I translated an interview with the noise musician Shu Ride: https://saddleblasters.com/translation/shuride

I took suboptimalism up on his book trade offer: https://saddleblasters.com/trades/elementary_particles

Also, in hopes of doing this again with someone else, I made a page for future book trades: https://saddleblasters.com/trades/

i've been called out... https://suboptimalism.neocities.org/secret/wang.xml

My plan to strong arm you into writing something worked! I will have to add Wang Xiaobo to your Murakami vs. Houellebecq analysis at some point and make a three way venn diagram out of them, since he also exhibits many similarities and interesting differences...

Also you might have read it already, but Vonnegut's Bluebeard is another meditation on "what is art?" that specifically focuses on Pollock. I like to pair it with his earlier novel Deadeye Dick, narrated by the son of a failed painter.

haven't read either of those but i have read the one that came out right in between the two, galapagos...

I really enjoyed reading ‘On Waking’ !

good shit bud

I wrote an essay about noise performances I saw last year and poems I wrote about them: https://saddleblasters.neocities.org/essays/noise_poetry

Chinese noise is crazy... i know about Merzbow, Masonna, Gerogerigegege, Les Rallizes Dénudés, ...but had not much clue about the Chinese noise scene.

I only really talked about the Shanghai scene in this essay. If you're curious about the Beijing scene, you can read Yan Jun's English language writing (though a lot of it is outdated): https://www.thewire.co.uk/about/contributors/yan-jun/yan-jun_which-hell-do-you-prefer_

Added a section for short pieces that don't fit what "records of a saddle" has come to represent.

A local venue that my friends would perform at frequently recently shut down and is set to be demolished. It's always so heartbreaking when those kinds of things happen :-((

In our apartment, "upstairs" is the top shelves of the kitchen cabinets that my wife can't reach.