Georgina on My Mind

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

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

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

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

But I think I've done Los Angeles.

Friday Night Cat Hoarding Blogging

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

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

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

Welcome to the Jungle

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

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

Smells Like Teen Spirit

In preparing for tomorrow's (ed: well, technically today's) lecture on 80's metal and 90's alternative, I realized that in my last lecture, I unwittingly passed an important milestone.

On Tuesday I played my class a snippet of Michael Jackson's "Beat It", just to point out that Jackson's complex fusion of many musical genres included heavy metal, in the form of a guitar solo by Eddie Van Halen. Ladies and gentlemen, "Beat It" was the very first pop song I can remember. I don't believe I heard it when it first came out, as Thriller came out when I was only three. But at a very early age, probably about five, I distinctly remember hanging out with my best friend in his kitchen, and he had a cassette tape of "Beat It." We both thought it was pretty cool, and I memorized the words as best as I could. Even then, in my pre-musicological childhood, I could sense that illicit danger early Michael Jackson communicated so effectively and creepily.

As we now move further into music with which I have very deep personal connections from my youth--particularly Nirvana and Metallica--I admit I feel a little trepidation. Am I going to do this music justice? Am I going to be critical enough? Am I going to have any insights, or am I just going to sit up there and be Mr. Fanboy? I'm bringing in my guitar, mostly to demonstrate power chords and two-handed fret-tapping for the 80's metal, but I know I am not going to resist playing some Nirvana. After all, I learned how to play guitar by playing along with Nevermind for hours at a time, and I can still more or less play my way through the entire Nirvana catalogue, from Bleach to In Utero. (Unplugged too, which although clearly sub-par did introduce me to Bowie and Leadbelly.) I hope it works--I've found that some of my most effective lectures have been on music with which I very clearly did not identify, such as early hip-hop.

I considered including in my slide show a picture of me in full grunge regalia, with shoulder-length hair dyed black, but I think that might cause them to lose all respect for me.

Mooooo

I promised myself I wouldn't blog about the heat. Yes, it's been real hot in Los Angeles for the past week or so. Horribly hot. Humid, and swampy, and life- and cow-threateningly hot. Blackouts have been threatened, the power grid is melting. The end times might be near. If cows are dying, what next?

But every single LA-based blog has been complaining about the heat. Even visiting bloggers. So I promised myself I wouldn't blog about the heat, and stick to trenchant comments about teaching, and punk rock.

But you know, it's really, really hot.

Dio Mio

Letter from David Tudor to M.C. Richards, November 1954

...John [Cage] does very well in Paris. One talks incessantly about the situation internationelle des arts an intellectual tour of what goes on in the world of art. How can one have conversation without movement of the wind? It's dirtying up the street with words. Sometimes I think I will retch if I hear another word about chance or control or "very interesting" or "very importante parce que" closing in quickly to make a judgment. And John is just as bad as the rest, everything to be rivant but this seems to function like masturbation. So that's really how I feel about it being "clear," and then claiming that this same clarity is "mysterious"--really, don't you say so, let's go somewhere else, where there's no need for clarity or just no-need-period. See you all in the funny papers. One might say "shit" but that's a European word these days. If I go any farther with this it might turn into a polemic--dio mio!...

I love archival research! Even though I am probably violating all sorts of copyright rules by posting this little extract.

Blank Generation

Those who know me know that I am rather passionate on the subject of Patti Smith. If memory serves, one of my first posts on this here blog thing was about seeing her in concert. (Incidentally, that same concert was recorded and released as part of the special reissue of Horses last year.) There are a lot of things that draw me towards Patti: her politics, her sex appeal, her voice, her moral authority, her guitarist. She means a lot to me also as a passion that Mary and I have shared together for many years. And as a historian, I appreciate the crucial role she played in the early stages of the NYC punk scene of the mid-seventies.

One of my favorite things about teaching is that when I am lecturing, everything I say automatically becomes true for all these undergrads. Yes, I wish they were thinking more critically, and yes, I wish that more learning here took place in smaller situations that encouraged discussion and said critical thinking, rather than me standing on a stage in front of sixty people. And I try hard not to teach music history as some sort of coherent, linear, bedtime story. We responsible teachers focus on problems of historiography, the question of "authenticity" in popular music, the ways in which music shapes our social identities.

But sometimes story-telling is necessary, and when it is, I love the fact that I get to be the one telling the story. I love telling everyone that no, neither the Sex Pistols nor the Ramones invented punk rock. It wasn't a group of obnoxious boys playing cynical three-chord rock loud and fast. It was, rather, a hallucinatory poet who invented punk rock, taking her fashion cues from nineteenth-century symbolist poets, her lyrics from the NYC spoken word scene, and the music--assisted by the indomitable Lenny Kaye--from the angry garage rock of the midwest. My students grew up thinking that punk rock is like Green Day, or--god forbid--Blink 182. The slightly more astute might know punk rock from its time in the wilderness, when it existed only in small regional underground scenes around the country. Nothing wrong with that music, but there is nothing better than playing for my students the actual music of CBGB's in 1975: Patti, Television, the Heartbreakers, Blondie, and yes, even the Ramones. I'm not sure they quite get how powerful this stuff is, how subversive it still sounds.

But I hope that just hearing the music expands their ears a little bit, and hopefully their brains a bit too. It's naive, I realize, to think that just hearing this music will change the students in some important way. That is hopelessly romantic, almost anti-intellectual. But even we pomo academics hope for such mystical accomplisments occasionally.

Democracy Exercised

My god, what an unpleasant two days of jury duty. I shouldn't complain too much--here it is Tuesday, and I am all done. Considering some other jurors were assigned to a thirty day civil trial, I should count myself lucky.

But it was definitely a big hassle. I showed up at a downtown LA courthouse at 7:30 am, ready for duty. Sat around for a bit, and it quickly became clear that there weren't many trials going on, which seemed like a good sign. A bunch of jurors were reassigned to a courthouse in Burbank, where there was a more pressing need for warm bodies, and I was thankful not to be one of them! But then, of course, at 11:00 am, when I had visions of being sent home at lunch time, the last twenty of us there were reassigned to a superior court in Inglewood.

What a pain! Luckily I had driven, I can't imagine what bus people did. So I show up in Inglewood at 1:30. Now, the downtown courthouse was nothing fancy, but it was well-appointed, and even though downtown LA is not exactly thriving, it nevertheless has plenty of restaurants and attractions. Inglewood, not so much. The courthouse was a parody of poor modernist urban planning: the classic featureless box looming imperialistically over the landscape, with a "plaza" in front that was not only barren and soul-less, but was elevated a story above street level. The picture to the right is the entrance to the plaza. Nothing like welcoming the public to this pinnacle of democracy!

Anyways, the trial. The first day was spent waiting around doing nothing. Luckily, part of my job is reading books for a living, and I was able to read an entire book I needed to get through for teaching next week--Jeff Chang's excellent history of hip-hop. Finally at 4:30pm, all 75 of us in the prospective juror pool were called into the court room, where the judge introduced herself, the prosecutor, and the defendants, and read the charges. It is hard to figure out exactly what happened simply from the list of charges, but involved robbery, intimidation, guns, and at least one person shot. Juicy stuff. But the real juicy part was that the defendants were representing themselves, which explained why everything had been taking so long.

One thing that amazed me was the initial juror screening. The judge asked if there was anyone who had a bias or prejudice against the defendants--two black men. Now, I wanted to get out of jury duty as much as the next, but at least a dozen jurors were willing to stand up in court and claim that they were racist to get out of the trial!

Actual jury selection didn't get started before quitting time, so we had to come back at 8:30 am the next morning. We were all dutifully there, but once again, the day dragged on with no progress or information. At 9:30 we were told we weren't needed until 11:00 am, and then at 11, we were told to come back at 1:30pm. Finally, we were called into the court room, and selection was about to start. First, though, the judge asked if any of us had discussed the trial with one another. A few people raised their hands. Then she asked if any of us had discussed with one another the issue of the defendants representing themselves. Nearly thirty people raised their hands at that moment. So the judge sighed, asked the rest of us to exit, and began interviewing the troublesome jurors one by one. She must have made it through about ten of them when she called us all back in, and informed us that the juror pool was irrevocably tainted, and she was going to start over with a new group.

Gotta say, I was thrilled! The trial was going to be held in the afternoons, so I actually could have taught and served at the same time. But two days of sitting around waiting and waiting, in a poorly-air-conditioned room, in the middle of a burnt-out section of Inglewood, was about all I could take. So, democracy served, of a sort, and back to normal life!

Civic Duty

Why am I awake at five o'clock in the morning? Because I have to report for jury duty, that's why. At 7:30 am, in downtown Los Angeles.

Argh.

Farewell, Adele

A few months ago, Mary and I were lucky enough to see the Bloch-Bauer Klimts while they were on temporary display at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The linked news story gives the details, but these are the famous Klimt paintings that were recently returned to the Austro-Jewish family who had originally commissioned them, only to see them stolen by first the Nazis and then the Austrian government. The family had ended up in Los Angeles, and so while sale of the paintings were arranged, they were on display for free at LACMA. The centerpiece of the collection, a portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, was then purchased by a wealthy collector for a museum in NYC, where my mother and sister just went to go see it in its new home.

Although glad to see them in a museum open for public viewing, it saddens me to see these paintings leave Los Angeles. LACMA and other area museums attempted to put together a bid for them, but LACMA is not a wealthy institution, and it never came together. It is too bad, because having the painting here would have been a tangible link to one of the most important stories of Los Angeles: the emmigration of many important European artists to the area in the 1930s and 1940s: Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, Thomas Mann, Rudolf Schindler, Aldous Huxley...many others I can't think of at the moment. The Bloch-Bauers, like so many other Jewish families, ended up in Los Angles having fled Hitler. Ironically, their lawyer in the lawsuit to regain the paintings was a grandson of Schoenberg.

It's not that this period is not famous, or that it isn't given proper importance in histories and whatnot. It's just that, like so much of Los Angeles history, it seems like this rather amazing period went by without leaving any kind of tangible trace on the city. The most obvious trace left behind is a number of modernist structures, like the Schindler house and the Case Study houses. And UCLA and USC each have buildings named after Schoenberg, who grumpily taught intro music theory at both institutions. And there are quite a few well-known novels by these artists, complaining of their time in Los Angeles with themes that can be summarized as, "oy, the constant sunshine!" Down the street from me is an IHOP which some friends and I believe was one of Stravinsky's favorite haunts later in his life--we know that he spent a lot of time at an IHOP, and since this IHOP is near to where his house was, and has been in that location for many decades, it seems like a good possibility. I love thinking of Stravinsky sitting there, eating his waffles or whatever, and dreaming up The Rake's Progress. Update: This IHOP was built after Igor left Los Angeles. I'm going to ignore that fact. So there.

But I wish there was more. In so many cities, you have layers of history that you can feel as you walk the streets, or talk to people. You just don't have that feeling here. I know that this isn't how Los Angeles works, and that as the great postmodern city, I need to appreciate it on postmodern terms. But as I watch buildings go up and down, and people move in and out, I can't help wishing that more people and things would leave something behind.

Kiss Lieberman Goodbye

Today's New York Times has an article about the bruising primary fight around Senator Lieberman. It is a very frustrating piece, typical of the Times. Poor Lieberman, he's trying to be all collegial and nice and non-partisan, and those flame-breathing anti-war Democrats are out to get him. The unspoken politics of the Times is that having political beliefs, either left or right, is wrong. The only correct way to do politics is in the "middle", where there are no ideologies or beliefs involved. Please! Nothing frustrates me more than moderates who claim to have no ideology. Of course they have an ideology. I don't know anyone more ideological than Joseph Lieberman. I find it profoundly insulting that people such as myself who are not afraid to speak their political beliefs out loud get labeled extremist, and those who keep them secret--or "moderate", as they say--are given some sort of moral legitimacy.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised that the status quo newspaper supports the status quo.

One of the more frustrating things about this article is the claim that this is simply a knee-jerk reaction by anti-war Democrats. The fight against Joseph Lieberman goes back a long way. When I was living in Connecticut, I was often pretty heavily involved in state Democratic Party politics, from driving Susan Bysiewicz to a fundraising cocktail party in her first run for statewide office, to participating in a secretly-organized slander of now-former Congressman Sam Gejdensen's Republican opponent--after that little adventure, I was literally advised that I should stay inside for a few days and not answer the phone, lest the media find me. Not one of my prouder moments.

Anyways, this is just to say that I've known people in the Connecticut Democratic Party for quite awhile. And I can tell you, even way back in 1998, when the Iraq War was still just a twinkle in the Bush family eyes, the grassroots of the state party hated--hated--Joseph Lieberman. And it wasn't a matter of ideology, or even any specific political platform. It was that he was considered a Machiavellian, power hungry jerk who was personally unpleasant to everyone in the party, and had made his career by running against fellow Democrats. Lieberman got his start doing just what Lamont is doing now--by attacking the Democratic Party from the inside. And now finally it's caught up to him.

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.


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

Thank God

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

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

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

Historic Hollywood

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

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

Hack

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

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

Okay, enough procastination.

It's the Small Things

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

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

The Missing E

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

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

My life suddenly seems rather dull.

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

Day One

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

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

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

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

Exam Prep

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

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

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

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

and, lastly, but most amazingly....

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

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

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

Grading, Grading, Gone!

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

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

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

Conference Roundup

My conference this weekend went very well.

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

Viva Chongqing

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

Doris is Everywhere

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

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

Maine?

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

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

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