I Can't Get No

Man, this edumacating thing takes it out of me. I'm quickly settling into a routine with my lectures: first two hours are fine, but as I enter the home stretch of the third hour, I start to give out. My throat begins to ache, my legs feel like they are glued to the floor, and I forgo class discussion and painstaking analysis for stuttering quickie points on, say, how Keith Richard's guitar lick from "Satisfaction" isn't actually a blues riff, but an attempt to imitate the horn section of a Motown number. Write that down, kids.

Still, all and all, I'm pretty pleased. We're getting through the material, people occasionally laugh at my jokes. And I think this experience is really just about learning techniques for endurance: the importance of having water to drink, the importance of standing up straight and wearing comfortable shoes, the importance of good air conditioning.

Tomorrow I take a break from teaching for some honest to goodness dissertation research. The Getty Research Institute, located in a building on the grounds of the Getty Museum, has a wonderful library that holds the papers of several figures important to me: M.C. Richards, Allan Kaprow, Dick Higgins, and especially David Tudor. I've worked some with the Tudor papers already, especially his scores, but now I'm going to dive into his correspondence, and that of Richards. This is no substitute for getting to the Cage papers in Chicago, but it is a good start, and as far as I can tell, I don't think many Cage scholars have looked through the Richards papers. I have an all-day appointment tomorrow, so we'll see what I dig up!

La tragèdie bleue

Oy...what a tragedy today. Turned off by Italy's doping scandals, constant diving for fouls, and general cockiness (and also following my rule for the World Cup that when in doubt, root for the country that didn't send troops to Iraq), I was rooting for les bleus. And things were going great. France was in control, and it seemed like the constant attacks would have to pay off sooner or later.

And then...Zidane goes and ruins it all. Totally crushed me. France played the better game, but after that head-butt, Italy deserved to win. And I'm glad they did.

Pablo, I suspect, was rooting for the Italians from the beginning.

Thursday Cat Blogging

In celebration of another three-hour lecture successfully completed, I present to you a current picture of Pablo, the Cutest Kitten in the World. He's doing his usual impression of a B----- t------ here.

P.S. How do you know you've really advanced to doctoral candidacy? When a $65 "Doctoral Candidate" fee shows up on your student account, that's how.

Theory, Music

Critic, scholar, and composer Kyle Gann has a wonderful post on his blog about teaching and learnin music theory. Much of it it really rings true for me, and not just the quip that Schenkerian analysis belongs in the religion department. It's a long post, but worth the read!

London Photos

I've flickr'd a selection of photos from my last trip to London. You'll find pictures of St. Albans, Windsor Castle, Cambridge, and random assorted Barnet-ness.

Enjoy!

Dusty in Memphis

Friday was payday, so, as is my usual custom, I walked down to the Tower Records on the Sunset Strip to pick myself up a treat. Last month was Peggy Lee's Black Coffee, this month's, following in the icy blonde theme, was Dusty Springfield's Dusty in Memphis.

I discovered Dusty for the first time when I was TAing a course on gay and lesbian popular music. I had heard her music before, of course, but just as part of that strange ahistorical soup of music that gets played on oldies stations. Her music is so stylistically diverse, I certainly never thought that "I Only Want to Be With You" and "Son of a Preacher Man" were by the same person. And I certainly never would have that this music was by an English lesbian of Irish descent!

Side note: A friend of mine likes to joke that Dusty's "Wishin' and Hopin'" is her revenge on heterosexuality. Just consider the lyrics:

Wishin' and hopin' and thinkin' and prayin'
Plannin' and dreaming each night of his charms
That won't get you into his arms

So if you're lookin' to find love you can share
All you gotta do is
Hold him and kiss him and love him
And show him that you care

Show him that you care just for him
And do the things he likes to do
Wear your hair just for him, 'cause
You won't get him
Thinkin' and a-prayin'
Wishin' and a-hopin'

Just wishin' and hopin' and thinkin' and prayin'
Plannin' and dreamin' his kiss is the start
That won't get you into his heart

So if you're thinkin' heartbreak
True love is
All you gotta do is
Hold him and kiss him and squeeze him and love him
Yeah, just do it and after you do, you will be his

This is Dusty's advice to some poor little straight girl? If you like a guy, don't just hope he likes you. Instead, have sex with him--oh, I'm sorry, "hold him and kiss him and squeeze him"--do everything he tells you to, and then maybe he will like you. Nice advice, Dusty.

Anyways, Dusty in Memphis. What a great album. She recorded it in 1969, at a time when her career was sort of in the doldrums. So she made a deal to go record an album with Atlantic Records at their "soul" studio in Memphis, using many of the same studio musicians who had played on Aretha Franklin's breakthrough debut album. Although like Aretha, she recorded her actual vocals back at a fancier studio in New York City. "Son of a Preacher Man" is obviously the stand-out track on this album, but the entire thing really holds together well. Dusty idolized Aretha's singing style, but really, she does things her own way. What I find most attractive is her sense of restraint. Unlike every single wanna-be soul singer on American Idol, she knows that the key to singing soul--especially if it is not the idiom one has grown up with--is not to simply go for vocal pyrotechnics. If you go back and listen to "Son of a Preacher Man" now, you'll hear that it is actually remarkably restrained. She always seems to be holding back something, never quite giving all of herself up to the music. It's a lovely sound, with a hint of menace to it.

So, musicological advice of the week, go buy and listen to this album. Rhino has a great reissue that has a bunch of unreleased tracks from the period.

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.

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.


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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.