I had all these links about the election but screw it, there’s not much I can add. One thing that stuck out to me was a video that was getting passed around of Romney supporters that had some people freaking out when the polls started going that way. Some of those people did seem crazy or dumb, but check out the guy with three teeth and the hillbilly beard. That’s real America. He ain’t buyin’ it. I knew Romney would lose when I saw that. All those polls were bullshit. Most people are not brainwashed. Can’t we agree that all politicians are awful again? That use to unite this country (sort of). I think we’re getting back on track.

There’s kinda a lot of reasons not to like Obama that are not racist or made up. I don’t need to get into it. He’s just a politician. I voted for him if there’s some kind of tragic misunderstanding. Not because I think he will make things better but stop them from getting worse, as much as that is possible. There’s other things to get to.

Rockaway Beach. Pretty fucked up. Closer to home for me literally and figuratively was the damage to the Atlantic City area where I’m originally from, but no indie filmmakers live there. Southwest Jersey had almost no damage. Power didn’t even go out.

The before/after in areas of the shore is almost tsunami-bad. The water didn’t go very far inland of course. I’m not a fan of this area in general, but there’s that.

So what else is going on?

• JLPT SUNDAY SUNDAY SUNDAY

  Just about cleared out the Core 2000 series on Anki and I’m up to Step 3 in the 6000s. Lost some progress botching the update to Anki 2 on the iPod but I was only through Step 1 at that point. I kept the 2000s on my laptop which I didn’t update so I didn’t lose any of that. Been like two years now almost working on those. Guess that’s what it takes. All I’m gonna say so I don’t jinx it.

• Why do I keep doing this bullshit?

  The blogging I mean. Or maybe the Japanese too. I feel like Japan is still important. Blogging is almost definitely less important, but I feel compelled to keep something going. I don’t have a goal of being a full-time paid writer, never did. For a little bit it seemed worth going for but it sure doesn’t right now. I just need to write to organize myself and I need my own space to do it in.

• Facebook, etc.

  I’ve got sharing buttons at the bottom of the posts now, just because I could with Jetpack 2.0. Great post by Warren Ellis on fb pages & Google+.

• Bandcamp

  They’ve just started with personal pages and I think it’s already better that whatever the new MySpace is gonna be. I put my old Hakujin albums on there. Just the ones I felt were real albums, but even those, just barely. Some of it sounds way different because you just upload wavs to the thing and it encodes what you choose when you download. Some of the stuff was available in a severely jacked mp3 mastering to make it more like a noise record. Some of the other stuff I lost the wavs to so I just resaved the mp3s to wavs, which could sound really bad when it’s re-encoded. See if you can tell the difference if you care. To me, it wasn’t worth working on any longer than I have. The point was just to get something out there.

• Where was this going?

  Here’s what what’s been sitting in my draft for a couple weeks, like I was going to start the post like this:

  So I’m sitting here, listening to Elliot Carter and the can of seltzer on the arm of my futon, just drank. The carbonation of seltzer creates a small cave-like micro-environment when the can is just emptied, the bubbled water clings to the inner top of the can and slowly drips down for several minutes. It goes nicely with the harpsichord and all that shit.

  Hey this could be the start of a NaNoWriMo novel! Not this year I guess. I made the album 108 for NaNoWriMo one year. That’s why it’s like that. There’s an official National Solo Album month now but there wasn’t then I don’t think I’d do it again. Not sure I’ll record under that name again. The whole concept was largely based on drunkenness, which I’m kinda over.

• Back to the storm for a minute:

  Recovering Eyebeam’s Archive from DEEPSPEED media on Vimeo.

  Yeah, not to minimize that people died and lost their homes, but the art district also got hit pretty bad. This, along with the last few years seeing how bands and artists have dealt with going digital and whether to have a label or not, had made me think about what’s worth it. I think it’s DIY all the way. This is in line with what Martin Atkins is saying in case you were just blowing that off as something else. Also, in order to do this effectively, it’s important that the artist not die. That’s really the only way to keep control of the stuff. And live away from water. You used to be able to trust other people (and traditional flood maps), but look at this mess!

• Instagram

  Yes I’m on it and there’s profiles there too now. As a site it’s not great and I still think most of the filters are silly, but in the smartphone format it’s a pretty cool way to do photos.

• Blip.fm/FUZZ

  I don’t know why I’m even mentioning this but I got invited to FUZZ a while back. I don’t think either one has a future. It’s cool but there’s too much other stuff that’s doing a better job. I’ll probably expand on some of the stuff I posted on blip as posts.

• Streaming nonsense

  Here’s something else that was sitting in my draft. I think I had a point about streaming music. It’s a nice few songs.
  

• Cloud Atlas

  I didn’t have any intention of seeing this movie in the theater. I wound up seeing in IMAX. It was the first movie playing at the first theater I could find after I couldn’t get into the Rollins show in Trenton. (There’s no way I was paying Ticketmaster charges for a show in a museum auditorium.)

  Whatever. I liked the movie overall. It’s long as hell but there’s no time no notice, and it looked great on the big, big screen. (Except for the, um, makeup. Hold on.) The most interesting idea in the movie was that at some point a fascist government has suppressed all of the world’s philosophies, then it collapses in some kind of revolution which itself eventually fails but the only thing that survives of all that is this one person’s Freshman Philosophy 101 speech. That’s a great concept. I’m not sure the irony of that was fully intentional, those parts of the movie were taking themselves way to seriously. It’s like Monty Python’s Meaning of Life with the funny parts kept to a minimum so as not to distract from the Meaning. (But it reminded me even more of a serious version of The Mighty Boosh. Parts are straight up ridiculous.)

  Then there was the yellowface. I like their quote about “playing both brows against the middle”. But this was taking it a little too far.

  It was weird how they acted like it was not as issue at all in the press. Jim Sturgess went so far as pretending that no one had ever put those two words together before.

  Now, I think within the context of this movie it…kinda made sense? It’s almost like they started with that idea, which is terrible and seemingly impossible to pull off, and made the whole movie to win a bet. Like the part that (*spoiler alert*) folded in ideas from Matrix-themed satire of factory farming The Meatrix). If it’s not even about just humans, how could race be an issue? “Oh, in that case…sure.” I didn’t even get that the Sturgess character was supposed to be Korean OR that it was the same actor as his other characters. He just looks like a different white dude with funny eyes. Has anyone mentioned that the real Asians in the movie all have double-lid surgery? Couldn’t white dudes be getting single-lid surgery a hundred years in the future? Like, it’s ludicrous but in that story it’s possible. But still, you’d think it’d look better.

  Look at these motherfuckers. No one’s eyes look like that.

• Here’s a Korean…

  

  Gangnam Style went double platinum, just before an appearance on the American Music Awards featuring MC Hammer. Which seems backhanded yet somewhat appropriate. Man, people really like that dance.

  But is PSY really phantom horseman of the Apocalypse? What happens when he hits a billion views? Let’s back up for a minute where I have Google “American Music Awards”, because I’m looking at K-pop on this thing. Seems it’s some kind of award show. But check out the “Artist of the Decade”—goes along fine until you hit the 90s. Garth Brooks? How? I think I can make sense of this: in the 50s it became acceptable for white people to perform Rock, a “black music”. In the 60s it became acceptable for British people to perform it. In the 70s, it became ok to actually be black, and in the 80s it became ok to be gay (rounding off ok Jacko to “gay”). But in the 90s it became ok to just live in your own separate reality and pretend like that was the only important thing going on. Thus, Garth Brooks is equally as valid as Nirvana or the Backstreet Boys or Biggie. No one thing really dominated, it’s entirely subjective. They even gave up on it after that. The 00s should have gone to Asians, right? We’re just getting to them now. (Or everyone else is at least.) Things aren’t progressing out of control as much as lagging behind slightly. But it’s a logical progression of increasing acceptance of marginal groups into the mainstream.
  

  Just in time for it all to end or whatever. %

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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