Feel like I gained some traction this month. So much so I almost forgot about finishing this roundup post as I worked on a couple other drafts. I don’t even know what happened this month. This election bullshit is destroying my brain. I can barely write another sentence about it. A possibly deadly hurricane is approaching and not the metaphorical kind. The electric company has just robophoned informing everyone to expect power outages. My first thought: better get that tumblr queue in order.

• I have no idea what I am doing.

  Just gonna leave that there.

• The bright side.

  The conscious awareness of mental impairment is clearly an improvement. After I re-listened to the old podcasts when I transferred the archive to this domain (one of my domains is expiring and it’s not worth keeping), I can’t believe I was just putting those out there like that. I was drinking when I made them but not really that much at that point for it to be the excuse. I really sound brain damaged, and that’s ones I didn’t delete. And I completely forgot I did this, but all throughout the thing, I’m giving out the band email. Because I couldn’t get into the gmail then I guess? Which is probably why I started getting press releases for Japanese bands there. Alright.

• YouTubes

  I finally started straitening out my youtube situation. I made a new account when I was locked out of the old one but now have access to both, same with gmail. Leaving the videos that are still there on the old one but only adding videos to the new one. Moved all the subscriptions over there too. You don’t really “friend” people on there anymore you just subscribe or add them as a contact, which is just the new spam now and totally unnecessary, unless you are a spammer. Why not subscribe? Please. Thank you.

  
  Current BGM. Nothing to do with anything just in my queue. Not exactly calming.

• Beards

  
  

  OK.

  Look, a lotta people got beards now. Whatever. I went on a tangent. You know who don’t have beards? The people in Beardsville, most of them. At least half of them can’t even grow beards, probably more. The rest…well, only a few of them really have to grow beards just to prove it can be done. Having a friend with a beard is fine enough. And I realize this whole thing sounds ridiculous to some people in a argument in favor of guitar solos when so many metal dudes have “metal beards” now. How recent is that tho? (Seriously, I ask these rhetorical-sounding questions to get out of doing the research myself.) Still seems pretty new to me. And, uh, apologies to ZZ Top I guess.

  Oh, and Freeway did a track with Malik B. That’s cool.

• Demise of Hydra Head

  Didn’t get to this last month somehow. Pretty bleak. Worth mentioning. Here’s an interview with Aaron Turner about it and his beard.

• Japanese record industry is really…something.

  I thought there was some news about it becoming the world’s largest, just recently edging out America. Can’t find that anywhere now. According to this article about the horrible new anti-piracy law it’s still number two. Maybe someone read a chart wrong, or there’s some projection that it’s headed there. Again, I want to know and would rather someone just tell me.

• Notation project really a note-naming project

  I need to do a longer post on this. But I mentioned an argument over the key of D#. Take a look at the key of D# with an explanation here. The songs in question are written in the Eb. It’s the same notes. I’m not really coming up with a new way to write out music in any kind of practical way, but it is a more practical and precise way of naming the notes. It’s a more intuitive and direct way of seeing the intervals in a scale.

  Real quick, the Aolian mode or A minor scale:

  A-B-C-D-E-F-G
  0-1-3-5-7-8-10

  It looks like the simplest scale in normal notation only because it’s the first one they came up with. It was most common when they started naming notes. That is the only reason for the entire letter-based note system, it’s completely arbitrary. The notes for the D#/Eb major scale then are 6-8-10-11-2-3-5. %

Found an old Myspace blog post digging through the old band RSS, it’s more appropriate to repost here. It’s a list of people I bought stuff off of. There was someone on there with a list of albums for sale that I felt was just fucking with people so I called their bluff and bought one, because I was also fucking with people but I had real CDs I was giving away for free. Of course I never got anything, or my money back. After a period of public antagonism that probably went on longer than it should, I decided to thank the people who had no problem at all exchanging money for goods. I’ve rewritten and updated the list, I could add more people but there’d be no end to it. This is more like a where-are-they-now of that original list:

3Xfx pedals

Still around but not very active on the social sites. Crazy stuff. The pedal I got from them is so crazy apparently no one else wanted it cause they didn’t make anymore.

ASSACRE

Bandcamp), but he’s moved on from one-man conceptual-performance art metal bands; the quintessential type of Myspace band that’s half-joke but was able to find some kind of audience outside of an immediate group of friends.

Autonomous

Gone without a trace. Got some band buttons from them, really nice. Haven’t seen another place offering transparent backgrounds.

Azure Emote

Another one man metal band but less of a joke, Mike Hrubovcak is also another artist who does artwork for other bands.. Met this guy a few times but we’re not friends to where I get free CDs or anything. And yet, for money, a physical copy of his recordings can be obtained directly from him in a timely manner. Definitely worth buying too, he puts a lot into the packaging of course. Moved his business to Reverb Nation which Myspace made almost obsolete…at one point.

Bei Bei

The other type of unique artist on Myspace are the completely serious Classical instrumentalists. It’s a lot rarer to interact with these people on other networks the same. Bei Bei plays Chinese Zither and she’s got a regular website but that’s not much fun (right). Got a CD from her with a personalized autograph, nice touch.

Brad Warner

Think I bought his book from him before he joined Myspace, whatever. He’s good for it. Altho you can get his stuff on Amazonnow of course, which I recommend, but what do I know. He was not a fan of the Myspace. Moved on to his own site.

Bubble/Gum

Inactive. They might have broken up. Bought their one CD and they threw in a 7″ after sending them a money order with a hilarious note I do not think they found funny but what can you do.

Candle-Ends

Purveyor of spooky music, and a spookier podcast. On his site.

George Korein

Took down his personal page although his several other bands are still on the site. On bandcamp.

Kenny Mooney

I’ve got a CD copy of industrial project Novak’s In Ruins with a different cover than on his new site but you can’t argue with a free download. I’ve tried.

Nick Millevoi

I believe Circles is no more. This guy has a lot of projects which can be kept up with in blog form.

Matt Garfield

Mose Giganticus mastermind is now signed to Relapse, but used to sell his own CDs direct to you, the CD buying public. By which I mean me. Also he had another band Hulk Smash who also had a CD, purchased painlessly.

Joseph Suglia

Clearly an instigator, yet comes through with the product. Bought his book Watch Outtwice, because I lent the first edition to a friend who was so disturbed by it he threw it away. I try not to lend him things anymore but that’s a different story. Yeah you can get it on Kindle now but the paperback of that edition us really nice. Seems to have run out of steam after making a straight-to-video movie adaptation of the book which is another thing all together. Most likely to comment on this post.

Jon Solomon

WPRB DJ Jon Solomon is mostly know as a WPRB DJ, But he also runs Comedy Minus One and My Pal God Records. You can buy records directly out of his basement. You should really follow him on twitter.

Pirate Satellite

I don’t know how this happens in 2012 but I think there’s another band using this name now. Members are now The Glass Bees.

PxOxFx

Planet of Friends was a one-off benefit comp. Mean to review it, some good Russian hardcore and not-so-good rap-rock. Interesting tho. It was for a good cause but not sure how much money they made.

Pothole Skinny

Know these guys but you know how that goes. Still around but very sporadic. Cover of one CD was handpainted. And…it looks they’re on bandcamp, wow that’s a lot of stuff. I should talk to these guys more. Reclusive dudes.

Secretary

Bari sax player Moist Paula and co. is on facebook and such.

Seething Grey

Know the bass player through the Giant Robot message board, but he doesn’t run the site so I bought it off one of the other guys. This is like a almost local to me Jersey band I should have known already but didn’t until I met the one guy. One of those weird things. They were pretty good. Apparently…the one guy (who I don’t know) is making new songs. Not sure what that’s about. The old stuff is on Amazon digital.and CD Baby.

Wheatboy Dave

Dave has probably created and deleted more myspace profiles than anyone. His experimental band MFM changes what their initials stand for every time they do something. One of those is or was on bandcamp, but I can’t find it now. He’s on youtube but who knows how long? The easiest way to contact him is by postcard. Or facebook, I guess.

Yah Mos Def

Seems like they broke up. One of the guys is in Instamatic, but that is not the same at all, it’s just a regular band. I guess they were too extreme. And they were probably bummed they had to change their name. Sucks. That album still rules.

Vanessa Rossetto

I bought one of her records and when I didn’t get it after a month I told her and rather than shamelessly mocking me she sent me two more. Astonishing. You can get them now through the site for her label Music Appreciation Records.

I hate to admit feeling a little nostalgic for a site that never worked that well. Absolutely nothing works on there anymore. I can’t even delete inbox spam, which people don’t even bother to send lately. Supposedly there’s some radical redesign coming, I do not see that working. But when everyone was using it, some people made it worth using. And I think there were some strengths to the way it was originally designed that other sites have missed. They’ve all gone for a real-time feed-based system which favors the noisiest members: It encourages meaningless activity. This was originally only a small part of myspace (the bulletins) that you didn’t even have to look at to use the site, you could just go through your friends list. It’s almost calming just to think of this simpler time…of course this was all because they hadn’t figured out the best way to maximize people’s time spent on this kind of site. The feed is distracting and addictive. It keeps you coming back to a site there’s no reason to visit more than once a day and makes it harder to just look up what you might be looking for that day. It’s diabolical bullshit, man. You gotta not get sucked into it. I hate to see people falling off that can’t deal with it all but you can’t blame them either. And there was that whole NewsCorp thing. Pure evil. I don’t know what else to say. Support the arts. Have a great summer.

It did? You didn’t? Well, keep in touch.
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So it turns out

• the RSS feed

  for this blog doesn’t preserve list formatting. Can’t do much about that, except not start out

• posts as a list

  …I like this format, but I’ve got to to think about the RSS readers, who probably don’t even click through most times. I could just stop truncating the posts, but then I gotta click on the settings, two more clicks to get to feed settings and another click to change it. I’m exhausted just thinking about it. You know how it is.

• One of the dogs I watch died

  
  

  RIP Flounder

  Old age pretty much. That’s him a few years ago. I need a real job.

• Flickr

  Flickr lets you pay quarterly now, so I got the whole thing up again, including the postcards. Hold on tho, aren’t some of my postcards Yayoi Kusuma ripoffs? Hm. I think it was a coincidence at first, maybe we both have a similar nervous condition. It’s just something I’ve done since I was a kid and I started doing it on postcards, just the black on white dots. Then I saw her stuff and figured I should mix it up a bit and I did the layers of colors. Now it seems she also did that, but it was years after I did. Her’s are 5 ft across tho. She wins. This raises the question how far the artist is willing to go for their art. I’m willing to live with my parents for a few years and no more; she lives full-time in a mental hospital. I’m not competing with that.

• 2003-2005, Part Deux

  Man, what happened in 2005 that postcards didn’t seem that interesting anymore? Oh right, Youtube. That’s what I remembered with that note. I wasn’t buying much J-music after P5 broke up. There were still a few rock bands I liked, but I had no idea what was going on in Japan anymore. Lately it seems there’s not as much good stuff coming out if you compare it to around 2005, but really it wasn’t more stuff then, you were just hearing about it all at once. Those first Halcali videos, for example, were already two years old when we saw them. Most of those Hello Project videos were even older. Of course following the stuff in real time was going to be a disappointment.

• It Matters What You Are Like

  I keep running into the quote from High Fidelity, “it’s not what you’re like, but what you like that really matters” lately. Nerdist Chris Hardwick argues in favor, writer and bibliophile Kristopher Jansma argues against. I probably like more of the same things that Hardwick likes, yet Jansma is clearly smarter. Which side to choose? Over the years I’ve found basing friendships on matching interest lists to be a complete disaster. I think the way you like things matters more than what those things are at this point. Unless the things you like are Republicans and racism. There’s no good way to like those things. Also child molestation. Can’t like that. That’s a dealbreaker. Lotta things you can’t like, ok.

• “Third Culture”

  So I just threw this term out there last month without much context. It’s not really used that widely I guess and you get a few different meaning when you google it. Like this one:

  In 1959 C.P. Snow published a book titled The Two Cultures. On the one hand, there were the literary intellectuals; on the other, the scientists. He noted with incredulity that during the 1930s the literary intellectuals, while no one was looking, took to referring to themselves as “the intellectuals,” as though there were no others. This new definition by the “men of letters” excluded scientists such as the astronomer Edwin Hubble, the mathematician John von Neumann, the cyberneticist Norbert Wiener, and the physicists Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, and Werner Heisenberg.

  How did the literary intellectuals get away with it? First, people in the sciences did not make an effective case for the implications of their work. Second, while many eminent scientists, notably Arthur Eddington and James Jeans, also wrote books for a general audience, their works were ignored by the self-proclaimed intellectuals, and the value and importance of the ideas presented remained invisible as an intellectual activity, because science was not a subject for the reigning journals and magazines.

  In a second edition of The Two Cultures, published in 1963, Snow added a new essay, “The Two Cultures: A Second Look,” in which he optimistically suggested that a new culture, a “third culture,” would emerge and close the communications gap between the literary intellectuals and the scientists. In Snow’s third culture, the literary intellectuals would be on speaking terms with the scientists. Although I borrow Snow’s phrase, it does not describe the third culture he predicted. Literary intellectuals are not communicating with scientists. Scientists are communicating directly with the general public. Traditional intellectual media played a vertical game: journalists wrote up and professors wrote down. Today, third-culture thinkers tend to avoid the middleman and endeavor to express their deepest thoughts in a manner accessible to the intelligent reading public.

  If you thought that’s what I was talking about, wow, you’re giving me way too much credit. That’s form this article by John Brockman. This is a great concept which is why I’m quoting it, but I’m trying to place myself on an accurate intellectual scale. If a pseudo-intellectual is 1 that thinks he’s a 10, I’m think I’m a legit 2 or 3. I’m smart enough to appreciate the value of people smarter than me but not much smarter than that. I could go back to school for English Lit. or Science and raise my number, but I’m going in a different direction with this Third Culture thing.

  So, I first heard this term from Momus:

  …Tokyo as a mecca for a certain kind of international creative, as a place where a sort of “third culture”, a blend of East and West…

  Simply explained. It’s also used in Utada’s bio:

  She is a third culture singer, composer, arranger, and record producer in Japan and United States.

  They just dropped that in there like it’s totally normal thing to say, didn’t they? Seems like the same meaning as well. Momus almost seems like he’s inventing it, but when I saw the Utada bio, I figured it’s a normal term for something I’ve been into a long time, like it would include most things covered by Giant Robot. I started using it, but I think I won’t anymore.

  “Third Culture” as the Utada bio uses it really comes from “Third Culture Kid”, which is not really an East/West thing, it’s much broader. Latino-Americans could belong in the classification as much as Asian-Americans, or any hyphenated person. This definition depends on circumstance more than intentional mixing of cultures. Most large American cities have a Third Culture population. Tokyo is just one specific type of it. By Momo’s definition, any J-pop singer is part of a third culture (altho he would be very selective about which of them to mention, he probably doesn’t think much of Utada’s music). But Hikki was born in America. She’s authentically both American and Japanese but also somewhat not 100% either. That’s Third Culture. This is what I’m relating to. It’s not really about wanting to a “part” of “it”, but more a way things worked out already and I just want to go with it. I’d like to be around people who just get it.

• They Shooting/Crazy friends

  For the record, I’m not in favor of mass shootings. I don’t care how unpopular it makes me. Back when I was in college I ran into one of my “crazy friends” from high school. I don’t use the term lightly. I have a few friends from high school days still, but the rest of them I don’t really talk about much. This person was really excited to see me. “Did you hear the good news?” Oh no, they’re not like religious now are they? “Um, no, what.”

  “Columbine!”

  I don’t know wtf was said after that, I just tried to finish my retail transaction as quickly as possible and got the hell out there. I was a pretty outspoken fan/creator of some fucked up shit in high school and often wound in the guidance counselor’s office because of it. I got a weird sense of humor. I didn’t have any plans to hurt anybody. Neither did actual members of the “Trench Coat Mafia” apparently. Even Marilyn Manson had some real shit to say about it that made actual sense. Because he’s not a sociopath. Never saw that person again and didn’t want to; I made a serious effort after that not to hang around my old neighborhood.

• Marc and Tom show

  I got an iPod Touch as a birthday gift. I wanted one just to be able to carry around my Anki decks, but now I have access to the iTunes store. I even had gift cards piling up for years but I’m such an asshole about hating having iTunes on my computer I wouldn’t do it. (I used another computer to get the Anki decks on there…that app is totally worth it btw.) Even tho this show is from May is was still in the back of my mind and was the first thing I went for. (Because I still had a balance after buying the Anki app…I mean $2.99 just to hear these dudes talk for an hour? Just because they’ve supplied countless hours of entertainment for free? Give me fucking break.) Well, I’m glad I did. I think it’s great. They talk about Jersey a lot so maybe your mileage will vary. But there’s a lot of other relevant stuff in there. I just can’t get enough of non-insane people having a real discussion. Literally, it does not happen to me with any frequency and it is destroying me psychologically. Ba-dum-dum.

• The K-pop

  I’m not going to blog about K-popm but everyone’s talking about this Psy song, I don’t really need to get into it here, (I got into it on the Robot Lounge facebook page, I hate that discussion has moved there; that’s another rant) but I love this version with Hyuna from 4Minute:
  

  That’s just a good song, man. The male/female tradeoff is very old-school K-pop, I love that. People are comparing the song way too much with LMFAO because the production of the beat is similar but LMFAO are derivative as fuck! Every part of their songs and videos comes from somewhere else. And the choruses are weak. Melody is the content in a pop song. Asian pop never forgets that. Production is the surface. And if you look into the lyrics and all that, it’s all a really complete thing. Lotta levels going on. This guy rules. If I was trying to learn Korean again I would listen to more K-pop. It’s kinda weird it’s getting popular now, it’s like when ska got big.

• Continuing Music Theory, History & Quantum Performance

  This is a long ass post but I need to keep reminding myself to get back to this notation project I started a couple years ago. I posted a link on tumblr er, reblogged…this is too complicated right?

  Well so was this which leads to this which reminded me of this.

  Then there was this whole article which reminded me about the numerical notation system and it looks like I deleted some of my notes when I set the old tumblr to private. That was a really wonky way of doing that anyway, obviously. I started a new tag here.

  Now I gotta fix that somehow. Maybe after I do some record reviews. Yeah, that’s gotta be more important.

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