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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