The Celebrity Sphere

Last night, after seeing The Black Rider downtown, we were hanging around outside talking when we realized that Jake Gyllenhaal was standing next to us, waiting for his car at the valet. He was looking good, with the short scruffy beard he's often sported lately. He and a friend hopped into his car (a silver Mercedes, and yes, we got the license plate number, thank you very much) and drove off into city.

I admit to unreservedly loving the game of seeing celebrities in this town. I love pretending I don't care, and I love then emailing the sighting to Defamer PrivacyWatch. I love the vicarious thrill of participating in the vicious cycle of consumer culture in late capitalism, and the pleasure of bragging about it to people who live elsewhere.

But sometimes I fear that I don't remember all of my sightings. So I'm going to list all I can remember here, and update my blog with them as they happen, so that when I am old and living in a much more boring locale, I'll remember this fun.

1. Johnny Knoxville and Wee Man, from the MTV show Jackass. Spotted at Venice Beach, while my parents were visiting.
2. The midget from Seinfeld, shopping at my grocery store.
3. Sandra Oh walking by the movie theater at The Grove. Just as I was coming out of a screening of Sideways, no less!
4. Speaking of Sideways, the very next day I saw Virginia Madsen pulling out of the parking lot on the corner of my street.
5. Debra Messing coming out of a performance of Sweeney Todd in New York City.
6. The entire male cast of The Sopranos congregating in a hotel bar in Chicago, and, the next morning, checking out of the hotel.
7. Nick Lachey and Jessica Simpson drove by me in a black SUV while I was waiting for a bus on Sunset Boulevard.
8. Just tonight, I saw the actor who plays one of Will's gay friends on Will and Grace.
9. John C. Reilly. My roommate and I were backstage at the Mark Taper Forum, meeting a friend, and he was hanging around waiting for a friend too.
10. Movie premieres don't really count, I think. It's cheating if you know a star is going to be somewhere at a certain time. Still, last summer in London, I saw Scarlett Johanssen and Ewan Macgregor at the British premiere of The Island. It kind of counts, because we just happened to be walking through Leceister Square when we stumbled upon the event.


There are more, but that is all I can remember right now.

Relief

After much delay, yesterday I finally had the formal oral defense of my special field exams. It was actually quite pleasant, a nice opportunity to have a long talk with committee about many interesting issues. As I've written before, my exams ended up not being incredibly useful in terms of my dissertation, but in the defense it occurred to me that a portion of one of the essays I wrote could make a good addition to another paper of mine if I wanted to try and turn it into an article. So that's a project I can ruminate on this summer.

It is quite a relief, I have to say. Passing wasn't too much of a worry, as our department doesn't view them as a weeding-out process. I am thrilled, however, that I can finally turn all of my attention to my dissertation. I get no small amount of joy from returning to the library all these books on modernism that I have no intention of ever looking at again! Not too much crazy celebrating, but I did go with friends to see this new production of The Black Rider at the Ahmanson. Review forthcoming! (I would make a horrible newspaper critic--I always need a few days to digest a performance before I feel like I can write about it.)

True Story

Mary is currently doing her pathology rotation at vet school. One of the lowly jobs she has to do during this rotation is going around to the various departments at the hospital and collect dead bodies to take down for autopsies. Straight out of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, if you ask me. I picture her going down the hall with a big cart singing, "Bring out your dead!"

But anyways, yesterday she got off early, and so was at home in the evening. Rather than slogging into the hospital for no reason, she called the nurse in charge of this process to ask if there were any bodies to be collected. The phone conversation went like this:

A: Hi, this is Mary from Pathology. (pause)
B: (silence)
A: I was just calling to see if you had any dead bodies for me.
B: (silence)
A: I have the wrong number, don't I.
B: ...umm...I think so.

ABC

I've never done a meme on my blog before, and generally find them annoying, but for some reason this one appeals to me. It's been going around a lot; I saw it first at Et. Al

Accent: Non-descript Californian. Although, when I mumble, sometimes people think I'm British, especially in the south.

Booze: Jack Daniels is my nemesis.

Chore I Hate: Cleaning my shower.

Dog or Cat: Dogs a little more than cats, but really anything with fur is great.

Essential Electronics: My computer.

Favorite Cologne: umm...none.

Gold or Silver: Definitely silver.

Hometown: the Bay Area, I suppose, but I have strong ties to a lot of places around the country.

Insomnia: Since I was in elementary school

Job Title: "Teaching Associate"

Kids: none.

Living arrangements: A fellow academic roommate in a creaky apartment in a great neighborhood.

Most admirable traits: patience?

Number of sexual partners: My parents read this blog, thank you very much.

Overnight hospital stays: None that I've been told about.

Phobias: claustrophobia, ever since a Boy Scout spelunking trip.

Quote: "Postmodernism is how we live under postmodernity," Gayatri Spivak. Sorry, that's horribly nerdy, but it's been rattling around in my head a lot recently.

Religion: A confirmed atheist since seventh grade, I occasionally dabble in high church episcopalianism.

Siblings: One opera-singing little sister.

Time I wake up: All over the map.

Unusual talent or skill: My fingers are freakishly bendy.

Vegetable I love: not many. perhaps raw red peppers.

Worst habit: mumbling.

X-rays: Teeth.

Yummy foods I make: I grill a mean portabello mushroom.

Zodiac sign: Aries

V For Vendetta

Last Friday Mary and I saw V For Vendetta. What a complicated movie. Although I had a good time watching it, I think I ultimately had a lot of problems with it.

1. The England Issue. V had a rough time at the box office in England, and was pretty mercilessly savaged in the press, even the left press. This is completely understandable, and not just because Natalie Portman can't do a British accent to save her life. As the Guardian review notes, it is a particularly American movie, and setting it in England feels very wrong. Not that the U.K. doesn't have bad political problems, and that anti-fascist critiques of the U.K. aren't useful--see the British punk movement circa 1983. But this movie feels very off, as if a bunch of Americans came to town, blew up half the city, killed off most of the inhabitants, all to make a point about American politics. Which leads me to...

2. The Violence Issue. I don't have a problem with the parable of using violence to overthrow a government. But I did have a rather visceral reaction to one tiny little clip. Near the end of the movie, there is a montage that shows the history of a terrorist biological attack on the country. A disease was spread in a school, in the water system, and in the tube system. Fake news clips were shown of each location, but for the last, the attack on the underground, I'm pretty sure that the director used actual clips from the bombing of the London underground last summer. I'm not positive, and it was a very short clip, but I'm pretty sure that I remember that specific clip. This ties in to my point above--the makers of this American film use particularly-European iconography to portray a climate of fear. That's a displacement I don't really like.

But there is more to this. As my loyal readership knows, I was living in London during those attacks last summer. So when that little clip flashed on, I was immediately transported back to that moment, and I remembered my own fear at the time. Now, the movie makes lots of big points about fear, and about how bad it is, and how it is responsible for right-wing political movements that promise security in exchange for freedom. The transformative moment for Natalie Portman's character comes when, after being tortured, she learns to live fearlessly.

I just don't like that. First, I find it sanctimonious on the part of the movie. But more importantly, I think that fear is just a necessary part of living with other people. And it is part of living under globalization, and under postmodernity, or basically in any kind of proximity to people who are different from you. Not to get all academic, but the Wachowski brothers have always struck me as hopelessly modernist and old-fashioned--everyone gets off on the fact that they showed a character reading Baudrillard in The Matrix, but the instant Neo takes the pill and finds out that there is a real meta-narrrative behind the simulation, you realize that they have probably never actually read Baudrillard. And remember, totalitarianism is an essentially modernist concept. And if there is one good thing about postmodernism, I do think it produces a world so hopelessly fragmented and mixed-up that totalizing meta-narratives like fascism become impossible, in a way. There are still political challenges, and horrifying social situation that need to be acted upon, but an old-fashioned critique of fascism and fear no longer feels relevant to me. To face the problems of postmodernity, we can't pretend we are still fighting Big Brother.

A Good Boy

My family's dog, Webster, passed away today. He is quite elderly, for a large dog, and has been in poor health for a number of years. He's had epilepsy for quite awhile, and about two months ago he started declining a bit. The diagnosis was never quite firm, but it was probably a cancer of some sort. Visiting home this last weekend, it was pretty obvious that he was failing, but he was still very happy to see us, and quite comfortable. By today it seemed like he wasn't going to get better, and so the vet came over to the house, and gave him the shot in the backyard, his favorite place to sleep. He was very spoiled in his last few weeks—his hip joints were very sore at the end, so my parents carefully gave his rump an assist every time he wanted to get up.

Webster was a very good boy. We got him my senior year of high school, and on the way home from the breeder he sat in my lap, got a little carsick, and threw up in my lap. But still, he was a good boy. He wasn't particularly a good swimmer, but he did like the beach, and hikes, and cold weather. Like any proper child of the dot com age, he had his own web page, befitting an animal whose full name was World Wide Webster.

Anyways, as I say, he was a very good boy. And he will be missed!

Allan Kaprow

The artist Allen Kaprow died today at age 79. He was a pretty neat guy, one of the group of young artists in NYC in the fifties who took Cage's class at the New School and went on to bring the art world into the sixties; he more or less invented Happenings as we now know and love them. (I'm not quite sure why the Times obituary thinks he was influenced by abstract expressionism, as he strikes me as the furthest thing from it.) His book Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life is a lovely read, if you have never experienced his art before--lots of small, simple, and wise thoughts.

Choices, Choices

Well, if this high school classmate of mine wins the prize for first among my peers to achieve international stardom, this college classmate of mine wins the prize for first to commit armed robbery.


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The linked article is no longer online. Basically, a classmate of mine from college robbed a Gap at gunpoint, and is now, predictably, in jail.

Thank God

Well, the exams are finally over. They've been over for two days now, actually, but only now can I drag myself back to the computer to announce the news. It was a pretty dispiriting experience, to be honest. Hopefully I'll struggle through the defense fine--I keep telling myself they are just exams. I don't need to have written great scholarship, just have done well enough to pass.

I have had a pleasant time relaxing though. Immediately that evening after I finished my comrades in the department took me out for margaritas, which was very pleasant. Friday I scrubbed the filth off of the apartment, ordered a pizza, and watched The Two Towers. Today, I bought a trashy novel and read it at the beach. A little windy, but sunny, so quite pleasant.

One more day of vacation, and then it is back to the grind.

Historic Hollywood

In my desperation to avoid writing my final paper, I found a web site that has a bunch of neat photographs of West Hollywood from the 1920s and 1930s.

• An aerial shot of my neighborhood. The big curving street is Sunset, I think my street is the one where the "m" of ".com" is. We developed a little bit earlier than the streets to the west, so that makes sense.
  
• The corner of Sunset and Fairfax.
  
• I think this is where the Virgin Megastore/Laemle 5 complex is.
  
• This is, I believe, now the Starbucks next to the Hyatt. Or maybe it's that vacant lot next to Cabo Cantina.
  
• A streetcar on Santa Monica Blvd, where Astroburger is now.
  
• The Whisky circa 1973.
  

Hack

Having lived in my current apartment for two and a half years now--the longest I have lived anywhere since my parent's home!--I have become accustomed to the particular soundscape of my neighborhood. At night I often hear police helicopters, cars zooming away from the valet parking of the Mexican restaurant on the corner, the rumble of partying on the Sunset Strip, and late at night the stumbling footsteps of drunken gay men returning home from the boulevard. The predominantly Russian residents of my building often have loud conversations in the courtyard that always sound angry to me. The male nurses for an elderly lady downstairs often sit outside having a cigarette and discussing Shakespeare (no joke), and the woman below me watches television most nights at a volume that is not overly loud, but loud enough to slightly vibrate my floor in this creaky building. In the building next door there is a woman I have never met, or even seen, but she carries on long conversations with her dog. She is from the south; the dog's name is Oliver.

These sounds are all rather comforting to me now. But there is one that I just cannot figure out. Sporadically, what sounds like an older man will cough loudly. That might seem innocuous, but it is a bizarre cough--very dry and hacking, and always just in a single burst. I wish I could transcribe it somehow, or record it, but I never know when it is coming. Just when I least expect it, a booming "hack!" will come careening in my window, and every time it happens I am startled.

Okay, enough procastination.

It's the Small Things

I don't know why this makes me so happy, but I just quoted Gayatri Spivak for the first time in an academic paper. For some reason, it feels like an accomplishment.

In other news, I would love to be done with these exams. They are not very fun. If they were due tomorrow, I would be more than happy to stay up all night finishing them, and frankly they would probably be about the same quality. But, unfortunately, they aren't due until Thursday.

The Missing E

So, there is this young fashion designer named Erin Fetherston who has been getting a lot of press lately. I don't follow these things so much, usually, but happened to skim an article in the Los Angeles Times about LA Fashion Week that mentioned her meteoric rise to stardom--originally from "Berkeley," she ran into Kirsten Dunst at a party, made friends, and is now this big deal designer.

Now, former Piedmonters--among my small but loyal readership, I guess that would be my parents-- help me out. Was there not a girl in my year named Erin Fetherstone? (with an "e", I could have sworn.) This could totally be her, albeit much more glammed up than she ever was in AP English.

My life suddenly seems rather dull.

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Update: My informants reveal that she was indeed a classmate of mine. But there was no "e" then either, so it isn't some sort of fashion designer affectation.

Day One

I apologize if for the next week my posts get a little monotonous! Such is the life of qualifying exams. I have seven days to write three fifteen-page essays, which really ain't so bad. I wrote a fifteen page paper in one day last week, after all.

I picked up my exam questions today at noon. They are...okay. It's not to say they are bad questions, as they accurately reflect my reading list and the written rationale I provided. However, it makes me realize that I wrote the first draft of that list practically a year ago. At the time, I knew that eventually my research interests were headed in a slightly different direction, but now that I am dealing concretely with this field I defined last year, I am struck how much some of my intellectual positions have changed. On the surface level, it would be easy to miss this, since I am mostly still working on the same subjects I have been working on since I started graduate school, even since I started doing musicology as a junior in college, really. But there have been some important changes in my theoretical mindset, and in my intellectual priorities.

I'm not sure why this is. Certain seminars I have taken have helped, both in and out of my department. Participating in several national conferences, where for the first time I had to present myself as a serious scholar with coherent positions, certainly affected things. Not unrelated, I've been working on my dissertation proposal for the last quarter, which in effect is my last chance to define what sort of scholarship I intend to pursue for the next few years. And personally, I've gone through a bit of a journey these past few months. All told, it seems like this last year--really, almost the exact amount of time I've been writing this blog, interestingly--has been a time for figuring out what sort of scholar and person I want to be for the foreseeable future.

So I guess what feels a little weird about these exams is that I feel pulled back, to a certain extent, to who I was a year ago. It's not a bad thing, and it is certainly not my committee's fault. But I hope when I get back to work tomorrow, I can stop being so darn introspective and start writing!

Exam Prep

Before American Pie, before Bring it On, before 10 Things I Hate About You, there was....Can't Hardly Wait.

Now, there are countless wonderful things about this movie, a touching coming-of-age tale set entirely at a high school graduation party in 1998. But one of the most amazing thing was the large cast of young unknown actors, almost all of whom went on to...well, not better things, but similar things.

In no particular order, and with some assistance from IMDB:

1. Noted Beethoven scholar Lauren "Claire on Six Feet Under" Ambrose
2. Seth Green playing a jive-talking little white boy.
3. Sean "Save the Last Dance" Patrick Thomas
4. Jennifer Love Hewitt and Her Neck.
5. Freddy "Six Feet Under" Rodriguez
6. Jamie "My Name is Earl" Presley
7. Hottest Proto-Lesbian in the World Clea DuVall
8. Donald "Scrubs" Faison
9. Nicole "Bring it On" Bilderback
10. Selma Blair, now my girlfriend.
11. Jenna "Dharma and Greg" Elfman
12. Melissa "Clarissa the Teenage Witch" Joan Hart
13. Chris "The Sherminator" Owen

and, lastly, but most amazingly....

14. Charlie Korsmo, who most of us know as the little boy from Hook! The best part is that after Hook, Charlie never really acted again. He went to MIT to get a degree in physics, and is now a policy analyst for the House Republicans. But somehow, in some way, somebody managed to convince the little boy from Hook to come out of retirement to play a drunken nerd who rocks out a version of "Welcome to the Jungle."

Has any other movie had such an amazing ensemble cast? Oops, now Lauren Ambrose and Seth Green are about to kiss. Gotta go.

p.s. Apparently the kid who plays the foreign exchange student is Dean Martin's grandson.

Grading, Grading, Gone!

It's been a six hour marathon, but I just finished all my grading for the quarter.

After grading sixty final papers this last weekend, we had our final exam today. I start my exams on Thursday, so originally I was going to take this evening and tomorrow to do the grading. But after further reflection, I realized that it would be very, very nice to have a day off to relax and re-group before I plunge into the ordeal, so I resolved to just start grading as soon as the final was over, and not stop until I was done.

It's now 11:30 pm, but I am done!

Conference Roundup

My conference this weekend went very well.

Now, I just have to grade, grade like the wind for the next two days. And then, on to my exams!

Viva Chongqing

Today's Guardian has an interesting article about Chongqing, the city in China where my grandfather grew up. Apparently, it is now the largest and fastest-growing municipality in the world, with 32 million residents. I visited there once with my grandparents, in 1992, to celebrate the centennial of the hospital my great-grandfather administered back in the 1920s. I remember the city as being fairly small and quiet. That might just be my faulty memory, but I imagine that the growth of the city has largely occurred in the last decade or so, especially with the nearby Three Gorges dam. Millions of farms and small towns near the Yangtze river were displaced by the dam and reservoir system, and Chongqing is probably the closest city to emigrate to. It's a mysterious country, China.

Doris is Everywhere

My project this weekend has been to finish up a seminar paper before I head out of town this week. The topic is doo-wop, specifically the early African-American vocal quartets of the late forties and early fifties who sang in what is called the "sweet gospel" style. It includes groups like the Ink Spots, the Drifters, the Orioles, the Penguins, and so on. Anyhow, I've been struggling for a specific topic to focus on. I've always been intrigued by the classic doo-wop chord progression: I-vi-IV-V. (The educated reader might know it best from a song like "Earth Angel.") Rarely in popular music is a single chord progression so utterly dominant--there are literally thousands of songs from this genre that use it.

So anyways, I was jut listening to lots of this music, when I stumbled across the fact that two of these early groups, the Orioles, and the Moonglows, recorded cover versions of the hit 1953 Doris Day song "Secret Love," a song I know quite well having just delivered a paper on it at a conference. The weird thing is that while the Orioles version does a fairly straight version of it--a bit jazzed up, but otherwise so straight it could be a parody--the Moonglows version reharmonizes the song to fit a variant of the doo-wop progression. They keep the melody the same, but underneath it just paste I-vi-ii-V. It doesn't fit at all, and when they get to the chorus they have to give it up and go back to the original chords. Still, the compulsion to use the doo-wop progression makes them do pretty weird things to the tune. So bizarre!

Maine?

I was filling out one of those Visited States maps, and I realized that I have never been to Maine. I can understand why I haven't been to that whole Idaho to Wisconsin area, but Maine? I lived in New England for five years.

I'm having trouble keeping the energy to post to my blog. Lots of craziness going on right now. I'm taking my special fields exams in three weeks. In two weeks I am giving a slightly controversial paper at a a fairly important conference. In one and a half weeks I have to turn in a seminar paper on a subject (doo-wop) I've never written about before. After all of this is done, I have to write and defend a dissertation proposal, and pass a Spanish exam. All of this in an attempt to advance to candidacy by the end of next quarter. And to be honest, I've been going through some really hard stuff of a non-bloggable nature.

So, apologies, loyal readers, for my non-posting, but hopefully I shall return soon!