Less Inauspicious

Future employers take note: my second class went much better.

Inauspicity

Folks, you are not going to be believe what I did yesterday. I hesitated to even blog about it, because this is exactly the sort of story one does not want a future employer reading. But here we go: you know how this summer I am teaching my own course for the first time, an introductory lecture course on popular music to about sixty undergraduates? And that I have been very excited about teaching this class, and getting to pretend to be a "real" professor type, and write my own syllabus, teach my own material, and all that?

Well, yesterday I almost missed the very first day of class.

Somehow, all quarter, I have had written down in my calendar that the summer quarter begins on June 29. Thus, I had arranged to get back from England on the 26th, giving me enough time to get over jet lag and make last-minute preparations. Well, I got in from the UK at 10pm Monday night, horribly jet-lagged, and suffering from a bad cold I had picked up my last day in London. Just before I collapse in bed, I see an email from my colleague and TA extraordinaire, K--, asking if I need anything before tomorrow. I cheerfully write back, "of course not, we don't teach until Thursday!" Then I go to sleep.

At 3am, my jet-lagged body wakes up, and I check my email. There is a note from K-- which says, in effect, "okay, but you know that the registrar has us listed as starting tomorrow?" Sure enough, she's right. I am due to be teaching that morning, at 9:30 am.

Now mind you, I have completed my syllabus, and had done a fair amount of prep for my first lecture. But I now I have an extra class I didn't plan for, which means re-shuffling my whole syllabus around. And there is still quite a few loose ends and details to be cleared up for my lecture. So at about 3:30 am, I get to work. By 9:30am, I am indeed ready to go, but let me tell you, it was one of the worst lecture experiences of my life. I had slept about three hours in the last 32 hours, had a bad cold, and was not as prepared as I wanted to be. My voice kept giving out, I was feverishly sweating, I occasionally had to steady myself on the piano, and I kept losing my train of thought mid-sentence.

Somehow made it through though. It's a good learning experience, and as several people have pointed out to me, teaching conditions are rarely any more adverse than this. I just hope I can win back my class on Thursday!

This post will self-destruct as soon as I am on the job market.

Barnet ex-bound

It's been a lovely week. But now I'm headed home.

Historicity

There a number of towns in England which have been kept meticulously "historic." I'm thinking, for example, of Stratford-upon-Avon, Windsor, Bourton-on-the-Water, and so on. There is a subtle formula that creates these towns: they can't be too large, because then the pressures of industrialization, need for housing, public transportation, etc., tend to have overriden any desire to maintain older buildings with consistency. But they also can't be too small, because it does take money to maintain all of that history. And of course, the most important part of the formula is tourism, which provides the money and energy to create systematic plans to retain the historic character of entire districts, rather than just individual buildings.

The thing is, of course, that all of these "historic" towns end up kind of looking the same. Stratford-upon-Avon looks a lot like Bourton-on-the-Water, which looks a lot like Windsor, which looks a lot like St. Albans. These towns are all in drastically different areas, and have very different histories, but they really do all blend together. I think it is because people, especially tourists but also the historic preservation industry, privilege certain historical architectural styles over others. We love timbered construction (what we call "Tudor" style in the U.S.), low ceilings, thatched roofs, wattle and daub walls, and so on. And so certain buildings get preserved, but not others--in the Cotswolds, for instance, there are lots of stories of people "renovating" Jacobean and Georgian structures by adding thatched roofs!

Anyways, I don't have any larger point here. Yesterday, Mary, Laura and I spent a very pleasant afternoon in St. Albans, which is only about ten minutes away from Barnet. It was the home of a famous abbey once upon a time, although post-Henry VIII all that remains now is a large gate. But there is also a funny little cathedral, and a really nice park that has some great Roman ruins. We had a leisurely lunch at Ye Olde Fighting Cocks, a very old pub that was once the pigeon house for the abbey. All day I'd had a hankering for British food, and I was pleased to be able get a Sunday roast with Yorkshire pudding. Delicious!

St. George on a Stick

I arrived safely in London yesterday after a fairly hassle-free flight. Air New Zealand was nice enough. About the same level of service as BA, although they did have a nicer in-flight entertainment system. (As you might expect, the entire Lord of the Rings cycle was available fore viewing). On the way back from Heathrow we stopped for lunch at Wagamama (I would give anything for them to expand to the U.S.), and then had a pleasant evening relaxing around the house and the local pub.

Barnet is still more or less the same as ever. The one funny thing about London at the moment is that every pub, house, apartment, and car is flying the English flag at the moment--not the Union Jack, but the red and white cross that is specific to just England, rather than Great Britain. It is theoretically in celebration of the World Cup (not that England has much to celebrate at the moment), but it is a weird phenomenon, because flying the English flag has for a long time been associated with the BNP and various right-wing fascist movements in the U.K. There is a lot of talk in the papers of English citizens "reappropriating" the flag back from racist use, but I have to say, I'm not sure I like it. True, the flag now has less racist connotations than it once did. But at the same time, I have yet to see a non-white Brit flying the flag from his or her car, and I bet they are supporting the World Cup as much as everyone else. It's like the Confederate flag in the states--you can say it means whatever you want, but as a matter of how people receive it, there will always be resonances beyond your control. And even if the flag was purely harmless, flying flags from your car is such an....American way to celebrate things.

I've decided that Brazil is going to be my team for the World Cup this year. Both the U.S. and the U.K. are unworthy of my support, and Brazil has Kaka, who is pretty hot.

Barnet Bound

In a few hours, I am bound for Barnet once more. This trip it is courtesy of Air New Zealand, which should be fun. I have my iPod, a stack of grading, and some books both academic and non. I actually kind of look forward to these gigantic flights I take every so often. There is something zen about having to sit in one place for eleven hours. Plenty of time to think.

My plans for London?

1. Windsor Castle. Last summer I kept meaning to go, but sundry events like terrorist bombings kept getting in the way. It's going to happen this time. Mary's working, so I'll probably just take the train myself one day.
2. Cooking. I'm going to cook a dinner for all of Mary's rotation-mates, all twelve of them.
3. Rambling. The weather is lovely in London right now, so I plan to spend as much time as I can poking around in meadows and forests.
4. Work. Only mild, mild, amounts. But I do need to start preparing my lectures for this summer.


I never updated my blog this week, so here's another list:

1. Turned in the worst seminar paper of my life. Also my last, so I guess it is a good news/bad news kind of thing.

2. I successfully defended my dissertation proposal, and I am now ABD. Shocking! The best part is that it happened in time for me to teach this summer on a higher pay scale. It's not a gigantic difference, but I'll take what I can get. My goal is to write my Cage chapter this summer. I think that is very do-able, since I've written a forty-page version of it already, much of which I can keep. That way I'll be off to a running start, and will have a completed chapter for fellowship applications this fall.

3. Gave the final for the class I'm TAing. My grand plan was to grade it that night so that I could be completely done with this quarter before leaving. That didn't happen.

I think that's it! ta-ta!

Blegh

Apologies for the blog silence. Suffice to say, I am at the point right now where I weighing these options:

1) Finish writing my seminar paper due tomorrow morning.
2) Drop out of graduate school, work at MacDonald's for the rest of my life.

It's a toss-up at the moment.

--------

Update: I chose option #1, but I'm not happy about it.

Milestones

A funny thing happened today: I went to my very last class of my life. Truth be told, it's a little anticlimatic, but I am happy nevertheless. It's been four long years of graduate coursework, preceded with no break by four years of undergraduate coursework. That's a lot of classes. Afterwards, our professor took me and the other two musicologists in the seminar out for drinks at the faculty club.

Other good things happened today as well:

1. TA assignments were decided for next year, and I got my first choice: the second half of our two-year music history sequence, so from Beethoven to the present. I'm very excited by this. Most of my teaching so far has been with non-majors, and in pop music classes. It will be nice to teach good ol' fashioned classical music to good ol' fashioned music majors for once.

2. I scheduled my proposal defense. Barring a very unfortunate defense, by this time next week I will be ABD!

3. I cleaned my room, and did some laundry. The cats helped by turning my "recyclable paper" pile into a swirling playground of paper fun. It's the thought that counts.

4. A week from tomorrow, I leave for England for a ten day visit before summer teaching begins. For a brief moment, my blog's title will make sense!

Rock n' Roll

The show last night was a ton of fun. The Boy Least Likely To might not be the prettiest men in the world--they can't help it, they're British--but their personalities are certainly infectious. As a number of reviews have pointed out, the great thing about the BLLT is that they take that kind of cutesy, poppy Indie thing but add a certain dark sense of humor. So they have lots of kind of cute songs with names like "Warm Panda Cola" and "Fur Soft as Fur" and "I'm Glad I Hitched My Wagon to Your Apple Star," and they are very peppy with plinky bells and banjos and whatnot, but they've always got an edge. The eponymous creatures of "Monsters," for instance, are his childhood friends who have now grown up and had babies. And the songwriting is totally top-notch. Anyways, I highly recommend their album. You can get it on iTunes if need be. And their US tour is just starting, so non-LA people might be able to catch them live this summer.

And also loves The Bicycles, a Toronto bad who opened. Their drummer looks distinctly like Patti Smith, they sing in chipmunk voices and were covered in temporary tattoos, and I have more than a little crush on their lead singer, who had a mohawk and had written on his guitar, "This Machine Kills Fashions."

I don't have the time, energy, or inclination to care too much about the rock n' roll kids listen to nowadays. It's a full-time job to keep up with indie rock. But going to a good show occasionally reminds me that live music is fun!

Speaking of rock n' roll, and kids, I'm finally putting together my syllabus for this summer. How I am supposed to recount the history of popular music in the United States in twelve classes, I ask you!? Oh wait, Fourth of July holiday, make that eleven classes...plus the final exam, make that ten classes...yikes! I think reggae is going to have to go. And probably country rock too, not that that's a big loss.

The Boy Least Likely to Get Work Done

Despite some logistical issues, and a dreadful sound system, our gig last night went well. Violet Vixen has a review that covers all the bases. Steph and I are hoping to play more this summer, once our schedules calm down some. Plus, we want to expand a little bit--a bassist and a drummer would be nice. It's funny how playing music is actually....fun!

Tonight is yet another rock show, but this time as a spectator. Last night at 2 am I couldn't sleep, so I was mindlessly reading various blogs. A number of them were talking about a show tonight at the Roxy by The Boy Least Likely To, a British indie-pop duo. I went to their web site, listen to their single and really liked it, went and bought their album on iTunes, and now, voilà, less than 24 hours later a bunch of us are going to go hear them play! Should be a good time, and it is always nice to actually do something on the Sunset Strip, rather than just skulking about.

Friday Cat Blogging

Look how handsome Carlos is! This picture is about a week old, and his collar already fits much better. Right now, he is very energetically licking my elbow. We're a little suspicious that these kitties have a little bit of canine to them. Pablo in particular: when you pet him, he often rolls over so you can get his tummy, and he has these funny bow legs that make him walk like a bull dog.

In other news, tonight a friend and I are playing an all-Elvis set at TransUnity Pride at the LA Gay and Lesbian Center. "It's Alright Mama," "Love Me Tender," and "Trying to Get To You," all in our patented banjo-electric guitar instrumentation. Good times.

I Been Travelin' Over Mountains

Two more tasks accomplished! I had to do a presentation today in seminar (also known as The Last Class I Will Ever Take In My Life After Taking Many Classes For Many Years.) That went okay, especially considering I was presenting about a topic I knew absolutely nothing about. And in front of a professor who is an expert in said topic, no less. One more class to go, and one more paper, and then the coursework phase of my graduate career is completely done. About time, considering this is my fourth year of it!

But more importantly, the faculty passed my proposal this afternoon--haven't heard the details, but sounds like there were no real problems. If you will indulge me in a quick moment of immodesty, one professor in particular, whose opinion I care about more than any other person in the world possibly, told me she thought it was, and I quote, "brilliant." So that really made my day. (End of bragging. I apologize.)

But I have to say, as nice as that was, it also made me realize just how run down I am right now. It has been a long quarter, coming on the end of a pretty rough year. And my supply of emotional energy is just about depleted--even the kind of validation that every grad student craves isn't quite enough to pep me up as much as it should. I'm really looking forward to my upcoming trip to England, and to a summer that I hope will be a little more...different. Than now.

Memorial Day

Usually, Memorial Day kind of gets lost in the shuffle for me. May is always insanely busy, and the long weekend always ends up just being a chance to get mildly caught up on life. And then last year, of course, Memorial Day was Day 4 of my MA exams, and that was no fun at all. (Actually, by Day 4, I was in pretty good shape, and ended up going to see a movie that evening. Days 1-2 were less pleasant.)

But I managed to have a nice Memorial Day this year. I usually TA on Mondays, so I had an actual day off. A friend was housesitting for a family that lives up in the Santa Monica mountains, over the ridge from Malibu, and invited us to come up and barbecue and swim in the pool. There were dogs to play with, lots of roasted vegetables, a movie/nap, and even a hot tub. Completely red-blooded American day, and I loved it.

The faculty all received copies of my dissertation proposal today. They'll vote to approve it (hopefully!) on Thursday, and then I do the actual defense in front of my committee two weeks later. In the meantime, I'm giving a lecture in class tomorrow, on Thursday a presentation in seminar on Martha Graham, and then the next week I need to turn in what is my very last seminar paper of all time! Good times.

Sunset Strip Melancholia

Walking to go see a movie last night, I strolled along the Sunset Strip for the first time in awhile. It was very busy for a Saturday night. I once read somewhere that you can always chart whether or not an LA party neighborhood is attracting celebrities or suburbanites by the nights it was busy--celebs don't go out on the weekend, they leave that to people who have to work for a living.

The Sunset Strip was the first real bit of Los Angeles I saw when I moved here. Mary and I drove out here in the summer of 2003 without housing settled yet, so we stayed with a childhood friend of Mary's who lives in the valley. We arrive there at night, and the next morning, he drove the two of us into the city to look for an apartment. We drove over the hills through Laurel Canyon, which is a narrow two-lane road that goes up and over the Hollywood Hills, crossing Mulholland Drive and winding down through movie star homes and bohemian shacks. At the bottom of the hill, you are suddenly spit out onto into a forest of giant billboards, outlandish restaurants, hotels so ugly you know they have to be famous, and legions of scantily dressed plastic surgery nightmares.

Once I was moved into my apartment, just a block away from the Strip, our friend took us out for a night. We first went to The Standard, and it was everything I wanted Los Angeles to be. It is just a hotel, with a lounge in the lobby where you can...well, lounge. But it was like no hotel I had ever seen before. There was a DJ spinning next to the check-in desk, a thick shag rug, round pillows upon which to sit awkwardly while drinking your watermelon martinis, and a pool out back overlooking a view of the entire city.. And the pièce de resistance was a lucite box behind the check-in counter, in which sat a young woman in her underwear, asleep. Apparently, The Standard hires women to hang out in the box in shifts, just for atmosphere. It's still my favorite place to go to remind myself I live in Los Angeles.

That first year in Los Angeles, I used to walk the Strip a lot at night, when I was bored and a little lonely. It was always fun to watch the scene. I'd walk by The Standard, to make sure the woman in the box was still there. Next came the Saddleranch, a western-themed restaurant with plastic dummies hanging out the upper windows, and a mechanical bull that always brings out the worst in drunken celebutantes. There was the Hyatt, where Jim Morrison supposedly used to hang by his fingertips from the balconies, freaking out the crowds below, and across the street an outpost of the House of Blues, trying to imitate a rusty southern blues shack. And across from the House of Blues was the Mondrian, home of the Skybar. It's an ordinary square hotel, but completely surrounded by inanity. Two giant wooden doors, so enlarged they look like toys, hang in the middle of the driveway. The valet parkers all have to wear white painters uniform, complete with white caps. To get to the Skybar--I've been once--you have to go into the lobby and take an elevator up to the top. There, you have to make your way past a velvet rope, but once you do, you are in this truly bizarre outdoor lounge overlooking the city. There is a pool, lots of ferns, and plush mattresses scattered about so you can kind of lounge uncomfortably. (There is a theme here.)

Further down the Strip, you go through a section called the Sunset Plaza, which is pretty boring--a poor man's Rodeo Drive. Then you get to the rock club section of the Strip, home to the original Tower Records, Book Soup (the only independent bookstore for miles), the Viper Room (formerly owned by Johnny Depp, and the scene of River Phoenix's overdose), the Whisky (Jimi Hendrix used to live in the apartment above), the Roxy, the Rainbow Room, Shamrock Tattoos, the Key Club, and finally you are spilled out into Beverly Hills.

It's a strange place, the Sunset Strip. It's been a bastion of excess since the 1920s, when it was an unincorporated part of Los Angeles County that therefore was not policed by the LAPD. It became part of West Hollywood in 1985, and has been considerably cleaned up. No more prostitutes, and the drugs available for sale are now fancy party drugs instead of heroin and crack. And the really fancy celebrity party scene has mostly moved east to Hollywood.

But it is still an alluring place, and I never get tired of walking it.

The Cruelest Cut

So, tonight I went to go see the new Terry Zwigoff film, Art School Confidential. (quick review: thumbs way down). Before the movie, there was a preview for some dreadful-looking movie called Peaceful Warrior.

The preview showed several scenes that were clearly filmed at UCLA. This is not an unusual occurrence, of course. Practically every university you see in a movie is either UCLA or USC. In fact, there were a number of scenes in Art School Confidential that were filmed in the patio outside of the graduate student library here--it's a little jarring to see a movie pretend that the spot where you eat lunch every single day is a parking lot. But you get used to that after awhile. My favorite such moment was in that horrible Katie Homes movie First Daughter, which had the pre-Cruised Katie living in a dorm that is actually the student government building. And there was the Gilmore Girls episode that tried to pretend UCLA was Harvard. (Not an easy task.)

So anyways, I can understand that movie people use UCLA to represent lots of different universities. However, in this preview for Peaceful Warrior, they had to gall to pretend that UCLA was UC Berkeley. And it wasn't just inference--they literally added a computer-generated campanile to the background of a scene shot in front of UCLA's library!

The nerve, I tell you.

A Love Letter to Pablo

Instead of writing my imminently-due dissertation proposal, I've been taking pictures of kittens all evening. Carlos is very photogenic, but it is really hard to get a decent shot of Pablo. He has this slightly odd fur that is very thin. So when the flash lights him up, you can kind of see his skin underneath, and he looks a little strange and spooky. So, apologies for the darkness, but this photo I think gives a reasonable approximation of just how darn cute Pablo is. Look at the little white paws! Look at his white moustache! Look at his charming pink collar that is still too big for him!

Fortune Smiles

Miraculously, I passed my Spanish exam today!

Name That Genre

I spent this evening preparing for a re-take of my Spanish exam (tomorrow morning, wish me luck!), but also doing some preparation for a lecture I am doing next week. The class is "Music and Gender," and my contribution is discussing the post-WWII woman singers that I study, people like Doris Day, Patti Page, Rosemary Clooney, Peggy Lee, and so on. This is a repertoire I really like, and a good change of pace for me--unlike John Cage, this is stuff I can sing along to while driving to school.

I have this problem though. I never have any idea what to call this music. Above, when describing it, I gave the time period (post-WWII), the gender (women), and the fact that they were solo singers, but that description doesn't actually tell you anything about the genre and style of this music. And this isn't just a problem I am having, this is actually a problem with the way everyone discusses popular music of the second-half of the twentieth-century. What exactly do we call the style of music that was immensely popular in this country from about 1945 until rock n' roll hit in 1954?

Quick history lesson: Most jazz historians will tell you that during World War II, the great swing bands of the 1930s all shut down for lack of money and personnel. So when people trickled back into the country and the record industry began producing again in 1945, the participants in those swing bands went in three different directions:

1) a small number of instrumentalists started jamming at afterhours clubs in New York City, and produced a virtuosic and rarefied modernist style of jazz that came to be called be-bop.

2) a larger number of instrumentalists simply joined bands that were smaller and more stripped down than the big swing bands of yore. This gave a sound that was a bit more energetic and rawer. Instead of having a section of saxophones, you might just have one sax player, who would play loud and hard. This style becomes known as "jump blues," and is ultimately the music that becomes rock n' roll. Most people now would listen to this and think it just sounds like early rock n' roll. The only difference between this stuff and say, Bill Haley, is that the jump blues musicians were all black, and the music circulated in subcultural urban African-American communities, rather than in the white mainstream.

3) Back in the day, these big swing bands, like those lead by Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Benny Goodman, and so on, all had vocalists. But they weren't the star of the show, and they tended not to sing songs that were focused solely on the singer. Rather, they would play long numbers, and the vocalist might join in for a verse or two. Doris Day's "Sentimental Journey" is an excellent example of this. Doris was just an unknown vocalist with the Les Brown Orchestra in the 1940s. Although most people now associate this song very strongly with her, if you listen to it now, you'll be amazed at how little she actually sings, and how most of the song is actually instrumental.

After World War II, the most popular style of music actually comes when all of these vocalists from the big bands strike out on their own. Obviously solo singers have been around forever (Bing Crosby, for example), but after the war music by famous vocalists becomes completely dominant on the pop charts, and stays there for decades.

This post is getting way too long, but again, I point out: what do we call this music? It isn't swing. Many of them called themselves just generic jazz, but importantly, many of them did not, especially the women singers. "Pop" works, but is way too vague. Today in the record store it usually gets classified under "Vocal," but that is also pretty vague.

Any thoughts?

Pablo and Carlos

We have cats!

This picture is of Carlos. His friend Pablo is black with white feet and tummy, but is being a little shy for the camera at the moment. Pablo came with his name, and we liked it enough to keep it. Carlos came unnamed, but during the car ride home he both tried desperately to escape from his box, and meowed constantly and stridently. So we realized that a good source of names might be revolutionary leaders. We considered Che, Fidel, Zapata, Raoul (Fidel's brother), and so on, but eventually settled on Karl, as in Marx. Then of course it had to be Hispanicized to match his brother, and voila!

They came from a rescue group in Santa Monica. Luckily for us they were very laidback--many of these groups do home visits and reference checks. We had to fill out a hefty form, and put down a deposit to ensure they get neutered, but they let us take the cats right home, which is nice.

And they are pretty darn cute.

Feline!

A thousand pardons for how boring this blog has become. I'm really quite embarrassed by it. One of my colleagues at school has a blog that she updates almost every day, and it is a beautifully written jewel of a blog. (I'm not going to link to it, to preserve some semblance of anonymity.) I have no hope of reaching that level, either of regularity or of writing.

But I want to break my radio silence to announce that this weekend, my roommate and I are going to inquire about adopting a cat! Yay!

With any luck, this blog will soon become filled with endless pictures of cat.