Punk Pizza

Pizza Pals with Frankie Cosmos

A little ways back I read Slice Harvester, a memoir by Colin Atrophy Hagendorf and his mission to eat a single cheese slice at every pizza joint on the island of Manhattan.  It was good!  Now he has a video series of interviews with musicians where they sit down and -- wait for it -- eat pizza together.  It is also very good!

Life Update

between Trump and Republicans and Logan Paul I'm pretty much ready for a huge meteor impact / hostile alien invasion of earth

— James, Nazi-Puncher (@wetcasements) January 6, 2018

"Have You Ever Been?"

Nai Palm, "Electric Ladyland"

In addition to being great performance, I love the fact that she's playing a rock classic as a jazz standard on a metal-ass Jackson shred-master guitar.

My favorite type has always been against-type.

Hack Back

South Korea has had enough with North Korean cyber-attacks, so they've opened up a "Best of the Best" academy for so-called "White-Hat Hackers":

"With the North’s economy increasingly strangled by international sanctions, the country has almost no tax base and an expensive nuclear weapons program, meaning it has to seek alternative, often illegal, ways of generating income. North Korean hackers were linked to the theft of $81m from Bangladesh’s central bank in March 2016, and in December the US Trump administration identified North Korea as the culprit behind the WannaCry cyber-attack, which in May caused millions in losses. North Korea has denied involvement.

North Korean hackers have been linked to leaks of credit card information and illegal ATM withdrawals in South Korea. 'There are thousands of cyber-attacks in South Korea every day and most of them never get reported on the news,' Kim said. 'Information security is the basis of economic development.'”

For such a technologically advanced country, it does seem overdue for South Korea to finally take cyber-security more seriously.  They probably never expected a "backwards" North Korea to pull off the type of shenanigans that they've gotten up to lately.

Here's a free hint for starters: maybe don't make all your universities and banks and government agencies so heavily reliant on Internet Explorer?

These Trousers Are Rolled As Fuck

I did nothing for New Year's and it was glorious.

I mean, I did small things like laundry and a work-out and reading and watching a movie.

Getting older means being post-fun.  Post-fun is the best kind of fun.

Cutting Corners

Another year, another easily preventable public safety disaster in South Korea:

"Jecheon police said sprinklers in the first floor lobby, near the origin of the blaze, had been shut down, accelerating the spread of the fire. 

A fire exit on the second floor of the building, where most of the dead bodies were found, was blocked by iron shelves used to store supplies.

Eight people including Lee were legally in charge of evacuating people inside the nine-story establishment, but only a few -- excluding Lee -- carried out their duties, according to police. All eight managers safely escaped the engulfing fire, while Lee is known to have sustained minor injuries."

29 people, mostly women at a sports complex / sauna, died.

I'm about to re-sign a contract for 2018 at my college.  The thought of going back to Trumpistan still fills me with dred, but these sorts of stories happen way too often in South Korea.

Then again, I won't be shot to death.  Probably just die in a nuclear blast is all.

Good times.

True Fact

I think I make far too little of the fact that my first apartment in Korea was behind the Hooter's Restaurant in Gangnam.

Nerdmas!

Santa brought me new books!

Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood, Maddaddam

Mark Evanier, Kirby: King of Comics

Ann Powers, Good Booty: Love and Sex, Black & White, Body and Soul in American Music

Matt Brennan, When Genres Collide: Down Beat, Rolling Stone, and the Struggle Between Jazz and Rock

Marc Woodworth, Bee Thousand (33 1/3 Series)

The Kirby book in particular is absolutely gorgeous – lots of full page plates of great images.

"all the fun we had last year"

Darlene Love, "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)" live

I wasn't sure if 2017 could be actually worse than 2016.  But it was!

Merry Christmas to you and yours though.

Star Wars! The Last Jedi! Spoilers!

I liked it.  It was long.  The final battle felt kind of gratuitous, especially since the whole point was that the rebels couldn't actually win.  And there's only like, 25 of them left.

But I really loved it when Luke threw away the light-saber.  I think that and the book-burning were really the key scenes -- the Jedi screwed up the universe by trying to codify and reify The Force.  (Luke and Yoda are, not surprisingly, hella down with Zen Buddhism, i.e., direct understanding versus doctrinal memorization.)

It really was Leia's movie.  I'm fine with that.

Phasma was wasted.  (She's not really dead though, is she?)

Rose was likable enough, but her kiss with Finn was forced.  But I did like her line about how fighting for what we love is better than fighting what we hate.  This killed a lot of fan-boi-boners out there, and I'm fine with that.

The casino planet was kind of stupid and too long.

The whole Luke arc from hating The Force to burning up all memory of the Jedi but ultimately sacrificing himself for the good of the rebellion by way of using The Force?  That worked for me and that, along with Leia, was really the heart of the film.

Dare I say it, but maybe this film really should have been "Episode Seven."  I mean, it really should have taken place after the original trilogy as a sort of "Goodbye To All That" of the Jedi and The Force, and stupid-ass laser swords and space magic.  Then you can introduce Rey and Finn and the “next generation” of heroes, because at the end of the day they really didn’t need to be in this one.

Again, it's Leia and Luke's movie, not Rey or Finn's.  It feels out of place as film number eight because in terms of actors and arcs, it is, completely and absolutely.

Come to think of it, I can remember a lot of things I really didn't enjoy about the film.  But then again, I remember walking out of it feeling really happy and uplifted and wanting to see number nine.

So my heart dug it, and my brain not so much in retrospect.  Make of that what you will.  Zen indeed.

K-Pop Is Horrible And So Are You For Liking It

K-pop star Kim Jong-hyun is apparently dead of suicide (singer for Shinee).  Condolences to his family and friends.

That said, if there was ever another good reason to shun the toxic mess that is K-pop and K-pop fandom, here you go.

Aesthetically, it's no secret I can't stand what's supposed to be a musical genre that's defined more by haircuts and choreography than it is actual music.

But that's beside the point.  K-pop is, objectively, a vehicle aimed at young women and men to exploit them financially and sexually.  The contracts alone, signed at an early age, basically ensure that even if you "make it" in K-pop you are basically fucked for life contractually.

No doubt this shit exists in America as well (#metoo, Kesha, R.I.P. Prince, etc.) but if you can write your own songs and hire a good lawyer, you've got a lot of leeway that Korean artists could never dream of.

So yes, get off of my lawn and all that.  K-pop and (kill me now) K-pop fandom have always struck me as bizaro-world parodies of actual music and love of music but rather than end with more of my bile, how about this -- next time you have a chance in South Korea, check out an indie band or singer at a local nightclub, somebody who isn't signed to YG or SM or didn't attend an "academy" for their art.  They're out there, some of them are really talented, and they could use your 5,000 won more than any entertainment agency here could.

It's a small start.