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.

More Memory Is Required to Complete this Operation

Why is this blog suddenly going into hiatus mode? Beause this week, my brain is struggling to juggle: (1) a two-day academic conference I am organizing this weekend, (2) the launch of a new issue of the journal I edit, possibly also this weekend, (3) my dissertation proposal kind of needs to be absolutely done by next week, (4) I'm still, you know, taking a class that has homework and stuff. And TAing.

You know when you have a lot of programs running on your computer, and there isn't enough RAM, and things start to slow down a bit? Yeah, that's me.

End of whining.

Schoenberg est vivant

Amused by Alex Ross's recent post about Arnold Schoenberg's car troubles in 1934, I poked around the Schoenberg center's web site, and found that they offer Schoenberg t-shirts for sale. For only 6.50 euros, you can get a shirt with the maestro's head on it, or even one that reads, "Der Mittelweg ist der einzige Weg, der nicht nach Rom führt." (My German is pretty bad, but I think this is Arnie's famous quote that "The middle road is the only one that does not lead to Rome.")

The Schoenberg Center, incidentally, used to be located here in Los Angeles, in a special purpose-built location on the USC campus. Then the money-grubbing Schoenberg heirs got into a financial dispute with USC, and took all of the materials back to Vienna. They are a rough group, those Schoenbergs. At UCLA, the music building is called Schoenberg Hall. Supposedly, a few years back the music department got a big donation to refurbish the main concert hall in the building, but ended up having to reject the donation because the Schoenberg heirs wouldn't let them rename the hall--not the entire building, mind you, just the name of one of the two concert halls inside.

Considering that John Cage, LaMonte Young, and Harry Partch all had important and more appreciative experiences at UCLA as well, I think we should rename the building after one of them.

Blogging Notes

Traffic to my blog has spiked recently. This is partly due to the fact that I re-informed many of my colleagues of its existence, and also due to the fact that Mary emailed one of my posts to a bunch of her relatives. But examining my site traffic meter some more, I realized that in fact, most of my recent visitors are drawn to this blog by the siren call of Jake Gyllenhaal. Thanks to the power of search engines like google, a search for the name "Jake Gyllenhaal" will bring up my blog.* Not as the first hit or anything, but still, high enough up at the moment that a small trickle of people come by every day, looking for info about Jake. It makes me wonder how much traffic I would get if, hypothetically speaking, I had a phrase like "naked pictures of Britney Spears" in my blog. Oops! Guess we'll see!

On another note, I have decided that I need a better pseudonym to sign my posts with, as, well, my initials are not exactly the most anonymous things in the world. It's not that this blog is anonymous, as I talk quite freely about who I am and what I do. I do, however, attempt to make it slightly difficult to find this blog through google by not actually referring to my name or to the full names of others. So I'm thinking maybe I should ditch my initials.

Suggestions for a different handle are welcome.

*a technical note: the site meter I use let's me see by what page people link to my blog. Therefore, if somebody comes from a Google search, I can see what the search was. I can also see people's IP addresses, and when they visit. With my limited traffic, that means I can pretty accurately identify almost all of my visitors. The .edu address in Evanston is easily traceable (Hi, Susan!), as is the Durham, NC visitor. (Hi, Grandma!) Knowing all of this makes me feel slightly stalker-ish, but then, it is my blog.

He's too pretty to have privacy

Our sighting of Jake Gyllenhaal made it into this week's Defamer Hollywood Privacy Watch, Treo'd to them by my friend less than five minutes after it happened. Too bad they censored his license plate number.

What would we do without the internet?

Uh Oh

The Guardian just had a little feature on travel spots in the U.K. They also had a list of "Five Places to Avoid," of which #1 was London. I quote:

All year round, it is the European capital with the worst cuisine, worst traffic, highest prices and most unwelcoming natives, as well as being burdened with a service industry that has only the most tenuous connection with the concept of service or, indeed, industry. Don't go there. If you hanker after the London experience, sit in a bathful of your own sweat in a room full of exhaust fumes and pale sneering people in shorts, and burn twenties with a lighter.

Yikes!

Return of the Repressed Sitcom

Photo by spacecowboym1.

In a seminar last year, I somewhat irresponsibly claimed that the uncanny was impossible under late capitalism. But today, I realized that was not true. I went hiking with friends today at Malibu Creek State Park, a lovely area in the Santa Monica Mountains that has streams, lizards, and a very small but pretty lake. We did a nice five mile hike on a hot but pleasant day.

Malibu Creek is also where the television version of M*A*S*H was filmed from 1972-1983. We knew this as we started to hike, but were a little unsure where it happened exactly. Coming around a bend in the trail, we suddenly realized that we were in the exact spot where the opening credits were filmed--you know, where the helicopter flies in through the mountains and lands in a meadow.

It was, in a word, uncanny to be standing in this spot. It was a lovely spot, very calm, with impressive rock formations around. It would make a very good camping spot. But all I could think about was that I knew this spot very well, as if I had been here many times before. Years of half-watched re-runs of hoary old M*A*S*H linger in my subconscious, despite the fact that I don't think I've ever seen a single episode all the way through. All of those old-fashioned anxieties that Freud puts as the repressed roots of the uncanny--the castration complex, the womb fantasy, etc.--give way under late capitalism to an uncanny triggered by the real-life version of a television show set. Perhaps only possible in Los Angeles, but then, that sort of proves my point.

Okay, I'll stop being abstruse now! It was a lovely hike, and with lovely company. I really do need to see more of Los Angeles, since I'm not going to be living here forever.

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.


--------
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.

--------------------
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!

Chin / Progress

The Judgement
Progress. The powerful prince
Is honored with horses in large numbers.
In a single day he is granted audience three times.

Commentary
Progress means making advance. Clarity rises high
over the earth. Devoted and clinging to this great
clarity, the weak progresses and goes upward.
Hence it is said: "The powerful prince is honored
with horses in large numbers. In a single day he is
granted audience three times.

The Image
The sun rises over the earth:
The image of Progress.
Thus the superior man himself
Brightens his bright virtue.

------------------------
With her talent for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, Mary managed to be in Dublin today, just in time for some riots. They were fairly small and contained, however, and she and her friends are fine. Tomorrow she is off to work on a cattle ranch outside of Belfast for two weeks. And of course, nothing bad ever happens in Belfast...

Conference Roundup

My conference went pretty well. My paper was fairly well-received, I think. Giving a paper at these big conferences is often anti-climatic. Beforehand, you visualize all these scenarios where famous senior scholars quiz you on minute details of your presentations, and you spend hours trying to think up snappy replies. In reality, you get one or two questions about some insignificant detail, and that's it. Still, I think people were pretty receptive. They laughed at my jokes, at least.

Friday night I had dinner with an old family friend--my grandmother's boarding school roommate, as I said earlier--who is the grande dame of Nashville society. It was pretty amazing, and involved a gigantic mansion and a butler, but I'll leave it at that. Afterwards I went out with her grandchildren to the Bluebird Cafe, a famous little bar in Nashville that is a forum for up-and-coming country songwriters to show off their tunes. Friday nights they have a regular residency with these four guys who have been playing together there for twenty years--the only one I had heard of was the songwriter Don Schlitz, who has written songs for Mary Chapin Carpenter, Kenny Rogers, Johnny Cash, and others. The bar is a tiny little place that seats about 50. There is no stage, just a little clearing in the middle where the four musicians sit in a circle facing each other. They play their own tunes, chat, tell jokes, and it is a very entertaining few hours.

Today was a whole range of papers to see. A really good one about the fifties child star Brenda Lee was probably my favorite. Then tonight, the graduate students all hit the karaoke night at the hotel. Hearing a grad student sing a song that he is writing his dissertation about? Good times. And there was even a Very Distinguished Senior Scholar listening to all of us from the corner of the bar. Afterwards, suffice to say, I cannot say I really know Very Distinguished Senior Scholar all that well, but I can say that I have done shots with him.

Looking forward to coming home tomorrow!

Dingbats

Fascinating! These things are all over California.

It is always interesting to see how different regions build mass amounts of housing for the lower-to-middle classes. In Philadelphia and Baltimore, they tend to be very small, two-story brick row houses. In Boston you have the wooden triple-decker duplexes. San Francisco has the small, modular suburban-style home that span hundreds of blocks in the Sunset and the Richmond. New York... I'm not sure what the New York equivalent is. The older big tenement buildings of lower Manhattan are kind of the equivalent, I suppose, but the more direct correllation might be those ugly brick houses in Queens. (Think of where George Constanza's parents live on Seinfeld.) Washington, D.C. never had an industrial base, so it doesn't really have these working class habitats. Instead Northeast and Southeast DC have lots of dreadful post-war housing projects and apartment complexes that started decaying about a month after they were built.

Incidentally, I arrived safely in Nashville. Jet lag is unfortunately having its way with me, hence me blogging instead of sleeping. Wish me luck for tomorrow!

Nashville Bound

After a busy couple of days, I am about fly out to Nashville, to give a paper at a conference. This will be my first time in Tennessee, and my first real stay in the non-coastal south The best part of this trip is that I am going to be having dinner one night with my grandmother's old boarding school roommate/mother's godmother/daughter of the man who owned the Grand Ole Opry. Fun! And then afterwards I'm accompanying her grandchildren to some sort of country music concert. Fun again!

OnDemand Ate My Life

Over the summer, my faithful cable provider began a new service called "OnDemand." I think it is supposed to compete with TiVo, although it functions somewhat differently. Rather than recording TV to a hard disk, it lets you access a library of free television shows and movies. When you are watching them, you can pause and rewind just like TiVo.

Anyhow, the upshot is that now I have available to me, for free, the entire first five seasons of The Sopranos. The last two days, Mary and I have watched dozens of hour-long episodes. And now that she has flown back to England, I am still watching them. Luckily, only two more episodes and then I run out.

Diploma

Earlier this week I was walking by the main administrative building here, and I realized that I had never picked up the diploma for the master's degree I earned last spring. So I went in, and with the flash of a student ID got it. It's quite nice. Not as snobby looking as Wesleyan's, but definitely much nicer than Brandeis's. The best part is that it is signed by Governor Arnold.

It gets me thinking about the value of graduate degrees, however. For so many people, having a master's degree is the main barrier to a comfortable middle-class life. There are so many people out there who slave away for years earning a master's, attending night school, taking off time from work, taking student loans. And here I am, picking up a second master's degree for practically nothing, in a field where it means almost nothing.

No great point to be drawn from this, but it feels weird.

Unsurprised

This last Thursday, my partner paid me a surprise visit from England. Well, it was supposed to be a surprise, but literally about half an hour before she showed up at my front door, I suddenly figured out the ruse. The key was that I had come home earlier than I had planned to, and phone her at home. Her roommate picked up, and said that Mary had gone to bed early. I knew that was impossible, so my mind started whirring.

We've been busy ever since. Saturday night was my roommate's birthday. We've had big parties for her every year on her birthday. The first year, it was a gigantic blowout that lasted all night long--for most people, at least, I passed out on my floor partway through. Last year was very sedate, with almost everyone gone by midnight. This year was a perfect medium--fun, lively, and with a diverse crowd of people.

Just got back tonight from having dinner with friends in the valley. A very nice couple. One is a farrier, the only woman farrier I hvae ever heard of. She is a tough cookie, with tattoos up and down her arms, a garage full of motorcyles, and a thick Kentucky accent. Her partner is a petite little woman who is the daughter of a porn producer and a former Miss Teen California. (I think, I always lose track of which beauty contest is which.) Only in LA!

Supporting NYU Grad Students

I urge anyone who is in the position to do so to support the NYU graduate students on strike. The history of labor relations at NYU is too long and complicated to go into here, but even just a little bit of research will show the callousness of the NYU administration towards those who do the majority of the teaching at a very privileged, and very expensive, private university. Beginning this quarter, the administration has "terminated the fellowships" of striking workers. As Bitch Ph.D. points out, they have to use that awkward terminology because if they were to simply "stop paying" the strikers, that would be admitting that the graduate students actually are employees who do work for the university. Can't have that. We graduate students are just lucky for the privilege of working our butts off for our "fellowships" that put us below the poverty line.

Bah humbug.

Dear Rich People

Giving money to the arts is good. Giving money to education is good.

However, there are more effective ways of funding both the arts and education than giving Princeton and Yale $100 million each.

Just saying.

McCarthyism Redux

There has been much discussion in the press the past week about the Bruin Alumni Association. The BAA is, of course, part of a nation-wide conservative movement in the past few years which has been agitating against what they see as liberal bias in academia. This is nothing new, of course. In many ways, we can trace the beginning of modern conservatism to academic politics: it was William Buckley's 1951 book God and Man at Yale which kicked off Buckley's career, and gave rise to the National Review. And even Buckley's book was rooted in the context of post-war McCarthyism, which began in the late forties with the Alger Hiss case. One of the key features of the hostility towards Hiss was a general suspicion of the highly-educated, often academic, men who Franklin Roosevelt had surrounded himself with in the 30's and 40's, of which Alger Hiss became the prime example. The Republican Party very effectively managed to convince the public that to be academic was synonymous with being soft on communism.

Since then, this mythology of liberal bias has often invigorated other conservative movements. In the 1980's, the Dartmouth Review served as an incubator for conservative intellectuals like Dinesh D'Souza. In the 1990's, the campus culture wars over identity politics and sexual expression nearly destroyed the NEA and the NEH. In the past few years, the main domestic battleground over the Israel-Palestine issue has taken place on college campuses. And we shouldn't forget that our current president's own reactionary and anti-intellectual conservatism was formatively shaped by his undergraduate experiences at Yale.

So, this whole history noted, I'm still not sure what to make of it. I am not at all worried about the Bruin Alumni Association. Its leader is this young kid, a recent graduate, who is quickly managing to alienate other conservatives, especially conservative academics. It only takes five minutes on the organization's web page to see that he is just in search of attention, that he is more interested in being the next D'Souza or Horowitz then actually creating change at UCLA. The BAA is destined to self-destruct.

I still wonder, however, about the form in which these movements take place. A few observations, just to see if I can make anything out of it.

1. The leaders of these movement are all men. I have yet to hear a single quote in the press from a woman, or read a single article in the campus conservative paper by a woman.

2. It tends to be very small groups of men. One never gets the sense that there is a large silent majority backing them up. I imagine that at UCLA, we are talking about no more than a dozen people actively involved, out of 24,000 undergraduates.

3. These men are often, but not always, white. The exceptions are important to note. One of the leaders here at UCLA, a kid who started his own conservative newspaper that features a regular professor profile titled "Nut of the Month," is Armenian American. Many of those involved are Jewish, radicalized, I imagine, by the Israel/Palestine issue. I am not quite sure what to make of all this.

Certainly, it is worth noting that here at UCLA, the targets which the conservatives have attacked most viciously are Latino and African-American student groups. The Bruin Republicans lead a horrible campaign last year against MEChA, the largest Latino student group, claiming in all seriousness that MEChA was plotting to overthrow the country. They attack student of color groups rather than attacking, say, the Bruin Democrats, or labor groups, or anti-war groups. So much so that in the last student elections here, the Bruin Democrats shamefully teamed up with the Bruin Republicans in an attempt to limit the power of student of color groups. As I say, I am not sure what to make of all this exactly, but race is playing a large role.

4. It is easy to spot that the campus conservatives have adopted the rhetoric of identity politics. They talk about discrimination, about victimization, about being unfairly singled out and punished for who they are. This tactic is extremely effective. I don't think it actually works as they intended--nobody feels sorry for some privileged white boy. But it has completely destroyed the efficacy of that rhetoric, and those of us who care about the issues raised by identity politics have not yet found a new mode of organizing.

Phew! Suffice to say, this all worries me.

Other interesting takes on the BAA:

• Michael Bérubé has a typically amusing and trenchant post about the BAA.
  
  
• The leader of the BAA has always been a jerk. Confirmed by his former classmate.
  
  

zzzzzzzzz-pft!

Kyle Gann says that this British commercial for Honda is proof that the 60's avant-garde has hit the mainstream. (He thinks Pauline Oliveros, it reminds me more of Robert Ashley's "She Was a Visitor.") Fredric Jameson would probably see it as proof that postmodernism is inextricably tied up in late capitalist commodity culture.

Decide for yourself.

Caffeine

I have often bemoaned the fact that there are not enough coffeehouses in my neighborhood. (In fact, I could have sworn I blogged about this problem once, but I can't find it now.) There are only a few places nearby, most of which either don't have comfortable seating (the assorted Coffee Beans) or are Starbucks (unacceptable). There is the Buzz chain, two of which are within walking distance, but they tend to get crowded really fast and don't have comfortable seating either. Then there is Insomnia, which is a good ol' fashioned independent coffeehouse with raggedy old sofas to sit in, ordinarily just my kind of place, but it is always crammed to the gills with people writing screenplays. Plus, it's a little too far to walk comfortably.

In the past month or so, however, not one but two new places have opened up nearby. My favorite is The Grounds. Free wireless, excellent and cheap coffee, and almost always empty. Except on Saturday nights, which I rather disastrously learned are Queer Comedy Nights. (If the link apears to take you to a florist, that's because The Grounds not only sells coffee, but fancy floral arrangements.)

The other place is a Peet's, which I'm sure my parents will get a kick out of. Haven't been there yet, but I am excited, and not just because apparently Katie Holmes goes there.

Sigh.

For those of my loyal readers who breathlessly follow my academic career, I regret to announce that I am having to postpone my special fields exams until the beginning of next quarter. If this were an anonymous blog, I would spill forth the details of why, but alas, it is not.

It actually isn't a big deal, logistically speaking--since I am all ready for the exams, I will just start writing my dissertation proposal now, so that once the exams are done in early April, I will be able to submit my proposal to the faculty tout suite. Emotionally speaking, however, I was all pumped up with adrenaline, ready to conquer the exams next week. Now, I just want a nap.

Sad But True

The next time you picture England as a land of cozy pubs, where a pint or two for lunch is a lovely tradition, an enlightened country free of repressive attitudes towards alcohol, remember that this New York Times article is completely true.

Instrument(al) Rationality

Some of you may have heard of the plight of the Audubon Quartet. If you haven't, their web site has a list of news articles discussing the situation. The New York Times had a good one, but is unfortunately only available for a fee.

In essence, this is what seems to have happened: the Audubon was a well-known and successful string quartet. They had done well in international competitions, recorded quite a bit, and had a pretty cushy residence gig at Virginia Tech. Over the years, however, conflict grew between three of the members and one violinist. Eventually, they kicked him out of the group. He retaliated by suing them for breach of contract. A judge ruled in his favor, and against the other members of the quartet, and ordered them to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages. Because they were of course unable to pay, the judge ordered their instruments to be repossesed.

It's a tragic situation, but also telling. It's a perfect example of that classic concept of "instrumental rationality." The drive for efficiency, under capitalism, doesn't just stay in economics. It reaches into every corner of society. These lofty concepts that we have of "art" and "music" are nice and all, but the fact is, they don't have a place in late capitalism. The institutions, large and small, that make up classical music, are not run rationally and reasonably. They take into account fundamentally irrational things like "creativity" and "taste." It's the fact of living under late capitalism that rationality must be expanded into ever last corner of society.

People who find this case to be tragic usually lay the blame on the judge, who seems to be something of a philistine who didn't appreciate the subtle dynamics of classical music. That's true, but the fact is that if the case had been more of a sympathetic judge, it would have only been a temporary win. That more "cultured" and appreciative judge would have just been a residual trace of a past culture. Don't blame unappreciative judges and mercenary musicians, blame economic liberalism, and its unprecedented and unchallenged sway over our politics right now.

I feel nostalgic for the failing institutions of classical music. I like the music, and I appreciate what those institutions have done. But they are on the way out. Instead of trying to revive cultural institutions of the past, I think it is important to create new ones, and see if they can take us somewhere different.

And we're off!

It's been so long since I've posted, Blogspot forgot my password. Sigh.

Unfortunately, it is unclear how much I will be able to blog in the coming month. I start taking my Special Fields exam in a little less than two weeks, which is freaking me out quite a bit. Plus, lots of other things going on: all those conference papers to finish, a recalcitrant Echo issue to put to bed, a severely messy room, various personal dramas, a new course in an outside department to begin taking, and a new unfamiliar subject matter (The History of Jazz) to begin TAing.

Okay, deep breath. Start with the messy room.

On the Road Again

Phew!

I write this from the living room of a friend in Scranton, Pennsylvania. What a weird city this is. It is an old steel town, very blue-collar, but making a very interesting economic transition in recent years, with a combination of white collar jobs (especially insurance) moving into the region, and increasing residential development as inexpensive central Pennsylvania becomes attractive to lower-middle-class folks who work in New York City.

The family I am staying with is gigantic--the mother was one of twelve children, and she had nine herself, the youngest of whom is my friend. Scranton is still an insular little city for the most part, and therefore everyone, and I mean everyone, is related to one another, or went to school with one another, or spent a night in jail with one another, and so on.

Mary and I traveling around the eastern seaboard courtesy of Zipcar, a cute little service that lets its members rent cars by the hour, or the day, very inexpensively. Not only that, but our car for this trip is a Mini Cooper convertible, brightly painted gold with Zipcar logos all over it. We make quite a scene on the road.

Tomorrow to Philadelphia!

Here We Come a-Wassailing

Saturday night was one of our department's lovely traditions: a caroling party. There were christmas lights, a tree, heavily-fortified mulled wine, and a solid three hours of singing. All of which goes a long way towards making life seem, briefly, a little more like Christmas. Not a small task in Los Angeles, and in grad school.

Houston, We Have a Problem

Somehow we seem to be missing five midterms. As in, the students took them, hand them in, and now we can't find them. Not good. Not good at all.

What do we do? Make them re-take? That's not a good solution. Do we not count that as part of their grade? That makes the final weigh a lot more than is really fair. So do we give them a little extra credit bonus? Argh!

In moments like these, I'm glad to not be the overall authority figure in a classroom yet.


-----------------
Update: Found them!

Calm Before the Storm

Things have seemed rather busy this quarter. But as I start to pencil in things for next quarter, I am now realizing that it is going to be a doozy.

Late January: Special Fields exam, and defense.
February 16: Fly to Nashville, present paper.
March 3: Present paper here in Los Angeles.
March 15: Fly to Chicago, present paper.
Throughout: Research and write a disseration proposal!

Probably should have gotten more work done this quarter while I had the chance.

Heavy Harpsichords

As if to provide a immediate rejoinder to my previous post, I went to a harpsichord recital last night, given by a friend in the department. It was lovely. The standard warhorses of the harpsichord were brought out--Scarlatti, Couperin, Bach--plus a Haydn sonata. I usually think of the Haydn keyboard sonatas as being for the piano, but it actually worked quite well. Especially when he used the lute stop for the minuet, a nifty little trick you definitely can't do on the piano! The concluding Scarlatti sonatas were especially amazing. Luckily I was sitting with a good view of the keyboard, because some of the leaps he was making were astounding. I'm so impressed that my friend has been able to keep up his playing, despite the time constraints of being a graduate student, and despite the fact that his teacher moved to Canada just as he entered our program. He takes lessons here and there with other faculty, but for the past few years he's mostly been working on his own.

Before and after, however, I helped move the two harpsichords--one a double manual French, the other a pretty little Italian--from the music building over to the central rotunda of the main library, where the concert was being given. Man, those are some heavy suckers.

Viola Dreaming

Inspired by a variety of factors--my recent return to the stage, a general desire for something meaningful in life--I played my viola yesterday for the first time in two years. The last time I took it out of its case was at the end of my first quarter here in Los Angeles, when for a seminar we put together a small amateur performance of a few scenes from an eighteenth-century opera-comique.

The poor old guy is in good shape, luckily enough. I couldn't find any rosin, and the A string I have on there is a cheap brand that I must have put on as a last-minute replacement, but everything else was just as I had left it. The same stickers and cartoons were taped up on the inside ("Stop the Violins!"), my trusty folding chinrest, the same mechanical grey pencil I used to make notes for much of my time at Wesleyan. There was even a program in the pocket of the case from the last "real" concert I played in, a premiere of a string quartet by Justin Yang, then a grad student at Wesleyan. It was an extraordinarily difficult concert, physically. One of the movements was almost forty-five minutes of holding one note in a long sustain. It was also an emotionally difficult work. The piece was about violence, specifically school shootings. Overlaid on top of our live playing was taped excerpts of interviews with survivors of the shootings. Some of them were very hard to listen to. Justin was quite religious, I recall, and I believe the last movement with the enormous prolonged sustain was supposed to enact catharsis of a sort. To be honest, it kind of worked. Rehearsals were difficult, but during that one performance I was entranced enough with the sound of the chord that I didn't mind the passing of time.

So anyways, back to my viola. I played for a little bit, although I made the rather stupid choice to launch into a difficult piece and was rewarded with instant muscle cramps, pains that were immediately familiar even if I hadn't felt them for a long time. My fingers still knew what to do, however. Some of the pieces I used to play, especially the older ones, are permanently burned into my muscles, and I don't think I'll ever be able to shake them. Other pieces, like the more difficult ones I worked on during the year I took lessons at Wesleyan, were a bit harder to pick right up again.

I don't know how I feel about being a musician and a musicologist. One of the things we musicologists always gripe about when we are together is the standard question asked whenever we tell people what our occupation is: "oh, so what instrument do you play?" In those situations, I often refuse to admit to playing anything, since describing myself as a non-musician is closer to the truth than calling myself a musician. Certainly I wouldn't now be a musicologist if I hadn't once been a musician. But part of being a musicologist is being intensely critical of music-making, especially your own. When my closest friend has two degrees from Juilliard, it is hard to say that I do anything similar! I'm more extreme than most about this, and certainly my own department tries to encourage us to continue performing, but the reality of the field is that few of us still consider ourselves musicians. We know too much to say that without irony.

It's a schizophrenic position. We owe our careers to our own history of performing, and our careers (for many of us) keep us from performing with any seriousness ever again. Our--I should say "my," I suppose--playing music becomes intensely private, as if ashamed of itself. An English professor draws upon a lifetime of enjoying reading to be able to....read! But musicologists draw upon a lifetime of performing music to...read.

Farewell to a Wesbian

Horrors! Kim Stolz, the Thespian Lesbian from Wesleyan, was knocked out of the competition to be America's Next Top Model tonight. This after a rough episode, where she tried to be a peacemaker between anorexics feuding over their energy drinks. Kim came out of the fracas looking good, but her photo shoot just wasn't that great. It's kind of unfair though--this week's challenge involved the models posing in scenes taken from famous paintings. Poor Kim, with all her odd angles and nervous butch energy, somehow got chosen to recreate Botticelli's Venus. A good match it was not. I think the producer's had it in for her.

Incidentally, I just discovered the beauty of Wesleyan's alumni directory. Suffice to say, if I wanted to give Kim a call at her parent's house to cheer her up, I have her number.

Thanksgiving Rundown

The scores from Thanksgiving break:

Attempts to install fourth satellite dish for grandparents: 2
Successful installations of said satellite dish: 0
Hours driving, total: 16
Meat consumed: much
Diet Cokes: 6
After dinner nightcaps: 1
Family members: 4
Dogs: 2
Dead rats: 1
Headlights fixed: 1
Midterms graded: 2
Dungeness crab bisque at nice restaurant: priceless

Updates

Ah, craziness. My usual practice on this blog when I have not updated for way too long is to simply give a quick list of the interesting things I have been up to in the meanwhile. So without further adieu:

Recently, I have:

1. Flown to the UK for a surprise visit to my significant other. The tickets were cheap, it was a long weekend, and the timing was right. It was a masterpiece of planning, if I do say so myself, requiring the assistance of both of Mary's roommates and several friends out here, who provided rides to and from airports, distractions, alibis, and general support. Mary was suitably surprised, and we had a lovely weekend.

2. Done my best imitation of a rock star, performing two gigs with a friend. He plays banjo and sings, I play guitar. The repertoire included some bluegrass numbers, an obscure but rockin' Elvis ballad ("Trying to Get to You"), and a George Michael cover ("Father Figure"). The occasion was Transgiving, a regular event in West Hollywood that is a showcase for the transgendered community. I was just backup, for the most part, but my friend Steph wowed the crowd with his swiveling hips. We plan to keep on playing together--I'm going to pick some additional songs that are more my style (I'm thinking a combination of Patti Smith, a few showtunes, maybe some Motown numbers), we've got a bassist in the department who wants to join in, and so all we really need to do real shows is a drummer. Well, and I need to break down and buy an actual guitar amp one of these days. I've got my eye on the Fender FM 212R. It feels really good to be performing again. I like to think that my teaching experience has given me slightly better stage presence, which is nice.

3. Worked. A lot. It is already the eighth week of the quarter, which means stacks of midterms to grade, and the looming specter of seminar papers to write. While giving a makeup midterm today I spent some quality research time on this quarter's project, which is an essay on Stravinsky's 1952 neoclassical classic The Rake's Progress. Lots of stuff out there, although the better scholarly work is in French. I can read it, but not very quickly. Somehow this absurdly ambitious project is also requiring me to become familiar with the entire field of aesthetics, from Kant to Bourdieu. Yikes. Very useful, very interesting, but yikes.

Wednesday I drive north for some much-needed relaxation in Napa Valley. Thank goodness.

The Best Political Ad of All Time

Today I have received nine pre-recorded phone calls urging me to vote one way or the other next Tuesday. They ranged from Barbara Boxer telling me no on Props. 73 and 77 (unclear why those two only), the mayor of West Hollywood telling me to vote no on everything, to a really sketchy call that had a man sobbing while telling the story of how his daughter died because Planned Parenthood prescribed her RU 486. Yikes.

This all makes me wish I lived in New York City, which has the greatest political ad of all time, no matter what your politics.

Via Alex Ross.

Kill Me Now

I'm having trouble dealing with the supernatural cuteness of Butterstick, the baby panda bear at the National Zoo.



This is the little guy shortly after getting his first shots. Vets can be so nasty sometimes, can't they, Butterstick.

In other pop culture news, America's Next Top Lesbian, Kim, rocked this week's episode. Unfortunately, her most recent conquest, Kyle, was kicked off before they could consumate their newfound love. To celebrate, I googled this old Wesleyan Argus article that quotes her thoughts about transgender politics.

Wrong About the Right

This week's issue of The Nation has an important article by Jean Hardisty and Deepak Bhargava analyzing the success of conservatism in the United States over the past few decades. It's unfortunately not available online to non-subscribers, so if you see the Nov. 7 issue of The Nation on a newsstand, it's definitely worth your three bucks. Hardisty and Bhargava astutely point out the principles which allowed right-wing conservatism to grow so successfully in this country. For example, allowing ideological diversity rather than a monolithic movement. An emphasis on serious ideas, not "framing." Grassroots active listening rather than hierarchical control. Electoral politics as a means, not an end. And most importantly, the fearlessness to take what might be considered extreme positions at the time.

Dr. Atomic: The Opera

To summarize: Good opera. Not sure if I entirely liked it.

Dr. Atomic is definitely a successful opera. It is coherent, it worked well, the audience was into it, and I see no reason it shouldn't enter the standard repertoire. But I'm not sure if I actually...enjoyed it. I really like John Adams, and prepared for this trip by listening to recordings of Nixon in China and Death of Klinghoffer, both of which I really like. But Dr. Atomic didn't totally do it for me.

I think the main problem was the vocal writing. A lot of it seemed rather arbitrary--large amounts of text was just kind of spit out, pitched in vaguely atonal melodic lines that seemed designed to just spit large amounts of text and nothing else. The few moments that I found really beautiful, like the John Donne aria at the end of Act 1, were the moments where the music seemed to be driving the text, not vice versa. What's the point of being postmodern if you can't have pretty tunes?

That said, the orchestral writing was great. Adams has no problem with that, beyond a slight tendency to have little minimalist quotations that made me yearn for some actual hardcore minimalism.

Let's see, what else...the libretto had occasional tendencies towards annoyingness. We all agreed that the love scene between Oppenheimer and his wife was pretty stupid, although to be honest during that moment in the opera I was expending most of my energy supressing a sudden coughing fit, and so was not really appreciating anything. Unlike several of my friends, and some restless audience members, I found the last twenty minutes to be really compelling. The twenty minutes are actually a prolongation of the five minute countdown to the first detonation of the bomb. Throughout, the entire chorus is spread out on the stage lying down, assuming the prone position the scientists were supposed to take just in case the bomb was more powerful than expected, but also summoning up images of dead bodies littered everywhere.

That was I think the best part of the opera--these brief, powerful moments that carried with them enormous resonance. Like when Mrs. Oppenheimer (I think--we were in the cheap seats, so it might have been her housekeeper) was singing to her baby in its crib, unaware of the gigantic bomb hanging Damocoles-like over her head. Or the John Donne aria, where the bomb was covered in white silk sheets lit from within so that Oppenheimer was silhouetted in front. And the rather sad, frail, moment, where the General talks about his struggle to lose weight as a small boy.

The thing is, looking back at my favorite moments, none of them have anything to do with music. The only musical moments I really remember well, a week later, is that the Donne aria was pretty, and that the last twenty minutes were appropriately loud and ominous. Everything else is mostly visual.

Hopefully they will release a recording soon, or with any luck maybe even a score. I'd really like to think about this opera some more.

P.S. Alex Ross, he of New Yorker glory, has an interesting roundup of Dr. Atomic critical opinion.

Dr. Atomic: The Trip

I returned last night from a hectic but fun trip up north to see the closing night of Dr. Atomic, the new John Adams-Peter Sellars wizbang which had its premiere at SF Opera this fall. I'm going to review the opera in a separate post, but here I just wanted to recount the trip for posterity's sake.

We left Friday afternoon after everyone was done teaching sections. Thanks to various logistical issues, there were five of us crammed into my little car. Fine with me, as I was driving, but I suspect a little uncomfortable for the three in the back. It went easily enough however, with only one little pause in Dublin, where we slowed down enough for Pete to roll out of the car and catch the freeway-side BART train into the city. We spent the night in the Oakland Hills, where Elizabeth's mother made us a later dinner and we forced Kelsey to watch Amadeus--an embarrassing movie for a musicologist never to have seen.

Saturday we had a late and lazy brunch, again courtesy of Elizabeth's mother, at Rick and Anne's in Berkeley. It's a classic Berkeley restaurant, one which Elizabeth informed me I should be ashamed of never having been to. Then we headed into the city to meet up with the other half of our gang. It was a beautiful sunny fall day in the city. Sitting in Dolores Park, watching packs of dogs tussle with one another in front of palm trees and the San Francisco skyline, signing left-wing petitions and seeing a man try to sell musical instruments to sunbathers (accordion? ukelele?), it all makes it difficult to believe that one can't actually live here at the moment.

Some book-shopping in the Mission, dinner at a cheap Indian restaurant, a quick change of clothes in a friend's apartment, and we were off to the opera.Afterwardss the night was spent at an apartment in the Haight, which had the most beautiful hardwood floors I have ever seen--a deep luscious red wood that I was afraid to step on

Sunday was The Race. Elizabeth has been training for a marathon for the past few months. It's the Nike Women's Marathon, benefiting leukemia research. Sunday was the big day, so we dragged ourselves over to Golden Gate Park to cheer as she ran by. We were a little slow in getting out of the house, so we ended up missing her at mile 16, but managed to find her at mile 21, threw her a power bar, and cheered as she went past.

Then, it was back to the Mission for brunch with the some former Stanford classmates of Nikki's, at an extremely greasy little diner. Then back to the car, and six hours later, home! I am almost always really glad to be back in Los Angeles. Coming back to LA from New York, London, Washington, DC., Boston, Philadelphia, or really almost anywhere, I consider myself very fortunate to live in a wonderful city. Coming back from San Francisco, however, was a little....disappointing.

Please Please Me

I have a difficult relationship with the Beatles. Growing up, I was always a Beach Boys partisan, mostly because my parents like them better and had most of their albums on vinyl. (The only Beatles LP I remember seeing was the White Album, which kind of mystified me.) Plus, "Kokomo" came out when I was in elementary school, and although my friends and I weren't old enough to see the movie it was written for (remember Cocktail?), we loved the song and memorized all the words. Seeing the reunited Beach Boys perform live at a local amusement park put a bit of a damper on my Beach Boy love (60+ year old beach boys + bikini clad go-go dancers=horrifying), but I still remained--and remain--partisan.

But anyways, this quarter I am forced to listen to the Beatles twice a week, in the presence of 140 undergraduates who want both an easy A and the affirmation that the Beatles are The Greatest Band Ever. This should be a recipe for me to hate the Beatles even more, but I am growing oddly ambivalent.

Their downsides:
1. Way too cute for their own good.
2. Single-handedly destroyed the careers of dozens of black r&b artists by giving white America a clean-cut simulacrum of rock n' roll to listen to.
3. Early and unfortunate homophobia and gay-bashing by certain members. (I'm looking at you, John)
4. Some very unfortunate covers early on in their careers.

The upsides:
1. Please Please Me is actually a pretty great album.
2. Their entire image and career was carefully stage-managed by an effete gay Jewish upper-class British manager. Hence the trendy haircuts, Pierre Cardin suits, and the snazzy record contract with EMI.
3. John Lennon and the aforementioned effete gay Jewish upper-class British manager once went on a trip together. Alone. For two weeks. To Spain.
4. It's not really their fault that those early covers were really bad. If I become a famous academic someday, and somebody digs up my high school papers, I would be pretty embarrassed.
5. Point number 2 above is actually much more complicated than it is often represented. But that would be a whole 'nother post.

So we shall see! Downside # 1 still remains however.

Pool

Apologies for not posting more frequently, gentle reader. I fear the advent of the school year will be putting a damper on such things.

But, I have some exciting news. Some of you know that my building has a swimming pool. That sounds fun, but it is this bizarre little pool in the middle of the courtyard formed by the two halves of the apartment building. Not only is it usually rather debris-laden, but to go swimming in it requires swimming right in front of all these big windows where you can see neighbors peering down at you. And since the residents in my building are either Russian mobsters or snobby gay male model-actors, it's just not very appealing. Very occasionally the manager's 14 year-old daughter and her friends splash around, and occasionally at 2 a.m., when the bars close, you will hear a drunken splash or two. But no right-minded person actually uses the thing in any seriousness.

Yesterday, however, Elizabeth and I went for a run. Or rather, she, being someone currently training for a marathon ran six miles, picked me up, and we ran another six miles together. We got back to my apartment at about 8pm, were hot and sweaty, and decided that it was finally time to baptize the pool. So we did! It was dusty, it was freezing cold, I saw lots of strange eyes peering down, but we did it!

Elderly Politicians

I just read this Guardian article, which talks about how there is mounting pressure for Silvio Berlusconi to step down before the next election. The main reason? He is too old, even if he did have a facelift.

The strange thing is that Berlusconi is only 69! It's interesting that here in the U.S. there is really no age limit on politicians. When Reagan ran, there was some fuss about his age, but it obviously didn't stop him from two terms in office. And people like Senator Thurmond are allowed to totter around the Senate well past the point of senility. I wonder why the difference between here and Europe. I have no problem with older politicians, per se, but it seems like in the United States some people value it as a positive quality in and of itself.

Let's Get This Party Started

Gad. Posts like this are why I can barely stand to read the liberal blogosphere. I appreciate that the Daily Kos has often been an effective progressive tool, particularly in holding Democrats accountable to their progressive constituents.

However, I can't stand this whole discourse promoted by Kos, that those pesky single-issue groups like NARAL need to be quiet for the sake of electing more Democrats. (And this isn't Kos's first posting on the subject.) The simplest criticism to make is that it is really easy for Kos and bloggers like him--a group of people composed almost entirely of white men--to call for groups to subsume their beliefs for the larger cause. If abortion is illegal, it's not going to be Kos who gets pregnant and needs one. It's really easy for somebody who lives a really privileged life to call for everyone to hold back on their own "personal" issues so that our beloved party can gain a few seats. People such as myself, who believe strongly in "single issues" don't do so just to be difficult. It's because these issues that seem so inconsequential to Kos actually affect people's real lives, and that's much more important than the Democratic Party gaining another senate seat. I don't care about politics because I want the Democrats to "win," I care because I hope there will be meaningful change someday. I'm not afraid to say that Dianne Feinstein has caused a lot of harm to a lot of people, and just because she is a Democrat doesn't make it any better.

The other problem I have, with that post and many other similar strategies, is that there is an undercurrent of anxiety beneath them which says, "the Republicans are winning, therefore we need to adopt the strategy that makes them win." I firmly believe that in politics, the message is the medium. I've always had a problem with PETA not so much because I disagree with their politics (often that too!) but because they take their tactics and iconography from the anti-abortion movement. The disgusting posters with pictures of foxes skinned alive are not at all different than disgusting posters of fetuses. Actions by PETA and the anti-abortion people never actually challenge the dominant order in a meaningful way, they just try to horrify you into blind submission.

I don't want our entire movement coalesced around media friendly leaders. I don't actually think that a disciplined party leadership is a good thing. We don't need a tight, focused message. I don't want a pseudo-fascist college organization along the lines of the College Republicans. I don't want old-boy networks of any kind, or pandering of any sort. The Democratic Party's greatest strength is its fractiousness. Where there is conflict and diversity of opinion, that means real human beings are around.

Dr. Atomic!

i am going to see Dr. Atomic at the San Francisco Opera! Wahoo!

If anybody wants to come, there seem to still be inexpensive tickets left for this performance, Oct. 22.

America's Next Top Wesleyan Grad

I apparently went to college with this girl.

(And supposedly she is family, too!)

Parsifal

Don't you wish that the leader of our country could carry on a long and literate conversation about the merits of different productions of Parsifal?

Speaking of Parsifal, I'd really like to go see this.

Four Saints

I'm probably the last musicologist in the world to realize this, but the Virgil Thomson/Gertrude Steing opera Four Saints in Three Acts is really fun. I've been reading about it all summer, in a variety of different contexts--Nadine Hubbs does a long analysis of it in The Queer Composition of America's Sound, as does Daniel Albright in Untwisting the Serpent. So, I figured that it would probably make a good addition to my fifty item list as one of the ten musical works, and bought both a recording and the vocal score.

Finally got around to listening to it tonight (just the first act so far), and it is fabulous! Very witty and campy--my favorite is when the chorus keeps getting the word "anoint" confused with "annoy". I don't know Thomson's music well, and had been curious to see how he would set Stein's libretto. He does it very straight, in a lot of chorales and hymn-like settings that give you both a sense of dry midwestern-ness but also a touch of poignancy. Occasionally there are little hiccups that remind me of the similar hiccups in the fast sections of Glass's Mad Rush, and make me realize that additive processes owe a lot to Stein.

On to the second act!

Notable Aspects of Returning to Los Angeles After Three Months Away

1. In my absence, three new restaurants have opened up within blocks of my apartment, and one rather major building has been demolished.

2. In my immediate neighborhood, when I encounter a group of tough-looking muscle-bound drunken young men, I don't need to worry.

3. My local Subway has changed from Pepsi to Coke. Rock on!

4. My own-hipness-relative-to-surrounding-hipness ratio has gone down by about 300% in just 24 hours.

5. Three months of the Chronicle of Higher Education is about two feet worth of paper.

6. Smog! The glorious smog! I have missed you.

7. One of the aforementioned new restaurants is actually a new coffee house. Very, very, exciting.

Now, to unpack.

The Eagle Has Landed

I am safely back in Los Angeles, by way of Philadelphia, Atlanta, and Cincinnati. The last leg of the trip was spent luxuriating in first class, which was quite lovely, although it was an older plane and therefore it was not quite as fancy as it could have been. I did get to watch Herbie Fully Loaded. Hard to believe it was directed by the same woman who did D.E.B.S. Kudos to Violet Vixen for picking me up at LAX.

Now, back to the grind.

In Transit

I write from Atlanta, where I have an unexpected five hour layover on the way back to Los Angeles--my first flight, from Philadelphia was slow in leaving, and it was enough to make me miss a tight connection. Now I get to trickle home across the country, from Atlanta, to Cincinnati, to Los Angeles. Sigh.

I had a lovely night last night in Philadelphia with my sister. She took me to see The Teachings of Chairman Rick, a short cabaret which sets speeches by Rick Santorum to music. It's a cute idea, and even if it wasn't quite as clever as it could have been, it had a nice community vibe going on--three actors and one musician playing the songs in the ballroom of the local gay and lesbian community center, with "Santorum for Dogcatcher" t-shirts for sale in the lobby. The best moment was probably the "Teri Schiavo" number, which juxtaposed Santorum's speech from the Schiavo case with an earlier speech on the Iraq war. For that number, Santorum was played by a young gay black kid who solemnly recited the increasingly paradoxical statements while the other two cast members sang a "Teri Schiavo" ostinato in tritones.

Santorum is up for reelection in 2006. To help defeat him, go to http://www.libertypa.org/

Or, you can just buy one of those Dogcatcher t-shirts.

Race

Being back in east coast cities like Washington D.C. and Philadelphia always makes me reevaluate how I think about race. If I have one serious complaint about Los Angeles, it is that in LA, if you are white person in comfortable circumstances such as myself, it is really easy to avoid seeing black people. To be blunt.

Los Angeles has an extraordinary amount of diversity, and I always have appreciated the way that the racial makeup of LA really problematizes simple binaries of black and white. But still, the fact of the matter is that the diversity I encounter on a daily basis, in the classroom and in my neighborhood, is not the kind of diversity that challenges me or makes me feel uncomfortable. In West Hollywood there is a sizable immigrant Russian population, and at UCLA the largest racial group is Asian American, but neither really exist outside of my own personal comfort zone.

It's partly the fact that I am at a somewhat elite university, and live in fairly wealthy and definitely white neighborhood, but it is more than that too. In Washington, I have lived for many summers in a very wealthy neighborhood, Dupont Circle, that, like West Hollywood, is home to a lot of well-to-do gay white men. And yet, in D.C., and also in Philadelphia where my sister lives, one encounters different people constantly, in every aspect of your life. In fact, you have to work really hard not to.

It's not the case that all my friends in Los Angeles are white. They aren't, and there is frankly a ton of diversity among them, especially along lines of class, geography, and sexuality. But one of the things I value most about living in a city is the random, and often forced, encounters with difference. I always find it helpful to resort to theory to think about it: Samuel Delaney makes a distinction between what he calls "networking" and "contact". Networking is simply meeting other people through your job, or your school, or through other friends--the end result being that certain people are channeled in your direction, and others are channeled away. Contact, on the other hand, is the urban phenomenon of just plain running into people that you never would have met otherwise. Delaney believes so strongly in contact as a social force that back when he lived in New York City and taught in Massachusetts, he used to commute to work on a Greyhound bus rather than drive by himself--just so he could run into more random people.

I love Los Angeles. I think the possibility exists for more contact there. And I also know that I should probably blame my own self rather than geography--I could choose to live in a different neighborhood, for instance. But even if it is selfish, I wish Los Angeles would make it harder to isolate myself.

Maybe I just need to ride the bus more.

Geek Rant Pt. 2

There seems to be some sort of robot that automatically posts a spam comment every time I do a blog post--see the comment on my previous post. And not only that, but it is in the guise of hurricane relief. The nerve! Probably the only way to stop it is to disallow anonymous comments. I'm just deleting them for now, but I leave you the previous comment for your perusal.

Geek Rant

I really, really hate tech support. Mary's mother just bought a laptop--her first home computer in a long time--and we were very excited, both because it was a shiny new 12" Powerbook, and also because she got DSL and a wireless router to go with it.

However, I have spent all week struggling to get the wireless network to work. There are two problems. The first is that although it cheerfully says that the router should work fine with Macs, there is absolutely zero instruction on how a Mac owner is supposed to set up the network. The instructions tell you to use some Windows setup assistant thing to get it going, and because it is a third-party router, not an Airport, there's nothing I could do about it.

Secondly, the tech support people have absolutely no training. It was perfectly clear that the woman on the phone was simply listening to my problems, and looking up the answers in the same manual I already had handy. And it was even worse when Mary's mother called by herself--the Verizon tech support people swore it was a problem with her computer, so she drove all the way out to an Apple Store because Verizon told her it was Apple's fault. It wasn't, of course. I eventually figured out how to manually configure the router myself, and it's all working fine now, but grr!

Hot Hot Hot

Washington, D.C. is hot. Hot hot hot. I'm not surprised, of course, but it is a rude shock to go from the 30 degree nights in the Adirondacks to the 90% humidity of our nation's capital swamp.

Today Mary, Anne and I visited the Hirshorn to see the Visual Music exhibit that I had missed when it came to MOCA in Los Angeles last year. I was a little apprehensive, having seen mixed reviews, but it turned out to be pretty darned fabulous. It was basically in three parts: early abstract art like Kandinsky that "aspired to the condition of music", mid-century experimental filmmakers like Fischinger and the Whitney brothers, and then more recent computer-based sound installations. The first part seemed a bit forced (although I do like my Richter), and the third was predictable, but it was really amazing to see all of these very rare experimental films. The Whitney brothers were particularly interesting. Like a lot of their crowd, they were inspired by Schoenberg to find, basically, visual serialism. So they decided that a point of light was more or less the equivalent of a tone, and then did a bunch of crazy abstract maneuvering of points of light, in the manner of tone rows. All of this before computers, so they built these gigantic mechanical contraptions involving pendlums, stencils, and other assorted detritus. I hope I can buy some of their films on DVD or something, it seems like not only an important modernist artificact to know about, but also a really good teaching tool for discussing, say, Milton Babbit.

Only one more week in DC, and then I am back home!