Categories
Me Myself&I

Citizen fail

LAX Immigration and Customs, first time:

“Have a nice stay, enjoy California!”

Second time:

“Are you on vacation here? Allright”

Third time:

“What are you doing here? Where’s the plane ticket to get back to your country? What are you doing here? Why staying for so long? Let me see your card. So why are you coming here?”

Immigration. It seems fair until you’re on the other side.

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Me Myself&I

Love it or quit it.

It was the french president Sarkozy talking to suburbs and saying that about France.

Well I’d rather do both.

I’m stupid: I started working with this idea that it always seems to be greener there while it seems shit where you actually are, but that is on average (well in the western world) the same wherever you go. There’s down and upside. So I believed France and Europe would be a good playground to do stuff, no need to go away in Canada or CA. There is plenty of good things in here and a cultural melting-pot quite unmatched on Earth. Paris is amazing for that (and weird, I’d talk about it). I was thinking about the challenges and the potentials. There are still here.

But nothing big happened. Or it’s so slow it’s invisible.

No real good signs of society improvements just some willing to move forward but nothing happens really. France is lagging. In so many ways it even goes backward (wtf is this religious vivacity these days?? or Hadopi or this amazing rampant bigotry..).

People don’t give a shit. Globally, French don’t give a shit. Progress is difficult in this context.

Wherever I am, since I’ve been living outside a bit, I can’t believe how France don’t care from the airport to sidewalks to services, whatever. It’s not that it’s bad behaviors, it’s more like it’s dull and selfish ones (boss kidnapping I mean, come on!). It’s even more irritating when people apologize. Sometimes I want to stab the dude in the eye and say “SORRY I DIDNT KNOW IT COULD HURT I MEAN I HAVE THE RIGHT TO PLAY WITH A KNIFE RIGHT?”.

I love the independence state of mind of France, questioning everything, all the time. I think it’s good to be not sure of anything, because that’s what life is. I hate the careless rude, rough, mean side of it.

We don’t have to have them both. We could have the positive one and ditch the stupid side but no, that would be totally not french to do so.

I guess.

Anyway, I feel angry against myself for giving up, against french people for having all the pain in the ass to believe, adapt, build and finish stuff instead of always talk and criticize it (because if they are not like this, they usually are not in France anymore) against California for being so awesome despite its own downside.

I hate waste in every way and I can’t stop thinking about it when I remind myself of these last years or when I listen to my friends or public transports conversations. Social, society opportunities falling and failing.

And then I just have to see some smart witty funny french people and..

Man I feel weird. But I’m doing it. Both.

Categories
Me Myself&I

Sunset Submarine

Après un mois et des poussières sans nuages, ça fait bizarre quand même. Juste après le Groenland, mer de nuage. A 10 km c’est magnifique, j’ai même vu un château dans le ciel. A 3 km sur Paris, on plonge doucement dedans. C’est doux, c’est gris.

C’est du moisi.

N’empêche le lever du soleil sur la planète blue en altitude, c’est le pied.

Categories
Audio&Games

Open terminal

“For 2009, sales are expected to jump to 35 million, rising to an estimated 139 million in 2013.”

About netbooks. I think it could be the case.

For me the netbook is the beginning of the computer becoming something like a fridge, really useful, really efficient, cheap, with the brand that says nothing except that it is totally useless and irrelevant to know it (almost).

What is interesting is that its development around the world is matching the beginning of services like OnLive or Gaikai. David Perry said in some interview:

“You don’t need to have full screen HD to play a game, you just don’t. It needs to be good, but each game has a set size it’ll work at, and we suggest that they go as small as they can while still having a great experience – because the audience will be exponential. The smaller you go, the bigger the audience.”

Playing on screens like the DS/iPhone or the low res of the Wii which are currently the best selling game devices proves the point. People don’t give as much about overall technical graphical achievement that they do for innovation and gameplay and fantasy (which I will discuss later). So if the server side game service is working as in this demo (and this is where Prism or others are gonna be useful):

Well people running little computers with gigabit ethernet or wifi n are gonna be happy. They are legion.

Categories
Music

unDust the funk

The Dust Brothers.

I was reading this interview of brother E.Z. Mike in Waxpoetic and couldn’t stop but think that Funk is so central and yet so not understood.

E.Z. Mike did with King Gizmo the insanely funky and acclaimed Beastie Boys Paul’s Boutique, Beck’s Odelay and Fight Club soundtrack among others.

Question:

Waxpoetic: “I’ve run into a lot of different people from a lot of different backgrounds who really dig the Fight Club soundtrack. Along with the movie, it’s really become a cult classic as an instrumental record. Do you feel that record now?”

E.Z. Mike: […] To me, the funk is the core of everything I do. To me, the thing I focus on is the bass and the beat. To me, that’s the driving force of music at least [the music] I want to hear. So I always start there; that’s the foundation. The cool thing is, with funk as the foundation I mean, it’s incredible how versatile the funk is: you can throw anything on top of it and it works. […]

That’s why as a music producer from the 2000s I did start to dig funk in its original flavor from the 70s to 80s instead of wanting to buy the exact same sample machine of some famous hip-hop producer or stuff like that.

People may think that I appreciate and love funk and soul music just for the black side of it but that’s not my first argument. The argument is musical: funk is the foundation of almost all the music of the last decades. It evolved to hip-hop – like it or not, it’s the most international music ever, it’s everywhere-, it gave soundtracks that funkyness, it is the base of house music, JPop etc. It almost gave birth to reggae too (the US RnB and jazz were the biggest influences on Jamaïca well-known music).

The versatility of production on funk records is seriously quite unmatched. There is no music with that wide choice of how the record sounds, from heavy bass to heavy horns to heavy guitar saturated or not, heavy keyboards, synthetizers, to heavy beats with all the gradient between them all together. It’s truly amazing.


Picture of the funk. Keywords: Sun, urban, dirty, searching, exciting, cool.

So when listening to Paul’s Boutique or whatever in the 90s sample music I was always really frustrated to only have a fragment, a loop, two bars of it. I wanted all the funk and nothing but the root, the original. I was always thinking “there must be a lot more that this breakbeat which is brilliant but I want to listen to more. Btw who the fuck is Bob James???”.

There is so much to learn about music and its effectiveness with funk:

“Funk utilized the same extended chords found in bebop jazz, such as minor chords with added sevenths and elevenths, or dominant seventh chords with altered ninths. However, unlike bebop jazz, with its complex, rapid-fire chord changes, funk virtually abandoned chord changes, creating static single chord vamps with little harmonic movement, but with a complex and driving rhythmic feel.

The chords used in funk songs typically imply a dorian or mixolydian mode, as opposed to the major or natural minor tonalities of most popular music. Melodic content was derived by mixing these modes with the blues scale.”

I mean funk is simply a lighter and rhythm based jazz music. It’s like it tends to be the most efficient way to make you wanna move physically or “active in your head” using music knowledge from bebop which is one of the most expressive and complex music ever created. That’s why it works so well, body and soul at the same time. It comes from there.

And yet funk is either consider as gimmicky, soul-less (compared to rock like U2 maybe, but it’s less boring) or meaning dancefloor and bottom bell pants.

It’s way more than that. You should dig more my friend.

Categories
Me Myself&I

US Me

What to say?

That I have never been that happy in life? That it’s the best summer ever? Or that it’s gonna be the best autumn of the galaxy at least for me?

I don’t want to make you more jealous that you already are.

Seriously though, there is still some unsolved and important stuff to deal with but at the same time it’s always the case whatever you do so..

I don’t know which subject to talk about living here, on Sunset blvd. I’m pretty sure it’s gonna be about food and diet though :) I’m still in the process of assimilation of cultural differences. I miss nothing in the everyday life compared to France, at least for now. At the opposite getting back to Paris scared me and made me regret L.A. Not only for Her.

I have unleashed the archives to december 2005 and re-reading some stuff I can’t say I’m not having what I wanted. It’s all happening. It’s scary fabulous. I’m suspicious about the scary part.

Maybe I miss to speak/hear french. That’s why I’m finding myself listening to “Libre comme l’air” from Reciprok french hiphop band (la hontassse). I feel so constricted in english, checking so many times my grammar and all. Eventually it’s gonna be automatic.

But man, this weather.. I breath better with roads everywhere and an ocean breeze than in Paris with woods but no breeze at all, just a big annoying wind. And fucking rain.

It’s awkward to listen to the music I know in a completely different environment like one song was reminding how much I wanted some change, looking at the moon, freezing in my appartment while playing before having some soup.


Paris, I’m not missing your cloudy mood. At all. I need an amp though.

It’s weird because I didn’t believe that I would find something or someone in the US. I was just fed up with Paris and parisians. I even wondered if I would not return in the french countryside, making music and growing vegetables. Even if I know that I’m too urban for that, it was tempting. Living cheaply, independantly, no bullshit, just jokes weed&wine. I was thinking about it so hard when back in my less than 300 people village.

And then a few weeks later, I’m starting a life in a 11 million people city. It makes me wonder what is next? Well for now some funk legends live. It’s like that my friend!