Goblins and Elephants

The first musicology I ever wrote was my senior year in high school. In AP English we read E.M. Forster's Howard's End, and I was very taken by the passage in chapter five where the family attends a concert of Beethoven's Fifth. When they get to the third and fourth movements, Forster illustrates the personality differences between the two siblings, Helen and Tibby, by showing how they listen to Beethoven differently:

Helen said to her aunt: "Now comes the wonderful movement: first of all the goblins, and then a trio of elephants dancing"; and Tibby implored the company generally to look out for the transitional passage on the drum.

Helen goes on to analyze the third and fourth movements quite extensively in terms of goblins and elephants. The goblins creep about the universe, "with increased malignity," until Beethoven scatters them about the universe.

He brought back the gusts of splendour, the heroism, the youth, the magnificence of life and of death, and, amid vast roarings of a superhuman joy, he led his Fifth Symphony to its conclusion. But the goblins were there. They could return. He had said so bravely, and that is why one can trust Beethoven when he says other things.

Today I got to teach the Fifth Symphony for the first time. Just the second movement, and after a lengthy review of German Idealism--as Hedwig says, "You, Kant, always get what you want"--we only had time to discuss the augmented 6th chord at about m. 28. It's just a little bit of harmonic trickery, the Gb of the violins in previous measures re-spelled as F#, now the raised 6th of the augmented 6th chord. And augmented 6ths always lead to the dominant, which in this case is G major, the V of C major. So thus, with this one quick little re-spelling we are suddenly launched into the world of C major, the eventual gusts of splendor and superhuman joy in the last movement.

The professor of this course wanted us to point out the augmented 6th here because it is one of many ways in which these C major moments poke through. However, technically speaking, a moment like this isn't "real." We aren't actually in C major for more than a few measures, and it is just a little bit of trickery that makes us feel momentarily assured. But you know, that's just a bit of annoying Beethoven-ness. Beethoven wants you to feel like nothing is real unless you've worked hard at it. It's got to be built from the ground up, and you've got to feel the pain along the way--and after a solid forty-five minutes of Beethoven, you've felt the pain! There's no quick fix.

Beethoven's probably right, but I don't like it. I think he is asking the wrong questions. Beethoven, and the rhetoric of hard work and discipline, doesn't pay enough attention to small gestures that might not be a gust of superhuman joy and the magnificence of life and death, but nevertheless accomplishes no small amount of work of its own. Earlier today, Mary and I were listening to a bunch of recordings from the Kronos Quartet 25th anniversary box set; an excellent investment, incidentally, if one is looking to blow some money! One of the CDs is a recording of Morton Feldman's Quartet for Piano and Strings. It clocks in at seventy-nine minutes of near-stillness and quietude, the music almost imperceptible at times. It does have its own ethic of discipline and hard work, since after all it does require an enormous amount of physical effort to play so quietly. But rather than Beethoven's model of extreme ups and downs, with goblins and elephants, the Feldman quartet models a life of quiet pleasure and appreciation for subtle beauty. And if music was a world, I'd much rather life in a Feldman string quartet than in the Fifth Symphony. Hard work just can't be sustained forever, or if it can be, it is at the expense of pleasure. I've definitely done a lot of hard work this year, and although it's gotten me to some good places, it's not going to get me everywhere.

Wake Me Up, Before I Go-Go

You know, it's good to be back in Los Angeles. I always forget how pretty our campus is, even when my new parking assignment has me wading through the school marching band practice to get to the department. And even though I have been driving the five miles back and forth to school now for over three years, I still don't really get tired of the drive. For one thing, how many people's daily commute includes not only the site of Jan (as in, Jan and Dean's) horrifyingly ironic 1966 car crash at Dead Man's Curve, but also the public bathroom where George Michael was arrested for soliciting an undercover police officer? Pretty cool, I think.

Plus, last night, at the local greasy diner, I had a seared ahi tuna sandwich. I don't think greasy diners anywhere else in the country have seared ahi tuna sandwiches.

London Bridge is Falling Down

On our last day in London, Mary and I took a break from surveying horses to go down to the the Tate Modern to see the big Kandinsky show. Snap review: I like Kandinsky; who doesn't? It seemed like a fairly thorough overview of his work, with an impressive number of major paintings. The exhibition subtitle was "The Path to Abstraction," and there was indeed a predictable emphasis on his chronological progression from early impressionist landscapes to the more abstract stuff. I'm not sure that was particularly enlightening, but I did like one room where they displayed one of his major paintings alongside all the sketches and studies for it. I imagine it is rare to see all those parts together in one place, so that's neat.

Kandinsky is not what I want to talk about today, however. Because on the way to the exhibition, we got off at the London Bridge tube stop. And thus, two songs immediately entered my head, one old, one new:

London Bridge is falling down, falling down, falling down
London Bridge is falling down, my fair lady.

and then,

How come every time you come around
My London London Bridge want to go down
Like London London want you to go down
Like London London be going down

The first is a nursery rhyme, the second is from this summer's hit song "London Bridge," by Fergie, on her first solo outing. Fergie's version, of course, has been the inescapable hit of the summer. The first time I heard it, it sounded to me like it was the same basic idea behind Fergie's hit with the Black-Eyed Peas, whose chorus goes "My hump, my hump, my lady lady lumps." Which is to say, it pushes inanity to the point where it becomes so shocking you can't help but be attracted to it. As such, it was in the same vein of songs like Kelis's "Milkshake," or maybe some tracks by 50 Cent.

But man, "London Bridge" has been everywhere. I have to ask myself, what else is interesting about it? I mean, for one thing, there is the fact that it wears its intertextuality on its sleeve, which is the academic way of saying it rips a lot of other songs off. There is the lyrical allusion to "Me So Horny," which, interestingly enough, can be found in two or three other pop songs on the charts right now. There is the more subtle nod to Missy Elliot, particularly the Missy of "Work It." (Really, go listen to the Missy track--it's hard to tell the two apart, except that of course Missy can eat Fergie for breakfast any day.)

Then there is the issue of historicity. I've blogged about this before, and it is something that a number of critics have noted about Top 40 music right now. It is the "simple" idea that under postmodernity, our sense of history has collapsed. As Fredric Jameson writes, it is a sense of "historical deafness," punctuated by "a series of spasmodic and intermittent, but desperate, attempts at recuperation." Of the pop hits of this summer, I would put John Mayer and Jessica Simpson's tributes to, respectively, Curtis Mayfield and Madonna into this category of recuperative attempts.

But London Bridge? Hard to say. There is, of course, the titular object. As is well-known now, both the cover and the video for this song feature Fergie dancing in front of a bridge in London (see above). Unfortunately, it's not actually the London Bridge, but rather the Tower Bridge, a Victorian construction that is very pretty and elaborate, and suitably old-looking (the Victorians could collapse historicity like nobody's business), but is unfortunately quite different from the London Bridge.

The London Bridge is a much more pedestrian affair. As any Wikipediast will tell you, it has gone through three main incarnations. The "Old" London Bridge was a gothic stone construction that crossed the Thames from 1029-1831. As the nursery rhyme tells us, this bridge was falling down and the enterprising Victorians put up a replacement in 1831, the "New" London Bridge. This bridge was then replaced in 1973 by what most call the "Ugly" London Bridge, the current incarnation pictured above that is essentially a freeway on-ramp plopped over a river.

But what is fabulously postmodern about the saga of the London Bridge is that the "New" London Bridge was not destroyed. No, in a triumph of late globalized capitalism, it was sold to the highest bidder, taken apart brick by brick, and then reassembled in a new home. And that new home was none other than Lake Havasu, Arizona, where today it is surrounded by blonde coeds flashing their breasts at the Girls Gone Wild cameras in the shadow of the poor old London Bridge.

Which finally brings us to the ultimately unanswerable question of this song. At a party I was at tonight, the claim was made that Fergie's "London Bridge" is part of a trend of recent popular songs which celebrate powerful female sexuality, a trend that stems from Christina Aguilera's album Stripped and perhaps some fin-du-millennium hip-hop by Missy Elliot and Lil' Kim, music widely seen as representing a turn away from the de-sexualized ideology of Britney Spears, the boy bands, and "Genie in a Bottle" Xtina. The argument was made that the lyrics, which do indeed seem to involve somebody performing sexual acts on the singer, somehow represent a positive vision of assertive feminine sexuality. On the more performative sound, Mary pointed out to me that maybe it isn't the lyrics, but the ferociousness with which Fergie launches into the chorus that gives us an attractive sense of power. But how does this all tie together? From medieval London to Girls Gone Wild, from "Hit Me Baby One More Time" to "I'm a Slave 4 U"?

So yeah, it's a complicated text. If anybody has any other ideas about it, let me know.

Ode to the Crab Tower

Tomorrow, we return to Los Angeles. It'll be very nice to be back. I just was flipping through this year's calendar, and did a bit of counting: I spent 78 days living out of a suitcase this year. If you're doing the math, that's a little more than 20% of the year. It does make me appreciate the little things that come with being at home, like having all my clothes available to me, not just the five shirts I've been wearing since early August. And an ironing board. And Tivo. (Memo to Violet Vixen: by any chance, did you Tivo Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip? Both times I tried to watch it this week, I missed the first twenty minutes.)

But I digress. I started this post because there is one thing that is always missing from my life when I am away from Washington, DC. It is a ten dollar creation of pure goodness, available at Clyde's of Georgetown, called the Crab Tower. The menu description just doesn't do it justice:

jumbo lump crab salad, seaweed salad, tobiko, coconut-curry rice cake and wasabi-sweet chili mayonnaise

I just can't tell you how delicious it is. The combination of crab, seawood, and rice cake is the most absurdly tasty thing you will ever taste. Back when Anne was a server at Clyde's and we were there a lot, I used to eat that thing three or four times a week. Now that Anne has moved to Mexico, my Crab Tower consumption has gone down a bit, but I still cherish the occasions. I'm considering the possibility of ordering a dozen, freezing them, and shipping them back home.

That is all.

Productivity of a Sort

I have to say, I have not been as productive this second half of the summer as I had hoped. The plan was to come back in the fall with a good solid draft of my first chapter. That could still happen, I suppose, but it probably going to require some serious writing when I get back to Los Angeles next week.

On the non-essential productivity front, however, I spent all day yesterday at the Library of Congress, poking around in the organizational archives of the NAACP. It was a really random idea: a historian who works on McCarthyism noted in some footnote that it might be interesting to research how McCarthyism affected the NAACP. That's interesting in itself, first of all, but it also occurred to me that the NAACP might be a good source of discourse on mainstream, respectable African-American life of the early fifties, the same sort of discourse of which my sweet gospel people were also part (that is, as opposed to those surly R&B types that we all know and love today.) Maybe there would be interesting representations of African-American masculinity, some fun pamphlets or something, I don't know. It just seemed like maybe I could poke around in the archives, and maybe something interesting would turn up.

Did anything turn up? Stay tuned for the dissertation!

Happiness is a Warm Laptop

I think I have finally accomplished one of my major goals in life. Yesterday I bought a wireless router for Mary's father, and today installed it. Now, I can cheerfully chug away on my laptop in the living room, and resume some semblance of a wired life. It makes me very happy.

We are slowly adjusting to life in Northern Virginia. It was a big adjustment, especially for Mary's innate DC snobbery that anything south of the Potomac automatically equals suburban sprawl, bad driving, and the NRA. But with the huge population growth of DC in recent years, the inner ring of suburbs in Virginia have become much more urban and liberal. And the street we are living on is pleasantly leafy and residential, with nice houses and even a few shops within walking distance. Last night we bumped into a bowling alley by accident, and whiled away the night with a pitcher of Yuengling and several sub-100 games. Good times.

Hegemony is Leaky, and So Are You

For the past few weeks, I have had something of a blogging writer's block. I have this long exegesis of Fergie's "London Bridge" that I've been writing on and off all month, and it keeps getting more tangled and confusing, so I think I just need to set it aside for now, and take a deep breath.

I am, however, alive. Currently in Washington, DC, with only intermittent internet access. Apologies to those who have emailed me in vain, and to those to whom I owe various tasks. Both shall happen at some point.

In the meantime, I highly recommend Michael Berube's recent posts about Raymond William's famous essay "Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory." Williams is one of my favorite writers, this is one of my favorite essays, and Michael does a great job explaining things. I've read the Williams's essay dozens of times--heck, I actually taught part of it to my class this summer--but learned many new things from these posts. So, if you need some light end-of-summer reading, go to!

Sir Edward

Can I just say how cool it is that the twenty pound bill in the U.K. features a picture of Edward Elgar? I mean, it's not like the British have a proud tradition of classical music. And yet, they feature one of their few big names on a rather major piece of currency. It's hard to imagine a piece of U.S. currency featuring a twentieth-century artist! I'd like to see Aaron Copland's shiny bald head on the fifty dollar bill some day; who really feels the need to commemorate Ulysses Grant these days?

Tragedy on the A1001

The horse surveying adventures continue apace: we've been to Hickin, Harpenden, St. Albans, Sandridgebury, and my favorite name, Ickleford. The horse people run the gamut from friendly to quirky to rude. We went to a horse show in Tring to do some clipboard surveying, and I ended up giving advice on how to get into vet school to a fifteen-year-old Brit. We went to a stable in Thrall's End, run by an American couple, who had not only horses but a suite of professional offices such as dentists and the like; would you like a free toothbrush with your horse? One stable was on the grounds of vaguely sinister-sounding company called something like "Ovebra", but Google doesn't give me any info so either I mis-remember the name or it is an MI5 front.

However, the most pertinent event since my last post is that we had a car accident on Thursday. We are both perfectly fine. The car is less fine, but fixable. It went down like this: we were driving to a stable outside of St. Albans, and came to a roundabout off the A1001. Mary is a pro at these roundabouts, which, if you've never been to England, are the primary way the British route traffic, rather than streetlights. So we get to this roundabout, which Mary has driven through many times before. This circle actually does have traffic lights as well, which regulate your entry into the circle. We were waiting in the line of cars, and when our lane started to move, we cheerfully followed.

However, it turned out that actually the lights were turned off for roadwork, and we were actually in a yield situation--the cars in front of us had simply taken advantage of a gap in traffic. Mary was entering the circle, and I looked to the right and saw this gigantic lorry bearing down on us. It honked, Mary tried to get out of the way, but it rubbed against the front driver's side of our poor little Citroen. If Mary hadn't gotten out of the way as much as she did, it probably would have smashed straight into her door, so that is a little scary to think about. We were obviously at fault, but it was also obviously an ugly traffic pattern.

But, we're all fine. And the good news is that of course the lorry was completely unscathed, and the driver was very nice. Also nice was a road worker who got the car down to a pull out spot, and nicest of all was Mary's mechanic, who came out personally in the tow truck and was very soothing, even going out of his way to drop us off in Barnet. As best as I can tell, the damage didn't involve the engine--it just knocked out the front headlight, tore off part of the bumper, and pushed in the side of the car.

In the meantime, we have resumed our busy driving schedule using a roommate's car. No pain no gain!

The Story of Catlips

This past week the missus and I have been busy with her final year research project, a survey of horse owners and equine veterinarians in hopes of determining attitudes towards physiotherapy--that is, alternative treatments such as acupuncture, chiropracticy, equine massage, etc. Physiotherapy is not as popular in the U.K. as it probably should be, and so the idea is to find out if this is due to ignorance, miseducation, or veterinary malfeasance. The survey is limited to the county of Hertfordshire, and the distribution process involves us driving around to every single livery stable and equine veterinary practice in the phone book.

It's actually a lot of fun. Hertfordshire is an odd, liminal area. The county includes urbanized tendrils of London, stretching up into cities like Watford and Barnet, satellite cities like St. Albans, quaint villages on the border with Essex and Cambridgeshire, and lots of very rural farming and grazing land. (Historical trivia: the imaginary line between Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire counties dates back to the division of the Saxon kingdoms of Mercia and Wessex!) We have been spending about five hours a day in Mary's little Citroen, puttering about down tiny little country roads in search of horse. It is very nice to meet so many British people for a change, especially since British horse people tend to be a bit oddball.

Yesterday, we were trying to find a stable evocatively named "Catlips" in the area of Chorleywood, near the western edge of the county. (Historical trivia: Chorleywood was the center of British Quakerdom before they all emigrated to Pennsylvania.) We have our trusty A-Zed of Hertfordshire, which showed that the farm was in the middle of a big patch of green, completely roadless. There was one vague line that seemed to indicate a driveway, so we tried to find it. Exiting off the A1, we (and by "we", I mean Mary) proceeded down a series of smaller and smaller roads, until we were hurtling around on a path barely big enough for our own car, let alone the occasional oncoming traffic. We kept on not being able to find the turnoff, so we slowly circled around the green patch on the map. Finally, we saw a little dirt driveway that indeed bumbled its way into a meadow, and eventually lead to a farm.

The farm? A bunch of rickety old wooden buildings, an aggressive rooster pecking away at the ground, and a grassy area in which were parked at least twenty decomposing motorhomes, lying fallow and gradually being overtaken by the woods. If we were in the U.S., this sort of scenario would make city people such as us think scary things about banjos, but this being the U.K., we quite had no idea what to expect. We poked our heads into the house trying to find a person, and found ourselves in the middle of a crowd of people who were all pawing away at a gigantic pile of horse boots, saddles, leads, and whatnot. Turns out that there was an unofficial used horse gear shop being run out of this farm, and there were several families checking out the merchandise. Mary waded through the crowd to hand off the surveys, and I waited outside, where a middle-aged British man in wellies commiserated with me. "Like a sale at Harrod's, it is, with these women!" he remarked companionably, although his accent was so thick he might actually have been telling me to haul my American butt out of town before he got out the shotgun. I just smiled back.

Mary successfully handed off her surveys, however, so we trundled our way back to the A1 and civilization. We never found out what was up with the name "Catlips." The mind boggles.

Musicology in Action?

Who says musicology isn't relevant?

There was a very bizarre little item in the news today. Apparently, at the World AIDS conference going on in Toronto right now, a study was presented which investigated the correlation between HIV infection and musical taste. According to the article, teenage boys who listen to "gospel, techno, and pop" are more at risk for HIV than teenage boys who listen to "hip hop, reggae, reggaeton, rap and rhythm and blues."

Now, it was very hard to tell what this study is actually about from this quick little wire feed article, which was mostly just a few quotes from the study's author, Miguel Munoz-Laboy--all of which sounded like they were taken a little out of context. I did find the study's abstract, which tells us that this is actually an ongoing ethnography of urban youth cultures focusing on masculinity and sexual risk. The presentation at the conference was on one aspect of that project, hip-hop as a "narrative of masculinity."

Obviously, the musicologist in me--as well as the queer activist still in me, buried beneath the layers of graduate school, who really cares about the real-world implications of this study--has a lot of questions. Most of them are completely unanswerable in lieu of a finished, published project, rather than just an abstract and a half-ass interview. I do sense that it is a well-meaning project, and I like the fact that an empirical public health study such as this is taking music culture seriously. Obviously nobody is claiming that listening to one genre of music "causes" certain risky sexual behaviors. Munoz-Laboy's claim is that involvement in certain "scenes" tend to correlate with risky behaviors. That makes intuitive sense-- a "scene" is a community of people typically linked by an appreciation for a certain genre of music. And that "appreciation" is important--it is the way certain people appreciate music that matters almost more than what is being appreciated. A scene is an analytical tradition, not so different than, say, set theorists or Schenkerians.

Interpreting music is a social phenomenon--we don't call them theoretical "schools" for nothing--so if one's object is to study social behavior, such as sex, it seems particularly important to look at how these kids are listening to music. And that gets to one of the obvious problems of the survey as presented so far. By dividing up popular music into all these genres, they are doing the musical interpretation for the kids. I mean, can you really put "pop" music and "rhythm and blues" and "hip-hop" into different categories today? I think not. Yes, plenty of people do, and I have no doubt that the study attempted to take its cue from how the teenagers talk about their music. But I do think that if you are going to study such a complicated cultural problem, as this study thankfully attempts to do, you need to also look specifically at the music on its own terms. Because any sort of social behavior inevitably bleeds into other social behaviors, and studying how these kids listen to music might tell us something about how they do other things. Otherwise, you're just randomly correlating data, which can lead to also sorts of silliness.

And might actually give you some ideas for how to fix things. I know a high school teacher in Los Angeles named Patrick Camangian, who uses hip-hop lyrics to teach his young charges critical thinking. That is, he didn't just use hip-hop to gain street cred with them. (As a former drop-out of the school at which he taught, he already had that!). He uses it to teach them analytical skills, and critical thinking. And the optimist in me does think that if you can learn how to be critical in one part of life, you might start to be critical in others.

I sound awfully formalist, don't I? Oh well. I'm very open to opinions others might have about this. Really, I just think everyone needs a musicologist in their lives!

Barnet Thus Far

Surgery Reports. Dissertation writing. Big Brother 7. Evil landlords. Heathrow is Hell. Suspicious customs agents. Lamb with a balsamic vinegar crust. Wagamama. Ye Olde Monken Holt. Guinness Extra Cold. New sheets. Irish soda bread. Rain. My Super-Ex Girlfriend. Sun. Pinot Grigio. Queen Mother Hospital for Animals. Whitby trip planning. Green beans. Unsucessful search for shoes. Boots. Starbucks. Little Red Citroën. Penelope the Rottweiler. Waitrose. Conversation.

Newark Cat Blogging

As I type, I'm sitting in Newark Liberty International Airport. (Sidenote: what kind of airport name is that?!) I had to pay a few bucks to have a day's worth of internet access, but as I got to my flight three hours early, it seemed worth it. Today, I drove from the Adirondacks down I-87 (the Los Angeleno in me just had to resist typing "the 87") to Newark, stopping briefly in Woodstock to take a few more research-y photographs of the Maverick Concert Hall. Last time I was there, two years ago, it was deserted, and I was able to cheerfully poke around. Today, it turned out that I arrived twenty minutes before the Tokyo String Quartet was due to play a concert. So I couldn't quite poke around as much, but it was neat to see all the people there. Paid tickets get you a seat on a bench in the shed, but for free you can sit outside the shed in a little clearing in the woods called "Rock Bottom." A line of little old ladies were primly sitting in their lawn chairs in Rock Bottom, looking like they had been there for hours to get front row seats.

So in a few hours, I am Barnet bound! Hopefully, I will not be blown up by a stray bottle of Gatorade en route. But as I sit here, I realize I miss the kitties a lot, and although I obviously don't have any current photos, I remembered that I have a short little movie I have not shared with the world. The setting for this little clip is the morning after we had a party in our apartment. Pablo thought that sitting in the empty chip bowl was about the most fun he'd ever had. I thought it could be more fun.

Enjoy!



----------------------
My flight has been delayed five hours. That's what I get for joking about airplane security. I'm sorry. Exploding Gatorade® bottles are not funny. The Transportation Security Administration is a righteous force for truth and justice. War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength.

A Room with a View

I write from possibly the best place I have ever worked. I'm at a study carrel in the Joan Weill Adirondack Library, which is on the campus of Paul Smiths College on the banks of Lower St. Regis Lake. I'm next to a window that faces out over the lake, with a view of St. Regis Mountain. And the window is open, so there is a breeze coming in off the lake, and I can here the water splashing up against the birch trees on the shore. All this, and free wireless internet. I'm in heaven.

Back on the homestead, I only have dial-up access that trickles down wire like mud. So there probably won't be too many updates this week. I made it safely to the Adirondacks, via two planes, one rental car, and one ferry ride across Lake Champlain. I love that ferry ride--it's only fifteen minutes, costs only $8.50, and gives you a chance to stretch your legs and watch the sunset.

Up here, things are basically the same as always. A lot of lounging on the porch, reading on the dock, the occasional sailboat race, regular meals with the extended family--12:30pm and 6:30pm sharp, every day. It's a nice existence. Tomorrow is the regular Tuesday sailboat race, but the boats I typically race go on Thursdays, so I'll just take a motor boat out and saunter about the lake to watch. Wednesday night is the annual Moonlight race, where we all drift around the lake at night, lit by the moon and fueled by the occasional thermos of Irish coffee. My mother and I will probably climb the local mountain at some point, as I have every summer since I was six years old.

Before all this begins, however, I have to finish my review! Back to "work".

Adirondack Bound

I tell you, one thing about all the travelling I've been doing for the past four years, I pack an efficient suitcase! This was one of my tougher jobs. I needed to pack for my week with the family in the Adirondacks (warm days, very chilly nights, potential for athletic activity and snooty cocktail parties), four weeks in London (warm, rainy), a wedding (father's hand-me-down suit), and two weeks or so in Washington, DC (hot hot hot). I think I've got it all in my trusty suitcase, although I suspect it will be overweight for domestic flights. Luckily, the prepared traveler is never without a cheap foldable duffel bag in which to toss heavy items these days.

It's been a busy time. Lots of laundry, lots of cleaning of my room (I HATE coming home to a messy room), a haircut, thirty final exams graded, sundry responsibilities taken care of, bills paid...phew.

But now, in a few hours, I am off for summer!

Hips Don't Lie

Yesterday was my last lecture of the summer. We covered nineties hip-hop--NWA to Jay-Z--and then spent the last half of class discussing the top ten singles on the iTunes Downloads chart from last week. I had originally wanted to assign the top ten singles on the Billboard chart, but the singles chart for last week didn't have a single rock-ish number on it, and I really wanted to have at least a little bit of diversity. The "Most Downloaded" chart had John Mayer's recent single on it, and a song by The Fray, a very dull alt rock band.

In fact, here are the songs, just for posterity:

1. Gnarls Barkley, "Crazy"
2. Ashlee Simpson, "Invisible"
3. Nelly Furtado & Timbaland, "Promiscuous"
4. The Pussycat Dolls featuring Big Snoop Dogg, "Buttons"
5. Christina Aguilera, "Ain't No Other Man"
6. Jessica Simpson, "A Public Affair"
7. The Fray, "Over My Head (Cable Car)"
8. Cassie, "Me & U"
9. Shakira featuring Wyclef Jean, "Hips Don't Lie"
10. John Mayer, "Waiting on the World to Change"

It's really fascinating to try and look at this rather arbitrary assemblage of songs, and try to construct some sort of greater point out of it. I'm not sure we really succeeded. Couple things though:

Generic boundaries are obviously quite blurred. Many of these songs would vaguely be considered R&B, but the line between R&B and Pop and Hip-Hop is not a particularly clear or useful line these days. When you think of the top songs from the early nineties, this would not have been the case. The top artists of the nineties all had very strong generic identifications: we all know what genres Nirvana, Garth Brooks, Metallica, and Dr. Dre fall into. But Shakira?

The postmodern collapse of historicity seems to still be in effect. In this list we have allusions to early hip-hop (Nelly Furtado conjures up "The Message", Christina Aguilera works with DJ Premier), a near exact recreation of Curtis Mayfield (John Mayer), another near exact recreation of early Madonna (Jessica Simpson), and of course Gnarls Barkley, the songwriter of whom made his name mashing together the The Beatles and Jay-Z's Black Album to create The Grey Album.

As usual, people are really concerned with Ashlee Simpson's relationship to authenticity. No surprise here, although I was surprised with the intense emotional hatred some have for her, but not for her sister. Given that both sisters are more or less doing the same thing, it seems to be that it is that matter of genre is still really important in some ways. Dance music, it's okay to lip-synch. Rock music, not so much.

Any other points to be drawn from this list?

The Gang

Today's research trip to the Getty was foiled by poor scheduling (on their part), so instead I must stay home, work on tomorrow's lecture, and post a picture of the cats!

Going counterclockwise, from the left, we have Newton, Pablo, Dante, and Carlos. This picture is just to prove that they all play nicely, in case the SPCA comes knocking.

Georgina on My Mind

I'm not sure when it was that I realized I had done Los Angeles. Or that Los Angeles had done me. Or maybe it in't the city, maybe it's graduate school. Or maybe it's the endless trauma of living eight time zones, one continent, and one ocean away from my partner, for a very long time. In September, we will begin our fifth year of living apart. It has not been easy.

The great Heatwave of '06 hasn't helped matters. Nor has the fact that after two master's degrees, four years of coursework, countless seminar papers, and plenty of qualifying exams, I am finally advanced to candidacy. My acronymic status says it well: Ph.D. (ABD), Doctor of Philosophy (All But Dissertation). That is to say, suddenly I am in the position of supposing to be a full-fledged academic, minus one more (longish) seminar paper. When this year's job market swings into gear, I can technically start participating. Not that I really will, but if for some reason my dream job were to open up, I know that I should apply for it. It's definitely a good feeling, to know this, but it is also a little alien.

So Mary and I spend a lot of time talking about the future, rather than the present. In a year from now, she will be finishing vet school, and I will hopefully be on a fellowship that will relieve me from teaching in order to finish up the dissertation. So we will be living together once again, and will have the rare opportunity to choose where we want to live, at least for the year. We're thinking of setting up house in Philadelphia. I'd like to be near NYC for research purposes, and her family is in DC. We both have friends in Philly, and my sister lives there at the moment. And it is one of the last great cities that is relatively affordable--those student loans aren't going to pay themselves off. We're both city people, and would love a chance to live in some nice little apartment in an old building in a funky neighborhood. We both really want to get a dog--she wants a Rottweiler, I want a lady Bulldog who shall be named Georgina.

I have another year in Los Angeles, to enjoy the sunshine, and the company of my friends that have made these three years so enjoyable. I think I will enjoy this year more knowing it is my most likely my last here. I'll know that I should go out and do all those LA things I have yet to do, and that I should savor that which I have been doing. And I know that I'll definitely look back fondly at my time here.

But I think I've done Los Angeles.

Friday Night Cat Hoarding Blogging

The title of this post is an understatement. I write surrounded by no less than four felines. Carlos and Pablo, the subjects of many a previous rapturous cat blogging, are well known to my loyal readership. Add in to the mix two houseguests for the next week: my roommate's brother's tiny little kitten Dante, and my friend's gigantic pile-o-cat Newton. Which is not to say Newton is fat, he certainly isn't. He's just....huge! He's as big as the other three cats put together, and has the longest tail I have ever seen. He's a little shy, so he spends a lot of time underneath my bed.

Dante, on other hand, is true to his namesake: hell on wheels. He's very sweet, but a little bundle of energy. When eating a sandwich for dinner tonight, he climbed up and bit my hand so that I'd drop it, and then started to gobble it up. I squirted away with the trusty spray bottle, but he was so determined to eat my sandwich that the gush of water up his nose didn't deter him in the least. No, he kept on wolfing down my sandwich, so I kept spraying, until both it and he were soaked. Finally I dragged wet kitten away from wet roast beef. He gave a cute little kitten sneeze--water up the nose will do that--shook his little paw fastidiously, and went off to go attack the other cats or the sofa or something.

In the midst of this, my roommate is leaving for a few days. It's no trouble to take care of them by myself, but one person, living alone in an apartment with four cats? It starts to not look so good.

Welcome to the Jungle

My nifty diagram from Thursday's lecture, captured by my valiant TA's cell phone, tells you everything you need to know about 80's pop metal. You know when a cat is frightened, and it arches its back and bushes up its tail to appear as large as possible? Same idea with, say, Guns N' Roses.

In other musicological news, today's business is trying to finish up a review I am supposed to be writing, my very first academic publication. The item under consideration is a DVD featuring a new recording of a Very Important Piece of Music, with an accompanying documentary. Thus, an expensive trip to the local Tower Classical to buy every version of the piece available, for comparative purposes. Maybe I am a lost cause to nerd-dom, but honestly, I can think of few better ways to spend a Friday afternoon then listening to endless recordings of a great piece of music!