Rich Seymour's stochastic statements.

Here I am sitting in a room with these nice grass floor mats. Doors in Japan are… right about 6 feet tall or so. Which means that I will probably hit my head at least once during my visit. The toilets are high tech, with heated seats. Outside I saw something of perhaps the bay or the ocean and it looked very picturesque. In fact I took a picture that I will upload later.

It’s 10:10 AM here and somehow I managed to feel completely normal regarding the time change. I hope it stays that way.

Had breakfast of fish, rice, miso soup, mini-fish, tofu, salad (with mayo), omelette with ketchup and some pickles and stuff. Green tea and coffee as well. So little sugar but a fair amount of salt. From what I recall my Mom telling me, her Dad would eat his eggs with ketchup. I do too sometimes, but in Japan it’s standard. I feel like when I get home I will have to get like froot loops or cocoa pebbles or something to restore my sugar balance. I did have a green tea (macha) kit kat, which I’ve been wanting to have since I saw it on the internet. It was pretty good, with a mellow green tea flavor.

This hotel/spa in Izu is crazy nice. Also the Kobe Interdisciplinary Simulation School (aka KISS) looks like it will be fun… I can’t read or even pronounce Japanese, but I understand the universal language of the UNIX command line. Yay.

Also there is a guitar here, which I haven’t played yet, but I surely will.

Riding a bullet train. This fulfills a childhood fantasy of some sort. Smooth, clean, etc. No iPhones or service out here and that’s ok.

Japanese people at least in Tokyo and whatnot are sharply dressed. I suppose it’s a business thing. But yeah even the hipster are in designer distressed garb that somehow seems to work.

On Narita express to Tokyo. We are about an hour outside of Tokyo, but this is the main Tokyo airport. Only food place at airport: Starbucks. That is deep right there.

This train and everything thus far in Japan has fit in with the clean, friendly and high tech stereotype. The problem being that unlike the neuromancer days, everyone the world over can peep Japanese tech whenever they want via YouTube. So, unless I meet a person who is actually a cyborg or a complete robot I will probably leave Japan feeling kind of meh about cutting edge tech.

That said a guy could use a nice Japanese chef’s knife. Also what should I get people? Mechanical pencils are my go to right now. Pentel don’t fail me now. That and maybe some postcards?

This trip combines two of my worst things. a) buying stuff for the holidays and b) buying souveniers.

So given that drinks are free on this flight I suppose I should be plastered. Sadly I ain’t much of a drinker. I would like to share some budget mixology:
Singapore Sling on the cheap
2 parts Hawaiian punch
1 part beefeater gin (or whatever is cheapest)
mix and serve over ice

Landing in something like an hour.

We’ll see if I can keep blogging this jazz.

We’ve been airborne for maybe an hour. Hangin in the front row of economy. They still give free drinks and little care packages with a toothbrush and a microminiature tube of toothpaste. Took enough seroquel to allow me to sleep at the drop of a hat. 250mg in case you want to play along at home.

I guess I will try to eat some lunch and drink a Singapore Sling:
created in 1915. dry gin, Dom Benedictine?, Cointreau and cherry brandy shaken with lime and pineapple juices and a dash of angostura bitters and grenadine. I’m not sure you can make a stranger cocktail based around gin… questions: just how girly a drink is this and how many mini umbrellas will it have?

Yeah. So I hope to upload this once I have wifi. Wondering if I should have lugged Mason & Dixon (the book) with me. I wanted to leave space for vintage Japanese electronics and mechanical pencils though.

ok time to eat.

I’m waiting in a cab to go to LAX. Flying from there to Japan. Hoping to catalogue this journey in full multimedia and may or may not distribute it on CD-ROM at a later date. I am quite sure that my main interactions with Japan, outside of knowing awesome Japanese people, have been through video games. Also, big fan of ninjas. This is the prototypical boring blog post before something exciting happens that I won’t write about.

oh and there will be photos.

I am blogging this while sitting in a fish fry place at western and mlk. Wooooooo awesome.

This is a short post of some bands/people I’ve been listening to lately:::

Metric ilovemetric.com/
Dead Western myspace.com/deadwestern
The Fervor myspace.com/thefervor
The Dreamers myspace.com/dreamerscandream
Treasure Mammal myspace.com/treasuremammal
Double Dagger www.posttypography.com/doubledagger

Yeah. So things are good. I was talking about blogging with my friend the other day. I said well, I do the Clark 8 blog on myspace with some frequency, but … nutation.net really just gets updated in spurts. Who knows though, I love wordpress, much more fun to blog with. I bet there’s some iphone app to do this directly via said device… that’d be rad.

Onto that. Have a great day.

Recently on reddit there was a question of who was your favorite jazz artist. I didn’t write anything, but David S Ware’s work with Matthew Shipp really moved me when I was in NYC.

But yeah, he needs a kidney… all of this from the daily swarm.

They also have an interview with erstwhile (used that word twice today, probably wrongly) program manager of indie 103.1 here.

File under: day late dollar short.

In the category of radio station most likely to play the bands on the cover of SPIN magazine in Los Angeles, there was only one. Indie 103.1… I don’t know the who deal beyond the fact that this radio station is going to become net only. (I guess they weren’t getting enough advertising revenue) You can check it out at indie1031.com

But in my opinion, wfmu.org is the best online radio by far. Also, as a shout out to my Dad’s lifelong love of steel guitar you can check out Steel Guitar Radio

Then in terms of LA “independent” radio, it’s nearly maxxxxed out already with:
littleradio.com who had an interview with erstwhile indie 1031 program director Mark Shovel::: here (look on the left under archives 1/16/09… it starts with a wicked sharp ease track)

vivaradio.com run by the canadian/american dreamers at American Apparel.

killradio.org very independent… clark 8 (err me playing clark 8 songs acoustically) played on killradio.org a while back

dublab.com killer electronic sounds and events around LA

and finally
imradionetwork.org

All of those are LA based alt-sounds streaming on the internet…
not to mention the variety of podcasts coming out of more and more blogs… who knows, maybe this one.

So… I personally think Fox/MySpace should buy 103.1 FM. I personally see more rotation of commercially viable rock, rap, r&b, etc. on MySpace Music than anywhere else. They just cornered that market early and well.

I still mainly buy local when it comes to fresh tunes.

So, 2009, what’s in store? We have MLK day coming up, followed by inauguration, followed by my band playing a show (on a Wednesday)…

I just upgraded this site to wordpress 2.7, it’s rather snazzy.

I’ve been looking into the language Haskell a bit over break. It seems interesting.

I’ve had a nice time in Jamestown, hanging with my parents and my friends. Finally got to meet my … 8 year old niece and have pictures to prove her precocity. Her grandma is going to great lengths to give her a great childhood, too.

I suppose this sort of thing happens all the time and has been forever under the name of Artistic cycling.