TV Blogging

I watched Dave Letterman tonight, it was pretty good. Usually I watch Jay Leno at 11:35 but I was a little tired of it. Jeanine Garafalo and They Might Be Giants are on Conan; Jeanine was pretty good, I am sure TMBG will also be pretty good. It's like the Triple Witching Hour of white bread liberal empowerment. Excellent. I saw They Might Be Giants in Boston at The Paradise theatre in 1987; there were only a few people there as the show began and three songs in, a woman experienced a bout of syncope. She fainted and left with a friend. 8 months later the band was back, and I walked down to the theatre to go to the show, and for some reason their super brighly colored plastic sound was changed to a more natural sound, more like Busta Rhymes or Guided by Voices' Vampire On Titus, like changing from white bread to wheat bread.

Wow. Their new song "I'm Impressed" sounds more like their first album than most anything I've heard in a long time.

Clicking to NBC.com, one finds that 30 Rock episodes are all available there. Excellent, I will watch them all before The Rule of Law returns to the website.

Carson Daly is very good for one's music appreciation. The show goes good with bands like Gas Huffer and other West Coast stuff. There is some kind of difference in the demographics of European-Americans and Asian-Americans, including people who walked here to this continent 11,000 years ago from Northeast Asia.

These Mexico City subway station icons may help express some figures in the blog entry:

1 Carson Daly
2 Jeanine Garafalo
3 30 Rock
4 My coffee maker

The Mexican government has assembled a set of pictures for their subway system, so very thoughtfully, as thoughtfully presented as the words on an Asian map or subway system. Asian can express every emotion in a word or two; there are many idiosyncracies and conventionalizations involved, making this language useful for news stories, science textbooks, advertising, fashion, novels, history, government, et cetera; "reading" the Mexican government's subway sign system gives one a new appetite for homework and study; the two actually have something to do with each other.








More talk about Paris Hilton tongight. Putting together the real picture, from Jay Leno's commentary expecially, one supposes she is a woman who jacks guys professionally and then screams joyfully. Great. The crime pages are full of this crap, dudes and their ladies at the end of the line, slogging hypnotized through apartments and rented rooms, alcohol is involved, the non-violent nature of the struggle between the pair grows boring and then there is a fight, the guy normally wins these fights. Dudes need to avoid this kind of situation absolutely in the first place, bands like Black Flag, The Motards, and of course the Dead Boys definitely satisfy the appetite for crappy experience in a clever, fun, non-painful way. If my rap collection was as well-developed as my punk rock collection, I could drop a few rap names here as well. She's Sophisticated!

Poker After Dark, I watch 3 or 4 times a week if my schedule permits it. It is very reassuring to see the professionalism, sportmanship and conversation that goes on on this show. Baseball players, football players et cetera are as experienced in organizing their thoughts as are the poker players; the nature of the game of poker makes it obvious how game discipline can lead to personal excellence. Some of the conversations going on at these tables go far past interesting. What a great show.

The Shopaholics

I'm going to the desert, the dirty dusty desert, there are things there worth avoiding....The Meat Puppets from Too High To Die

Nelson Muntz: ....just like they have in Candyland!
Lisa Simpson: Nelson, theres no such thing as Candyland!
Nelson Muntz: Sniff. There isn't? But I was going to move to Cuckoo Corners!

Unlike The World, which was made in Beijing and is set in a Disneyland-like context, The Shopaholics, which is made in Hong Kong and is set in shopping malls full of Gucci and Prada, doesn't really change course midway through the movie. The Shopaholics is a very Imelda Marcos movie, in American terms it would have something to do with both Paris Hilton and Leona Helmsley. Its star, Cecelia Chung, is a Chinese Shelley Long. It just doesn't stop, until halfway through, when one starts hitting the time bar to move it along, and then it is over in less than a minute.

The Shopaholics is about mental illness (shopaholism); The World is about improving oneself by reading. Maybe it's true that people in the north really do think about things more seriously. Or, maybe it's true that in the south, there are more things worth avoiding, and frothy plastic colorful warning signs are pleasing to the eye. I don't know. Buddha bless you. Both movies are available at Netflix.

E Commerce

E Commerce consists of Alternative Rap. Music downloaded from eMusic includes:

Pharcyde - Cydeways:The Best of Pharcyde
Pharcyde - Labcabincalifornia
Epitaph Records Hip Hop Sampler - Amongst others, Talib Kweli has been working at Epitaph Records.
Atmosphere - You Can't Imagine How Much Fun We're Having - A Minneapolis area rap group. Related artists include MC Lars, I am looking forward to getting that.

Saved for later: Planet Asia, Erykah Badu, Arrested Development, more De La Soul.

Media Focus

When one is from an education family, and is the son of teachers, there is always available the option of just going off on a tangent because it is pleasing to you to do so. After so many years of teaching and answering questions, it pleases a teaching parent for a son or daughter to be perfectly abstract, for comic effect.

Son or daughter: "I thought I would take that architecture seminar at The New School and then do some work and then submit a bid on the apartment buildling on the corner. I read the sign. I could write about the experience on my college application. Can I borrow $80 bucks?"

Parent: - Very funny. Sure, here's $40. Don't screw up.

'''''''''''''''

So, to be perfectly unaccountable, here are some media topics. To be perfectly accountable, it is my belief that people really benefit from being coached on how to respect, disrespect and choose between our many media products, sort of like people need to be coached on how to experience criticism. It shouldn't really be that uncomfortable a process to learn something. It should be fun, it should be like learning to drive a car. We are all in the driver's seat of our lives, one shouldn't piss off the driver, even if one is a student at it.

''''''
Media
''''''

Rammstein - Deutche Neue Harte - The new German heart? The new German deer? Actually, looking it up, it is "The New German Hardness", which is a funny way to talk about a genre that is otherwise known as "Dance Metal". I was listening to a tape loop from a college radio station in the middle of Narragansett Bay, this song was on every 110 minutes. It was a good loop, I was thinking of something else, 2 am, 5 am, 7 am on a summer Sunday morning, I decided to tape the Rammstein when it came around, I also managed to get "Arthur Murray Taught Me Dancing in a Hurry" from the 50s. "Arthur Murray then advised me not to worry. He taught me the groundwork, the walking around work, and told me to take it from there."

Mo the bartender on The Simpsons - What is the deal with Mo? This show, which started in 1990?, has provided so much positive narcosis for teenagers of all ages, hopefully will still be around in 10 years.

Brian and Stewie on The Family Guy - These two, I am not sure who is really in control of this relationship, they are very good for each other.

Brian Giunta of the New Jersey Devils - Great. If one knows how to hit somebody then one can be an All Star NHL player. There are plenty of champion sumo wrestlers who are built like NFL lineman, who win all the time against the guys who are built like the fattest men in the world. "Career Opportunities - Do you really want to make a score?" Practice, practice, practice.

Trusty, the band from Dischord - There is nothing more interesting than accepting the conceit of a racehorse narrating a song - "Unsnowplow". "No one's checking on me. Why do you have to take me for a loser? Check me out, check me out, check me way out. I live in the laundry room seen in the movies. It's all there and no one's going to touch it. East side. North side. South side. West side. [You] said you got a reputation for taking chances, get out of my way 'cos I'm an amublance, you know." The rest of the song is more or less expressed instrumentally.

Lara Flynn Boyle - This person, who was a regular on David E. Kelley's The Practice, is a good poker player and has a gothic cross tattooed on her ankle.

The movie Tart - The protagonist in this great movie behaved badly part of the time, badly enough to make me question the salience of her world.

''''''''''''''

I know this is all Chinese, but it does crack me up in a safe, productive way, and I am keeping with the theme. Cliche is the only enemy.

Son or daughter: "Gee, I am looking at these papers, and each and every single one of them says "William Blake was ahead of his time." How do you take each one completely seriously? It seems like hard work and a lot of them are pretty good."

Parent: - You got that right.

Son or daughter: "So, do I get credit for all this Chinese stuff?"

Parent: - Groan.

Millenium Mambo

Pourin' on the metaphor - PE
What does it mean? What does anything mean? - PiL
It's always just about right here; it's always just about right now - Lungfish


This is a really great movie, it was made in Taiwan in 2001 and as is usual with the movies I like, it made me feel like working; it delivers energy in a clever, effective way. The movie stars Shu Qi who reminds me of Jang Nara and or Jeon Ji Hyun. The movie certainly seems to be as good as some of the Korean movies that have constituted the main drive of Asian cinema for the last 10 years. Millenium Mambo seems to start to shift its flow towards the end of the movie, when "the issue of someone having made some of Stonehead's money disappear" is broached. Available at Netflix Queue and Watch Now.

Oh, life goes on, long after the thrill of blogging is gone...

Sorry not to have posted for a few days; given the nature of the preceding blog post, it is understandable that one would give blogging some thought before continuing on. Thinking about NBC's Law and Order, one thinks of Mariska Hargitay and Chris Meloni; their squadroom temperament is strong, strong like being able to crack walnuts with one's hand. In contrast, I really have to say that the cop on Adult Swim's Squidbillies is a cop I would find myself able to emulate, transferred to an urban setting, of course. (This has no bearing on my appreciation of Detectives Sifowicz and Simone of NYPD Blue.) In reflecting on the differences between Chris Meloni and Commissioner Squidbilly, one might consider that the officer played by Mr. Meloni on Law and Order has a certain type of clientele; he finds it to be a regular occurrence to simply get energized and get results in a very short amount of time; the morality generated during his largely successful law enforcement efforts is very intense. The thesis being presented here is that one could not actually survive that level of moral action for more than a few seconds at a time; contrasted with Commmissioner Squidbilly, who seems (accounting again for his clientele and adjusting his persona to an urban setting) to work on about 55% of the maximum moral action potentiation, a level under which one could live and work comfortably for the many decades of one's life. Whereas Meloni's character is an optimal choice for an interview room emergency, the Commissioner, for normal citizens who may have shoplifted a couple of times as a teen, or who dealt a lot of weed and then quit dealing weed because he or she got too old for it, or who receives inexpensive cable service, or any other number of things that people do, that person could find it to be very copacetic (to borrow a term from Hill Street Blues) to be able to think about the Captain on Squidbillies in an office at City Hall and at the Police HQ.

What would be the title of the Squidbillies if it were to be set in urban Baltimore or New York? People who feel slightly uncomfortable with the law agencies, due to unfamiliarity, wrong impressions, recreational drug use, et cetera, would have plenty of energy to work at the auto shop, the insurance company, the department store, the transit authority, et cetera. What's the deal with eating grapes at the supermarket and with illegally throwing one's trash into a convenient dumpster that one isn't paying for? If law can remove presences in society that prevent people from getting to work, it can also speed the Bart Simpsons, Courtney Loves and Cosmo Kramers to that place of work.

Opportunities in Law Enforcement

A new, recurring feature here at heaven up here.com.

'''''''''''''''''''

Well, why not give this a try?

Hey, officer, look at this!

This week's Law Enforcement Opportunity is "W.A.R.", or "White Aryan Resistance". Like the city of Greater Los Angeles, which is reaching a natural limit of growth, that of the mountains and desert, my punk rock criticism - a necessary component of this blog - I only really talk about bands I like - is reaching a natural limit of growth: that of racism. People have problems and if they are allowed to actually blame their problems on others, then something should be done. It's too distracting to working Americans. Our national prosperity is suffering due to the sites that will be covered in this feature.

To communicate directly with Tom Metzger:
SEND MAIL TO: TOM METZGER, BOX 401, WARSAW, IN. 46580


Where the heck is "Warsaw, Indiana"? Looking in the Wikipedia, it seems to be here. The Wikipedia goes on to say that:

Warsaw is a city in, and the county seat of, Kosciusko County, Indiana, United States. The population was 12,415, as of the 2000 census.

Cradling Winona Lake, Pike Lake and Center Lake, Warsaw is nicknamed "Lake City," though other cities in the surrounding area are also referred to by that nickname.

Who the heck would invest money in Warsaw, Indiana at this time? Tom Metzger is kryptonite for new factories. He is 69 years old. Metzger is a person who was successfully sued heavily for inciting a hate crime, it should be possible to comb through the website and find another example of that. Here is his Wikipedia article, the address is written to the reference section, featuring Morris Dees' book; Morris Dees is the lawyer who secured the monetary judgement against Metzger.

ALL ORDERS AND SUBSCRIPTIONS (for W.A.R.) GO TO:
THE INSURGENT, PO BOX 2267, TEMECULA,CA. 92593-2267

This group has somehow managed to get the internet address "www.resist.com". This is no good, how many years, decades or centuries will this last? This post office box is in the inland part of Los Angeles. This website features some good looking women.

'''''''''''''''''

Punk rock is in a cul-de-sac. If we're so smart, why don't we do something to correct this situation? The "Rule of Law" is essential for the survival of business, for the flow of money from the corporations to the people, that Rule of Law is one of the main victims of the hate groups.

'''''''''''''''''

The bloggist would like to state that this is the first installment of "Opportunities in Law Enforcement", and that our effort is bound to improve as time goes on. The philosophy at work here is methodical, like cleaning a garage. Let's try to fix our country up so that we can all breathe a little easier!

Pat Buchanan is Crying Nut

Pat Buchanan is Crying Nut. As I watched him sit there Sunday (7/1/7) morning putting a lot of pressure on his interviewer, to create a conversational template that would allow him to speak his mind without sounding bad, it sort of crossed my mind that it is difficult to placate Pat Buchanan. I don't know how many hundreds of hours I have put in with the regular Rx for this type of guy, that Rx appearing every weekday night at 11:35 on CBS, watching Dave certainly makes it easy to cope with superbad nerds like the Buke. A regimen like Dave will keep the nation healthy. But there's even more Rx available, material produced by people who grew up watching Dave, took to the programming, and know how to talk. Crying Nut, the band from Korea, is a good example. Too bad I haven't found the translated lyrics yet.

Yet, their YouTube video for their song "Circus Magic" is easy to follow and understand. It has that real verite/fake verite look, it's epic fakeness makes a very true response in the viewer; it's real good film making. If one invests too much in a video, one might walk away from the computer all jazzed up, too jazzed up to sit and think it out with a Miles Davis cd. When a media customer gets excited, it's up to media product like The Late Show to take the load off.

There's actually nothing fake about fake things. Pam cooking spray is real; Glade air freshener is real; Toni Basil is real; these are all real things with very fake qualities. The workday often includes real problems, problems with insurance coverage, construction equipment, lines of software; if one turns on the Late show, and the problems are fake, and the answers are fake, then why does one feel a real sense of relief?

Note: As far as I know, The Late Show is on every night in Seoul.

''''''''''''''''

Well, here are the lyrics for Circus Magic.

Yogijogi moyobosseyo
yogujogu golaboseyo
uridurun sokosu magic yuramdan

anyonhaseyo

...

Urinun crying nut todori sinsa
han manun peldogansan yuranhevoce
maundero chumur chumio toduro voceyo
ochapi uriegen neilun opda

Onuldo asul.asul jejunomjiman
gomgomhi senkahani nega gon i ne
nanjan.i kande.e whejultaginun
arumdata. sulpudoda. nabiroguda!

Urinun crying nut todori sinsa
han manun peldogansan yuranhevoce
maundero chumur chumio toduro voceyo
ochapi uriegen neilun opda

The new transliteration scheme is easy to follow. There are videos at YouTube of a big Christmas TV celebration featuring the band playing Christmas carols. If I ran the circus, Green Day and Dwight Yoakum would be playing on December 24. Lots of songs have what Western listeners might identify as a "Russian" sound; maybe "Central Asian" or actually "Altaic" might be a good word to use. At any rate, here is a big Cring Nut blurb at YesAsia (link):

Choson Punk Revisited Friday, November 17, 2006
Picked By Sanwei (See all picks by this editor)

The original Choson punkers have long lost their indie edge, but their rocking irreverence is as welcome as ever. After a long hiatus (courtesy of the South Korean army), the band regrouped last year and released their fifth album, The Cow of OK Pasture, earlier this year. There must be something about that military service because three and a half years after their slightly disappointing fourth album, Crying Nut is back in top form for The Cow of OK Pasture.

The album is everything you can expect from Crying Nut: loud, infectious rock tunes, rowdy lyrics, and manic energy. Their riotous grassroots folk punk - complete with accordion! - has grown a lot more polished and inventive with this album. The instruments and vocals all have their own places, and there are more snazzy arrangements and less of the chaotic noise of previous albums. If the boys have matured in implementation, they are thankfully still as immature and joyfully raucous as ever in presentation.

It is pretty hard to go wrong with this album. There are fun straightforward pop punk numbers, like "Bump" (Track 3) and "Bedwetter Generation" (Track 13). And if you've ever felt the overwhelming desire to chant "Luxembourg" - and really, who hasn't? - then there is always Luxembourg (Track 2). For slightly less riotous, Crying Nut-style folk, there is the relaxed accordion- and acoustic-guitar-driven "Bird" (Track 10), perhaps most suitable for lazy strumming on a beach, and "Myong-dong Calling" (Track 4), which is a far shot from London Calling, but still a decent mid-tempo reggae rock track with catchy guitar hooks. Where Crying Nut fabulously outdoes itself is when folk, rockabilly, polka, punk, and lunacy collide, as in My World (Track 11) and "Drink" (Track 5). Just for the record, I believe if a drunken circus cow drove his pick-up truck into an Irish pub and started an ad-hoc polka band, the result would sound something like "Drink".

It is easy to discount artists after they have stayed past their prime and, in Crying Nut's case, become suspiciously mainstream-friendly in the process. True, we will never again see the raw, anarchic Crying Nut of 1998, young, brilliant punk pioneers on the verge of breakthrough. But the 2006 Crying Nut has developed their signature musical style to a new level of circus magic. And there is always the accordion.

More E-Commerce

Material purchased online and downloaded from eMusic in previous months includes:

- The 4 Skins History of the 4 Skins - Oi? Always surprised to find true value, again and again, this record is on Taang's 50 List, this is the other side of Naked Raygun, 4 Skins is kind of positive and encouraging like Raygun is kind of negative and liberating.
- J Church many records - Lance is in medical trouble, may need a kidney. Dana Carvey says "Kids today have it too good. When I was a kid we used to gnaw the bark off a tree, and we liked it!" Maybe the old guy could also try to get kids to go to some kind of church. J Church is a good substitute for church. Technically, it is a church - J Church.
- Hasil Adkins Out to Hunch, Peanut Butter Rock n Roll, Achy Breaky Ha Ha Ha - To me college consisted of hearing everything Hasil Adkins would have had to say about the U.N., the media, geopolitics and relationships, if the Haze had been some kind of would-be yuppie.
- V/A The Rough Guide to African Rap - I saw this at Newbury Comix and I picked it up. Good idea. Ty, Reggie Rockstone from Ghana, Prophets of da City, Positive Black Soul, Pee Froiss from Senegal. The Wikipedia has a lot of material on African (and Asian, Indian, South American et cetera) rap. The revolution (is right here in front of you) has something to do with De La Soul of New York.
- Fugazi The Argument - I have all of Fugazi's studio recordings, maybe, I have listened to In On over 50 times. The Argument is so good, something to start with if one is interested. Who is this guy "Fugazi" anyway? I won money at Keno, in Reno, I picked 20 numbers and not one of them came up. This was in the winter of 1993-1994. I went across to Japan for a few months, flying out of the San Francisco airport, the Bay is a short west coast bus ride from Reno. So I bought some music, including Fugazi, at Tower or HMV in San Francisco near Chinatown and I was walking around and I found the Fugazi building. I sat across from the Fugazi building on some steps for an hour. A couple of days later I was in Tokyo looking around for some books. So interesting.
Movies: Dazed and Confused and Bob Dylan's Don't Look Back - Sick of mockumentaries?
Wiley Treddin on Thin Ice and Dizzee Rascal The Boy in da Corner - Grime music is freely available at eMusic, with interesting helpful commentary included.

E-Commerce

Records downloaded from eMusic include:

- Colin Newman A-Z
- Gas Huffer Integrity, Technology and Service - Smaht, sounds like Carson Daly has formed X. Sounds like Christmas. In Excelsior Dayglo Liquid Paper. Sounds like Wire. Sounds nice, for some reason, like rainy Southern California mountains, the band is from Washington State. The Wikipedia article is real good: Gas Huffer was a band from Washington state that played a sort of rockabilly punk, with lyrics both formal and comical, with antic stage presence. The classified themselves loosely in the Garage punk genre. The band created comic books with each album (drawn by all four members of the band, including Joe Newton, now deputy art director for Rolling Stone magazine), that contain the lyrics to the songs. This was done for every album up to (and including) "Just Beautiful Music". They are contemporaries of many, much more famous, Pacific Northwest rock groups.

Gas Huffer played its final show - dubbed "The Last Huffer" - at Seattle's Crocodile Cafe on January 14, 2006. Opening the show were Girl Trouble from Tacoma, Washington, and Canned Hamm [1] from Vancouver, British Columbia. At the conclusion of Girl Trouble's set, K.P. Kendall called Gas Huffer's Tom Price (who has been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease) to the stage and presented to him a "Certificate of Achievement".

Prior to Gas Huffer, Tom Price played with The U-Men.

The term "huffer" often refers to a form of substance abuse known as huffing.

- Rich Kids on LSD Riches to Rags Learning about the world one lives in, one finds RKL, from Santa Barbara area, part of Nardcore from Oxnard California. I didn't know 'til now, knowing punk rock is like knowing all the parts of a personal computer, it's a long complicatedly organized list that keeps changing and growing in an exponential manner. 3 of these guys died during the last 2 or 3 years. Tragic. Serious. Powerful. UC Santa Barbara. Jim Rome from the world of sports went to this college between LA and SF.
- Slits Cut Some kind of German female dub and punk rock. Pretty good. John Lydon married someone's mom from this band.
- Scientist
- Quincy Punx We're not Punks...but we play The on TV - I think there's an m missing, for some reason this reminds me of my high school, sometimes it's supposed to be funny, this is what people might have meant to say, in a non-corporate, trouble-making way. "We have to get jobs, you know." "Yeah. Me too." Eat a bowl of what? My high school was ok, but this record makes the experience funnier in retrospect.
- Battles EP C - It says "Math rock". I am interested in math rock. Reading some material on math rock, I have two Circus Lupus records, which are supposed to have something to do with math rock, or so I have read. Let's see what this sounds like.
- 2 Randumbs tracks
- Camper van Beethoven song "Interstellar Overdrive" - I can't remember what the original Pink Floyd version of this song sounds like, it must be good, all I have is this fascimile cover. Next month I vow to download the 4 discs of Camper van's collection.

Food ordered from Peapod includes:

Cafe Bustelo
Nestle's Amaretto Non-dairy
Joseph's Spinach and Onion Dip
Tortillas
Coleslaw
Salsa
Refried beans
Vodka sauce
Egg Noodles
Campbell's Chunky Chili
Ben and Jerry's
Frozen limeade
Grey Poupon mustard w/horseradish in squeeze bottle
Produce
3 18.5 oz Hungry Man frozen turkey dinners
Frozen spinach



Food ordered from H-Mart includes

3 cases kimchee ramen
17 Tea
Gen nip
Ottogi Medium Curry
Radish Chunk Kimchee
100 sheets of laver for $4.99