amw (amw) wrote,

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restore from draft

Yes i would like to restore from draft. I would like to get my whole fucking post back, not the accidentally-clobbered version of the post! Jesus! Whichever UI designer thought it'd be a smart idea to auto-save-to-draft a post that miraculously went from several hundred words down to a handful should be shot. It doesn't help that Safari loses its "undo" memory as soon as an auto-save-to-draft occurs. Sigh.

So this is a meme max_volume did and i thought was cool, so i did it too, then i lost it, and now i'm doing it again.

Comment on this post and I will choose seven interests from your profile. You will then explain what they mean and why you are interested in them. Post this along with your answers in your own journal so that others can play along.

1. Acid
Not the stuff you put magnesium in during Chemistry in high school, and not the stuff that makes the world go all fractal-shaped - the offshoot of Chicago house music that grew into its own genre. There's not much to it - a simple 16th note refrain - but it's always played on the Roland TB-303 synthesizer. It sounds boring to some, but to me it's like God talking. The synth has this amazing flow, it burbles along like a demented rapper - with lazy pitch slides and accents that create very human vocal sounds. Even in today's musical climate where the 303 is seen as dated and cliche it still melts me into a puddle of bliss when i hear it on the dancefloor. This is everything techno is meant to be.

2. America
I don't know when i first fell in love with America. Was it watching Knightrider? Listening to Kim Wilde? Seeing Ronald Reagan on TV? Reading Marvel comics? Or Kim Stanley Robinson books? Either way, by the time i was around 10 years old i knew it's where i wanted to be. It's the American dream. LA! New York! It's where everything happens, where all the movies are filmed, TV, cars, where immigrants can grow up to be governor of one of the world's largest economies, where you can become a billionaire by the time you're 40. Of course that can happen anywhere in the world, but there's something romantic about America, the IDEA of the place means something to me.

3. Androgyny
I used to consider myself pretty androgynous. I guess i still am to a degree, because i still get confused for a guy sometimes. Going out in the gay scene you see a lot of play with traditional gender stereotypes - especially drag (kings and queens), which is a lot of fun. But what i really like is the art of being deliberately androgynous - those beautiful boys and girls where you need to do a double-take, where you're not quite sure - it's a total headfuck and it's sexy and i love it. That said, i don't dig the dweeby 12-year-old look of the goths or emos or indie kids. I like understated glam.

4. House music
Wow, it's been around in my life for years - from when it hit the pop charts in Europe in the 80s right through till today. Not bad for some gay dudes from Chicago. I love house because it doesn't try to be any more than it is - simple music for people of any age who like to dance. I like how it balances down-to-earth soulfulness with crazy synthesizer noises. It's not pretentious like techno or suburban like trance - it's just gritty, sweaty, sexy club music. And then on the other side of the coin i also like the deeper "future jazz" side of house - the lounge bar elevator tunes that are just groovy enough to bop along to without being intrusive.

5. Kevin Smith
He's a love-him-or-hate-him director, and i'm in the former camp. I only discovered his stuff in the late 90s, so i don't have any underground cred - i just really dig how he addresses nerdly neuroses in his movies without painting nerds like some loser Napoleon Dynamite cliche. I loved Clerks and Chasing Amy, and a lot of it hit close to home. Even Mallrats. Dogma and Jay & Silent Bob were more silly road-trip comedies, but that's fine by me. I also admire how the dude broke out to become a big-name cult director by maxing out his credit cards and working hard with his mates. It makes me think if i work hard enough maybe something i do can break out too. Something else cool is that he knows comics fandom so well he totally exploits it to make lots of money in merchandising too. Very clever.

6. Politics
I couldn't give a shit about Australian or European politics. What i love is American politics. I love how big of a deal it is, how every election is this ridiculous dog and pony show - the candidates are larger than life; armies of advisors and pundits suddenly appear from the wings - it gets the whole media world buzzed. It's just another example of how America does everything bigger and better than the rest of the world. My personal feeling on politics is that day-to-day domestic policy will run more-or-less to popular opinion regardless of who gets in, so they might as well make the process entertaining. The way America does politics actually makes it fun to be interested in politics - i think that's a good thing. I'm also interested in international relations, so i like to pay attention to war/terrorism, summits, overseas trips etc.

7. Synths
I've always loved synthesizer music, but it probably wasn't till i was a teenager when i started becoming aware of what instruments made what sounds in the music i liked. I bought my first synth in 1996 - a large vintage thing with wooden end-panels and lots of knobs and sliders all over it. I've probably bought and sold another 20-30 since then, each time thinking that maybe having this particular instrument will help me write better music. Truth is, you can write music with nothing - it's just a matter of getting off your ass to do it. It doesn't matter how much gear you have. These days only hardcore enthusiasts buy "real" synthesizers - everyone else just loads software onto their laptops that can make all the same sounds at a fraction of the cost. I've kinda gone that way too - now all i have left is two TB-303 clones (see "Acid" above) and a keyboard to plug into my Mac. I guess it's less the physical objects i care about these days and more the sounds that come out of them.

So there you have it, more than you ever needed to know about my interests :-)
Tags: memes

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