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. %