asian dotcom millionaire 5.0

Or: How to be a foreigner

[gregoryaperez-blog1]

jviewz plays Teardrop. With vegetables.

I'm still really digging the digital album project from jviewz, and I just stumbled on to this. Amazing.

[gregoryaperez-blog1]

Building Something Out of Nothing

I have the utmost respect for people who write good songs.

It’s one of the hardest things to do: to not only compose something musically which snaps into your skull and chest but to also guide someone through your thoughts in a way that fits that sonic environment (or vice versa) and then actually sing those words well. That is hard. For me, anyway. 

I can’t write lyrics to save my life. It does not come naturally to me. Words and music are still separate kingdoms to me, and I'm trying to learn how to make peace between them. I've been spending time listening hard to the musicians I really love to get clues to how to do this. I have so many talented friends who are incredible singer/songwriters and can piece together both intimate human narratives and catchy pop melodies. Somehow they make it feels so effortless. But of course there's effort.

I remember listening to this really wonderful episode of Songexploder where my friend John Roderick talks about how he wrote of my of my favorite songs from his band The Long Winters. "The Commander Thinks Aloud" is a solemn ballad about the final moments of the Space Shuttle Columbia. It is haunting, human and unexpected. It guts me every time I hear it. To hear John talk about the inspiration for it and the process of making it is revealing and inspiring; he found a way to transform a tragic global event into a tiny slow motion Polaroid photo of a song, wrapped lovingly in evocative sounds. Doesn't hurt that he's an eloquent, warm storyteller who can articulate his process so well ("I don't publically out myself as a utopian and and a people-lover. It's not my brand."). Take a minute, this is really great:

I also recently stumbled on this great little documentary from 2013 produced by Pitchfork.tv about Modest Mouse’s amazing second album The Lonesome Crowded West. I’ve always had a weird fascination with Isaac Brock; he’s kind of that idiot savant stoner you knew in school who is unquestionably brilliant, who could wax about god and life and his shitty job with words you would never imagine stringing together, all over an Orange Julius at the mall food court. Early Modest Mouse (unlike the bloaty version he's got on at the moment) was full of so many questions and naked observations about America from the seats of Greyhounds and shitty touring vans. Listening now to The Lonesome Crowded west is like listening to a beautiful prizefight - violent, bouncy, gentle and raw, all best experienced from a safe distance. Isaac cuts through the bullshit and somehow gets to the emotional spine of things with super personal, sometimes awkward, always engaging words. Dann Gallucci (Murder City Devils/Modest Mouse) said it best: "I could listen to the lyrics and hear things that were going on in our lives that he would not say to me just in conversation. I've always felt like he's more honest in his lyrics than he can be conversationally." It's fun to see how the record came together from their personal rearview mirrors almost 20 years on. 

And beyond writing introspective lyrics, I'm also really fascinated with how producers and DJs compose the soundscapes around the words. How do people get inspired with sounds? What do they do when they hear something amazing, the way a turn of phrase could turn into a lyric or a song title?

Wonder no more: I came across this amazing site yesterday from Jonathan Dagan, a.k.a. jviewz, who is putting together an electronic album of found beats, sounds and collaborations right before our very eyes. The DNA Project is a stunning example of where songwriting is today: it's open source, it's interactive, it's collaborative. Most of all it's public.  jviewz is taking us along his journey to discover inspirations which he converts into musical expression. He's uploading videos of his experiences, posting samples for us to download and play with and inviting us all to contribute to his thing. It's an ambitious project, but an extremely personal one and inspiring as hell. Watch the bit with him and Gotye messing around with a Wurlitzer Sideman, an ancient analog drum machine from the '50s, on Song 6. That looks like a perfect day to me.

There are infinite other examples of great songwriters out there, and I don't claim to be a music historian or scholar by any stretch. These are the guys in my ears at the moment. There's already enough pixels and ink devoted to the Dylans, Springsteens, Lennons and McCartneys of the world, anyway.

Songcraft is something I'm going to keep digging into. It's the same as good design to me: something takes hold of you which emotionally compels you act on inspiration. It is a sloppy, unpredictable process. Yet it demands attention to details, to the construction and assembly of the pieces and to the refinement of the outcome. I started writing my own music since 2008, and while I'm nowhere near proficient as an instrumentalist or as a songwriter, it is so satisfying to build something out of nothing, to work it until it's something that will stick in my skull and my chest and I can walk around in the world with it in my ears.

[gregoryaperez-blog1]

I have the utmost respect for people who write good songs.

It’s one of the hardest things to do: to not only compose something musically which snaps into your skull and chest but to also guide someone through your thoughts in a way that fits that sonic environment (or vice versa) and then actually sing those words well. That is hard. For me, anyway. 

I can’t write lyrics to save my life. It does not come naturally to me. Words and music are still separate kingdoms to me, and I'm trying to learn how to make peace between them. I've been spending time listening hard to the musicians I really love to get clues to how to do this. I have so many talented friends who are incredible singer/songwriters and can piece together both intimate human narratives and catchy pop melodies. Somehow they make it feels so effortless. But of course there's effort.

I remember listening to this really wonderful episode of Songexploder where my friend John Roderick talks about how he wrote of my of my favorite songs from his band The Long Winters. "The Commander Thinks Aloud" is a solemn ballad about the final moments of the Space Shuttle Columbia. It is haunting, human and unexpected. It guts me every time I hear it. To hear John talk about the inspiration for it and the process of making it is revealing and inspiring; he found a way to transform a tragic global event into a tiny slow motion Polaroid photo of a song, wrapped lovingly in evocative sounds. Doesn't hurt that he's an eloquent, warm storyteller who can articulate his process so well ("I don't publically out myself as a utopian and and a people-lover. It's not my brand."). Take a minute, this is really great:

I also recently stumbled on this great little documentary from 2013 produced by Pitchfork.tv about Modest Mouse’s amazing second album The Lonesome Crowded West. I’ve always had a weird fascination with Isaac Brock; he’s kind of that idiot savant stoner you knew in school who is unquestionably brilliant, who could wax about god and life and his shitty job with words you would never imagine stringing together, all over an Orange Julius at the mall food court. Early Modest Mouse (unlike the bloaty version he's got on at the moment) was full of so many questions and naked observations about America from the seats of Greyhounds and shitty touring vans. Listening now to The Lonesome Crowded west is like listening to a beautiful prizefight - violent, bouncy, gentle and raw, all best experienced from a safe distance. Isaac cuts through the bullshit and somehow gets to the emotional spine of things with super personal, sometimes awkward, always engaging words. Dann Gallucci (Murder City Devils/Modest Mouse) said it best: "I could listen to the lyrics and hear things that were going on in our lives that he would not say to me just in conversation. I've always felt like he's more honest in his lyrics than he can be conversationally." It's fun to see how the record came together from their personal rearview mirrors almost 20 years on. 

And beyond writing introspective lyrics, I'm also really fascinated with how producers and DJs compose the soundscapes around the words. How do people get inspired with sounds? What do they do when they hear something amazing, the way a turn of phrase could turn into a lyric or a song title?

Wonder no more: I came across this amazing site yesterday from Jonathan Dagan, a.k.a. jviewz, who is putting together an electronic album of found beats, sounds and collaborations right before our very eyes. The DNA Project is a stunning example of where songwriting is today: it's open source, it's interactive, it's collaborative. Most of all it's public.  jviewz is taking us along his journey to discover inspirations which he converts into musical expression. He's uploading videos of his experiences, posting samples for us to download and play with and inviting us all to contribute to his thing. It's an ambitious project, but an extremely personal one and inspiring as hell. Watch the bit with him and Gotye messing around with a Wurlitzer Sideman, an ancient analog drum machine from the '50s, on Song 6. That looks like a perfect day to me.

There are infinite other examples of great songwriters out there, and I don't claim to be a music historian or scholar by any stretch. These are the guys in my ears at the moment. There's already enough pixels and ink devoted to the Dylans, Springsteens, Lennons and McCartneys of the world, anyway.

Songcraft is something I'm going to keep digging into. It's the same as good design to me: something takes hold of you which emotionally compels you act on inspiration. It is a sloppy, unpredictable process. Yet it demands attention to details, to the construction and assembly of the pieces and to the refinement of the outcome. I started writing my own music since 2008, and while I'm nowhere near proficient as an instrumentalist or as a songwriter, it is so satisfying to build something out of nothing, to work it until it's something that will stick in my skull and my chest and I can walk around in the world with it in my ears.

[gregoryaperez-blog1]

On this Mother's Day

I moved to China in 2008 to be closer to my mother.

Judy had been diagnosed with a rare neurological disease called olivopontocerebellar atrophy (OPCA) which gnawed at her motor functions over the course of several years. What started out as a little bit of fatigue walking around Countryside Mall in Clearwater, FL, slowly turned into an inability to walk, stand or move on her own. It was an incurable, inevitable fate. Her body began to give up. But her mind did not. During those years, she was alert and engaged despite everything which got stripped away. She always smiled her angelic smile, as if it were the last of her this insidious disease was going to take. It was the last thing I saw when I left her, right before she left me.

My parents moved back to the Philippines in 2008 to find a better way to take care of her. The US health care system was just too expensive to tackle something like this, and Social Security wasn't enough to sustain living in a big empty house they didn't need anymore. I arrived to China a couple days later to work for Microsoft in Shanghai. Every few months or so, I'd fly back to Cebu to visit and help my father take care of my mom. It was like seeing intermittent snapshots of her condition; each time I visited she was dramatically, visibly worsening. But she always smiled and welcomed me home, even though we both knew it wasn't really home for either of us.

At this point, I'd been messing around with making music, trying to figure out ways to express myself. Words and pictures weren't enough. I'd started using GarageBand to compose little instrumental things for myself, and while they weren't especially great, they were mine. Mom and Dad had always been involved in music (We're Filipino. So, yeah, we're musical). They used to sing with the Philippine choral group in Palm Harbor, and both of them had solos whenever they did big productions for the holidays or for church. People loved their voices. My father had a mighty baritone charged with a noble lilt when he climbed octaves. Mom's was more angelic and dear but no less powerful; her vibrato could rival opera singers and her tone silenced rooms. Together they were the stars of the choir.

In her later years, mom couldn't sing anymore, but she still loved music. And when I came home for Christmas one year, I wanted to show her that I'd been making my own music, too. You could actually make songs on airplanes and it was so easy now (that didn't mean it was any good, it was just easy).

I layed in bed next to her and showed her my fancy new iPad, pulled up a keyboard and let her take it for a spin. I held the iPad up above the two of us, close to our faces so she could reach up and play with the piano. Her eyes widened and I realized this was the first time she'd really interacted with anything like this; she could touch a piece glass and things would happen.  I pressed 'record' and we made something together. She rolled her fingers as best she could across the tiny digital piano and tried to steady her fingers to make sounds which made sense. Her hands were starting to be uncooperative at this point, and they tired quickly. After a couple of minutes she lowered her hands and looked at me, smiling. I took this photo:

On the plane home to Shanghai, I listened to what we'd made and I composed something. I imagined how frustrated and how helpless she was starting to feel, how angry she was at her body and at whatever made this happen. Maybe I was projecting. I was the one who was angry. I was frustrated with science and faith and all the things we're supposed to trust. And for a woman like my mother, who dedicated most of her life to science and faith as a nurse and as a former sister of the Catholic church, this was an unacceptable, unfair fate.  My mother came to terms with her fate and her faith. For her, there was no reason or need for her to blame or to rage at anything; nothing was going to change. She made her peace with dying. And like her smile, like the sound of this piece we made together, the tumult and helpless anger that could have lingered is survived by memories of simple beauty. I'm still learning so much from her.

[gregoryaperez-blog1]

Blue Is A Communication Color

Your Dad Gave Birth To Me

Holy Grail of Handjobs

Freakout In A Sea Of Animal Friends

Hard Shoulder For Emergency Only

Lovemake-A-Thon

Yeah, It's Cheese

The Monk Who Stole My Seat

I Don't Like Me On 24

The Dongle Situation

The Cookie Directive

Two-Faced Cat

What Are We Laughing At?

I Have Cherry Blossoms On My Back

Freshness Is Outclassing

Scratching At Camels

That Moment You Realize Your Dad Was A Dude

Resort Pizza

My Mom Meditates Her Ass Off

Africans Tend To Be Fruitier

Nuts About Philosophy

I Have To Delete A Person

Spandex Is A System

Shagging This Bird in Vietnam

We Probably Hated The Same People

No One Hired You Ti Be A Douchebag

So About Those Chicken Wings

Coke In The Loo

[gregoryaperez-blog1]

The daily grind

Step by step. One foot in front of the other. Over and over and over again. Every day until the end.

[gregoryaperez-blog1]

This Moment is Moist 

Bam Is Now

The Ballad of Polly Amory

So Many Sandwiches Later

[gregoryaperez-blog1]

I Ate Heart

Hectic Trees

That's Not Jeffrey Char

[gregoryaperez-blog1]

Tokyo song titles (thus far)

In an effort to overshare, here are the Song Titles I've collected so far in the 2 months I've been in Japan. I shall be adding more, with searing regularity:

Every Moment Is a Payoff

Weak Fish

My Third Wet Dream

I Woke Up And I Thought Motherfucker

My Poor Syllabus

My Neighbor Was A DJ

Man, It's So Hard To Find A Good Udder

That's a Very Dark Cowbreast

Miso Beach

Managing Project Manager

In The Meantime, I Got A Hotdog

I Like Iron Man and Trance

The Definitive Study of Knobs

Table For Two

He Really Shit The Bed On That One

Put It In A Frying Pan and Give It a Little Toss

Give Way Glenda

Declining Models

That's A Beautiful Octopus

Slave In An Owl Cafe

Don’t Be Like Europe

Submitting Yogurt

The May Disease

Mr. Aoyama

Bowing At White People

[gregoryaperez-blog1]

My Song Titles List

For about four years now, I have been steadily maintaining a list of things people say. They could be really brilliant things or really nonsensical things. But when I hear something that catches my attention, I jot it down.

I have been using this list as my repository for working song titles. I make music in my spare time, and when inspiration strikes and I quickly record something to capture the idea, I use the latest addition to the list as the working song title.

This has worked out exceptionally well, especially since most of my music is instrumental. Sometimes the music is actually evocative of the title, like this one:

But most of the time, they are musical non sequiturs. Lovely random juxtapositions. Like this one:

 The Song Title List is more than just randomness. It is a collection of life snippets. They remind me of people, places and moments. I have a terrible memory, yet a lot of these still stir scenes in my mind. Each one kicks up a little dust to remind me of someone or somewhere.

Last month, I was in Singapore with my IDEO friends and I overheard a particularly interesting turn of phrase. I fired up my iPhone Notepad (where I have kept the same list going this whole time) and POOF.

It was gone.

The whole list. Gone.

SHIT DID I JUST DELETE IT?

I actually had to sit down. How could be so STUPID? Why didn’t I back it up? Wait didn’t I back it up? It’s got to be up somewhere in the cloud, right? RIGHT?

Ran back to my hotel room to check if my Mac Notepad had preserved a backup. Turns out it was more like Dropbox: if it’s not on my phone, it’s not on my Mac. It’s in sync. So no Song Title list.

I panicked for about five minutes, drank a glass of wine then Googled for apps which could recover deleted backups from Notepad. There was one I straight up bought for $80 and was lucky enough to recover the last backup of the Song Title list. I’d lost about a month of work, but it was worth it.

So yes, I’ve started backing it up in multiple places. Evernote is my new favorite thing.

And I’m also going to post them up here, for you to enjoy.

I've added a section called Song Titles that will be my running list of musical non-sequiturs. Will also be linking ones that I actually record.

Check it out, and stay tuned for more!

[gregoryaperez-blog1]

We are here.

Getting an apartment as a gaijin is a bit trickier than I expected. Barring the language, there are so many little details to consider. If you are ever interested in moving to Tokyo, here are a few key pieces of advice you’ll need to have under your belt:

1. Speak Japanese.

2. Don’t have a cat.

3. Shrink yourself.

And when I say “little” I mean you’ll have to get used to the idea of small spaces.

My apartment in Shanghai was fairly sizeable. I got used to a three bedroom, two bathroom apartment overlooking Xujiahui. I was paying around $2000 for about 170 sq/m, and yeah that was a deal. For almost the same amount of money, we’re tucking into a 47 sq/m box. And that’s pretty reasonable.

There are plenty of nice, small places to be had, for sure. But when you say you have a cat in tow, your options become severely limited.

Basically, the landscape looks like this:

It's also tough to find a good place in Tokyo now because so many people move this time of year. In Japan, April is the end of the fiscal year, so people find out a) they have a new job because of a re-org b) they have a better job because they got a promotion or c) they have no job. So there’s movement.

Luckily, Ann and I landed in Shimokitazawa, a super cool neighborhood just 15 minutes from Shibuya. It’s full of awesome. Even among the sea of cool places to live in Tokyo, Shimo is quite unique: it has a village vibe with an almost painful hipster sheen, but it’s actually a lot less pretentious than it seems. It’s pretty real. (Ok fine, Bear Pond Espresso is painfully hip. But it’s because they care, man.)

The view from our place is spectacular:

The neighborhood is awesome:

There’s so much more to explore and  to share, but we are quite happy to finally be here.

[gregoryaperez-blog1]

Resetting the standard

Walking into work today, I listened to Alec Baldwin’s interview with Ira Glass on Here’s The Thing. Hearing him with Baldwin is a treat: Ira’s smiley, nasal lilt tangling with Alec’s husky gravitas-laden baritone is good radio. But it also highlighted one of the early points in the interview, where Ira talks about literally finding his voice on the radio, against the standard of the world-weary “announcer” approach.

Alec: “I hear so many people now on the radio who are the opposite of what I grew up with.” Ira: “I think it comes down to what you think authority comes from. Back when we were kids authority came from enunciation, precision. A kind of gravitas you are bringing to the character you are playing. But a whole generation of people feel like that character is obviously a phony - like the newscaster on The Simpsons - with a deep voice having gravitas. And so I think a lot of us just went in the other direction. For me, any story hits you harder if the person delivering it doesn’t sound like some news robot but in fact sounds like a real person have the real reactions a real person would, and be surprised and amazed and amused.” “At first when I tried to be on the radio, like most people, I tried to be the ‘official thing,’ and at some point I trained myself out of it because I thought it’s not as effective.”

It’s interesting to listen in on just how conscious Ira Glass was when it came to growing his craft. In addition to structuring compelling narratives, he figured out a way to create his own version of “broadcasting.” He kept his voice and approach real, authentic and very much personal.

This is the secret sauce, I think. Making it personal. Authentic.

At the beginning of any journey, especially a creative one, there’s pressure to feel like you need to hit some kind of standard. That good looks like something very…specific. And there is a maddening life-long hunt to try to get yourself up to that standard, while simultaneously trying to define what it actually is.

But the more I connect with people who inspire me, the more I realize they actually don’t give a fuck about “the standard.”

This takes time, trials and a bunch of self-awareness. And, no, I don’t think I’m there quite yet.

But really, who wants to be “standard?”

Wouldn’t you rather be the exception?

[gregoryaperez-blog1]

Konnichiwa. Ni hao. Kumusta. Hello.

If you’ve known me for a long time, you’ll recognize the title of this blog. If you don’t, it’s taken from my first foray into blogging back in 2000, when I lived in San Francisco and documented my time working at a startup and finding out what I was made of (meat, it turns out).

After fifteen years (!!!) I thought I’d give it another go.

Since then, I moved to Seattle where I worked for Microsoft and shot a bunch of music for KEXP.org. I got married. I moved to China and saddled up with IDEO. I traveled more than I ever did in my entire life; I lived and worked in Japan, India, Singapore, Malaysia and Australia. I got divorced. My mom died. I got married again. I moved to Tokyo. A lot has happened. There’s a lot to say. But somewhere along that journey I got scared of writing. I used to be super prolific. I wrote almost everyday on adcm, and made so many friends and learned so much. I felt brave, open and honest.

And then the era of social media dawned on us. Suddenly, I was limited to 140 characters. Suddenly, I was “oversharing.” Suddenly, tl;dr.

So I stopped.

The other day my wife asked me to write something. Anything. For 3 pages. It’s something she does every morning, to clear her head, to jog inspiration, to put it down on paper. “It doesn’t have to make sense,” she said. “Just write something.” I was sitting at a basement whisky bar in Shinjuku at that moment. We were texting on LINE. It made me realize that while I don’t write so much anymore, I definitely type more than I ever have in my entire life. WE ALL DO. We are texting machines now. On our phones, on our computers, in emails, in documents. We type a shitload. But it doesn’t mean we’re writing.

I wrote my three pages into my little notebook at the bar with a Yamazaki on hand and a small bowl of edamame. And it felt amazing. I haven’t done it since.

This morning, I felt bad about that.

So, here we are. This will be my morning pages. It will be more than 140 characters. I will be oversharing. It will be too long, and you may not want to read it. And it may not always make sense.

But I just want to write something. Additionally: Big ups to Mike Peng at IDEO Tokyo who inspired me to write more. He put up his first published essay on inspiring places to visit in Tokyo last week. It’s a good reminder to be brave and put yourself out there.