunderstood I think. I like Old Atheism, thanks very much. The Kurt Vonneguts and such. Like, fuckin’ relax, man. I’m reading the Shobogenzo, which is *not* the Buddhist Bible, but let’s say it’s the Buddhist Bible. Been at this thing for a while. It’s denser than I am (lotta footnotes). Buddhism is generally thought of as the most rational of the major religions or not a religion at all, but really, that’s because the literature isn’t that widely read. Try to follow this: if you start out with getting the general philosophy right then you start reading The Book, you come across things you have to immediately disregard as a metaphor or mistranslation, like Buddah, a real historical figure, being 16 feet tall who can shoot laserbeams out of his magical unibrow, or “relevant at the time, I guess”, like the detailed chapter on how to take a shit. Once you start doing that, it’s hard not to think that you might be able to do that with any other religion. I haven’t, but maybe some people could. Maybe.

Some things got less complicated

Altho the banner remains the official name of this blog is now is simply “Jim Haku”. I did this at first because I was setting up a podcast feed for iTunes and it was setting the blog name as the podcast author. Then I decided I did not want the podcast listed under my name, so I set up a feedburner feed for it which I thought I could set the name for which didn’t work, so I changed the feed over to the old J-pop vs. Metal blogspot, which was mostly a graveyard of deleted videos, and started posting the podcast there. I will still post the episodes here but it’s usually going to be a few days later, as it was already. If anyone’s interested I can explain the concept behind the whole thing more but it’s ultimately about appreciating the music so I’m not going to waste my time selling it to people who don’t care. The concept is that the concept isn’t that important.

I also re-renamed my old tumblr “aughtstar.tumblr.com”. Which means the posts on the current tumblr that were reblogged from there that disappeared are back. This was only important for my series of posts on numeric notation. It also meant deleting a lot of old stupid posts. More on that in a minute.

Google Reader RIP

Do people have a problem with “RIP”? Does it seem too religious? Was Google Reader given a full mass? Whatever. I don’t care what anyone says, nothing really works as well as it did, I’ve tried a few. I’m just ok with whatever at this point. I don’t need a perfect RSS reader. It’s almost better. Is any of this that important to catch every single post? I went back into one of the feeds of one of my old tumblrs and it just kept going and going. And some of those posts were great and some were horrifying. And I was really going through and trying to cherry pick the good ones for prosperity but these feeds are all jumbled because I switched around the tumblr urls so many times. And when I was trying to figure out where that one ended and where the new one started I realized that everyone of those posts had been live this entire time. Not that anyone was looking deep in the archives, probably, but it was all there if you did. Wow. One of the tumblrs I had heavily reblogged had all of it’s content purged, which does not happen when a blog is simply deleted. If you’ve noticed, (and you have) there’s still plenty of porn on tumblr, so this was something Worse Than Porn. That’s not what I was reblogging, I think it was stupid idol memes, but you know (hopefully you don’t) some people go too far.

Apology

J-pop vs. Metal Episode 00005, due to extravagant reformatting, had every album link wrong. Altho I do get credit for the Amazon links (in theory, hasn’t happened even once yet) they are really for reference and I take it seriously that they should be accurate. Please report incorrect links.

MYSPACE!

No! I am not dealing with MySpace ever again. If you haven’t noticed (and you probably haven’t) the “new myspace” design was rolled out over all the old pages, deleting almost all of the old content. It’s bullshit. The only reason you’d go back there is nostalgia for how it was, right? I mean it became a joke pretty quick but at one point it was really good for experimental artist and J-indie bands, and it remained useful for a lotta people like that for much longer than for Joe-Jane Average Internetter. Now it’s nothing. Even if people use it again I’m not updating my pages. I’m not with the constantly creating content for these companies that can just be deleted whenever nonsense. Luckily, I took many screencaps…

Proofreading or The Reason I Started Blogging Is Not The Reason I Continue

I have had this problem with proofreading in the past. It just felt so good to type a bunch of bullshit right from my brain and hit ‘publish’. Aw yeah. Now it’s your problem, world! I wasn’t just venting my frustration either, I was sharing my vast knowledge. Check out all this shit I know. So I was blogging to prove that I was smart (but also severely emotionally damaged and unstable, so don’t even bother trying to prove me wrong), now, I blog to prove to myself that I am not smart, to focus on what I don’t know, and to learn to be less damaged and more stable. So when I’m writing now my attitude is that I’m writing for myself to read, so it better be something that I want to read again. This actually allows me to read the posts and see where I can improve without feeling overwhelming self-hatred at my raw brain-words bleeding on the screen. And it’s all so precious you can’t alter it. I’m done with that. I’m done with posting personal stuff anywhere, too. That was an experiment for a lot of years, I was fully into it, it’s over.

I think I’ve raised all the money I was going to but who knows

Took down the Japan Society Earthquake Relief Fund Banner. I think it’s been long enough. Now you got a link to my flickr page which I should really work on. If it bothers you, give them more money:

History of Hawaiian Guitar

I keep meaning to mention this BBC documentary on the History of the Guitar. I posted a link or a reblog on twitter a while ago cause it seemed generally interesting; just went in the watch later queue, but watching it the most interesting part was something I didn’t know about how important Hawaiian music was to the invention of the electric guitar. I definitely would have mentioned that before in my Slack Key Guitar review.

Watch these two videos at once, I guess

Why are these in the draft like this? Might have been tumblr posts I deleted or maybe they’re still there. I’m not checking that again. Right away.

Last.fm blog

I almost forgot that Google Reader had archived my old last.fm blog posts I deleted. Mostly crap lists but this one was interesting, the contents of my old 256M iriver from when I had used it last, presented without comment:

Cursive – Burst & Bloom
Le Tigre – Feminist Sweepstakes
The Go! Team – Thunder Lightning Strike
V/A – Japanese Psychedelic Music 60s

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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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