Saint Monkey

Okay, so obviously it’s not literal, it isn’t quite a space / time thing, but in my infinite wisdom I have found the way to do it subjectively.

Step 1. Buy a ticket to your desired destination.

Step 2. Start drinking four hours before your flight.

Step 3. Check in and go through customs etc then continue drinking.

Step 4. Once on the plane you will need to use your charm to get the stewardess to get you a drink before takeoff (it’s your charm and I will not tell you the secret to my own), continue drinking.

Step 5. During takeoff, take Valium (You will need to know what you can handle. 10mg is fine for me, I’m 6’1” and 80kg and have taken Valium before. I would suggest doing some experimentation to know what you’re good for before hopping on a plane and see the disclaimer below).

Step 6. Drink more. This is where you can go hard. Try 3 double shots back to back.

At some point shortly after that you will pass out. My own experience was waking up not long before landing. I don’t know if I was woken up or it just happened naturally but my time experience was almost nonexistent. I personally drunk close to 20 standard drinks in that first 5 hour period but I also have a fairly high tolerance to alcohol. If you would like to try this highly stupid but effective method of teleportation, it would be best to know your limits for all of these drugs.

Disclaimer: I do not recommend anyone actually do this. It is very stupid and can be harmful to yourself and those around you. You could die. If you do think this sounds like some half brained idea that you wouldn’t mind giving a go, talk to your doctor first.

Last night I saw, what was for me, the third part in the life in Japan movies. It was the key that the other movies barely, if at all, touched. Heart. And while none of them are Japanese cultural movies, they do show the culture and experience of foreigners living in Japan, or more specifically, Tokyo, as that is what I know from my experience living there. Now, although it is fine as a trilogy, it still does not complete the experience so I have hope that there is either a film that I don’t know about or one will be made in the future for a quartet.

The first of these films made was Lost in Translation, dealing in most part with alienation and dislocation. The experience of alienation is not unique to foreigners in Tokyo, it is also true for locals and possibly most especially, with those that have come from another city or the countryside to work. Alienation can happen in any place and any environment but it seems that there is something that permeates the culture of Tokyo, making it such a large part of everyday life. Maybe it is the close living environment, where privacy must be achieved internally, thus creating an inner mode which becomes so strong that it becomes difficult to break. James Cavell put it interestingly in his book Shogun, where one of the characters described making different rooms in her head.
The Japanese word for foreigner is gaikokujin meaning “foreign country person”, however, the more commonly accepted (if politically incorrect) word for foreigners is gaijin meaning “outside person”. But from what I have seen of Tokyo, everyone has become gaijin.
Although there were other aspects to the film, loneliness pervaded it so much that whenever there was a moment of real connection, it does shone bright through the darkness.

The second film, showing an altogether different aspect, is The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (2006). Think what you will of it as a film, but it showed a definite aspect of a young foreign guy’s experience of living in Tokyo. Girls, parties and underground scenes (at least for me). The feeling of “WOW” walking into a party and being a fifteen minute celebrity because you are the only foreigner there. Sure, it can get old pretty fast but when it’s still a wow factor, it’s a hell of a ride.

Last night I saw The Ramen Girl. A heartwarming story about a young girl, semi stranded in Tokyo after her boyfriend dumps her after her arrival.

I would like to insert a note here about being in a long distance relationship with a guy that has moved to Japan. Once he has gotten on that plane, you’ve lost him. Even if he “doesn’t like Asian girls”, he will change his mind once he gets there. I have known many people to be in the situation of guy in Japan, girlfriend back in home country. Either he is just cheating on her or he is strong and holds out for a length of time and then dumps her so he can mess around with J-girls or girl, but it will happen. Don’t waste your time from either position. I have never even heard of a situation like this working.

Going back: After getting dumped, she finds a connection with a ramen shop and the couple that run it and fights her way into their lives. Although the story is fairly simple, the interactions between the girl and the other characters are beautiful and funny in the small clashes of culture, misunderstanding and intentional misunderstanding. Her frustration and growing love (for her understanding) of the culture is done with tenderness and to my mind, some accuracy of the experience.
It is a shame that this movie will largely go unnoticed as I think it is a direct to DVD release in the US. I would hope that it could get at least a limited release in cinemas in some countries (UK? Australia?). It currently only has 5/10 (for only 200 votes (probably imdb trolls that haven’t even seen the movie)) on IMDB and some of the ignorant think it is a remake of Tampopo (1985), which it is most definitely not, although it does use one of the same actors, probably in homage. There is some criticism for what can seem like irrelevant side stories, but I think they are there to give a bigger (and quite genuine) view of the other aspects of her life living there. She did not turn Japanese, she had foreign friends, she could vent and not have the madness of the foreigners who ridiculously “turn Japanese”. Out of these three movies, this shows the most positive aspects of living in a country and people I will always hold dearly in my heart.

Reading this, I feel that it seems a lot like a draft of something I would like to do better and expand but I’ll post it for now and come back to it at a later date.

Listening to a few things at the moment. First; Wolfmother’s self titled album. Sounds like modernised 70’s music with a very heavy and obvious Led Zeppelin influence. I’ve only recently gotten into them and I hear they have split, over money no less, although I also heard there are plans to continue with a different line-up.

Second is The White Stripes. I’m listening to two of their albums, White Blood Cells, an earlier album and Get Behind Me Satan, something more recent. The White Stripes are kind of hard to classify but if I were, I would say they are folk punk rock. Very creative in their simplicity.

The other is MGMT’s first album Oracular Spectacular. Super creative alternative pop. I’ve had it for quite some time now but it’s still in my regular play list.

Have a listen through this new fangled Amazon sample player. Amazon, better alternative to itunes as the mp3’s are DRM free.

Made a new logo. Not really sure why but I like it better than the last one. Created very quickly in a cafe using Adobe Illustrator CS3 and a mouse.

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It’s been a while since I wrote anything here. But, can always start again now.

In some ways I wish I could write about all the strangeness in my life but I have the fear that people involved in any of it will come across this and I’ll get into a bunch of trouble. On the other hand, that probably isn’t likely anyway.

Example:
Today I had my ear chewed off by a girl. Completely unjustified, uncalled for and just plain wrong. Now, this girl happens to be the older sister of my girlfriend, who would take it badly if I tore her sister a new asshole like she was asking for. I was calm and acted rationally and in the end she realised her wrong (maybe) and ended up in tears.

Now, I would like to write the details here but I have the fear of people involed finding it… What to do…

Stay tuned…

There is no nice way to say this, but for those people who are a part of the Cult of Mac: You’re weird and scary.

Really, there is something incredibly freaky about the fervour that Apple lovers have about a BRAND. It’s a brand people. It’s  based around an electronics company.

For people who are members of the Cult of Mac, there a religious like awe usually reserved for the divine.

It seems that no matter what they release, be it good or sub par product, there are people who will line up for days or hours to get if first. It isn’t like they wouldn’t be able to get it if they waited a week. It isn’t a rock concert that can sell out, without the possibility of more tickets released, in a matter of minutes. The i-pod / i-phone / i-whatever will still be available the next week and the week after. You won’t miss out.

Now, I admit, Mac isn’t my thing.

Some of it seems pretty nice but I find the all white notebooks hurt my eyes. If I want something really portable, I still want it to be powerful enough to be able to do things or, I want it really small like the Asus eee.

My experience with iPod’s isn’t that great because I did a series of sound tests using a computer, Sony HiMD and a first or second gen ipod. Using the same MP3 we (my friend and I) did a sound test on each plugged through the same set of speakers. The iPod didn’t sound a lot like the original. I’m sure this would go unnoticed without a comparative test and probably has more to do with the audio codec than the iPod itself, but between this and the fact that I like my music DRM free and my player DRM free and my software DRM free and not have my music re-encoded into crappy formats and hidden from me in my player, Apple failed to win me over.

Now, the iphone does seem pretty cool. But I wont be getting one because I don’t want to have Mac-Restrict® on every part of it.

But my point is; even though they have some possibly decent products, some crap products, some products that are to (only) some peoples taste, and some really good products (or what would be good products without Mac-Restrict®), there is no need to be so passionate about it.

Why do people from the Cult of Mac always feel the need to defend the products of a company? Look online, in forums, chat rooms and comments and if there is anything said that is negative about Macs, there will be those followers of Mac, ready to defend their mighty white god.

It makes me sick. It’s just a fucking BRAND. I don’t hate Mac, I hate followers of the Cult of Mac. You scary weird fuckers!

Audible seems to want to actively block the ability to rip / convert .aa files to MP3 through third party software. The fact that the non ability to use the purchased media however one wants only affects their own paying customers, astounds me. With any digital file there will always be a way to remove DRM encryption, maybe it will take some time but there are people happy to spend their time doing so. These same people are the ones most likely to upload it somewhere for others to use. So, regardless of what they do, it will always get out there on the “free market”, so in effect, they only restrict their own paying customers. More on this in a future post.

Why would I want to rip .aa to MP3?

The simple answer would be because I paid for it and wish to listen to it however I want.
I have no intention of giving it to other people, I just want to listen to them on my chosen player. Plus if I want to listen to them in the car, why cant I put the whole thing on a single CD instead of screwing the environment and spend money on 8 CD’s?
Why cant I make it future proof?
What they close down or I format my computer and can’t get online to enter my username and password?
For me, the most prominent reason why I like to have them in MP3 is because even though I have a media player listed as compatible, and if fact got my trial Audible membership from the box of my media player, the crappy Audible software doesn’t recognise it, hence I can’t play .aa files on my “compatible” MP3 player.

How to:

This is not the only way to do this but it is the only “true rip” method that I know of that currently works. Plus it is legal within the restrictions that Audible give you.

This how to works with Windows XP/Vista. If you know that it works or doesn’t work on a Mac, post a comment below.

You will need:
Audible membership with crappy Audible software.
Nero Burning Rom (or another compatible burning software. I will explain it using Nero 8).
A CD emulator (I use Magic ISO but Alcohol, Daemon Tools or any other should work fine)
WAV to MP3 encoder (there are literally hundreds out there. Google “CD to MP3″. I will use Windows Media Player 11 (WMP))

1. Open Nero Burning Rom. A “New Compilation” box should appear. Select CD on the top left side of the box. Scroll down on the left and select “Audiobook CD”. Click “New”.
On the top toolbar of Nero it will show the selected drive that the CD will burn to, click that and select “Image Recorder”.
Browse for your .aa file in the right navigation bars and drag it across into the right (empty) box. You should then see multiple CDs (CD 01 time CD name etc). Click “Burn”. The dialogue box will come up again, click “burn”.
You will then be asked to “save as”. Navigate to where you would like to save your files and click “save”. Click “Autocreate file names”. Nero will then convert your .aa file to multiple CD images on your hard drive. Close Nero when it’s finished.

2. You will now need to mount your CD image onto a your virtual drive (CD emulator).
There are a number of ways to do this but I will only write about one.
Find the icon of your virtual drive in your system tray (all those pretty little pictures in the bottom right corner of your screen), PowerISO is a little gold CD, right click it, select your drive and click “Mount Image”, navigate to your CD image and select the first one, click “open”.

3. You can now open your CD to MP3 encoder, I will use Windows Media Player 11 (WMP) for this purposes because most people have this.
Open WMP and click “rip”. Select your drive on the left and WMP should automatically start ripping to MP3 (or wma if you have that set in your preferences).
Once the first CD has been ripped, without closing WMP, repeat step 2 for the next CD and WMP should automatically start ripping. Repeat until all CDs are ripped.

4. Step 4 is optional.
Navigate to where WMP put your MP3s “Music” or “My music” by default.
Name your folder “Book Name CD1” etc. Go into the folder and select all MP3 files in the folder. Right click and click “properties” select the “details” tab and in the “artists” field write “Book Name”, in the album field write “Book name CD#”.

Your done.

It seems a little complicated but it is actually very simple. The most time consuming part of the process in step 4 but that is completely optional, although I would recommend at least naming the folders as the time and date system that WMP uses can be a little hard to navigate 6 months down the track.

Spence Peppard goes nuts doing a rendition of Crazy. What was probably supposed to be a joke turned into some pretty good sounding music.

Spence’s Myspace page

I had a listen to Portishead’s third studio album Third today and was somewhat disappointed with what I heard. The first couple of minutes sounded like a 14 year old messing around with some audio software on the computer, rather than 40 year olds messing around with audio software on the computer. However, after the abrupt ending of the first song Silence, there is some improvement, although they seem to have moved away from the trip-hop sounds they are known for into often upbeat, abstract sounds and quick melodic changes, which for myself, was a bit disappointing because it stopped me being absorbed by their darkness and taken on the journey which the previous albums were apt to do.

By the fourth track The Rip, I did start to enjoy it with a relativity smooth Gibbons evoking Leonard Cohen in an electric female ballad and moving back closer to their old sound with the next track, only to be destroyed by a ditty which seems to come directly out of an old Hollywood movie set in Hawaii.

Far more than any previous album, this seemed more a collection of songs than an album as a whole. Although there are some good moments, overall I found it disappointing and am left wondering why they bothered, after 11 years since their last album, to release this.

To be officially released on Monday, April 28, 2008

Portishead website

Been listening to the new Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ album, Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! and am impressed. Taking what was good about both his old and new material, adding a little splash of something newer and more obvious humour. Mixing shit, murder, fucking and spiritual yearning, Dig is Nick at in true form and I love it.

Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! video clip. Looks like it’s been done on the first take

Below is a series of promotional clips with the first coming out around 3 months ago and the latest (and last) a week ago. Very funny if you dig this kind of humour. Click to see them. Continue reading “Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! Nick Cave’s new album: Genius, Fucking, Genius!!!”