Chotto matte a minute…. There I fixed it.

• Death

  Sooner or later, sitting or standing, death will come for all. Happy Friday! I have not yet died as of this blog post, which is the first of my new meta-roundup format; who cares…well, I do. I care a lot. About a lot of things. We’ll talk about it. Can you deal with idea of pretending this is like talking? I don’t have to do that whole thing where I explain the concept of written communication, do I? There’s a comment section. I have email, and twitter and all that. It’s not that one-way. But I will be dead eventually, so don’t hesitate too much.

  The guy from the Frogs died, what a freak thing. And Ernest Borgnine died that was not a freak thing. I always liked him cause he seemed to be not really belong in Hollywood at all. Ugly face, ugly name. And he was old since I was a little kid. He was great.

• Crazy, crazy shit

  This Harley Flanagan stabbing thing seemed pretty crazy before the Batman shooting thing. I highly recommend the John Joseph auto-bio, The Evolution of a Cro-Magnonif you are looking more into the background of that and I would also recommend not shooting a bunch of random people but people do what they do.

• Shonen Knife vs. Pizzicato Five

  A recurring theme is the two groups that started my obsession with J-pop in general. I had some thoughts about this SK live show at Johnny Brenda’s vs the Ustream of Maki Nomiya’s 30th anniversary concert thing, but it’s gonna be too long. Seperate posts.

• Cleanup

  A few posts ago, I referred to an unidentified person as “a stupid asshole”. I’m not sure I’m totally wrong in my assessment, but this was a bad idea for two reasons: 1.) When I really think about it, are they stupider or more of an asshole than the average person? Not really. Maybe even less so. This would make me the stupider, bigger asshole. 2.) So this was clearly about some personal disagreement that couldn’t be settled privately but not extreme enough to call for some kind of public shaming. There’s got to be a dozen, at least, of people I know I’ve had some kind of problem with who I would not call stupid assholes, but who probably think I just called them stupid assholes. In fact, it’s possible everyone of those people, except the person I meant, thought I meant them. The person I meant it for would never think I meant them. This is the whole cause of the situation. Or maybe I’m wrong. The truth is, I just don’t get it. I don’t get what they’re doing or why they’re doing it. And I hate to admit that.

  I also mentioned “not fitting in” at art school. I didn’t care about fitting in at art school…fucking…that is the whole point! It’s all people that don’t fit in, everyone thinks they’re the shit, everyone is awesome by they’re own personal definition of awesome and no one else’s. You’d have to be a normally functioning human being to not fit in at art school, and I was not. I fit in perfectly.

  I really liked it for a while. There were no math courses in this school. I hated math. But really I just didn’t get math. All this art bullshit no one gets, I can deal with with any of that. Or if I don’t understand it, I want to. I want to spend time with it. Now I’m seeing I need to spend more time with math. I was wrong to hate math, and I was wrong to hate this unnamed blogger. But only one of these is worth spending any more time on.

  You know, I think I might have taken the whole conceptual thing a little too seriously. Imagine that.

  I also said I didn’t care about anyone more famous than Joe Strummer. I was kinda in rant mode, but I thought about it and everyone I really care about is at most equal in fame to Joe Strummer, or dead. Ernest Borgnine, for example. Or better perhaps, Joey Ramone. Never met him, he’s more famous. I guess it’s subjective. Or Lemmy, or Thurston Moore, they’re all about the same league. Even in art school my idol were like, Frederick Sommer and Chris Burden, or long dead people like Duchamp and Dali, or comicbook people. I think if I met David Bowie or someone like that it’d be cool, but wouldn’t mean as much as Joe Strummer, that’s all I’m saying. Does being obsessed with J-famous people seem like a contradiction? The most famous person in Japan still averages out to something like Strummerfame. My wildest dreams do not include exceeding Strummerfame. Why would you want to be more famous than that? You’d be fucked pretty much. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe to make it, like as a drummer, for example, you need to be Questlove and be on a tv show 5 nights a week. Maybe I’m fucked anyway. We’re all fucked anyway. I still like Questlove. This whole thing is whatever, forget it.

• Japan

  Heard the new Halcali, somehow without paying the ridiculous full price for it. I think if I go to Japan now, I get arrested right off the plane. Was it worth it? I dunno. Some of the new songs are pretty good, (like the song “Questlove”, which I thought was funny at first, cause do they even know who that is? But then I remembered he’s famous for real now.) but the inclusion of the old songs was such a horrible idea and not done well, if there’s even a way to do that well, it’s impossible to give the thing a thumbs up. I really hate how Sony has handled this group. You know their first album is out of print now? Why didn’t they reissue it? They only bought rights to some of the songs? Makes no sense. I think they’re last album also had some pretty good songs, but then if you listened to it back-to-back with the old stuff, it’s like, wow, that was so much better. This album does that work of disappointing yourself for you. No reason for it.

  Btw, I’ve ended my old blog in Japanese at Netlog and started on at Lang-8. The big difference is I’m going to be trying to write more grammatically correct instead of using a lot of heavy wordplay to give the illusion I have a more advanced grip on the language than I actually do. (I don’t see a lot of reason to talk about learning Japanese in English anymore on here.)

  Then there’s still the question of why I keep going with it. There’s a couple articles about how teaching English is not the greatest gig anymore. I hadn’t really thought of that until recently so if that’s really not a good option it’s not a lifelong dream crushed. It was always about translation or something like that. It’s about the 3rd culture thing, just being a part of that.

• Tags

  I need to tag the posts better. Deleted some joke tags, probably’ll delete all the meta tags (and most of the old meta posts.) I am not tagging these roundup posts because who is going to want to read these later. It’s mostly for my own mental health.

• Links

  Google killed the Friend Connect thing but I’m still using the Blogger dashboard for the blogspot…AHHHHH!! Whatever. Some still that way and some don’t. The one’s that work don’t get a direct link. Why do I insist on doing it this way? The damn list would be a mile long. And then there more links on the tumblr that don’t have a working RSS, or I can’t deal with it on a regular basis. It’s a system.

• 2003-2005

  No idea what this note means in my draft. I meant to mention something that happened in these years, but I can’t think of anything relevant to right now. I guess I was doing a lot of postcard mail art at that time. Been meaning to get back into it, maybe that was it. I wasn’t doing much else then except the postcards, so I think that was part of the excitement about it. Probably impossible to recapture now. But I still do have some addresses. Email me to get added to what is right now a very short list because I have lost the old one.

• Olympics

  Yeah, I don’t care about the Olympics. It’s Friday night, I’m home writing a blog post; my tv’s not even plugged in. Been like that a while.

• Fuck this whole thing, maybe

  I need to do these Thursday night, first of all. And I’m going to keep doing short meta posts on individual subjects. (Everything that isn’t a record review or a list is a meta post.) Also, fuck it. Fuck the internet, man.

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Still going with this format until I figure out something else. Think I can make it monthly.

• Still trying not to be a dick

  It’s…not easy. When you’ve got nothing else going on, I mean.

• Being an Artist, man

  Love this post of lost Kids in the Hall sketches. Am I kinda like this guy without the success (and work involving tits)? At times. Should I include more tits? Maybe, I’ve got nothing against them. Literally, it has been awhile. Look, it’s just you and me here. No one else reads this blog. I’m just trying to keep myself from going insane.

• How serious is art supposed to be anyway

  I have has this post about Kenny G lying around and you can think all about all that stuff if you inclined. I tend to go back and forth, from thinking people are depriving themselves if they don’t subject themselves to Le High Avant, to wanting to deprive myself of it at least most of the time. But what I really wanted to point out is the Japanese counting comedian I mentioned a few weeks ago in connection with Serious Joke Art Poetry Piece 1-100 by Charles Bernstein has a Japanese Serious Art conterpart, Shigeru Matusi. He sounds like Sekai No Nabeatsu with a straight face combined with Yip Yip aliens from Sesame Street. How Serious is he? I have no idea. I dropped out of art school for reason. (Not really.) My parents aren’t rich enough for me to really care, I guess? I don’t fit in. I got messed-up problems. I’m working on it.

  Ken also seems to have started a footwear trend.

• The Twitters

  Did I sound too harsh about the twitters? I like it fine. Facebook is what it is too. I’m still trying to take down one stupid asshole just to impress a girl who does not give a shit anymore and there’s always collateral damage when I do it. Or it would if anyone else read this blog. You get it. I just can’t help myself when I get going. Sorry. Pretty dumb. Over it now.

• HearJapan

  HearJapan deserves it’s own post. I’ve gotten a few things from them and there’s nothing good about losing a legit source of music. I’m a little critical of how the site worked, but dealing with these Japanese record companies is apparently (needlessly) complicated and with no American companies re-releasing stuff anymore you’ve got to give anyone credit for trying.

• WFMU and jobs part II

  I don’t mean to crap on the WFMU movie at all. It might be an effective recruitment tool, it just wouldn’t recruit me. I just went there one day cause I was between jobs and my band had broken up so I was just listening to the station all day anyway. I was way cooler than I imagined in a lot of ways. In other ways, it was mostly stuffing envelopes, but I met a lot of really cool people. I met Joe Strummer. No one that is more famous than Joe Strummer matters to me. If I cared about fame and money, why would I work so hard for such a hardcore non-profit anti-commercial establishment, overwhelmingly dedicated to the obscure?

  I was kinda mad that no one could help me get another job up there because I wanted to stay in North Jersey. But I was a complete drunken wreck except when I was at the station, it probably saved my life. I can’t blame anyone for noticing how unreliable I was in real life. I’ve quit every job I had without notice except for my current (toilet-cleaning) one which is way I’ve been holding on to it. (I do other stuff beside clean toilets, it’s general maintenance.) I’m just stating facts. I don’t think even the worst parts of the job are that horrible compared to 7.5 hours a day on a register is what I’m saying.

  I do also live with my family at the moment. That’s another story all together. There are some people who say you can’t really live a full, independent life while living with your parents. Those people are right. There’s no excuse for this bullshit. But when I move and I apply for some new jobs, they are gonna care that I actually kept a job for a few years, right? Before this I had no chance. WaWa does not care that I volunteered at WFMU. ShopRite does not care. Maybe if this movie gets big online they might though. Could be good for me then, I just don’t see WaWa managers donating money to the station because of that. I don’t think it makes it real for people who don’t care already. I hope I’m wrong, I want them to fix that roof. That is ridiculous.

• Internet finds and mixes

  IMHMIX re-post series continues. They get a little weird, don’t they. These mixes from 5 years ago followed a strict set of rules except when they didn’t and I haven’t been able to top them. They aren’t anything like my 8tracks mixes which each have a theme. It’s anti-theme, anti-comfort. I like the Mixcloud format which is closer to the original CD experience than allowing people to download a zip file. Plus, some people seemed to mind that. Some of the tracks were taken from myspace or limited releases.

  Speaking of discomfort, I was looking for a Pizzicato Five song on youtube and the closest I could find was this intro piece. On the record it’s Love’s Prelude/Love’s Theme, really one song over two tracks. Weird they didn’t post the main part of the song, right? Well, it’s lot weirder that most of the other songs in this persons account are some white power bullshit! Whatever fucked up connection there could possibly be between these two things in this person’s mind do not exist in my mind, for the record. I’m not about racial awareness, if anything I’m about racist awareness. You need to be aware how racist you are and (important step) stop doing that bullshit.

  Anyway,
  This post on MetalSucks about great metal covers reminded me of something I’ve been looking for years now: Cibo Matto’s version of Welcome to the Jungle. And I found it in this mixcloud mix. More of a show, and a great show it is. Some great crossfades in there, I never even try to do that. I like to just match up raw ends.

  I was also found CM’s cover of Stevie Wonder’s I wish, but it’s not as good as I remember. I saw them in either Philly or NYC during this tour and it was the same setlist but remember it being more uptempo, closer like the original. But maybe I was just enjoying the show. They were really great live at that point (in my memory) and I knew I would probably be disappointed, but it’s still pretty satisfying to track down.

  If there wasn’t a 5th IMHMIX to post I could quit the internet. Alas.

  *(It also reminded me what I was listening to even weeks after Nevermind had topped the charts: the Wayne's World soundtrack.)

  Also, I googled Charles Bernstein earlier in this post and came up with this. Different guy. But I don’t think I ever used Grooveshark before this week. Random.

• RIP Susan Tyrell, Queen of the Sixth Dimension

  I was not familiar with her work outside of one of my all-time favorite weirdfilms, The Forbidden Zone. (I only recommend the original b&w version) This article sums up her career and health problems. If nothing else, an excellent inspiration to try to keep up with the health insurance bill. Yes, some people pay for cable, I pay for health insurance.

• Music downloading debate

  Nothin’ new here.

• Hello Project alums livin’ life

  Kago Ai had her baby, and Yuko is suddenly married and pregnant now. Congrats to them. I really like these people I used to spend a lot of time on. It’s not about the brand. Expect no followups!

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The day you realize you do not have to respond to every crazy thing on the internet is a great one. Try it out.

• Happy Father’s Day

  Alright, I think I hate this whole weekly post thing. I predicted it would make me feel like an asshole to have a few in a row and I was right.

• Reorganization

  I had this crazy system of randomizing records to review that is complete nonsense. It was experiment that obviously failed since I seem to average about 1 1/2 reviews a year this way. I’m just picking any from the list from now on, I can get the ones done I actually want to do and skip the others or do them last. Last?

• HearJapan closing

  Jeez, I had some stuff bookmarked to buy when I have money again that I’m not going to be able to get now. I liked HearJapan because it gave some hope that there was a way to still run a business on a model that makes no sense at all. There’s still JapanFiles, but they tend to deal with bands that people have heard of. HearJapan had some big names but mostly seemed about selling new or unheard of artists. Which is cool, but J-pop fans are not really that adventurous I guess. And the credit buying system is like an old boardwalk arcade. The way things are going is for artists to go directly through iTunes, Amazon or Bandcamp. People pay for stuff when the price is reasonable and the process is streamlined.

• WFMU & jobs

  Tom Scharpling had his 500th show this past week after 11 years. Congrats to him, it’s a great show (but I still hate the name). I’ve read some interviews where he seems to have forgotten how much of a trollfest the show used to be. Of course people hated it. I mean it’s a funny show by itself, but the people that really get the joke has to be an increasing minority. Anyway, I used to volunteer at the station which means I worked for free. I don’t regret it and would do it again, but I am never doing that for anyone else. I just can’t. I seriously went to art school and now I clean toilets. It’s not a joke and I’m not mad, it’s just what you have to do. And this movie looks cool(? I feel pretty weird about it), but I would rather give money to the station. $50G’s? Couldn’t that fix their roof? I don’t get it.

• Issues

  I used to go to a shrink. At first I had to go every week. Then it was once a month. Eventually, I was only going a couple times a year until I started skipping years and now I don’t think I need to back. The thing about it is, when you’ve got an appointment in a month or two, you have that long to think about all the things you’re going to say to the guy and it’s all this turgid emo levels upon levels of bullshit and when you finally get in there he asks you how your shitty job is going and if you found a girlfriend and to rate how you’re feeling 1 to 10 and then he tells you time is up. If the number is on the low side he’ll fill out a script but that’s it. None of that ever made me feel any better, it made me kinda mad actually. But the thought process of articulating your problems in order to tell someone is what helps, even if you don’t tell them. Blogging is the same way now. I don’t want to trivialize people still going through stuff, but I don’t have to do that anymore. That should really be the goal. But then the question is, do you have anything else to say? A comedian’s got issues, but they also have jokes. A lot of bloggers have given up that probably had a similar experience, using discussion of music to talk about their problems, now I guess they don’t have problems. I wanna hear those people talk about music still. Twitter and facebook, whatever, these are companies that don’t give a shit about you. Some people just want attention and those are places to get it, I don’t really care about like that too much. You have to care about you’re own writing or whatever you’re trying to do. %

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Showbiz!

• Not everything is about Japan and nerd shit

  I get it. Last week I attempted to address the serious problem of racism with a video of a white guy talking about Japan. This was a follow up to the previous weeks Simpsons reference against it, which brought up the eternal nerd debate: does a Simpsons quote stand alone or carry with it the context of the entire episode? To be honest, I misremembered the quote as being spoken by Jasper Beardly, who is more my guy than Granpa Simpson… Do we need to go all the way down that road? I was trying to avoid invoking the name of Debito Arudo who wrote this article over a month ago now. The thing about Debito is he has all the sensitivity and people-watching skills of a comedian with none of the sense of humor. Just to give him some credit, he did not invent the term microagression, it’s just rarely used by white people in an environment entirely of their own volition. But some of the backlash against him is just as lacking in perspective. He ain’t Rush Limbaugh, he’s Dwight from The Office. If you had to work with this guy in real life, you wouldn’t bother with an entire counter-argument, you’d just put his stapler in a jello mold, right? It’s just not worth it.

• The Flaming Lips/Badu video

  Apparently a lot of people have been carrying around some deep hat towards Wanye Coyne already for some reason, just waiting to unleash it. I always thought he was cool, don’t love all his music, but…yeesh he did not handle this well. I saw the video and, yeah, it does not look like it’s done. I did not want to get involved in an argument about this on twitter but I think it’s worth mentioning in this context. I don’t think it was really about race, unless Coyne was assuming the Badus were way more into drugs than they are (the only theme of the thing seems to be drug-fueled ironic pretension), which…yeah. A bum trip.

• HALCALI, shiritori & more racism

  Some people think just the act of appropriating a culture you aren’t part of is racist and sometimes those people are right. So it can be for some. But that’s not any group any group I like. Then, someone posted this video on tumblr about an African-American doctor who has gone through some blatantly inexcusable racist bullshit. They basically called him a gorilla and tried to make it seem like a harmless joke. (It gets worse from there, watch the whole thing.)

  Then I remembered the video for Twinkle Star…oh, right.

  
  OK…the man-in-a-gorilla-costume is a common trope in J-comedy and is not racist by itself. Shaky ground though, admittedly. I think someone stole it from Benny Hill one day like 40 years ago and they just haven’t got enough of it. However(there’s always a however), the gorilla-man is not usually wearing a sideways baseball cap and carrying a ghettoblaster. That’s pretty questionable. But that part at least is part of a visual shiritori game.

  I mentioned my tumblr was kinda like that, but this Halcali video is the real thing. The last syllable of each object in the video is the first syllable of the next object.

  Halcaliハルカリ-ringoリンゴ-gorillaゴリラ-radikaseラジカセ-sentakukiせんたくき-­kitsuneキツネ-nekoネコ-concordコンコルド-donutドーナツ-tsunoツノ-noteノート-tok­yoとうきょう-usi-no-sippoうしのしっぽ-Polaroidポラロイド-drumドラム-musuu-no-ho­siむすうのほし-shikaシカ-kabanかばん

  Thank you, truehome8, I had lost my notes on this, and that fansite is down.

  [ringo=apple, radikase=boombox, sentakuki=washing machine, kitsune=fox, neko=cat, tsuno=antler, ushi no shippo=cow's tail, musuu no hoshi=infinite number of stars, shika=deer, kaban=handbag]

  The second gorilla appearance is a lot worse, when the black drummer morphs into the gorilla. That’s just a callback. A racist callback. The worst thing about it is it makes the first appearance a lot less defensible. It could be random wackiness, but it’s clear the director did intend the gorilla to be a stand in for a black dude. So that’s fucked up. If you think I’m a terrible person for still liking the video, I accept that judgement as a small price for enjoyment of an otherwise awesome vid. Actually, I really really wish that was not in the video. I think the great and try to get other people into it and it does not not to make more obstacles for itself. I hadn’t really thought about it in a while, since I got (legally bought) those first albums shortly after hearing the (illegally posted) songs on youtube and haven’t gone back to them as much as I listen to the records. But anyway, please, do not equate these two incidents. One is unfortunate racial naivety, the other is a man losing his job just because he tried to get an apology for being treated like an edgy insult comic who are the only people who used to (and should) be “roasted” before everyone decided they were comic geniuses. White people!

• Conservative libertarians

  I posted the results of an online political test that has me down as a left-libertarian. I took this test on paper when I was in middle school and got the same result. I took it again and figured it would be a lot closer to some Democrats…somewhere, since I registered as one in 04. Everyone gets more conservative in old age, right? Hey, that’s just how the test comes out. The last left libertarian type politician to actually hold an office that I am aware of was Ghandi. Do not let the label fool you. Ron Paul is not Ghandi. BTW, here’s an excellent point-by-point takedown of conservative revisionism.

• AnimeNext

  In general, if something is going on that costs any amount of money I’m not at it. I used my tax refund this year to see some shows I absolutely needed to see and that money is gone. I am in deep bill-paying hibernation mode until further notice. But I have to post this video:

  
  

  New Jersey: a place filled with nature where everyone is your friend.

  I think AKB and various scandals have warped Hello Project into something not as fun as it was. It all started as a goof, and it’s obvious at one point the girls were given certain roles to play but for a while there they seemed to be interacting as genuine people. It all seems very scripted now and it’s not the greatest script. But I love the idea of anyone not having an automatically negative image in their minds of New Jersey. Parts of it really are nice…ish. It’s close to New York, you can’t deny that.

• Surviving Japan

  I donated to this Kickstarter a few months ago and got the digital download. Haven’t watched the whole thing yet because I have a stupid blog that I have to write. It’s worth a look.

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