woods

awesome skate vid

http://www.insight51.com/2010/REPEAT-AFTER-ME/Film/skate.html

sappy music that i kinda like

http://www.myspace.com/chieftheband

limmy.com

dude's limmy. true art.

stream of consciousness writing is my favorite way of writing

i've been listening to a lot of lo-fi lately both because i've been getting back into it and in an attempt to recreate that sort of fuzzed out, gnarled sound in my own music.

times new viking has been the soundtrack to my last two months or so.

when i was in high school i was really into the vaselines. that was lo-fi. it took me a couple listens to realize that they liked to talk about sex. i suppose i should've understood that when eugene kelly moaned about how raw he wanted rory to ride him. then i giggled because i thought hey this is dirty.

but it's not really that dirty in comparison to, say, lil wayne. i like a long haired thick red bon open up her legs then filet mignon that pussy i'm a get in and on that pussy if she let me in i'm a own that pussy.

i wouldn't compare a pussy to a steak, i don't think. but i still like lil' wayne. and dirty music too.

considering celibacy is a strange thing. that's why i don't usually do it.

zach galifianakis is a very funny man. he reminds me of a friend of mine a little bit.

i've been watching this tv show called bored to death. i think i am bored, existentially. but it's a good show. wow. i was going to put a random still from the show up and when google image searched 'bored to death' this is what came up.

 

that's got to be the best thing ever. the file name was 'cooterpunch'. now this is interesting for two reasons. first of all, it is incredibly fitting for this blog post. secondly, cooter is my favorite word in the world. look at the dude's face. i can't tell if he's super pissed off or incredibly fucking excited. damn. that just made my day.

alright. bored to death. jonathan ames, played by jason schwartzman, is a writer who is bored with his life and decides to pose as a private detective on craigslist. i like craigslist. and i would like to be proactively bored.

but i'm not, in general. unless this is proactive. i don't know if it is.

i wonder if i'm going to go bald one day. and, if i were to go bald, whether i would rock it or comb what little hair i had left over my balding zones or if i would just get a toupée or if i would kill myself.

i don't think i would kill myself. maybe being bald is fun. you could get a sunburn on your scalp. and then it would peel and flake and get all red and sore.

remember the 'parental advisory: explicit content' labels they had on cd's? do they still have those, anyway? i guess they don't have cd's anymore. who is 'they'? anyway. that used to be a badass thing. i had a t-shirt with that label on it and i had a poster of it in my room. on the itunes store if something is explicit there is a square red box with the word 'explicit' in it. it's not as exciting or forbidden. it's bored to death. could bob dylan be considered explicit, ever?

that's weird. and see what i mean? it's not badass to have a little red explicit box next to your song. i miss my childhood. read below.

when i watched napoleon dynamite i spent an hour looking online to see if people actually sold stupid time machines that they built themselves. time machines are an impossible concept to grasp. theoretically, if they were possible, then why wouldn't they exist now? or thousands of years ago? someone in the future would have developed one and brought it back in time and marketed it commercially to the knights in king arthur's court so that the world could become more advanced back then so that it would be even more advanced in the time that the time machine was actually developed in. or maybe it has happened and that's why i'm writing on a MacBook Pro laptop on a website owned by Google ® called blogger. i'm listening to kid sister's album right now. i don't like it.

i like no wave music. and its contemporary incarnations. look it up.

full circle. i think that's a good place to stop. from music to music, with some mayonnaise, mustard, lettuce and turkey in between. i'm not going to read this until i press the orange button underneath this box in which you type your blog post that says 'publish post' and that is next to the blue button that says 'save now'.

music that has changed my life in an incredibly vague and mostly inaccurate chronology:

eminem
limp bizkit
linkin park
green day
blink 182
lostprophets
manu chao
the postal service
erik satie
frederic chopin
wa mozart
giacomo puccini
dmitri shostakovich
terry riley
the kinks
vashti bunyan
the velvet underground
neil young
os mutantes
the beatles
bob marley
my bloody valentine
neutral milk hotel
animal collective
panda bear
dan deacon
notorious big
black moon
smif n wessun
wu-tang clan
clipse
lil wayne
at the drive-in
nirvana
vaselines
boredoms
michael jackson
björk
radiohead
violent femmes
aphex twin
joy division
talking heads
new order
fugazi
pixies
no age
abe vigoda
times new viking
crystal stilts
deerhunter

When discussing high and low culture it is crucial to also consider the context of the times and the effect they have on culture itself. In our postmodern era, with the media being as it is, accessible to almost everyone in the world and everyone in more developed locales, the distinction between high and low forms of culture has blurred. Instead of separate forms or levels of culture, a global culture is beginning to emerge.
What is “serious music” today? How many people are actually aware of the existence and works of contemporary classical composers? Personally speaking, not many. The majority of people today listen not to music that was painstakingly composed by someone with a pen, staff paper and a piano, but to music that was generated in a matter of hours on sophisticated music software; the popular artist’s voice has been digitally altered and corrected, leaving a song free of even one single mistake. Even composers who write music in a more traditional or classical vein – those who may still be considered part of a more highbrow musical form – use computer programs that can transcribe notes or even create arrangements for an entire orchestra without lifting a finger from the computer’s mouse. The process of creating and the process of listening is no longer wholly tangible, physical. What we have now is a mess of media.
Remember the days of the vinyl record? I don’t, so I’ll stick to talking about tapes and CD’s. Back in the good old days, I remember reading about the release date of my favorite band’s next album in a magazine, being excited about it for weeks beforehand and saving every bit of money I had just to be sure I could go and get it on the day it came out. I would walk back home with the album in my hands; so eager to listen to it I couldn’t help but open it up to admire the artwork on the album leaf and the print on the disc itself. The next part was almost a ceremony. I would walk into my room, cradling my new treasure to my chest, and shut the door behind me. I would turn on my boom box, open the CD tray and then gently remove my shiny new disc from its case before delicately placing it in the stereo. I would hit play, sit back on my bed and listen to the whole album through – or at least until I was interrupted for dinnertime.
This concept will be totally alien to the next generation. They will be so used to having music at their fingertips all the time that they will not even be able to comprehend the rush of frustrated excitement one feels when struggling with the vacuum-wrapped CD case. In fact, it’s getting to be that way already, and the people of my generation are the remnants of those who still remember what it is like to hold music in one’s hands. We do not even have to wait anymore for an album to be released before we can listen to it; there are hundreds, if not thousands, of websites that allow you to download “leaks”, unreleased tracks and/or albums. So, already, the anticipation and eagerness is removed from the listening experience. To add to this, nowadays no one goes to the music store anymore. It’s all on iTunes, so why bother walking down the block? And if you can’t find it on your friendly Apple Corporation music program, it’s on a different website that allows you to download it right away after you punch in your credit card number – we don’t even pay for these things physically anymore. Listening to music on your computer is one thing; at least you have to stay relatively nearby it to be able to hear it. But now that literally everyone has an iPod or some sort of portable music device that allows you to store millions of songs, we all have music everywhere, all the time.
It was always so satisfying for me, once I had amassed enough CD’s to fit into a CD wallet, to flip through my albums, debating which one I felt like listening to. Now I just scroll through my iPod, hoping that I can move my finger fast enough to get from the letter A to the letter L in less than two minutes. The physicality of the music experience is gone, and, I think, some of its value and meaning, too. We don’t listen to music as actively anymore, we merely hear it. We have it playing constantly in so many situations that it is no longer music but instead a sort of comforting background noise. Very rarely do I find the time or the concentration to actually listen to an album anymore. Instead, I play an album while I’m reading for class, checking my email or driving my car. And as much as I enjoy listening to music almost constantly, I feel like my appreciation of it is somewhat lessened through the music’s accessibility.
Things are bringing about change in different ways than iPods and iTunes, though. The Internet is revolutionizing the way we hear and discover music. Websites such as MySpace, Pandora and the Hype Machine are responsible for the emergence of hundreds of thousands of new musicians whose songs are all readily available for instant listening. Anyone with a computer can be a musician, and, through MySpace, the entire world can hear your songs. As fine and good as that may sound – everyone has a chance to be an artist – it is actually destroying music. Music, historically speaking, has come to be well known through its musical value or superiority, not through blog hype. Technological advancements have made things so easy for us we even have our music recommended to us by computer-generated algorithms instead of discovering it for ourselves.
We’ve all seen an image Britney Spears on a can of Pepsi, Justin Timberlake on a Burger King placemat; music in popular culture is no longer about the music, but the money. Pop stars are churned out by major record labels that work with other industries to exploit the artist’s moneymaking potential to the maximum before spitting them out, making way for the next young and beautiful (and most likely not very talented) singer. According to Donald N. Wood, “ours is a post-intellectual era. We are experiencing a cultural transformation that is reversing four hundred years of intellectual evolution.” In an age of globalization, where more people worldwide can more easily recognize Ronald McDonald than their nation’s leader, we are beginning to lose our grip on intellectual value.
High music, such as opera, is today being converted into another moneymaking scheme by the music industry. Take a look at Il Divo , a group of male tenors created by American Idol pop-judge Simon Cowell. Like so many other pop acts today, this group was put together by Sony BMG and paraded around the world singing opera hits. "Popera," as it is called, clearly exemplifies the merging of this once high form of music with a lower, commercialized form. High art is commercialized, too. Museums worldwide with works by famous artists have three-hour lines of Hawaiian shirts and sandals clad tourists waiting to shuffle in not to see the art itself but only to have gone to this famous location. Then, on their way out, after hastily having taken a digital photograph of every piece in the entire museum (which they will most likely never even browse through again), they stop at the gift shop to buy a postcard of a work whose artist’s name they have never heard. High literature no longer exists. Instead, we are left with Tom Clancy bestsellers and books that we buy because Oprah suggests them. We glean our values from the media, basing them upon television and biased news reports. R. Cronk, author of Consumerism and the New Capitalism says, “The traditional cultural values of Western society are degenerating under the influences of corporate politics, the commercialization of culture and the impact of mass media. Society is awakening from its fascination with television entertainment to find itself stripped of tradition, controlled by an oppressive power structure and bound to the credit obligations of a defunct American dream.”
The world is becoming westernized and homogenized, based off the American consumer culture we have all played a part in creating. Having grown up in Thailand, I have seen first hand how Asian popular music seeks to emulate not its own traditional music but that of western, and particularly American, pop music. It is this homogenization of music worldwide that is creating a world culture, and it seems to be following the path that low culture set out for it. This combination of technological advancements, the rise of consumer culture and globalization is driving the general population away from high art, music and literature, and towards a mass-produced and advertised form of culture: our new traditions are emerging.
Even politically speaking, we as a whole feed what is handed to us. There are those of us who may complain, disagree, or even protest, but in general, we do not fight for what we believe in on a large scale. We have seen the effects of war and fighting on our country and others’, but today we do not speak up for ourselves. If you compare my generation to that of the youths in the late 60’s and early 70’s who actively sought change in the nation, we are doing nothing to combat the problems we face in this world. Instead, we write in our blogs about how terrible the state of international affairs is before we pop in a microwave meal and settle down in front of the television for tonight’s E! Top Hollywood Stories. We have reached a point in time where things have become so easy for us all we have to worry about is ourselves. This collective narcissism that we have only recently established on our planet is what is causing the decay of our collective intellect. We, through consumer culture, have been reduced to an obedient mass, following the directions of our television sets and the Internet. Culture itself, what it once meant, exists no more.

i need to use this again. here's a cool video.

this is a blog and i will treat it as such

so i am sick in bed and i still have not finished my paper that was due this morning
albeit i feel a lot better
i just need to stop procrastinatoringtation.
i downloaded about 15 albums and watched about 25 episodes of 30 rock.
i tried to read a book, but then my head hurt. it was psychological.
i'm bored of this

bard never gets boring!

I tried to ignore him and talk to the Lord
Pray for him, cause some fools just love to perform
You know the type loud as a motor bike
But wouldn't bust a grape in a fruit fight

MUSIC

click on the pic to discover a good band

http://www.artfagcity.com/2009/08/12/img-mgmt-the-nine-eyes-of-google-street-view/

hunt deer

deerhunter is art-rock in one of its truest forms. like the velvet underground of today, bradford cox and his ensemble blend poetry and waxy, shimmering music into a swirl of aural enchantment. they create canvases of sound; dark and looming, like an impressionist painting of an impending storm over the calm blue of the ocean.

short stories

• when i was seven all i wanted to be was eight.

• i woke up this morning, sneezed and looked around for a tissue - there were none to be had.

• i chased a duck when i was in pre-school once - it bit my cock.

• the night michael jackson died, someone's facebook status said, "You can do it, MJ". I googled michael jordan immediately, but he was fine.

• my first kiss was behind the slides at the playground; we decided to stare into each other's eyes until we fell in love.

• the breakdown in cyndi lauper's "girls just want to have fun" gives me the chills.

• i briefly felt the satisfaction of having landed the ollie off the box before i stood up and looked at my hand; all my fingers were wrenched backwards and my eyes burst from my skull.

• the first thing i did when i took off my glove to see why my finger was hurting and saw that it was twisted around my other fingers in a manner not physically possible was whip out my cell phone and take a picture.

• when i fell into the rapids and the brown, frothing water was swirling like ten foot walls 360 degrees around me i screamed, inhaling the muddy, bubbling liquid into my lungs. no one heard me.

• i want to be sitting on a white-sand beach, looking out at clear, turquoise water, drinking a piña colada from a coconut.

• i briefly dated this girl i wasn't really interested in in ninth or tenth grade, and when she asked me if i loved her i said, "Yes."

• i've been listening to music in headphones again, even when i am alone.

yosemite

the music i have been listening to recently

popo
maluca
ear pwr
woods
neil young
the new moby album, especially the song "shot in the back of the head"
the new tortoise album
the vaselines
the violent femmes
joker's daughter
hercules and love affair
chico buarque
clementina de jesus

what's with little kids
having kids

they don't even care about us

imagine how michael would have fared in prison...

king of pop, giving tree - beat it, just beat it.

i'm out of the jungle

two months in the amazon changes a man

i had this in my leg

ALBUM FINISHED

HITTING YOU ALL IN YOUR FACES ON APR 15

i think you're super just the way you are

i don't do interviews with women unless i fornicate with them. so you should, you know. stop talking. unless you want to, you know.

mister mosquito

this has got to be one of the most ridiculous things in existence i have ever come across. i want this now.

unforGIVable

connections

life

my eyes

i learned what fml meant the other day.

ramblings

god damn it.

alright.

you said this! no, i didn't. no, you did.

always always always! woohoo!

i have been going swimming a lot recently. not like laps, different swimming strokes. not like that. just putting on goggles, jumping in the pool and swimming down to the bottom of the deep end and looking up at the surface ripple above me. i didn't use to be able to do that. my ears would hurt too much or by the time i got to the bottom i would be out of breath.

i was a child soldier.

ab-lum.

it's almost done.

jesus.

check this out. you'll either laugh or cry.

also, i read that lil wayne is releasing a rock album in may. if it's anything like his guitar playing we better run for cover.

seriously, jesus.

album progresses.

over the past few months i have been making progress on completing the album i've been working on for about 2 years. i've moved away from purely digital production and my most recent songs have incorporated live drums, the ukulele, guitar, bass and keyboard. i've also strayed from my more dancy tracks and have moved slightly towards... well i don't know what i want to call it.
anyway. i'm putting it out finally by the end of this month. i have been working on album art and a friend of mine, matt stefaniuk aka rat samsa (check out his artwork after the jump), designed this sharkybara for me.
here it is with some colors, also courtesy of rat samsa.
the cd will be hosted on CD Baby.
get stoked.

as of late.

so i just returned from india; it was my first trip in 12 years.
i started off in mumbai, and after a few days of meditation i made my way over to hyderabad to visit a friend of mine who's doing a semester at the university there. her friends, she and i then took a 12 hour train down to hampi, an ancient city with ruins of temples and palaces. and lots of rocks; karnataka, the region in which the city is, is known for its boulders that lie as far as the eye can see. seriously. so that was an awesome trip. i had to leave early to meet my dad in delhi. that was great too and it brought back lots of memories.
here are some piktchers.

trying this out

so for the next couple of months i won't be up to all that much; i'm in bangkok and trying to be as productive as i can possibly be while i am here. so far that hasn't been working out so well, but i'm making some progress, i suppose. i've been eating a lot of food. that's new. i also started playing the ukulele.



but i've been exercising, too. i've been playing tennis, going swimming and riding my bike around.

reading this depresses me.

i've also watched a lot of bad movies.



i'm taking portuguese lessons in preparation for my adventure to brazil, i'm getting my scuba certificate.

i'm working as a dj, which isn't as cool as it sounds.

alright. so i don't intend for this blog to be about me and what i'm doing, but i don't really have anything to say right now so this will have to do.

welcome to this blog.