Tres Canciones

Tonight it is so incredibly cold outside. It's nice though, to be inside, to look out the windows at the new coat of snow. It makes me wonder if angels get cold when they are out helping people. To look down at the snow through the window in a heated house with all the lights out, it feels kind of angelic.

Here are some thoughts from tonight. The second one's a remake, but the others are newsies.









I heard you might need Flash for these to work. If you have a Commodore 64 or 128, then that might be a problem.

Writing About Yourself in the Third Person

Writing About Yourself in the Third Person, or How I Got Hired to Blog (or really, just post links and write blurbs about them).

Through a strange twist of events (the way so many things seem to happen these days), I have somehow landed myself a gig writing a weekly column for the Make Magazine blog about stuff from Japan. As part of my introduction to the readership, I had to write a little blurb about myself in the third person. If you've ever had to do this, then you know how weird this can be. What do you really say about yourself? Who cares, right? In addition to trying to make myself seem qualified to write this column, I had to try to make it interesting and to have a sense of humility. I've subscribed to their blog for a while now, and I have seen other new writer introductions (obviously written by the people themselves, and with even weirder pictures than mine, if you can believe that), and I tried to remind myself that IT REALLY DOESN'T MATTER. Nobody really cares, in the grand scheme of things. It's hard to remember that sometimes, ya know.

Anyway, so my column is called "Made in Japan," and I do a weekly showcase of links to interesting DIY projects from Japan. In a way, it's a dream job, because it combines things that I am already interested in, it doesn't involved actually going anywhere to do the work, and it hopefully won't take up too much time. Plus, it's kind of fun. I have been a subscriber to the paper version of Make for a while now, and I can honestly say that I anticipate every issue as if it was a tasty meal.* It is a fun day when I see it in the mailbox. The only other magazine that I think I would be more honored to work for would be Arthur, but I don't really have any skills that I could offer them, since I don't know any shamans, and I only own like four noise tapes. It would also be cool to do something maybe for Wired, or Modern Drummer. Those would be cool too.

So there ya go, here's the introduction, and here's the first installment. Check it.

P.S. Am I doomed because I used an emoticon in my first post? Hmmmmm.

*The phrase "looking forward to ____ as if it were a tasty meal" comes from Ben Bussell, who I'm told used that phrase to describe how much he looked forward to going to Andy Hollinden's class "The Music of Frank Zappa" at Indiana University. I also took this class from the legendary Andy Hollinden, and I think the tasty meal analogy is pretty much right on. But... what if the meal consisted of a Burnt Weenie Sandwich. That's the name of a Zappa album. Weird, huh?

西岡兄妹 - The Twisted Harmony of Nishioka Kyodai

The brother and sister team of Nishioka Kyodai (西岡兄妹) create vivid, living images. Their stories are like dreams, floating and vaguely familiar. Beautiful and destroyed, all at once.

It's like, I wanna wallpaper my room with it. Even the weird freaky stuff.








These are scans taken from their book ぼく虫 . (Boku-mushi = Me Bug? Bug Me?)

There's relatively little information out there about them, even in Japanese. I guess they are kind of mysterious. Apparently they look like this. Their Japanese Wikipedia entry says they've been at it since 1989. Their stuff has mostly been published by Seirinkogeisha (青林工藝舎), the publisher who also published most of Mimiyo Tomozawa's work (you know, the artist who did those two Jim O'Rourke record covers and stuff). So, they're down with the cool kids.

Not to be a buster, but I don't see this coming out in English anytime soon. But if you are reading this, Nishioka Kyodai, then 英語訳の本を出すんであれば、私、喜んで翻訳します。

Although most people seem to put them in this category, I wouldn't even really call what they do manga in the traditional sense, just because aside from the text, there is nothing about it that really shows signs of being Japanese or following the usual comic book style. It's as if they have invented their own visual language out of something completely unfamiliar.

I wonder how that works, collaborating the way they do. Is one the DJ and one the rapper?

Ridiculously Good Song - Subtle "Middleclass Stomp"

I liked this song when it came up on Last.fm. I even pressed that button that says "love." Yeah. But then I saw this video. So wonderfully weird, especially after seeing what they look like live.

Although it's pretty polarizing, I've always liked Doseone's voice, it's just so strange and nasal. I thought he was stellar in Them(selves) and I liked what I had heard of Clouddead. I think his lyrics are brilliant. And then Jel from Them is in this band too (he's the guy playing the sampler beats live with his fingers) and I really like his stuff too, his beats are "abstract," for lack of a better term. But this video, this just takes it to the next level. They look totally bizarro yet sound very talented. They look like a band from another planet. I know I keep talking about music from other planets, it's probably very weird, but I just really dig on this stuff. When I hear this song I picture some weird futuristic city inhabited with people with Doseone hair. Abstract rap guys started hanging out with Jethro Tull fans. It's wild.

I know it's late at night, but I think maybe I should move to Oakland and try to get in on this weird thing they have going on out there. I'll have to get a puffy shirt or something first though.

P.S. This band kind of reminds of that band that does the "Do the BIM" song from that movie The Apple. That band was from the future too.

This Year's Super Bowl National Anthem Was Lip-Synced

I'm pretty sure this year's Super Bowl national anthem was lip-synced. This is funny, considering that Jordin Sparks was on American Idol, a show that is supposed to be about being a fearless singer. Maybe that's why the camera was rarely on her throughout the whole song. Is that better or worse than last year's Billy Joel Auto-Tune fiasco? Not sure.

The first thing that cued me to the possibility of a lip-sync was that her voice sounded like it was coming from a condenser microphone in a recording studio. This was not the sound of a hand-held wireless dynamic microphone being pumped out into a stadium PA, even it were a direct feed from the board. It was simply too crisp and too compressed to be live sound. The fact that the sound quality was too good and too tight-sounding made it very unbelievable.

Then I started looking at her lips, which was hard to do, because the cameras hardly ever actually showed her singing (her bad job of lip-syncing was probably the impetus for this production decision). When I could see her lips, they were cutting off at different times than the sound. Also, she didn't appear to be "pushing" on notes that would require extra vocal effort. I'm sure she did actually sing it, but not at the Super Bowl. Her lip-syncing was poor.

Tom Petty's halftime show, however, was definitely NOT lip-synced and was quite good. It just goes to show that when you invest in making old-guy rock your entire life, it still sounds good when you are an old guy. Dude was thinking ahead! Seriously, even while performing on top of a giant neon flying-V guitar stage at the Superbowl for a crowd of what appeared to be mostly sorority girls, it was impossible to deny that Tom Petty is an incredibly classy fellow who has recorded timeless rock songs.

Nostalgia vs. Reality: a Cap'n Jazz Video

Cap'n Jazz, circa 1995 or so. This won't mean much to most people, because I think that I discovered Cap'n Jazz at a time when I realized that songs could really be from where your heart is, and that a feeling can transfer to other people through the medium of song. Because of that, it might be a "you had to be there" kind of nostalgia.

But allow me to talk about how wonderful this video is, and then I will tell you why I suspect that it might be hard for bands this weirdly great to come along in the future.

So, this song: A lot of the music that I listened to 12 years ago, I'm not that into, or when I hear it, I just think, "eww, I have certainly progressed since then." But this song in particular is still really exciting to me. Maybe it's because it never was recorded in the studio, the only versions of it floating around are live recordings. We're left with this raw, jagged version of their vision.

PIONEERS OF THE 'EMO' SOUND?
Seeing the video is impressive in a very different way, because the members of Cap'n Jazz are very very young. They just look like the kids that delivered your newspaper. There's Tim Kinsella, wearing a Reece's shirt, and little Davey von Bohlen, before he went bald and started that way less-cool band The Promise Ring. People always say that Cap'n Jazz was a very influential band in the formation of the emo sound, and in terms of pedigree, that is certainly true (Davey went on to do The Promise Ring, Mike Kinsella went on to do Owen, American Football, etc.), but I think that musically, their influence may have been felt, but not heard. There were hardly any bands after them sounded like they did, and certainly there were no bands that sounded as good, as weirdly and wonderfully wrong as they did. I think what really happened is that Braid was influenced by Cap'n Jazz, and lots of people ripped off Braid and The Promise Ring. Braid, The Promise Ring, etc. were not as weird and were lyrically and musically quite a bit more palpable to the cardigan-clad masses. Anyway, the point of belaboring this issue of their influence on "emo" is all but lost, since what is called "emo" these days is (musically anyway) pretty disassociated with what this style used to describe.

BEAUTY IN MUSICAL WEIRDNESS:
I think one of the main reasons that nobody really pulled off sounding like them is because these guys actually had chops. They certainly aren't just playing power chords on those guitars. The drumming is authoritative and powerful, and the singing is completely original and actually pretty in tune, despite the "pitchiness" of Tim Kinsella's voice being a major gripe of many boring fans of boring music. He's like the Tom Waits of 1995. Nobody likes Tom Waits because his voice sounds "right." He was inventing his own way of singing. I guess I really like music where they don't fully grasp what it is that they're doing. If they were to figure it out, it would all crumble up into itself in insignificance.

THE BEAUTY OF ORGANIC MUSICAL EVOLUTION:
I read once that Cap'n Jazz really wanted to sound like this local band that they worshiped, but that it turned out that this band just was trying to sound like Dinosaur Jr. Within two "generations," there was a band that sounds nothing like Dinosaur Jr. but that sounded like something completely fresh and different. They were listening to local bands, and getting influence by local music that was happening around them. It was like a genetic mutation that resulted from musical inbreeding, but instead of it being a toothless child with blue skin, it was a really great band. I guess that's why I always kind of worried about the whole "iPod generation" thing that seems to be happening. It gets harder for real, "tribal" (in the case of Cap'n Jazz, these "tribes" were groups of kids in the suburbs of Chicago) music to come about if every kid has access to the "best" of music history on their computer. I have a hard time thinking that a band like this could be born today, that a band of such youth and originality could come along and be so surprising, just because these days it seems like being surprising is harder to pull off than "bringing back the sounds of [insert name of 'classic' band or genre here]." Part of this is the fault of music critics. So much of what I read isn't really music criticism, but is just describing what the music sounds like by comparing it to other music. That's where a lot of this uncreative referentialism comes from. Historically, rock music journalism, and record reviews in particular, were about describing how the music felt, and wasn't just a tagging exercise like it is in so much of today's music journalism.

Does this mean that kids should be cut off from hearing a lot of music so that the bands they form won't be so damn derivative? Of course not, that would be absurd. But if this true and great organic musical innovation that I am jonesin' for comes from the perfect mixture of natural aptitude PLUS musical naiveté, then maybe there's something to that. Quien sabe.

Anyway. Cap'n Jazz, they're still impressive after all this time. They kind of sound like they discovered a musical monolith from another planet, and that is exactly the way I like it.

P.S. (But really, why am I talking like this? The pattern of music that is "revolutionary" clearly shows that it comes out of nowhere despite people like me constantly declaring that rock and roll is dead once and for all. Something new and amazing will come along, don't worry. These youngsters have a knack for making that happen. I have faith.)

P.P.S. I gotta stop this late-night, multi-paragraph blogging. I wake up the next morning and worry that I wrote something totally boring or out of line.

The Mysterious Octave

I love thinking about octaves. The fact that humans are able to recognize octaves, I think that it hints at the notion that humans are in fact supposed to somehow understand the order of the universe. If you think about octaves hard enough, they will blow your freakin' mind!!

Who'd have thought that there might be important clues pertaining to the mysteries of human cognition in music? Yeah, music, the same stuff that people get down to at bars. "Achey Breaky Heart" is an example of music. Who'd have thought that in the most basic unit of music there are cosmic truths? Actually, a bunch of people did. But yeah.

So octaves... A note of exactly double the frequency as the note before it will sound like an octave, or that the human ear perceives both notes as being essentially "the same." That's the best, most eloquent definition of the octave, as being "the same, but higher." It sounds obvious, but if you think about it, what's going on there is pretty amazing. So, what that means, basically, is that inside our ear, we have a measuring device that can tell us whether or not a wave flapping, say, 400 times a second, is also flapping 800 times a second, and when it does, we perceive the two frequencies as being very similar. Not the same notes, but being the same in essence. We are somehow naturally tuned-in to the doubles and the halves of these frequencies that come into our ears, with a great deal of accuracy.

You hit middle C on a piano, then play the C one octave above it. The (most simple) frequency of the first note will be half of the second. But why do these sound the same in essence? It turns out that the mathematics involved in these frequency relationships informs much of how we perceive all of the other notes in between these octaves as well, but what is the benefit of the human ability do divide sound up and categorize it in this way? We don't see color that way, and it also has wavelengths. Hmmmm...

This might be late-night rambling, but I really think that what octaves tell us is that everything is connected, recursive, relative, and eternal. Does this mean, for example, that when we reach the edge of the universe, we actually have ended up on the opposite side (like when you went over to that opening on the right in Pac-Man, how you showed up on the left, headed the same direction)? No, I don't think that it is the same place, but it is perhaps very similar in essence (and why are you trying to get to the edge of the universe, anyway?). Like sound frequencies, there are no bounds to how high or how low something can be, but that what concerns us is the way in which those frequencies are used in context to each other. Do you feel what I am saying here?

[If I were explaining this on my imaginary talk show, I would be laying on a floating beanbag made of clouds, with my hands hanging out over the edges. Brian Eno's "Music for Airports" would play softly in the background, and diagrams would pop up on a screen made of Fruit Roll-Ups.]

Seriously though. Octaves. Just sit down on your favorite instrument and play a few. Think about what they mean. Think about what they tell you. Close your eyes and truly feel it. I really think that it's evidence that humans have the capacity to perceive things with an elegant sense of relativity. We are able to perceive things in their essence, and not just their various quantities. How cool is that?

This means that we don't so much worry about whether a sound is happening at 440 Hz or 880 Hz, because who cares, they're both A's. It's time to rock! Is this why music is so powerful?!

P.S. It turns out that monkeys also experience octave equivalency (although I'd like to find out just how they have proved this), so until I have proof otherwise, that means that everything I have said about humans here applies to them as well. I hope you are OK with that.

Everyday Moments of Potential Disaster

Warning: This post contains a story about me going to the bathroom. If that's weird to you, read this instead.

If you really think about it, there are hundreds of moments every day in which something could go horribly wrong. By this logic, it kind of makes me happy because most of the time nothing that bad actually happens (knock on wood). However hard we might try, the human mind seems to be set up evolutionarily to protect itself from potential danger, and we are what we are because of that. We anticipate bad things that might happen, and we are cautiously aware of our surroundings. It comes in handy sometimes.

Where it gets weird is that the new dangers that we try to protect ourselves from are not actually dangerous in the way that getting eaten by a lion is dangerous. In the modern world, most people worry about things that don't actually put our physical condition in danger, but rather focus on things that might put our emotional condition in danger. Things like being seen by another man with your pants at your ankles. It's more difficult to explain why that is bad, compared to having to explain why getting gored by a rhino is bad. It's just bad in a socio-psychological kind of bad way. Not as simple.

Anyway.

I consider myself to be one who worries less than the average person, but today I had a moment of acute awareness of potential disaster. While on the toilet. I had sat down to TCOB in the one-toilet, one-room, no-stall lavatory on the basement floor of Goodbody Hall at Indiana University. As I was sitting there with my pants down, I looked at the door and realized that I had neglected to lock the door. There was a distance of about five feet from where I was s(h)itting and where the door was. With my pants still down, I stood up and lunged over to lock the door. This was the moment. My moment of acute awareness of potential disaster.

If during that one second somebody had tried to open the door, it would have been pretty embarrassing. But, I had carefully weighed the economics of embarrassment and felt that my very short period of risk of total disaster (being caught standing up with my pants down in the middle of the bathroom) outweighed the potential for the significantly-less disastrous (yet still completely undesirable) possibility that some one would open the door and see me sitting on the toilet.

I'll spare you the logistics of why I couldn't have pulled my pants up before going to lock the door, but I guess what I am trying to say is that I guess I am a little bit of a risk-taker. When it comes to these very short moments of potential embarrassment, I seem to not care most of the time. Pulling a bag of popcorn out of the trash at the movie theater, ejecting an irritating booger from my nose in public, adjusting an uncomfortable testicle from under my desk, checking a celebrity gossip blog during a class; all of these potentially embarrassing things can usually be done quickly and safely. I get away with it. All the time. (I'm pretty sure I have just jinxed myself.)

What is really interesting is how our minds almost subconsciously calculate the risks and benefits of potential embarrassment, in the same way that our minds once used the same facilities to assess the potential for danger. Real danger has been replaced by imagined, virtual, and social danger, and it still feels dangerous. That feeling that you get when you haven't read for class and then your teacher is looking out at everyone, trying to decide who to ask the next question, that is our evolved sense of danger, being applied to something that is culturally contrived. Pretty neat, huh?

In the same way that germs are everywhere and it will just gross you out or make you paranoid if you think about it too hard, the potential for cultural disaster is everywhere, but it's ok, because like most of the germs floating around, embarrassment cannot kill you. Plus, then you might have a good story to send in to Teen Magazine's Most Embarrassing Moments section. I'm pretty sure most of those are made up anyway.

I Saw This On The Ground Today

I have no idea what this is. At first I thought it was some kind of pet food, but why would it all be bunched up together like that? I didn't smell it. I was afraid. Any ideas? If Carlos Gonzales still lived in town, I would probably guess he had something to do with it. But he doesn't live here anymore.

A QuickNote From:

10 things, real quick.

1. Something is wrong with the celebrities of our nation. Why do we put such uninteresting people up on the pedestal of fame? What does this say about our society?

2. I officially take back everything I said about VH1. Their programming has been abysmal lately. Rock of Love 2? Come onnnnnnn.

3. As of Christmas, I have entered the club of iPod owners. I held out for a long time. For a while I intended to write some long, crotchety diatribe about why I think they are bad for the future of musical creativity (similar to a recent posting here you may have seen), but now I just kind of have to say to heck with it. One thing that I have been surprised by is the shuffle function. I used to think "why would anyone want to shuffle the songs like that?" Now I get it. Sometimes I'm not sure what I want to listen to, so I just put it on shuffle and skip through the songs until I find something that I like. Also, what can I say, podcasts are pretty cool, pretty handy, pretty futuristic. What if I turned this blog into a video podcast, where I sat on a comfy beanbag and read every entry to you in a soothing voice while doing accompanying hand motions? It would be awesome, right? Of course you would subscribe.

4. Smoothie Guy David Wolfe is loco. Somebody please explain to me what "ormus" is. You should check out his band, The Healing Waters Band. Coincidentally, I have kind of been on a smoothie kick lately. Or is it a coincidence? Sometimes, something so weird and hokey comes along that I can't help but kind of get into it. The Secret definitely had this effect on me. I was like "this might be the most absurd thing I have ever heard, but they are somehow pulling some kind of double-negative mojo and it actually kind of makes sense." David Wolfe is so weirdly charismatic and has such cosmic hair that I can't help but be interested in what he is saying, even if what he is saying sounds like it might be being dictated by aliens.

5. Gordon B. Hinckley, president and prophet of the Mormon church, died today at age 97.

6. I finally found out the title of a movie I had been thinking about for the last six years or so, and what I thought was a fake documentary turns out to be real. Well, it turns out the illusive movie is called Painting the Town. It was always on IFC at my parents' house, but I always started watching it in the middle, and never was able to figure out what the movie was called so I could rent it and see the whole thing. Well, after years of unsuccessfully searching, through my newfound advanced Googling skills (it was a combination of the terms "dances with wolves" and "stands with celebrities" that finally did it), I was somehow able to finally crack the code and find this movie, and now I can't wait to see it again. It's a documentary about a guy named Richard Osterwell. TVGuide.com put it well:

"According to Richard Osterweil, the star of PAINTING THE TOWN and its sole raison d'etre, he moved to New York City in 1974 for the same reason everyone does: to spot celebrities. Osterweil is a painter, a rather unsuccessful calling he supports by driving cabs and checking coats at fancy restaurants. (He's prolific and, if somewhat derivative, surprisingly good, but his insistence on retaining visiting rights to his paintings has scared off most buyers.) His true metier, however, is crashing the parties, marriages and funerals of the rich and famous."

Sounds like a good movie, right? Maybe this movie will help me come to terms with my current confusion about this whole celebrity phenomenon.

7. Should I do NetFlix?

8. My friend Patrick from Germany asked me if the Super Bowl was today (Sunday). Was it?

9. You know how Creed from The Office sprouts mung beans on a wet paper towel inside his desk? It turns out mung bean sprouts are the same thing as moyashi in Japanese, an ingredient you'll find in pretty much any self-respecting bowl of restaurant-style ramen in Japan. I never knew! Creed was right. Those things are good! I'm going to be doing some of my own home-sprouting here in the next couple of days, so look out for a full report on that!

10. What is it about the character Mel from Flight of the Conchords that seems so strangely familiar?