Been A While

 Alert the media! Blogger found alive!

An apology would be polite, but I'm not inclined to offer one. The nature of time itself takes on different aspects as one moves through the stages of life. It's one of those things that overtake us without reference to our desires. 

I came across a fragment of a poem used as the heading of a chapter in a nice book that I'm in the middle of. It hit me as illuminating a bizarre epiphany-like experience that I had last year. My two sons, both good men by all accounts, are now officially in middle age, which means that the experiences of their lives are beginning to take on new aspects for them as well. My oldest contacts me by the Line app or e-mail about one time per year; my youngster, much less frequently. I had always been proud of them, and I had a firm belief that I had been an okay father. It seems that even that estimation may have been overly optimistic.  

I know that poetry is avoided by more clever bloggers, being the boring literary equivalent of someone talking about their dreams. But here's the fragment: 

Poem title: A German Requiem, by James Fenton, an Englishman

It is not what they built. It is what they knocked down.

It is not the houses. It is the spaces in between the houses. 

It is not the streets that exist. It is the streets that no longer exist. 

It is not your memories which haunt you. 

(It continues...) 

It is not what you have written down. 

It is what you have forgotten, what you must forget. 

This was quite a kick in the chest for me. What I realized last year, thanks to my son's concise prompting, was that I was living in a dream world. I was nothing like the middling and kind of okay dad and husband that I had considered myself to have been. 

I had forced myself to remember only what I had built, ignoring what I had knocked down. I was concentrating on the houses, when I would have done better to pay more attention to the spaces in between the houses. 

I was considering only my memories, even though I am quite familiar with my survival technique of enforcing a strict policy of forgetting many of the things that had happened to me and, I'm afraid, many of the things that I had done. 

Porco dio, how I hate being old. No surprise though. I also hated being a boy, being an adolescent, being a young man, being a grown up, being middle aged, and everything in between. I was a baby that failed to thrive, but lacked the dignity to die. 

Cafe

Thinking of my friend from the DR. That would be the Dominican Republic. We've been around the block. He moved up to NYC, where I was born and raised. We met by chance, both of us married by then. We got along, and my education in Caribbean Latin music and cooking was a great benefit to me. I moved to California and lived there for thirty years, and by now I've lived in Asia for twenty years. He's back in the DR. We still manage to stay in touch. 

Fun Fact: Puerto Rico, the DR, and my adopted home, are all about 13 degrees north latitude. I was thinking that the weather should be about the same, or maybe it's cooler on the islands, with the breeze and all. Not true. I've looked it all up a couple of times, and the Caribbean islands are much hotter. Actually, much more humid. It rarely goes above body temperature where I live (37 Celsius; 98.6 Fahrenheit). In the Caribbean the temperature is often rather higher than that. (Note: it's always hot where I live, in fact almost every day it reaches 35 C, 95 F. But rarely more. Lower when it rains, which is often.) 

The difference is the humidity. In the Caribbean it is humid like Florida, humid like the East Coast up to New York. Summers over there it can get up to 100 F and 98% humidity. By me? Humidity usually thirty points below the temperature. 95 F and 59% humidity. There's a big difference in the feel, to say the least. 

I miss my friend, but I'm too old to move again. Also too old to feel like traveling. I guess I'm just at the age where one looks backwards more than forwards. There's so much back there. 

Velly Joonas ‎- Stopp, Seisku Aeg! (FULL 7", soul, Estonia, USSR, 1980-1...

Just stashing this here because now YouTube does not feature anything like "Favorites" or "Watch Later." Are they trying to tell us something? 

Answer: yes. 

They're trying to tell us: "PAY UP, peasants, or fuck off." 

PJ Harvey & Björk cover the Rolling Stones' "(I Can't Get No) Satisfacti...

Maybe the 1990s weren't so bad after all. There was the Shibuya-Kei pouring out of Japan, and Nirvana were very good, and there was this.  

I was pretty scattered then, and for a few years in the middle I did drink a bit too much, and I was in the process of finally figuring out Jazz, so perhaps I could be graciously forgiven to have missed occasional gems like this. But hey, nobody's perfect. 

Magic Sam ~ All Your Love and Lookin' Good

Well? What do you think? Sam was pretty good, 'eh? Yeah, I think so too. I think he was great. 

The way that I heard it, Sam was less than reliable when it came to money. He drank a bit. His guitar was usually in the pawn shop, so he had to borrow one. From the photographic evidence, he often borrowed the guitar of his buddy, Earl Hooker. He could be hard to find when it was time for the gig too. He generally had no place or phone of his own, preferring to share the lodgings of his girlfriends. I don't think he ever had his own amp. The clubs always had a few around. 

I think that there are two albums, or were. I couldn't say what was available at this point. One studio; one live. Don't quote me. 

I think that Magic Sam made a guitar work harder than anyone else. He kept them ringing like bells. No dead spots for Sam, no dramatic pauses. Racing the devil, I guess, and he lost in the end. He was thirty-two. 

The Internet Is Sinking, And It's Taking Us Down With It

It gives me no joy, and only a bit of relief, to know that the individual who left two disagreeable comments in March of last year has crossed the river. 

Not to worry, though. You open the door to such rough handling when you leave the comfort of a simple, anonymous life and write a blog. I cannot say that they did not phase me at all, but the reality of it is that I am much harder on myself than any of my critics could manage. 

Those comments were reassuring in their way. They were a human touch to our constantly evolving Internet. At the very least it is quite unlikely that they were generated by an AI bot. And likely that they were not planted for the purpose of positioning any other blog above mine in the order of importance that AI is in the process of creating and refining. 

I'm sure that you have all noticed by now that the Internet is becoming less useful, less enjoyable, and more of a tool of oppression than we had been accustomed too during its Golden Years. Google search? Clogged with money grabs. YouTube? I never thought that I would see twenty minute advertisements. Facebook? Fishing scams, hacks, and contact with maybe six of your friends. This will only get worse as time goes on. Always the reduction in human input, and always the ever more voracious cash grabs. 

Strange things happen because websites of all types are entirely machine operated now. All you want to do is some simple thing, like sign up for a streaming service, or renew a magazine subscription, but the machine misinterprets something and says, "no way, Jose." This kind of thing has happened to me several times in the last year. In each case, there is no opportunity to contact the vendor. No chat button. Remember those? There were always pleasant, knowledgeable Indian twenty-somethings ready to help you. In my experience, they did a very good job. I don't have problems of first impression, no problems that are particularly challenging. Very run of the mill. The young person takes care of it almost immediately. 

No, now we just hit the stone wall of the machine. Frankly, I have a low impression of any company that would release such defective software to accomplish its business with consumers who simply want to sign up for something and pay with a long established credit card that works. And the wall is made of genuine stone. "We're sorry, but your IPO doesn't match the address on your credit card." End of story. No Deezer for you! The list goes on. One of the world's largest corporations, with whom I have been doing business for decades, refused to recognize that I was me, even though I signed in at the IPO that I used to buy software from them fairly recently and signed in with the user name and password that they gave me on that occasion. Their machine gave me a series of tests designed to prove that I was me. The questions included, "what were the subject lines on your last ten e-mails?" Again, no possible way to contact a human being, where the problem would be solved in two minutes. "Please send me a photo of you holding your passport next to your head." Even I could do that fairly quickly, and I'm not good with this stuff. 

Has everyone noticed that the new scam is that you can't buy software anymore? Now you only buy a "subscription." What you used to pay for the software now only covers you for a year, and you must pay with a credit card and allow automatic renewals. This is neoliberalism at its apex of piracy. Increase the number of contracts, and reduce the duration of contracts. Textbook stuff. And annoying. 

So far, every year since 1999, I have hated the Twenty-First Century more each new year than the last. Although, as I have said before, it does take the sting out of imminent death.  

Sadistic Mika Band in UK TV show “Old gley whistle test “1975 サディスティック ...

This band brought me into the world of Japanese bands/ singers/ music. I've got several records by this group. Pizzicato 5, FPM, and Shibuya-Kei in general have been my jam since the late 1990s. I've lived in Asia for about twenty years now (almost exactly). Most of the local music is either syrupy sweet love/ pop or morbid traditional songs about longing. Canto-Pop, etc. Japan really is a world apart. Tricot, Elephant Gym, the new stuff is really amazing. They are the funky Asians. 

I have a guess about how this happened, but I fear it ain't woke enough to mention in todays boring cancel climate.