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

%

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.

%