週ＲＥＶＩＥＷ０５。２８～０６。０３
Last week’s shuu revyoo was the 100th post. A yay yay.
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Loose thoughts
(This should be the last week of bringing up things more than a week old. It’s counterproductive. I don’t need to talk about everything that happened, it’s just to make sure that I write something every week.)
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Racism (for real)
Some more thought needs to go saying something about this, but right not I’ve got this video in my my draft of an Australian martial arts instructor who lives in Japan with the disclaimer that I do not live in Japan, do not teach martial arts and am not from Australia:
Ongoing discussion.
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Protests everywhere
I’m not in ’em. Believe it or not, I do not have an arrest record and I intend to keep it that way. I don’t like half-assing things. If I’m going to protest, I gotta get arrested. I gotta camp out the whole time. You were there when the cops busted it up? I was there before the cops knew it was happening, man. I’m that asshole. (In theory.) I don’t wanna be one of these guys who sees the protest from across the street and acts like they are superdown without ever getting involved at all. I hope this whole movement get more young people voting. If not, it’s bullshit. You’re not going to tear down the entire system and build a whole new one with a series of sit-ins. That’s not even being cynical it’s just reality. I mean voting in all the elections. (And for progressives, not fucking Ron Paul people.) Even if you get the perfect president, you need a House and Congress that with him(her?), which is super boring to think about, right? You just want a guy coming in an kicking ass with an absolute iron fist…oh wait, we don’t want that…? Anyway, this protest in Chicago got pretty wild. I’m just saying, keep using your brain or it’s just stupid mob against stupid mob with stun guns and pepper spray. For example, if you’re in a Burger King with a bunch of cops, you might not be serious about this “anarchy” thing. (Forgetting abstracts for a moment.)
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Bruce Sterling & the New Aesthetic
Wasn’t taking this New Aesthetic thing very seriously, it just seems like a wider application of what Wired magazine was doing in the 90s, applying digital-only ideas to a real objects (in that case a magazine) until I got to just about the bottom of my read-it-later list and found this Wired article by Bruce Sterling. And that takes you through a bunch of links that are all interesting, and some are pretty old. Should have been more into that. What am I doing?
Also this post starts with a great Sterling quote against well roundedness.
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Religion
This Disinfocast with Daniele Bolelli is absolutely brilliant. Never heard of the guy before, and I tend to stay away from this site anymore cause I feel like and any minute it any conversation could go into chemtrails or lizard people. But this one is great. This dude says it all.
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Mari Yaguchi got married.
It was adorable. I will always love the OG musumes.
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PRB lost both metal shows
The respective DJs of The Furnace & Metal Mania both move onto to whatever. Sometimes shows come back to PRB but it was pretty cool to have two weekly metal shows for a while there. Metal Mania especially reminded me of the old metal shows on WGLS in the early 90s. (That whole station barely comes in that far from the campus anymore and plays it pretty safe now.)
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WaniKani
Got a public profile and leveled up. All stuff I know but I get to practice typing speed and it’s really nice. Great design. Anki by itself gets to be grind.
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HALCALI
Fansite HALCALI SENSATION has gone down. Found this post explaining it should be temporary. But it’s just before the new album. I’ve been kinda bummed to see old videos are harder to find. This is the group that got me listening to new J-pop again in the mid-00s, mostly due to youtube. Their management still has not fully embraced this.
Speaking of management, the current crappy exchange rate and the fact that it’s two discs makes this album (after shipping) FORTY FIVE DOLLARS for only TEN NEW SONGS. That’s BULLSHIT, HALCALI (you know?) Sorry, sorry…I can’t stay mad at Halcali. It’s not their fault, but really. Just got the new De La for a $5 download, just saying.
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Tumblr
Shut down a couple old accounts. They were from when I was having a bit of a hard time and did not really know (or care) how tumblr worked. I like tumblr now, but I’m not taking it too serious obviously. I said I was doing like an exquisite corpse thing with it, but it’s more like a shiritori game now. (Don’t hurt yourself thinking too hard about it tho.) I like messing with it as a design thing, but you never know what the page will really look like until you publish. I figure it’s only a matter of time before they start putting ads or there’s some copyright issue that screws the whole site. But it’s fun at the moment.
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週ＲＥＶＩＥＷ０５。２１～０５。２７
Starting these posts at the beginning of the week from now on and adding as I go.
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But it didn’t help
Have to do a better job. I had a BBQ today. Wasn’t thinking about it before today that I commited to finishing a review and one these. Now I got like five minutes to midnight.
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Maryland Deathfest
Didn’t go. Just been listening to Grim Kim’s MDF playlist. One day.
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Eclipse
Forgot to mention this last week. We don’t get solar eclipses in New Jersey. Some links: Eclipse in tokyo. Hikosaemon got some great pics
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Whoops
I just messed up the formatting of this whole post in a rush to publish and have to finish it after the fact. Also, I forgot to mention Donna Summer and Andy Gibb, but I’ve never really thought that much about them as people to honest. I mean literally. Disco is just like where samples come from. I was only technically born in the 70s, I don’t remember it.
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Speaking of remembering
If anyone in the future wants to discuss actual events that actually occurred at my high school, during the years I attended it…sure, why not. I’ll try, maybe. But if it’s about something someone I don’t know said to someone else that I don’t know, I can’t really help you. That’s not talking about high school, it’s like still being in it. N-ope.
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Racism
I’m not f’r it, I’m again’ it.
- More next week!
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Meshuggah | obZen
Bought this when it came out at the Borders in Cherry Hill. Seems like a long time ago. Everything about seemed post-apocylyptic. Very few CDs left. I used to love the CD section in that store. The whole thing’s gone now of course. I remember I bought this and a small stack that day, this and a bunch of classical stuff. It was one of those intentional shifts.
I only had a download of Destroy Erase Improve
The big song off this one is supposed to be Bleed (stream the full track or watch the video here
My favorite is the opener, Combustion. It starts with a “oh shit, shit is going down” kind of intro guitar riff. (Very similar to the Kill Bill theme, but more uptempo). Indeed, shit is about to go down and it’s going to be fast. The stage is set. Right, but then the hi-hat starts counting off another beat entirely. “Oh shit—different shit is abo—“, too late! Two entirely different shits are now going down, it’s very loud, it’s very fast, there’s a crazy man screaming at you…it’s probably exactly what you were looking for or you hate it and it makes no sense. Fair enough. But consider this: you can always make it faster, you can always make it louder. That’s building the music up vertically. This band also takes it sideways. But they do it with complete precision and grace. That first countoff almost sounds like a mistake they left in. But when it comes around again and repeats exactly it just seems bonkers. The guitar plays alternating bars of 6/4 and 4/4, not that hard to count. But the drums are doing something else—I listened to this 100 times and I can’t really explain it and that’s fucking outstanding.
It segues very nicely into Electric Red and there’s time things going on in all the songs, I’m not breaking them all down, but I really like the dissonant half-note chords they slash out in this one under the verse, scraping with the sides of the pick it sounds like. Crazy.
The middle of the record seems like one big chunk to me, which is not a putdown it’s just how I’ve been listening to it. There’s moments of space and even beauty, but I couldn’t tell you what individual songs those are in. What I like about this band is when they are trying to get across a feeling that isn’t just bashing your brains in with brutal volume and complexity, they do it with only the guitars. There’s no sudden crooning or mallet work or anything like that. I like bands that can mix it up, but most suck at it. I like that there’s no attempt here. It’s really a cohesive whole.
Dancers to a Discordant System is a nice long, slow(ish) classic album ender. It’s that epic album ending feeling, perfect. I’ll never get tired of a band that knows how to end an album. The whole thing is a journey. I was going to comment on how tastefully short the album is but it’s just shy of a full hour. That’s really the ultimate, to make the thing seem go faster than it does. An hour with no boring parts.
Negatives: no idea what any of these songs are about. I’ve even a lyrics booklet and uh…no I don’t really care what all the words are. It is what it is. I mean, even the title only works as a pun if you have a Swedish accent. (“obscene”?) Really. And the artwork of course. Kinda dumb. Like, what was that video. But who cares about that stuff? Oh, most people? Well, their loss.
Still need to get the new one. Missed seeing them live last week. Stupid. Broke again. %
週ＲＥＶＩＥＷ０５。１４～０５。２０
Sometimes you just can’t tell how bad things have gotten until they start to get better.
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Nothing major this week
I got nothing.
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Friends vs. navel-gazing, endless rumination on painful unfixibilities
Yeah, you know, last week I was thinking about life in general, the weirdly close friends I used to have that are all nuts. And some of them might have become junkies, they’re not all presently accounted for. Senior year of high school I started hearing some bad stories, I always stayed away from hard drugs and after that I lost touch with most of those people. Some guy at a bar the other day tried to tell me some shit he was still mad about from high school…I do not remember or want to remember most of high school. I got friends now, ok? We don’t talk a whole lot anymore. Not everything has to be like 3 Musketeers, all-or-nothing anymore. I’m feeling a lot of sympathy now for like, Henry Rollins, when he gets a little mad at people asking him questions about old shit.
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Backlog mostly under control
Keeping unread articles under a week and the total number under a hundred. This time last year it was over 1000 and about 100 days behind on average. This doesn’t mean that much in itself, but it means I’m getting better at managing a constant work flow. I just need to turn it into more output. Gotta a bunch of stuff in Google Reader…gonna add some links. I have been cutting back on facebook and twitter subs and putting more into RSS, it’s easier to manage overload. These sites are not designed to optimize your time, have you noticed?
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Japanese
I finished the Tofugu book, I guess I’m going through it again because I’ve skipped some steps, but there’s some great advice for like, time management, stuff like that. Now I’m started on WaniKani as a tester. It looks pretty good, not sure I need to stick with it as a whole program, I’m sticking to my boring Anki decks, but it’s nice. Esp. if you’ve got an iPhone, and are starting out, that would be the way to go. I don’t and I’m not, but I still kinda wanna spend money on the thing. I need to get into some online Japanese teaching teaching racket like this. Something.
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V/A | Now That’s What I Call Slam
That’s right, a mixtape download. From Invisible Oranges (via the internet infamous Sergeant D of Metal Inquisition / StuffYouWillHate). Right now I’ve got this thing playing on my old laptop I use for backup and it sounds awful on these speakers. It’s best on headphone with some decent bass response; a fantastic soundtrack for cleaning toilets (more than likely inspiration for many of these bands.) That’s how it gets on my realworld listening list, the only way a digital album can at the moment. A good comp is as good as an album to me and a well-thought out mixtape is as good as real comp—they have potential to be even better than real comps, with no commercial or label concerns. And I’m pretty slow getting on the digital train but being able to make a mixtape that sounds as good as the original CDs (under the right circumstances, and no, none of this came out on vinyl and yes my ears are probably ruined) …well, it’s exciting to me.
Plus, of course, I don’t want these song titles stinking up my last.fm charts. I think extremes in art are always defensible and much of this music is stylistically ground-breaking and technically astounding. But I’m a grown goddamn man. Even if I was 14 again, I would hesitate to broadcast the content of these records and back then I thought Deicide were making valid points about religion and Cannibal Corpse was being funny. These guys, I dunno what their deal is exactly. I don’t feel plugged into to it enough to say “these guys don’t actually want to kill people”. Like, a Cannibal Corpse t-shirt is gonna freak out some squares which is awesome, I love that aesthetic and attitude, but these guys are on some next level with some of this artwork. I’m ok on this level right here, where I will not post it. But I’ve got this thing on set up to repeat on Windows Media Player (which i never use but nothing else is set up on this other machine) just displaying the album art because I’d rather not even look at the song titles and uh, whatever, I guess is what I’m trying to say here. I believe there’s a certain segment of the internet population that uses last.fm primarily to transmit song titles at people, but I’m a believer in the pure sonic experience, my primary exposure being late-night college radio. I didn’t have a lot friends back then into the extreme stuff…
It’s…all clear to me now. All this time it was having friends holding me back from superior musical taste! What with their “fun” and “hanging out” and “having meaningful and sexually fulfilling relationships”. Bah! Try and stop me now! I can listen to whatever I want! Haha!
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