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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Oh man.

News

Sorry to anyone directly affected by various horrible events. I was not (this time) so don’t feel I should comment.

Categories

• Obviously, there is a new category for the J-pop vs. Metal podcast. This gives it an mp3 only feed that I’m going to try to send to iTunes.
• ［ｍｅｔａ］ —> ドッグチーズI’m not explaining this.

Inbox Zero

Deleted about 5,000 e-mails. Most of it from various mailing lists that never get read or unsubscribed from. It just builds up. I don’t see any reason to archive most email but I haven’t done a full cleanout in awhile. I was feeling pretty good until I got towards the end and there’s Beastie Boys list stuff and then there’s stuff about Adam Yauch dealing with cancer. So here’s this great dude, dying, and being kinda nice about it…and what have I done, read some email?

Postcards

Last month I forgot to mention I started doing quarterly postcards. Next one goes out June 21st. I can explain later.

Lang-8

I’ve had to take a break blogging on lang-8 to even out my correcting ratio which is not really enforced, but they remind you about it every time you try to post now. Which is fair. If you’re learning Japanese or any language you should try it out.

Other

• Kyary Pamyu Pamyu played NYC. Was I really going to that? Could’ve been fun. I think if I really apply myself at this blogging thing, like if I spent 16 hours a day online instead of 12, eventually, I could probably score some tickets to shows. What if I got to see a show like that every month? Let’s see…16 x 30 = 480 hours a month, so…a ticket is maybe $48…I could make 10 cents an hour!
• The Hummingbird Notation project is something I’d like to get into. I’ve always had a problem sight-reading. I don’t know if it can be integrated with my idea for naming the notes with numbers but I keep coming back to that. Need to write something up longer about that.
• Watched Dave Grohl’s Sound City doc, which is worth it. This guy runs down a problem with part of the underlying ideology of recording being presented. (He has a higher opinion of the music itself.) I was a little disappointed at the level of musician banter. Everybody’s so “about the music” they forget to say anything interesting outside of that context. The only good line in the thing is from Paul McCartney. Grohl says he wishes recording vocals was always easy to which Paul replies, “it is”. Of course it is for him, he’s fucking Paul McCartney. That’s the joke. Jokes, guys? Everybody’s complimenting each other, he compliments himself. It’s f— ah, forget it, musicians don’t get jokes. You guys are like math teachers.
• This blog has a facebook page, but it’s mostly what I post on twitter, which is mostly what I post on tumblr. Whatever.

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