*Latest on the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act*
(In the last 8ish hours as of this post)
CISPA PASSES COMMITTE WILL HEAD TO HOUSE FLOOR FOR A VOTE
http://mobile.theverge.com/2013/4/10/4210788/cispa-passes-committee-again
AMENDED CISPA MOVES TO HOUSE AFTER CLOSED-DOOR VOTE http://rt.com/usa/amended-cispa-house-vote-660/
REDDIT CO-FOUNDER SHARPENS KNIFE FOR CISPA FIGHT
I’d like to talk to you today about a friend of mine whose CD I’m just getting to know. I spacebooked and tweeted about it about a week ago (or more), and I shall probably mention it again (for sure). In addition to this, my pal Tom Giarrosso passed it along on HIS spacebook so that’s a good example of how passing the love along is meant to work. Let that be a lesson to us all, gremlins.
Now … This particular project is the first, brand new release from a musician I know from Song Fight! called Jim of Seattle. You should go look into this, because Jim is an exceptional musician who has created an amazing piece of Art. He is not the only “Jim” in Seattle, but as far as I am concerned after just an inital perusal of this material so I could get started enough to write a bit to you so you could go quickly and get this recording – he might as well be!
Jim is not new to the music industry, as you will no doubt figure out. This is the caliber of work I’d like to feel under my wings when I make a release and finally say “BOOM! Look at this! I have made sticky sound that will last for generations!” So not only is this thing just plain charming and important – Jim is a musician’s musician.
For Jim this has been a real journey. You’ll grok that if you read the interview between Jim of Seattle and Green Monkey Records President Tom Dyer (you can also see a fun photo there of Jim with a bike and a pigeon, and other nifty photos of Jim doing cool stuff. I rather enjoyed these because for a while I remember internalizing Jim’s SongFight avatar photo, even though I KNOW he does not look like the guy in the Earnest movies! I like seeing pictures of people that I know from the internet though. If you read my blog you know that I am creepy.).
Anyway, yes, there’s a special kind of energy hearing a recording from someone who has taken the time to reveal their vision to the world with such deliberate intent after a lifelong trip through many other musical avenues. So this recording IS pretty intense. And it HAS been a long time coming.
You can preview the recording at CD Baby (linked up there too, by that iTunes link); and there is a small sample of it on the Green Monkey Records website where you can hear three tracks in entirety -
{EDIT/1-19-2012: You can hear more than THREE tracks, actually. I went back and checked after my original posting of this blog and saw it! On the player there is a small dragbar to the far right of those first three tracks (like one on a browser). Scroll down with it. Voila! There are several more songs and you can actually hear them all!} -
-one of which is the track that is also featured in the video ‘Laboratory Rat.’
The video is creepy and slightly horrifying (in a compelling and thought-provoking fashion), but … it’s … CUTE …somehow… Because there are drawings of all these “oooOOOOOooo” things (he made the video with Bill Lieren). Icky scary creepy CUTE drawings. And that’s all I’m going to say. No more spoilers. 
From what I can tell in initial passes through Jim’s work – there’s a presence of intriguing juxtapositions. Little sonic ironies and pointed statements amidst moments of endearing delight. Really, I would say the listener is very musically well taken care of – Jim does know how to make you a spectator in a performance space. He has the background for this. But you have to hear it for yourself to really FEEL the Whole Thing, because he is just not Like anyone else, even if they are skilled at arranging pop songs into lush arrangements. He is different because HE is different. This doesn’t sound like orchestral showboating, this sounds like a lot of FUN.
I think this is why I like Jim, and why I was so pleased to encounter him at Song Fight in the first place and so happy every time he showed approval of anything I did in MY work. It’s because I GET that feeling of having a broad range of styles and of having just a LOT to say. Really, this should be appealing to most people as creators OR listeners or both … because at your CD collections they are just that – collections. Why would there not be a range of style and feel within one artist? The best sound-stories have an Album’s Entirety in mind, even if they are conceptual and able to be interpreted by the listener. I still feel I need more time alone with this recording from start to uninterrupted finish (mainly because I still do need to finish and hear All of The Bits). But I bet it stacks up through both skimming and deeper sonic inquiry.
Hearing developing cohesive complexity in someone’s work like this gives me hope that perhaps a thing like this is an accomplish-able goal! It’s exciting. It makes me realize that I can grow A Representative sound myself, over time, even if it is Range-y. There need to be more recordings like this, and I think this every time I hear something Quirky and Fun, and Beautiful.
On a personal note, there’s some titles here that I am happy to have heard before while participating in the Song Fight! contest – and I am inspired to see them more fully developed. This makes me want to hear more realized recordings of SF titles from others. But this recording is pretty special and I’ve been waiting for it
DEFINITELY check this out for yourself. Also, the first 100 copies will be signed. Order now!
********************
1. I am friends with the Pope. Pals. Buds. Homiest of Homies. On…uh… the Sacred Spacebook so, I’m his North Star, and he’s my Cardinal Effort (I’m not really, but that would be really pope-dope, and I grew up Catholic so I get to make jokes because I come from a long tradition of doing so and I can use the Church for object lessons. This is a Cautionary Metaphor. I humbly offer it here for the ben-a-dict-efit of all (#boo #aStretch).
2. Anyway, I posted this status update and the Bishop of Rome commented on it in a way that made me look a little Vroom-Vroom. Nothing I couldn’t banter back. Just a little zoomzy, you know, kinda a bit racy..? #nervouslaughter
3. but it just so happened that my friend David Beckham (not THE David Beckham…this is ANOTHER Mr. Beckham. I have not linked him because he’s very shy and he said I could use his name but not link his page) …wellll – Mr. Beckham “liked” the post. So I hoped that our dear Pontiff’s good natured and spicy fun using me as humor’s sacrificial lamb wouldn’t be taken amiss. I don’t want anyone thinking I’m a silly filly. Also notable was an additional “like” by Mr. Beckham’s friend Arthur Miller (not the playwright – he is no longer with us, but Mr. Miller the distiller is).
4. BTW, the post was something random concerning gardening, or life on the farm; like about Oats or something. No. Not my friend John. As an aside, I don’t talk about John anymore because we got into an argument about copyright infringement so I put Mr. Oats in one of my filtered groups (not Mr. Oates, he’s AWESOME!). Mr. Oats ALWAYS has an opinion and so do all his friends and frankly; I am CONSTANTLY getting sucked in and it’s a TOTAL time waster and before you know it, sure as donuts make your keyboard sticky, you’ve ka-spacebooked away your practice time.
5. Well, if you add all your Squa-squa-networks together, it just ka-escalates … so don’t go thinking that things are any better on The Google or Twitter or anything. It’s not. You have to show some restraint. Which brings me back to my story.
6. My friend Michael Jackson (no! not THE Mr. Jackson, although I know how it would be easy to be confused, because my friend has a warped sense of humor and posts profile photos of THE Michael Jackson and Inspirational Quotes about just looking at ‘…the man in the mirror’ before judging others. All that so that you can get your guard down and then he ruins it by posting some gross haiku like: do you wanna see, what I can do, baby girl… to your P.Y.T. ) – yeah … this friend got pretty bad himself in my post. His Holiness (or “Eggs 16,” as we call him during bowling) had already started the ball rolling and back and forth we went about me “sowing my wild oats” and then the ante was up when Mr. Jackson had to say something dirty about a plow and then all hell broke loose. I think friend pope made one more comment, and that was all good old MJ needed! Thank goodness no one made a dirty comment about Mr. Oats!
7. But see, I’ve been hoping that David Beckham would interact on my page for forever! So I was in panic about the post going in this snurly direction. I mean, I like saucy references to farm equipment as much as the next person – but you can’t go back and re-filter posts! Privacy Controls at the Sacred Spacebook are CRAP! I think it’s some kind of Advertising Related Conspiracy or something, although Mr. DJ Ranger Den (that’s my Old Man) thinks I have the paranoia. But I am sure you, oh Fair Fourth Wall, do get it about wishing your friends would be on Better Behavior and consider that like Mr. Miller the distiller seeing and liking your post because of Mr. Beckham’s news feed – you have a friendship with people like His Holiness as well. God can totally read your comments.
8. But on I go with Damage Control! I say “ha ha… I kinda shut the barn door on all THAT” or “we could argue about this till the brown-chicken-brown-cows come home” or something silly-yet-jokingly-validating to Lighten the Mood. It would have worked with Eggs, because he gets Family Values and would have reassessed my concern for the whole congregation of Postal Participants. Usually, I can trust MJ too. But something was off with him today and he kept going WAY over the line, taking the post in The Wrong Direction. And by then I was fearful that I was Offending People.
9. Example. I’ve been worrying for months about my great-great Aunt Berniecey Telulah McMegaphonezalo (not an actual aunt. She might know the pope though). I had concern that she and perhaps other members of my family would see some of my more unsavory friends posting Heavens-Knows-What on my page or making Unsavory or Controversial Comments. And I feel bad, like I am ashamed of my friends. How dare me!
10. In support of a dear friend of mine, Winslow, I liked the International Alliance of GLBTNinjas (this page blogged about here for Entertainment Porpoises only) page a couple months ago. I was afraid of Raised Newsfeed Eyebrows, but did it anyway – because we should be proud of our friends’ and support them when we can. But I feared conservative family would sanction me for my interest and support of “alternative” lifestyles – although I have to say, for the people living them, alternative to WHAT? Alternative to being yourself? But then there is the counter-fear of offending my friends with The offense of the Offended, therefore offending people who just want to see LOLcats and Gangnam Style (you know you wanna watch this again ……).
As well, if you tell people you’re into Ninjutsu, then are you, really, in fact, truly interested in Ninjutsu? Or are you just interested in it like hipsters are interested in the Zombie Apocalypse and flash mobs? Are you just jumping on a bandwagon to say, “hey I’m cool because I support THAT…”? Such things prey on my mind. But I know that even with a light sneeze, I am sure to offend someone merely by being ill and posting about it – as I am in this meta-metaphor being an attention seeking sneezer who is not sensitive to people with REAL illnesses and people may come to Question the Path I may take to the recovery of my common cold. And really, what makes MY cold more common than YOUR cold?
11. All of my friends, however, were included on my innocent post discussing farming. It was actually intended for the interest of David Beckham (again not the football star and I also meant Mr. Miller the distiller, not the playwright) and my ex-boyfriend’s old uncle who actually is an Amish farmer and ventures onto the internet sometimes (he isn’t an orthodox man, and who are you to judge what people do in their spare time??). But it felt weird to worry over what these two might think of the degenerating morality in Michael Jackson’s comments (how could I possibly “like” a person like MJ when he made such RUDE comments? What was wrong with me?!). AND to worry about a wide cross section of people varying from my ex’s Amish uncle (who I shouldn’t even be CONCERNED with, OMG! why am I even FRIENDS with an ex anyway???), to Auntie Telull-lie, to poor David Beckham, to a Mr. Oats who probably wouldn’t even see the post but if he heard about it would know I had friends of “Questionable Nature” AND that I was filtering him!
So I deactivated my account for the good of everyone and the good of Farming and the good of Family Values and Progress and indeed, America and also World Peace too – and the children and all things green and Lasting; and when I decided to creep back onto the Spacebook, I deleted the post Post-haste-ily even though I was upset about doing so because it started out with such an interesting cross-section of people liking and commenting Upon it … and at the beginning I was successful at bringing it out of Yucks-ville. I was proud of that. I haven’t posted again until recommending an album for a friend (that’s the truth!) and I live in fear that someone will ruin that for me (also true…)
But at least some of us are mutual friends with the Pope. My goal was that as diverse as is our audience, we “get” that just because we are engaging in microbloggery, we do not need to act like we are raised in barns. Which is rather funny because as you have probably gathered, you cannot trust that Human Nature will not escalate these problems even though you can Wholly See that some conversations are really meant for more Private Eyes.
1. Something strange happened to me today. I think that I am starting to feel more spiritual.
2. This does not mean that I am feeling more Religious.
3. I have not been blogging very much, because it is a terrible idea for me to engage in Blogging While Bitchy.
4. My health situation should be in an “in the know” state sometime next week.
5. I am finding social networking more and more exceedingly annoying. This is giving me a more clinical detachment from it than ever before. This is not really a good thing, because being warm and emotionally engaged was what made me … well, ME.
6. It’s Vampire Season, I’m noticing.
7. I like people to be interested in me because they feel I am creative and have something to say. I like people. I had a great weekend and am learning more and more that I actually DO like people … that if there weren’t so much MEAN-NESS in the world, I might be straddled well between introversion and extroversion. With a little more emphasis on being introverted, perhaps I could get lots of self-directed work done. I think I drew inward because of disappointments and extended hurt and fear.
I am hoping that this can be healed, with time.
I am achieving MORE unrighteousness in the Words with Friends-friends game. I can only say I’m sorry, and offer these excuses, which are that they wouldn’t take these perfectly fine words which are good and great and are Spelt correctly. So don’t get out the rieth of legad and beat me with it. Flarg. 
(see THIS previous entry for context CLUEZ)
GLOSSARY PT. 2 (via the XONDORIAN ROYAL INTERGALACTIC EMBASSY)
[not in alpha-bet-soup-ic-al order...]
lauuv
a more dastardly sort of trowel
pimay
a sure footed and lithe water bird with a long, beak that gets into absolutely EVERYBODY’s business.
le
yet ANOTHER note to follow sol,
Zitth
Xondor’s second moon. A Very Suspicious Place, indeed.
Quegad
both the plural and singular form of the mysterious rock creatures of Zitth
qued
a quorum of Quegad
li
yet ANOTHER drink with jam and bread.
biocene
the geological epoch in which bacterial life began to form
theel
a strange substance best not discussed.
vaceby
grandma abhors a vaceby.
bisec
the vein that runs across a well pumped gym member’s upper arm at a finer workout establishment
Vaces
flower arrangements with spy-eyes.
Theid
The ruling body of the Eomen (who are clarvoiant magic users)
Rieth
SEE “Legad”
Legad
a place of good spelling. See “The Rieth of Legad”
THE RIETH OF LEGAD
The stick that you hit people with who don’t spell real good.
ilmet
an ear-creature. but it’s not really gross or anything. no really. it sounds worse than it is.
Bitti
Legal trouble of the intergalactic sort.
xealew
a tuber similar to a potato, but purplish.
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in conclusion, here is a photo of me getting all Nur Ein-y on everybody’s hiney. So LOOK OUT BELOW (i.e….where I am coming from!!!)
1. Back away slowly. These are paradoxically both the oddest and most common of earthlings. They may flutter their Pom Poms in your face and begin chanting arbitrarily.
2. Allow them to explain the presence of “toros in the atmosphere.” Remember. A willing suspension of disbelief is key.
3. In more intimate settings, allow them to dominate the conversation.
4. Do NOT make them read beyond a third grade level.
5. DO try to check your ire, and perhaps learn what you can from their strange social practices. [NOTE: Apparently, one must engage in discourse with other humans in order to run the planet.]
6. Easily overpower them with memes and well placed social norms.
7. Set up conventions based around mutually shared areas of interest but hold secret meetings in closed session with discussion of how to take the planet’s power from the Loud and Ignorant.
8. Begin smear campaign based largely in well placed internet promotionals and other materials celebrating the casual quiet superiority of the Introvert; and decrying the drooling common idiocy of all who needily derive power from others to engage pathetically on a social level.
9. Watch society crumble.
10. Drink Jolt cola. Revel in success. Set up detention camps with mandatory times of “Quiet Reflection” and “Thoughtfulness Indoctrination.” Forbid any comparison to Godwin’s Law.
11. Celebrate new found power of introversion and your new dizzying popularity and the Era of the Subjugation of the Extrovert.
12. Organize a series of gladiatorial games to rid the earth of these aberrations once and for all!
13. Purchase Pom Poms.
14. Like … OMG! April Fools! I *totally* tested introvert on my TestyMcThing! Its @suspiciousden’s birthday, crazy-s!!! Get over yourselves!!!
I’m just trying to hang on till International Absentminded Sexy Professor in Latex Day, y’all. Shaaa… 
this morning I woke up afraid
like I have every morning.
I wondered if I was old
and reached up to feel my face
as i had for every day since the day
you’d touched it in the circular
fingertip sweep that convinced me
i might still have decades to go.
but this morning I hit a resistance..
a refusal to rhyme, a need to hit
pavement – a yearning to
define out-of-times
(a need to go back to My bass lines …)
the low beats that once made me
slip and to sway …
like to wait without breathing fresh
with my skin, or wrapped with a ribbon
beside of a lake;
stretched out of a porch swing,
or alone like a dagger inside of a letter
-they have once more intoned me!
the tips of my fingers hit smile
and today stop resenting invasions
of lace
(sad patters one misses
at distance but craters
one never mistakes upon closer
inspection)
…the evidence left in your trace.
And now, at long last, I shall tell you about Jason Liao, who makes Gorgeous and Fantastic sushi at Nanami Sushi on Brodie lane. I mysteriously say sometimes that I am going for sushi, and sometimes I post photos. And I have my new friend Teri, who I have actually known for years. This is a new story in my life, still in development.
I’ve been thinking about featuring interesting people, once a week or so, in my blog for a while. I love it when people pull me out of my self a little bit with songs, or poems, or sights or smells or tastes.
I wanted to start doing this on Fridays, but I fear for me that it is going to have to be less regimented than that, a bit of a surprise…things have been a little slow this year and I’ve been so stuck in my head. This whole blog is very self-referential.
I get insular sometimes. This is probably because I sit in a little cave for most of the day under headphones, or blog and make lists. I don’t get out much. So we have to take our pleasures and our surprises where we can get them. It’s nice to be pulled out of my head. That’s the thing about me and music, or me and art, or me and food. I have to be hooked in because something relates to me, or reminds me of a piece of music I’m working on, or is relevant to my life, the conversation, the things that are going on in the world. I suppose this is true of everyone though. We are people. And there are our sayings about the way to the heart…
My friend Teri that I knew from high school (this in itself is a long story which is deserving of another blog in and of itself, but here is a picture of us at Fiesta Texas for Referential Purposes) 
started saying “lets go for sushi” at me a few months ago. She began raving about ‘Jason’s Creations.’ She had actually started kind of a Facebook shrine of photos to him and his oddly abstract sushi art, which at times actually does look somewhat architectural. I once started wondering what it would be like to be a tiny-small dinner person and to hop up on the plate and walk around one of his creations like it was the Guggenheim museum. Sure, yeah… kind of like a smurf, but smaller. I could live in a Nice Fish house. I could EAT a sushi house.. I wonder what kind of tiny fish art Jason would make up on the walls out of tiny egg-lets… how it would all explode in my mouth, what other amazing things would happen with just the right applications of the “Sauce Swamps” from the sides of the plate…
I’m digressing now. Sometimes Teri and I go there to talk. We talk to Jason too. He’s very young, but you wouldn’t know it. This is what being an artist does to a person. It gives you a responsibility to the world. His medium, of course, being fish. Your fish. I’m pretty proud enough to be a part of what I am certain in food-and-drink drenched haze is culinary history (have you ever been there?) and figure we’d all better go down to that resturant and eat his food before he ends up on television. I know this is not just drama-den talking later, because Jason is about to get into some chronicle contest and probably win it. Also, apparently attractive naked women let him lay out pieces of raw fish on their bod-s while they lie there motionless. Yes. This really does happen In Real Life, and according to his facebook people have said TO HIM “*YOU’RE* naked SUSHI guy!” This says to me people were noticing the chef and not the naked PERSON with the food on them. This does not surprise me in the least because I’ve almost cried a couple times eating his food. Then again, I am the emo queen.
It’s not always easy. One time he decided it was time for a challenge and we got a fish. It was a difficult salty thing that we had to navigate. We got to choose how much of it to eat. Would we eat all of it or just the easy bits? How daring were we going to be that day? Sometimes we are given more information, sometimes less. After Fish Mountain was scaled, he said he thought we’d eat less of it.
It was surprisingly tasty, and I am a big fan of that feeling of eating partially with your hands as though you are on the beach with the chef, helping to bring the food down. A tiny first world fantasy, perhaps. But if you feel like you are a character on some Romantic Island Show and yet you don’t feel like a prole you are having an intensley wonderful restaurant experience.
Jason gives you instructions while you eat, the more he knows you – the more he’ll get in your sushi business. I was talking to Teri a little too much and we let the grapes thaw once; which was not the intention of the piece. Jason wanted the grapes to go “pop.” That’s how I explained it, with chagrin. I wanted him to know I knew what he was thinking…I don’t even remember the fish he picked. But it was supposed to be accompanied by a cold pop. He’s heaps younger than me, but we are both of the Mindset and you don’t clap in-between movements, you see.
After that, he made this chille relleno scallop soup. There was a pepper hanging around. We are sometimes friendly enough to make him taste his work. He hardly ever does. He’s just imagining it and going on the colors and stuff. That’s right. He doesn’t even know. It’d be like me mixing with no headphones, or just headphones no monitors. Or by just looking at the meters and STILL getting it perfect. He doesn’t even have a test piece.
I really started thinking metaphorically when he made this piece with pears and some other stuff (I’ll just put a picture of it up) that tasted like a cloud. 
I imagined if you could go out onto the wing of your airplane and see the clouds… just taste them… that it would taste exactly like this dish. I remember being told in school that it wasn’t true that the texture of clouds was fluffy; that when they rubbed together there was friction and this is what made the thunder. Clouds were able to produce snow and water to fall to the ground. There were sharp bits in this dish, and the sweetness of the pear. I usually think that pears are horrible, but they worked here. The fish tasted boob-like (I’m not trying to be vulgar. It was just inviting and smooth…you know, Imaginary-Cloudlike)…
I sound like a crazy person. Then again, the drinks at Nanami get the job done in tasty fashion.
A dish that was smooth and crunchy all at once. Automatically I was caught up in the description of it and for a while forgot my Very Real Problems. I even got to name it.
Theres no way he could know what I’ve been through, but his creations are like tiny messages of encouragement. Of hope. It’s not even a dish at a sushi restaurant any more. It’s an unconscious analysis of a personality. Like when you sit with a hairstylist you’ve been with for years, go sit with him and watch him work and you will be healed.
Maybe it’s because he puts Emotions onto a plate. I told him a couple of days ago that he had gotten “cute” down pat. What do we think of when we think “cute?” Kitties. Hello? Pink… maybe that goes to far. See. It defies description. But a nice apple is perfectly cute.
There was tuna and apples and vinegar. Just enough. Not too much, but just enough to force a smile from a grumpy demeanor or out of a person who had been Closeted Away for too long. So I ended up smiling and of course left the Decorative Apple Peeling behind to the same god of sushi that we all worship here and waited …for the next offering.
[ABOVE: Art by me, Teri Sanchez, Teri Sanchez. Rest of art stolen from Jason's and my facebook pages, and Teri's..
1) Jason makes Art (picture taken for Austin American Statesman Article. Ricardo E. Braziell 2) Warner Sisters 2) The sushi-shark-museum with Citrus Doorway 3) Grapes that go Pop with hidden salty Orange Surprises Inside! 4) the adorable Cloud 9 5) Chef-ly Activity with remote control and good luck kitty.
6) blurry and spicy from Abstract Instagram! 7) Souffle’ 8) Roll with Avocado
ps. I am bad with fish. Remembering it. This is my next step. It’s all too tasty to think!
