It seems like most of the music I listen to these days isn't even commercially available. One of my favorite albums of the past year has been Night Ripper, by the Pittsburgh DJ Girl Talk. He mixes hundreds of snippets of other people's songs into 40 minute albums, creating a hyper-concentrated, somewhat ADD-addled form of music. The samples on Night Ripper were, of course, completely uncleared, and had he paid all the related fees, may well have cost several million dollars to release. Consequently it pretty much existed only on the internet via downloads.
Still unable to release his music properly, I guess GT and his indie label Illegal Art decided that if people were going to download it, they might as well get the option to pay if they want to. Like Radiohead's In Rainbows, Girl Talk's new album Feed the Animals is available for download for any price you're willing to pay, including $.0.00.
I paid $10.00 myself. People talk about this model as a gimmick, but the sad truth is that if an artist averages more than a dollar per download with this method, they'll already be earning more than the major label system is willing to pay them for unit. And unlike a major label deal, which means handing over the copyrights of any songs you write under contract over to the company permanently, if you distribute your music this way, you can actually keep ownership of your own songs.
It's ridiculous that this cyber-panhandling is a better deal for artists than what enormous multi-national corporations will pay for the same work. But that's what its come too. So if independent releases like this become the future for many new artists, the labels will have no-one but themselves to blame. They dug their own graves.
Bonus true story: Girl Talk is a DJ from Pittsburgh that used to work for a Biomedical company. He kept is DJing secret from his more conservative co-workers, but as his career took off, he found himself flying across the country each weekend and arriving back home late Sunday night, or even early Monday morning, exhausted. It started to develop into a secret double life, and as his fame grew people like Paris Hilton began coming on stage to dance, and he was landing magazine covers. But by then he was in too deep, and it just would have been too much too explain out of nowhere. When his weekend earnings began to outstrip his salary, he left his job to pursue music full time, without ever telling them.
Graduation Ceremony for Temple University, Japan Campus, 2008. Finished my credits a while back, but this was the big night. I was basically in and out of Tokyo, had to leave to get back to Fukuoka an hour after the cocktail party started. Good to get down, though. Here's a couple photos with Stella and Mitsuyo. We scaled the stage after everyone cleared out of the main room. At first I wanted a shot with us throwing our caps up, so the shot had them frozen mid-air. That would have been messy so we went for looking like we were just about to throw them. I think Mitsuyo thought we were supposed to thrown them horizontally!
There was a family taking a pictures of their own below the stage when we took this. They got a kick out of it and just kept taking shots of their own while I was up there. So I'll forever more be in the upper background of their own graduation pictures. Years from now, people will be looking through pictures of their mom's/aunt's/cousin's graduation and go, "who the hell is that guy?"
Just picked it up, so far as I know only available in Japan.
Going down it just tastes like bland cola. Then there's a strong kickback of pineapple flavor, sharp to the point of being sour. They really could have tweaked the amount they used; it's too strong and drowns out everything else.
Finally, it leaves you with a nice aftertaste not unlike malibu coconut rum. I kept thinking that while its not that great a drink, it might make a good mixer. Then I remembered people used to mix malibu rum with coke and pepsi back in high school. Maybe the malibu rum has a little pineapple flavoring too, or this has a bit of coconut.
So in conclusion, cola and pineapple can mix okay, so long as the pineapple taste isn't too strong, as it is here. And at any rate these combinations just aren't as good if you're not getting drunk.
Headed to Tokyo tonight, I officially graduate from TUJ tomorrow in an official cap and gown ceremony. Sounds fun, except I'm sick and hacking up unpleasant stuff today. Hope it wears off by tonight.
Today's guest blogger is the Markov Text Synthesizer. I fed a years' worth of my posts to it and told it to imitate my writing. This is what it came up with.
Just got word from the built-in-robot, which can understand your questions. It's also supposed to be trying to Willie Hortonize Rudy Giuliani. And thereby hangs a tale — the cost of a testing center for foreigners learning Japanese?" I wondered. Then I saw in Tokyo It's hard to swallow. If R.Kelly and is sleeping with 14 year old girls and Gary Glitter is molesting prepubescent ones, this still makes McCartney look pretty lacking. Check out some good analysis on the market. But look at their own (Also see here). They might be the only reason she looks like a sore thumb amongst all the Republican Candidates combined. Even Clinton got more time now, so here it is. I was thinking about buying it, they were stolen goods. Check out these details- A big conference is in Japan Welcome to Tokyo. I've been through this routine before. It's insane. How is this even legal? If Amtrak pushed people into trains this way the ipod has in its current, bare-bones incarnation, is it basically said 0% Juice/Natural Flavor, so apparently there isn't even really legal. See where this info and the prospect of hitch-hiking like I didn't really know what you're up to.
Today's guest blogger is the custom in Japan is sliding in electronics, but when it turns out he was in violation of the world. The world seemed cruel and boring, and I'm moving on I'd just stand there awkwardly waiting for it this year. Prefectural police suspect that those negative moments only come out of touch with my sister Ali over the phone with a situation where literally millions of dollars. I was 18 back in Canada around 2000. We moved to a known developer. While this album would have made those songs would probably be charged with basic household needs at least I got used to be. If he stopped doing those he wouldn't have taken a new Casio too, she said, popping into the political right, climate change skeptics seem to like tearing stars down just as bad if not more, than most jobs though. You're up in finding the downtime. At work I gaze at it, the water is under the blanket with the benefit of hindsight, governed very well. But the ipod touch finally reached Fukuoka. The Apple store was so eager to reach out by pointing out that as a Personal Blog...you know, photos of my hill. What is your hobby, the thing you can see actual film footage of him yelling is just as hard to fake,” Professor Provine figure that the Simon character is living a dream of an attempt to expand out. It was actually a very brief flash of disappointment.
Most of the stuff I generated kind of came out like the conversation of someone who has just gotten really, really high; second by second, it seems to make sense and go somewhere, but soon you realize there's no point to it.
One thing that's interesting is that although it can't make sense, it does do a reasonably good job simulating English grammar, and coming up with words that fit the one that came before it, and its doing that on a pretty limited corpus.
fun fact- This entire blog totals 110,000 words, or 378 pages, including spaces and breaks between paragraphs.
Just got word from Kevin. A crazy guy decided he was tired of life and that he would kill people. Drove to Akihabara, the geek/tech district of Tokyo, and drove his rented truck through the crowd. Then he jumped out with a knife and started stabbing people. Details here.
This is Japan's answer to Virginia Tech, but you'll notice when it happens here, its never with guns, because the laws are so strict. As a result, these types of killings are quite rare, simply because its difficult to pull them off. 7 years ago, a crazy man went to an Elementary School to stab children. He had to resort to that act of cowardice, because if he had tried to bring a knife to a high school or University, he would have had the living shit beat out of him.
So while its true that its people that kill people, and not guns...not having them around does reduce the possible damage.
The automatic reaction I get to books written by Politicians, or even by celebrities and media figures in general, is hastily-assembled, usually ghost written cash-cows, designed to promote the image and agenda of the brand name listed as the author. The kind of thing that shoots up the bestseller list for a short time like a weed, then shortly after, like a bad fad, drops unceremoniously into the discount bin of things time has forgotten.
While that's a harsh caricature, and while its likely one of the best written books of its kind, arguably it's still possible that Obama's latest book, The Audacity of Hope, while winning awards at the moment, could still wind up meeting that description. Its the book of a Senator, a man of such prominence that he has to choose every word he says publically very carefully, and as a result winds up saying not much of anything at all. It spells out his political positions with the utmost of care, glossing over so many edges and skipping around so many potentially controversial snags that it can't help seem a little glib and empty. Only the safest of topics, such as taking care of his daughters after their school day, seemed to come from the heart, and thats just not enough to hold a book together. I came away from it feeling like I didn't really know Obama all that much better for having had read it. And to an extent, it was likely designed to read that way. Such is the reality of writing a memoir in the midst of a heated, often dirty political campaign.
Obama's older book, the 1994 memoir Dreams From My Father, is a different beast altogether. It is, like it or not, a real book, the product of a real writer. A reflection on race relations and conflicts of growing up bi-racial in America, It was written when Obama was 33, in the aftermath of momentary fame he generated as the first African-American Editor of the Harvard Law Review. Until that point, Obama's only professional experience aside from law school was a short-lived job as a legal writer in New York, and a low-paying job as a community organizer in Chicago that he had taken in a fit of idealism.
It was in this book that Obama confessed his experiments with drugs in high school and college. When I first heard that revelation, I assumed that Obama had released the information as a form of pre-emptive damage control, to bring all his skeletons out of the closet early on, so that they would already be old news when he ran for office in the future. But reading the dark Dreams From My Father, it becomes difficult to believe it could possibly have been written in the name of political ambition. Indeed, its most fervent readers have been Right-Wing bloggers, mining it for the most incendiary, Jeremiah Wright-esque sentiments they can find. And as much as Obama balances those types of opinions intellectually and looks toward common ground even as he broods, there are plenty.
But the real surprise for me is that Obama is an honest to God writer. To an impressive extent, I found myself hanging to the narrative, relishing the author's droll wit and internal conflicts in a way that reached beyond just trying to unlock the public figure behind the typewriter. It stopped being political homework and became a real read. Even the right wing bloggers that have parsed it have admitted it works as a book. Academic Racist Steve Sailer begrudgingly compares Obama to Evelyn Waugh, focusing his attacks on the idea that while Obama might be a talented writer, those same traits won't make for a good leader. Even the Republican-funded smear site Stop Obama, hell-bent on blocking his ascendancy, stops the attacks momentarily to comment that "Judging by its reviews, critics obviously don’t read it to its sensational finale...it is far more interesting and more engrossing than Audacity of Hope".
The main thing I picked up from it? Just how much his background differs from the typical mainstream "elite" political candidate. Most elite politcians follow the fast-track from a very early age, moving from college to law school to small but prestigious political appointments in Washington. While Obama did eventually go to Harvard to enter that track, he spent his entire 20's doing the little things in Chicago, working at a non-profit trying to organize neighborhoods to do things like rid the pipes of asbestos, and fight the general apathy and cynicism that prevented people from even seeing the hope in trying to organize. He even worked for a Ralph Nader-affiliated organization for a time.
Much of the book details the frustrations of his early career, of trying to convince people to show up at town hall meetings and that it wouldn't just be a waste of their time. To bring together the blacks and whites of the city, so used to sparring, for the good of a common cause. The sort of low-level conflict and frustration that most of us, set in better paying but less idealistic careers, just don't have to worry about.
Given this background, is it any wonder that his campaign showed so much prowess generating small contributions and local grassroots support using a bottom-up, grassroots campaign? Clinton wasted 30 million on far worse results because her campaign was run the way a corporation markets a product (literally, if you look at the micro-trend Mark Penn-types running the show. They count those corps as clients).
Suddenly, it becomes clear why Obama ran such a good campaign, why he seems so good at generating consensus among diverse groups, why he seems so good at inspiring hope in changing the system among people that usually don't see the point in trying. Because years ago, before there was any obvious political or financial benefit to doing it, he was out in the trenches learning how.
People scoff at Obama's experience as a "community organizer", and even his time in the Illinois senate. Next to the pasts of Clinton and McCain, this experience seems so inconsequential. But up closer, this and his previous work experience begins to look like something else- the work of a man involved face-to-face with the very constituency he purports to serve. A man practicing a grassroots form of politics that lacks the glamor and prestige that attracts so many of the wrong types of people to the work. A form of politics so far removed from channels of real power that its difficult to be swayed early in your career by big lobbyists and PACS simply because so few of them could care less about anything you could do anyway.
And in that frame, Obama's inexperience up until the age of 33 looks like something else altogether. A politically inconvenient memoir, a string of non-profit jobs that paid as little as 10,000 a year out in Chicago...it's a very different 20's from the one Hillary Clinton had, or George Bush had. It's the kind of 20's you see in the sort of person that really cares about what they do, and really wants to see a change.
Bonus- Video of Obama talking to the young staff that got him elected shortly after clinching the nomination. 13 minutes, but if you watch it all, you'll get a good sense of how he managed to build and inspire such a strong base of volunteers.
It seems like most of the music I listen to these days isn't even commercially available. One of my favorite albums of the past year has been Night Ripper, by the Pittsburgh DJ Girl Talk. He mixes hundreds of snippets of other people's songs into 40 minute albums, creating a hyper-concentrated, somewhat ADD-addled form of music. The samples on Night Ripper were, of course, completely uncleared, and had he paid all the related fees, may well have cost several million dollars to release. Consequently it pretty much existed only on the internet via downloads.
