Humanities R Us

Today is the big UCLA vs. USC football game, and my undergraduates are all a-twizzle. There are pep rallies, bonfires, even a vigil to protect the campus mascot from dastardly deeds. A number of my students are in the marching band, so they are all out in Pasadena today, performing great feats of lung-foot coordination and some milder feats of musicianship. I wish them well. **

Speaking of these two august institutions, there was an interesting story in the current LA Weekly by Justin Clark about their academic rivalry. Predictably, the two schools are constantly poaching professors from one another; in one incident, USC even tried to hire away five members of the UCLA linguistics department in one fell swoop. A lot of the competition has to do with USC's attempt to rehabilitate its academic reputation as the former University of Spoiled Children my Stanford alumni parents always warned me about. In the past few years, USC has gone from #46 to #27 in the rankings, almost tied with UCLA, and presumably they have their competitive eye on the NoCal schools as well.

Most interesting, however, is the the shifting status of the politics of this rivalry. Back in the 1960s, there was a stark difference between the two campuses: USC watched the growing "disintegration" of its urban neighborhood--and by "disintegration", we actually should read "integration"--with suspicion and hostility, seriously considering a move to join Pepperdine up in Malibu. UCLA, meanwhile, became a hotbed of student activism thanks to a fairly liberal school administration.

Forty years later, though, things have changed: USC has invested heavily in its surrounding neighborhoods, and has come to view its urban location as a major draw. UCLA, thanks to Proposition 209 and the gradual depoliticization of the UC system as a whole, has become increasingly less diverse: enrollment of black students is down to offensive levels, the student government is now controlled by an conservative (and explicitly white) slate, and Westwood is now a bland marketplace of chain stores and dull restaurants. This change, of course, mirrors many larger changes in American politics over the last forty years. Once upon a time, conservative power rested in the Republican "old money" WASP areas of Pasadena and Downtown--USC territory--whereas the largely Jewish and Hollywood-funded Westside was Democratic and liberal--UCLA. That distinction is pretty much gone nowadays, replaced by much more fragmentary and temporary political alliances. UCLA's enclave amongst the ritzy towns of Beverly Hills and Bel-Air increasingly has the feel of a gated community, while USC's urban location allows it to engage with the outside world on an ongoing basis. Obviously there are many complicating factors, and it will take a long time for public perception to catch up. But I think we've only seen the beginning.

Anyways, the one thing this article doesn't talk about it is how central the humanities are to some of these academic and political rivalries. USC has for the past few years been making a point to hire a broad range of very exciting humanistic scholars--just since I came to town, they've hired Judith Halberstam, Josh Kun, Alice Echols, Karen Tongson, and Bruce Smith. More that I'm probably forgetting about, or haven't heard about. UCLA? Not so much. Yeah, they brought in Sue-Ellen Case a few years back, but that was a no-brainer. Can anyone think of any other exciting senior hires? Even if there are some examples, there is nothing like USC's campus-wide commitment to bringing in these amazing humanists who are all on the forefront of their respective fields. These are people who publish a lot, do the actual teaching of their students, attract top grad students, and are genuinely committed to the social mission of an urban university. Top scientists might bring in a lot of research money, but they rarely contribute to the intellectual life of a university as a whole.*

The thing is, developing a talented faculty in the humanities is really cost effective. Let's be honest, we humanists have low expectations when it comes to institutional support, and we work for cheap. A recent New Yorker article points out that when Duke University wanted to raise its academic stature, they realized that for the price of one middling scientist's salary--not to mention all the labs, support staff, etc--they could hire three or four humanistic scholars at the very top of their field. And for Duke, it totally worked--despite that institution's somewhat checkered history, and location away from the usual centers of academe, it is still has one of the great English Lit doctoral programs in the country, and one of the best university presses. This seems to USC's approach, and assuming that they come through with sustained institutional support--not to be taken for granted!--I bet it will work wonders.

In other news, I highly recommend watching all eight minutes of this cartoon version of the Communist Manifesto, assembled from classic Hollywood cartoons. What could be more LA? Via Billtron via Sushi Pajamas.



* I don't say this lightly; my partner was a chemistry major in college. At a small college, the sciences faculty are often integral to the community, and that's a great thing. At a large research university, however, much scientific research takes place in hospitals and institutes far removed from anything that might be considered "education."

** My god! We won! I could care less, but that was kind of cool!

In Other News

It is currently the one week of the year when it is cold enough that I have to wear socks at home.

Tuesday Tunes

It's been pointed out to me that the last five entries in a row on this blog were about animals, more or less. While I am slightly obsessed with my cats, and love giraffes and my parents' new dog very much, I am actually a musicologist, and do spend most of my time thinking about music. So, in what I hope will be a regular Tuesday feature of this blog, I want to take a moment to discuss a favorite song. This week, that song is an obvious choice for those who know me. In fact, when I was teaching History of Rock and Roll this summer, I had an extra credit question on the final exam which read, "What is the greatest song of all time?" This was not a subjective, or defend-in-an-essay question. There was only one right answer, and I had warned my students earlier in the quarter that they needed to write down in their notes that this song was the greatest song of all time, and be ready to regurgitate this answer for the final. So, what is, objectively and empirically,* the greatest song of all time?

The Shirelles, "Will You Love Me Tomorrow?" (1960

I'm not, of course, the only person to love this song so much. In our classes here, we usually teach this song in conjunction with Susan Douglas's lovely essay "Why the Shirelles Matter." Jacqueline Warwick's forthcoming book on sixties girl groups will no doubt discuss it excellently as well. The basic point that these authors make is that although the usual annoying rockist scholars of popular music studies tend to view the period 1959-1964--after Elvis joins the army, before the Beatles invade--as a fallow time in popular music, it's actually the period when we get unusually rich and complex music aimed at teenage girls. This song is a great example--rather than being sentimental about love and boys and things, it is quite frankly discussing sexuality and teenage romance as a meaningful experience:

Tonight you're mine completely
You give your love so sweetly
Tonight the light of love is in your eyes
But will you love me tomorrow?

Is this a lasting treasure?
Or just a moment's pleasure?
Can I believe the magic of your sigh
Will you still love me tomorrow

Tonight with words unspoken
You said that I'm the only one
But will my heart be broken
When the night meets the morning sun?

Compare this with Patti Page's marriage advice for girls, published the same year, and you can see how unusual it is to treat this subject so forthrightly and frankly. And not only is it frank, but it is subtle and emotionally rich--the song's only two and a half minutes, but it feels like this microscopic moment of decision is stretched out for symphonic ages.

But it's not really about the lyrics, of course. And although the songwriters, Carole King and Gerry Goffin, knew how to craft a fancy-pants chord progression very well, it's not even really about that either. I agree with one of Douglas's points that actually it's all about the timbre: the heavy reverb on the lead vocal, mixed all the way front. No saxophone or distorted lead guitar, just those lovely strings, that shimmery quiet guitar, and above all, Shirley Owens's throaty, heartfelt vocals. The violins represent hopefulness, and when they break off for their solo moment, you really believe that it's going to work. But every time Shirley sings, it's heartbreaking. You hear that voice, and you know what is really going to happen in the morning, no matter what she is saying. But then there is the ineffable: it makes me really happy to listen to this song. It's sad, it's heartbreaking, but...the pain feels good, in an endorphin-rush-after-a-tattoo kind of way. I just wish I could put my finger on how the music does this, technically speaking.

It's a sad song, and it's a lovely song, and it is the Greatest Song of All Time. If you haven't listened to it recently, go get a copy, find a quiet place, close your eyes, and enjoy.

*Objective and empirical because I am a musicologist, and I say so.

More Thanksgiving

Click the owl for more pictures of Thanksgiving at my grandparents. Including, by popular demand, The New Dog. Unfortunately, being rather squirmy, he wasn't very good at sitting still for a picture. Biting my ear, very good at that.

Note to self: those thirty undergraduate analyses of a Chopin prelude ain't going to grade themselves, mister.

Lions and Tigers and Bears

No dead rats, this time, but lots of giraffes. I've been going to Thanksgiving at my grandparents' house in Napa Valley for almost twenty years now, and each time, there is some sort of activity to keep everyone occupied for the day after. Wineries are the obvious choice, and we've done that a few times. Obviously, this was less fun when I was under 21, but some of the wineries are kind of cool even for kids--one, I seem to recall, has a gondala ride up to the top of the ridge. We've also gone to visit the Calistoga Geyser, the Petrified Forest, even the Napa Valley Wine Train. For the last one, my grandfather had to go incognito in my baseball cap and my mother's sunglasses, since local residents officially disaprove of the train.

This year was no different, and my grandmother bought us all tickets to go to Safari West. It's a 400 acre wildlife preserve that breeds and raises a bunch of endangered African species. I'm not sure where they stand in the hierachy of such parks--they are a private organization that makes money off of tours and visitors staying in authentic South African tent cabins, but they seem to be accredited by all the right people, and eschew fancy lions and elephants in favor of more mundane elk and gazelle whatsits. With the exception of three cheetahs, its all herd animals. But I definitely liked the giraffes. Who doesn't like giraffes? Giraffes are great.

Turkey, Puppies, and Rats

Thanksgiving is upon us. Tomorrow, my cousin and I are driving up to my grandparents' house in Napa Valley, where we'll be doing The Meal with my mom's side of the family. I'm looking forward to clean air, good food, meeting The New Dog, and of course, time with the family.

Of course, last year, this same plan ended up with me nose to nose with a dead rat while crawling underneath the house attempting to install a satellite dish. But high hopes for this year!

Sunday evening with a cat in my lap

It's nice to take the weekend off. I've finished a chapter, a fellowship application, and a bunch of grading, so I thought I deserved some relaxation. These past two days, I've cleaned my apartment, done laundry, spent some quality time with the cats, gone grocery shopping, cooked a big heap of pad thai, and watched a good chunk of the first season of Battlestar Galatica. I've resisted BG for a long time, since science fiction tends to bore my eyeballs out. But I watched a few episodes this fall, and have to admit it's pretty good. Then tonight, I had some friends over to eat the aforementioned pad thai and watch Goonies, which I had somehow never seen before. I think it is a slight generation gap--the movie came out in 1985, so even though it was a kid's movie, I was just a little too young to see it in the theater, or appreciate it fully if I had. So I'm glad to have filled that pop cultural gap.

My favorite line from the movie, apropos of the characters trying to play a melody correctly on a special skeleton keyboard in order to open a secret door: "I can't tell... if it's an A sharp or if it's a B flat!" "If you hit the wrong note, we'll all 'B' flat!"

Despite this relaxation, I am getting excited for my next chapter. I'm glad that my dissertation involves several different genres of music--getting sick of the music I study is less of a problem than it could be. I'll post more about this chapter soon, but suffice to say, I spent all day today listening to the Moonglows, the Orioles, the Ink Spots, and the Coasters. Mmmmm.

Poetry Friday

Who doesn't love a little Roethke on a Friday evening in November?

“For an Amorous Lady”

“Most mammals like caresses, in the sense in which we usually take the word, whereas other creatures, even tame snakes, prefer giving to receiving them.” From a Natural-History Book

The pensive gnu, the staid aardvark,
Accept caresses in the dark;
The bear, equipped with paw and snout,
Would rather take than dish it out.
But snakes, both poisonous and garter,
In love are never known to barter;
The worm, though dank, is sensitive:
His noble nature bids him give.

But you, my dearest, have a soul
Encompassing fish, flesh, and fowl.
When amorous arts we would pursue,
You can, with pleasure, bill or coo.
You are, in truth, one in a million,
At once mammalian and reptilian.

Life in the Ivory Tower

Want to see something fun? This will really make your day. This is a video of UCLA campus police tasering a student in the campus library. You can read the full story here. The best part is when the kid, a 23-year-old student, is on the ground in handcuffs screaming in pain, and they tell him to stand up or they will taser him again. That's just slightly better than the part where a bystander asks an officer for his badge number, and he tells her "Shut up or I'll tase you." Good times.

Fellowship Collage

Fellowship season is in full swing. These past few weeks, my classmates and I have been up to our necks in sample chapters, "narrative timetables," "relevance to broader humanistic inquiry," and finicky online applications. Take your project, the proposal for which you slaved over for months and which is about 26 pages long, and boil it down to four pages. Take your beloved 55 page chapter, and cut it in half. Cobble together a two page "sample bibliography," wondering which books will make you seem smart, and which are passé. Fellowship season is all about chopping yourself into little bits, rearranging those bits as instructed to do so by a mildly fascistic fellowship authority, and somehow trying to inject a little bit of life into the mix

There are ups and downs to being an Americanist. There are less fellowships for us to apply for, for one thing. If you want to go do archival research in Europe, there are tons of funding opportunities. And while I suppose it is a little easier and cheaper for me to go to my archives, it's actually not that easy or cheap, and I wouldn't mind support. At the same time, a friend of mine has a fancy fellowship to spend time in a foreign country, and the paperwork is just astonishingly arcane and intricate. So, you know, ups and downs.

I finished my main fellowship today. Another big one to apply for in January, and another in March. Here's hoping that some referee somewhere finds the relationship between music and McCarthyism so unbearably fascinating that they want to shower me with piles of money.

The good news? Now that I've done this, it is officially time to really move on to my next chapter! I love me my John Cage, but I'm looking forward to writing about music I can hum to when driving to school. Music of Changes somehow just didn't cut it.

On Blue Books and Movie Stars

Los Angeles is an odd place to be an academic. You know how there are some cities that are safe havens for academics? Obviously, a lot of those cities are college towns. I lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for a year, clearly a place where my species feels comfortable. Walking around Cambridge, you know that the people on the street understand you. If you were to tell someone you were a graduate student, they understand what that means: that you're poor, over-educated, pretentious, and socially awkward. They don't judge you (much), because they have a slot in their brains where they can place you. Even in a non-college town like New York City, there is definitely a niche for academics. You see a slovenly-dressed person grading a stack of blue books, you know who they are. You see an older man with a comb-over and a tweed jacket, you know what he is.

The citizens of Los Angeles just don't have that slot for us. This town--or at least my corner of it--is so dominated by the Industry (and there is only one!) that anybody who does something different will always be an oddity. When I meet people in bars, they are always fascinated by the fact that I am getting a Ph.D. When I pull out exams to grade at my local coffeeshop, heads across the room look up from their screenplays and stare at me. There are actually a lot of academics in Los Angeles--UCLA, USC, Cal State LA, Cal Tech, and a lot of smaller places--but we are completely subsumed to the Hollywood monster. Sometimes I wish I lived in a city where I had a place.

Of course, if I was in Cambridge I would not, as I just did tonight, have looked up from my pile of blue books at the Sunset Boulevard Coffee Bean to see Eugene Levy, Christopher Guest, and Jamie Lee Curtis walk by on their way to the premiere of For Your Consideration, followed by a swarm of paparazzi. Take that, Cambridge.

A Week in LA

It has been a good week for celebrities. Last Friday, during the conference, I saw Brian Baumgartner at the Century City food court. The American version of The Office is one of my favorite shows, so that was pretty exciting. More exciting, however, was on Thursday, when I saw Morgan Freeman. I was walking to lunch on campus, and he was standing there being interviewed by a reporter. Cool!

Coolest, however, was today. While shopping at Collar and Leash, our local pet supply store, I had a discussion on the merits of different kinds of cat litter with Anna Faris, of Scary Movie, Lost in Translation, and My Super Ex-Girlfriend fame. I've always thought she was pretty cool, and it turns out she was nice in person too. Unfortunately, her cats are having trouble finding the litter box. She ended up going with some special litter that is supposed to attract cats; I went with our usual sawdust pellet standby.

Speaking of naughty cats, Pablo and Carlos have figured out a clever way to express their annoyance when Nikki or I don't feed them breakfast at an appropriately early hour. The hallway outside our bedrooms is wallpapered with New Yorker covers, so when they are hungry in the morning, they start eating the covers. Every morning I wake up to another pile of scrap paper outside my door, and another empty spot on the wall.

Maybe I'll talk to my good friend Anna for suggestions.

News of the Day

Things One Should Read:

• For a Veteran's Day feature, the San Francisco Chronicle had the bright idea to interview one of those veterans who often gets ignored on this patriotic holiday--in this case, the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti. It's totally fascinating to hear Ferlinghetti talk about his experience in WWII, which included chasing Nazi submarines in a little wood boat, and visiting Nagaskai six weeks after the bomb. Read it here.
  
  
• Steven Soderbergh is apparently making a movie using primarily 1940s movie-making technology: old lenses, only boom mics, incandescent lighting, etc. Using the technology forces him to use certain angles that you don't see much anymore, and forces to actors to speak loudly and with precise diction. Basically, it's historically-informed performance practice for film! Richard Taruskin must be spinning in his grave. Oh wait, he's not dead.
  
  
• One More: It's not the most intelligent article in the world, but our local weekly the Citybeat has a cover story this week on undocumented students at UCLA. A little depressing, but worth a read, especially for those of us in the teaching profession! We really often have no idea what is going on in our student's lives. Here I am hectoring my students to tell the difference between Schubert and Beethoven, and they are worrying about where to buy a fake social security number so that they can work and not be tossed out of the country. Man.
  

Poetry Friday

I'd like to share something about myself. I don't think it's common knowledge; in fact, it's rather personal. It's my favorite poet. A person's favorite poet tells you a lot about them. I'm not sure what exactly my choice says about me; so it always makes me a little nervous to reveal it. But here goes: William Carlos Williams. There. Now you know.

A Widow's Lament in Springtime
William Carlos Williams, 1921

Sorrow is my own yard
where the new grass
flames as it has flamed
often before but not
with the cold fire
that closes round me this year.
Thirtyfive years
I lived with my husband.
The plumtree is white today
with masses of flowers.
Masses of flowers
load the cherry branches
and color some bushes
yellow and some red
but the grief in my heart
is stronger than they
for though they were my joy
formerly, today I notice them
and turned away forgetting.
Today my son told me
that in the meadows,
at the edge of the heavy woods
in the distance, he saw
trees of white flowers.
I feel that I would like
to go there
and fall into those flowers
and sink into the marsh near them.

Good and Bad

I'm glad the New York Times is teaching its reporters how to write good:

A protracted recount in Virginia is a scenario that many voting experts feared, with control of Congress hinging on a razor-thin margin in one Senate race, bringing a replay of the bitter litigation of the 2000 presidential election, which resulted in a drawn-out recount and bitter litigation.

In other news, how do you know when your veterinarian girlfriend has become jaded?

Me: How was your day?
Her: Good and bad. We killed several of my patients today, but on the plus side that means rounds won't take as long tomorrow morning.

A Change is Gonna Come

Almost didn't exercise democracy today! My plan was to vote in the evening, once I got home from school. Jewel Dakini and I left at 6:30 pm, which should have been plenty of time to be home before the polls closed at 8, but there was staggeringly unpleasant traffic, and it took us over an hour to get to WeHo. By the time I dropped her off and found parking, I had five minutes left to vote, and also to deliver Violet Vixen's absentee ballot. (I'm hoping that in the future, every single person I know will have a blog so that anytime I recount a story I can link to every single person.) But I made it, and there were no lines, thank goodness.

My voting was along the expected lines. No on the annoying Props. 83 and 85, yes on the bond measures, the cigarette tax, and the alternative fuel thingy. Also, no on that measure that would have forced the legislature to put transportation taxes towards repairing roads--if there is anything I learned from my mother's career as a school board member, it's that state propositions are a bad way to allocate funds. I skipped the judges since, really, who has any idea, and voted a straight Democratic ticket everything else.

When it came to governor, however, I took the opportunity to indulge in a bit of caprice: I didn't vote for Democratic candidate Phil Angelides. Which is not to say that I voted for Herr Schwarzenegger, because believe you me, I am not looking forward to a lifetime of having students looking at the diploma on my office wall and seeing Arnold's signature. No, I voted for Peter Camejo, the Green candidate.

Now, I don't know a ton about Mr. Camejo. I feel like I have heard a few inklings of negative stuff about him, and at any rate, i definitely don't support the Green platform all the way. But voting Green was a wonderful feeling. When I first registered to vote, days after turning eighteen in 1998, I was a committed supporter of third parties, and gleefully registered as a Green Party member for my maiden election. Remember 1998? Things were so hopeful. Yes, the Republicans controlled the House, and yes, the Monica Lewinsky scandal had broken a few months earlier. But still, having lived under a Democratic administration ever since I was twelve years old, it was hard to imagine the evil that lay ahead. One could imagine that greater change was possible, and that one's convictions, rather than fears, could be the source of my vote. Don't worry, by 2000 I knew the jig was up, and voted for Gore.

But I still remember that feeling of optimism when I first registered to vote, and could actually vote for someone whose politics I agreed with. That really hasn't been possible since then. Like every other leftist, I've compromised, and compromised. And I don't regret it at all, because these political times have required it. But in this election, where Governor Arnold was headed towards a landslide, and the Democratic candidate had run a sniveling, unpleasant campaign, it felt great to be able to vote Green. And I could do so not just because my vote was a throwaway, but because once again, I'm feeling optimistic.

Conference Hangover

The day after an academic conference is akin to the day after a drinking binge. (Or so I imagine, mom.) You wake up with a hangover, literal and metaphorical, with no sense of what has happened for the last few days. Your belongings are scattered everywhere, the fridge is empty, and the cats are looking at you with a wounded look in their eyes. If the police showed up and accused me of murder, I could probably be pressured into a confession.

Man. This past few days was the annual meeting of my esteemed professional organization, held here in Los Angeles. Unfortunately, this non-anonymous blog is probably not the proper location to discuss the ins and outs of the conference. Saw some good papers, saw some bad papers. Schmoozed with lots of famous scholars, caught up with old friends who I only ever see at these things. Wasn't giving a paper myself, this year, so no pressure there. I watched several friends go through the job interview process, and I can't say I'm looking forward to that next fall.

Speaking of next year--so, I'm working on my application to a fellowship for next year, due in ten days. I've got my dissertation chapter all done, which was the main segment of the application. I look at the fine print, and read this: "Include a polished, substantive chapter of your dissertation (that is neither the introduction nor the conclusion) of not more the 25 double-spaced pages."

25 pages?!

What kind of diss chapter is only 25 pages? Mine is 53, and I am told that anywhere in the range of 40-60 is typical for my discipline. And note that they do not want a 25 page section of a chapter; they specify a 25 page chapter. Am I supposed to cut down and make a special version of this chapter just for the fellowship? Mind you, nowhere in the materials for this fellowship did they mention a page limit for the chapter. It was only revealed when you log in to upload your proposal. Argh!

Payday on the Sunset Strip

Yesterday was the first of the month, which means payday in these parts. And as is my custom, I went up to the Tower Classical on Sunset to part with a percentage of my paycheck. As we all know, Tower is going out of business, and like most, I feel ambivalent. On the one hand, Tower was the first monolithic chain store to come along and drive independents out of the business. On the other hand, in these days of Walmart as the nation's largest music retailer, one gets nostalgic for the days of big bad record store chains--at least they specialized in music! And Tower, to its credit, has always maintained a strong commitment to classical music. Although I am definitely not nostalgic for the waning power of the canon--as some commentators have been--I did like that a large corporation was willing to maintain a small space for music that is not commercially viable. The Tower Classical I used to frequent was a great store--not as gigantic a selection as Amoeba, but perfectly decent, with a knowledgeable staff. Oh well.

At any rate, this Tower has now made it down to 30% off, which means that the FLUX Quartet recording of Morton Feldman's String Quartet No. 2 was only forty bucks. Haven't listened to it yet, but I'm excited. Not that I will listen to the whole thing, as it is about six hours long--the package comes with one version cut up into five different CDs, and then a version on one DVD so that you could theoretically listen to the whole thing in one sitting. I actually was around when FLUX was recording this--they did it at Wesleyan my senior year. I didn't attend any of the taping, although I can't remember why. It was definitely a big event at the time.

Walking back home, I happened by the Viper Room, the legendary club on the Strip that used to be owned by Johnny Depp. There was a small pile of flowers and candles outside, and a small sign that informed me that October 31 was the anniversary of River Phoenix's death from a drug overdose, on the curb outside of the Viper Room.

Thoughts for the Evening

• I am surprisingly sad that Reese Witherspoon and Ryan Philippe split up.
  
• I could listen to the O Brother Where Art Thou soundtrack all night long.
  
• Pablo has an eye infection, and twice a day we have to stick two different kinds of paste in his left eye. So he kind of hates me for a chunk of each day, but luckily he also has a very short-term memory.
  
• Welcome to the coolest google maps hack you have ever seen, courtesy of my friend Pete.
  
• I'm thinking of sending in an abstract for a paper on pop hits of this past summer. From blog posts to academic paper...we'll see.
  
• Grading...oy. Beethoven's 9th refuses to leave me alone.
  
• Do you know what's ironic? The Blogger spell check doesn't know the word "blog."
  
• My fifth college reunion is this next spring. That's a scary thought.
  
• Why won't my room magically clean itself?
  
• The annual national meeting of the American Musicological Society is this weekend. It is in Los Angeles this year, which is fun, although parking at the conference hotel is $30 a day. I didn't make AMS last year; the last I went to was the one in Seattle. It was one of the most fun times I ever had a conference. Six of us stayed in one hotel room, and in all honesty, my friends and I were the life of the conference. Fueled by free booze pilfered from Princeton's party, we managed to be the last ones to leave two nights in a row. The second night, we straggled up to our room, and watched Paris Hilton's One Night in Paris while doing cartwheels and headstands in our pajamas. That, my friends, is how conferences should always be.
  

Poetry Sunday

Carlos has reminded me that I forgot last week's Poetry Friday. And not only that, October 7 was the 50th anniversary of the publication of Allen Ginsberg's "Howl." I have always thought that Carlos's name was a Hispanicized version of Karl, as in Marx, but I just remembered that Carlos is also the name Kerouac gave to Ginsberg in On the Road. And given that we suspect Pablo might be a Neruda, perhaps we need to re-think Carlos's alter-ego.

At any rate, in honor of all these things, I present a lovely poem by Ginsberg, written like "Howl" in 1955. It's a little long for a blog entry, but I think it's worth it--although again, I'm really not enjoying the difficulty of formatting poems correctly in Blogger. You can find this in Selected Poems, 1947-1995.

"Sunflower Sutra"

I walked on the banks of the tincan banana dock and sat down under the huge shade of a Southern Pacific locomotive to look at the sunset over the box house hills and cry.

Jack Kerouac sat beside me on a busted rusty iron pole, companion, we thought the same thoughts of the soul, bleak and blue and sad-eyed, surrounded by the gnarled steel roots of trees of machinery.

The oily water on the river mirrored the red sky, sun sank on top of final Frisco peaks, no fish in that stream, no hermit in those mounts, just ourselves rheumy-eyed and hungover like old bums on the riverbank, tired and wily.

Look at the Sunflower, he said, there was a dead gray shadow against the sky, big as a man, sitting dry on top of a pile of ancient sawdust--

--I rushed up enchanted--it was my first sunflower, memories of Blake--my visions--Harlem

and Hells of the Eastern rivers, bridges clanking Joes Greasy Sandwiches, dead baby carriages, black treadless tires forgotten and unretreaded, the poem of the riverbank, condoms & pots, steel knives, nothing stainless, only the dank muck and the razor-sharp artifacts passing into the past--

and the gray Sunflower poised against the sunset, crackly bleak and dusty with the smut and smog and smoke of olden locomotives in its eye--

corolla of bleary spikes pushed down and broken like a battered crown, seeds fallen out of its face, soon-to-be-toothless mouth of sunny air, sunrays obliterated on its hairy head like a dried wire spiderweb,

leaves stuck out like arms out of the stem, gestures from the sawdust root, broke pieces of plaster fallen out of the black twigs, a dead fly in its ear,

Unholy battered old thing you were, my sunflower O my soul, I loved you then!

The grime was no man's grime but death and human locomotives,

all that dress of dust, that veil of darkened railroad skin, that smog of cheek, that eyelid of black mis'ry, that sooty hand or phallus or protuberance of artificial worse-than-dirt--industrial-- modern--all that civilization spotting your crazy golden crown--

and those blear thoughts of death and dusty loveless eyes and ends and withered roots below, in the home-pile of sand and sawdust, rubber dollar bills, skin of machinery, the guts and innards of the weeping coughing car, the empty lonely tincans with their rusty tongues alack, what more could I name, the smoked ashes of some cock cigar, the cunts of wheelbarrows and the milky breasts of cars, wornout asses out of chairs & sphincters of dynamos--all these

entangled in your mummied roots--and you there standing before me in the sunset, all your glory in your form!

A perfect beauty of a sunflower! a perfect excellent lovely sunflower existence! a sweet natural eye to the new hip moon, woke up alive and excited grasping in the sunset shadow sunrise golden monthly breeze!

How many flies buzzed round you innocent of your grime, while you cursed the heavens of the railroad and your flower soul?

Poor dead flower? when did you forget you were a flower? when did you look at your skin and decide you were an impotent dirty old locomotive? the ghost of a locomotive? the specter and shade of a once powerful mad American locomotive?

You were never no locomotive, Sunflower, you were a sunflower!

And you Locomotive, you are a locomotive, forget me not!
So I grabbed up the skeleton thick sunflower and stuck it at my side like a scepter, and deliver my sermon to my soul, and Jack's soul too, and anyone who'll listen,

--We're not our skin of grime, we're not our dread bleak dusty imageless locomotive, we're all beautiful golden sunflowers inside, we're blessed by our own seed & golden hairy naked accomplishment-bodies growing into mad black formal sunflowers in the sunset, spied on by oureyes under the shadow of the mad locomotive riverbank sunset Frisco hilly tincan evening sitdown vision.

Done

Well, sort of. I left two sections incomplete: a few paragraphs in the middle, and probably another 2-3 pages at the very end. But I have solid 48 pages, and that's enough to get good feedback from the reading group. I'll keep adding and revising tomorrow, get comments from the reading group on Tuesday, and then send off the completed first draft to my advisor by the end of Wednesday. He promises to get me comments within a week, at which point I'll meet with other members of my committee to get whatever feedback I can, and then it is off to the fellowship people on November 15.

I feel like I should have some eloquent thoughts on what it feels like to have basically completed my first chapter--as a friend just pointed out to me, I'm now 1/5 done with my dissertation! But...I feel too drained to be eloquent.

But not too drained to go sit in a coffeeshop, get a large cappuccino, and starting grading undergraduate papers about Beethoven's 9th. Life marches on.

The Final Push

Apologies to those whose emails I don't return, phone calls I don't pick up. By the end of today, I'm supposed to send out a draft of my first dissertation chapter to our department's reading group. I've got a lot written, but also lots of little spots to fix and loose ends to tie up.

I realized last night that it is not actually so strange that this chapter is so hard to put down on paper. Not only is it my first chapter, but it is an entire chapter devoted to one piece of music, a piece that is four and a half minutes long. And that four and a half minutes is, of course, four and a half minutes of silence. Fifty pages discussing four and a half minutes of silence? In retrospect, I can see why I'm having trouble wrangling prose together.

Treat Myself?

Amazon apparently has a low opinion of what it takes to make me happy.

Patti Page's Guide to Marriage

In honor of a friend of mine who just got engaged, I present Patti Page's "How to Be Married and Still Live Happily Ever After," from her amazing 1960 self-help book for teenage girls Once Upon a Dream. Which, of course, I own an autographed copy of. There are explanations after each of these tips, a few snippets of which I have included.

How to Be Married and Still Live Happily Ever After

1. Be feminine
("I read somewhere that sixty per cent of American husbands get their own breakfasts while their wives stay in bed. To me, this is a sign of trouble.")

2. Don't protest if your husband takes you for granted.
("I don't know why so many women take this as an insult. All it means is that your husband is comfortable with you, trusts you and never questions your loyalty to you...personally, I think it's one of the highest compliments a man can pay a woman.")

3. Don't meet your husband at the door each night with the story of YOUR day.

4. Control your jealousy.
("The one way to get a man to come home every night and want to stay there is simply to make your home the place where he enjoys himself the most.")

5. Don't be too interesting.
("I think you'll find, when you're married, that it isn't nearly so important for you to be interesting as it is to make your husband feel that he's interesting.)

6. Share something bigger than yourself with your husband.
("It's essential that you share some interest, hobby, career--anything to give you a common objective. Usually, of course, that something bigger than yourselves is children.")


Keep in mind, though, that Patti's husband was probably gay (Elvis's choreographer, c'mon!), and they divorced in 1972.

Ouch

Walking to my car today, I got stung by a bee on the bottom of my foot. I was wearing sandals, and I guess the bee flew between sandal and foot mid-stride, and his dying act before being squished was to sting me.

Also, I drove by the most amazing accident on the way home from school: on the curvey part of Sunset Blvd, the #2 bus was halfway up the hillside, about to tip over, and a fire hydrant was geysering water a good twenty feet into the air. Pretty impressive! It looked like a scene from Speed.

In more important news:

HowManyOfMe.com

There are: 53 people with my name in the U.S.A. How many have your name?

Bunny Cage

I discovered something today that made all the expense and hassle of this trip instantly worth it.

The nickname that Xenia Cage called her husband?

Bunny.

That's right, John Cage, the pillar of mid-century modernism and the stern, ascetic father of experimental music, was affectionately called "Bunny" by his wife, or "B" for short. Maybe that's why he left her for Merce Cunningham.*

Seriously, it has been a productive trip. I'm actually glad I made it so short, as the archives are much smaller than I expected. The correspondence from the 1950s fits in one thick manilla folder. I had no problem taking detailed notes about all of it in one solid day of work. And I was relieved to find that there was nothing too shocking--most of my ideas about Cage are still intact, only now I have lots of details and evidence to back those ideas up. So that's a good thing.

Cage is still so slippery for me though. The man was so, so careful never to reveal anything about his personal life. I have now been through five different archives related to Cage, and I still have little to grasp on to: the Wesleyan papers, which contain mostly correspondence and rough drafts relating to his books, the Virgil Thomson papers at Yale, and the M.C. Richards and David Tudor papers, both at the Getty. All of these collections are voluminous, and all are places where one would expect to find at least some correspondence from Cage that might be at least a little personal, and deal with at least a little of his private life. But, no. None to be found, so far. Lots of polite letters home to his parents, lots of business correspondence. The most revealing correspondence was a series of letters from Xenia to some friends back in San Francisco. I don't think it is a coincidence that these letters surfaced after Cage's death, and were connected people outside of Cage's immediate circle. Those who were close to Cage clearly protected his privacy--even in their own intimate letters to each other, such as in David Tudor's letters to M.C. Richards which discuss Cage in only the most oblique terms, even as they gossip about everyone else.

Interesting. Very interesting. I should probably stop before I blog my entire chapter! Tomorrow I will poke around a bit more, and than I am having lunch with my cousin who goes to school here. Then home, and the race to write this damn thing takes off in earnest.

* Lest I sound like one more Xenia-basher, I want to go on the record as saying that I find her to be utterly charming and fascinating. Why has nobody ever done any work on her?

My Bus Redeemer Liveth

The bus is a harsh mistress.

There is nothing worse than trying to use a public bus in a new city. No matter how prepared you are, no matter how many maps you study and internet planning thingys you consult, there will be some local custom that messes things up--especially if you are like me, and refuse to ask for help. A few years back, I was in Seattle to give a paper at a conference. Being my frugal graduate student self, I attempted to take a city bus from the airport to my hotel. Getting from the airport to downtown was easy, and I successfully boarded a second bus that looked like it should take me right by the hotel, up by the space needle. I had memorized the names of a few cross streets to look for, and as the bus made its way uptown, I carefully noted that people seemed to be pulling the stop cord in the normal fashion.

So when I saw one of my cross streets, I reached up and confidently pulled the cord, doing my best impression of a jaded Seattle-ite commuting home from a long day at work, albeit with a suitcase. As soon as I pulled, every single head in the bus swiveled around and looked at me like I was an alien. What had I done? Somebody had literally pulled the cord in the exact same manner one block earlier, and yet somehow, I had done something different that made me the object of bus-wide scorn.

About thirty minutes later, when the bus had, instead of stopping for me, made its way across a body of water, left the city, and seemed to be entering a forest, I sensed that perhaps I might be on an express. About forty-five minutes later it finally stopped, and everyone got off, looking at me sympathetically. I tried my best to pretend like I had intended to get off in Alaska, but soon had to slink across the street, still in full view of all the other passengers, to catch the bus coming back the opposite direction to Seattle.

Actually, the whole point of this post was to brag that today, en route to do some reasearch at Northwestern, I managed to navigate by public transportation from Midway Airport in Chicago to a cheap little motel in Niles, Illinois, via two subway lines and one suburban bus line. And this time, I pulled the cord, and the bus gracefully coasted to a stop right in front of my motel.

Query

Does anyone out there actually enjoy Clint Eastwood movies? I don't care how "good" they are. I'd see Wimbledon over Million Dollar Baby or Flag of Our Fathers any day.

Poetry Friday

When I was in ninth grade, a freshman in high school, I had an awakening. See, when I was a child, I read a lot. Kind of obsessively, really. When my mom used to take me to the library, I seem to remember that we had a rule that I could only check out a certain number of books at a time, because otherwise I was liable to check out dozens of books. And I still remember looking at the shelves in the children's section, and being really frustrated that there were no more books I hadn't read. If all else failed, I would go over to the handy World Book Encyclopedia my parents had bought, choose a volume, and sit down with a bowl of cereal and start reading.

But at some point in middle school, I stopped reading quite so much. Actually, maybe that's not true. But in craziness of being thirteen years old, reading stopped being such a fundamental part of my identity. I was making half-hearted attempts at being popular, I was learning to play the guitar, I was growing my hair long. Reading didn't overwhelm my life the way it used to.

In high school, tossed and turned by new people and new experiences, I felt a little bit of an identity crisis. And I soon realized that part of my problem was that I had fallen behind in my reading. So I went to the school library, and started looking for new stuff. I think the first book I picked up was Walden Pond, but soon I turned, like every other teenager in the world, to the Beats. Howl came first, I remember reading it aloud to myself in a corner of the library. Then On the Road and Dharma Bums, and the Viking Portable Beat Reader. Never really got into Burroughs for some reason.

So anyways, this is all to introduce the poem for this Poetry Friday. After reading Dharma Bums, I wanted to be Gary Snyder like nobody's business. I still have the copy of Turtle Island I bought in ninth grade, and this was my favorite poem from it. Blogger isn't letting me reproduce the spacing correctly unfortunately, but this'll do.

"Bedrock"

Snowmelt pond warm granite
we make camp,
no thought of find more.
and nap
and leave our minds to the wind.

on the bedrock, gently tilting,
sky and stone,

teach me to be tender.

the touch that nearly misses--
brush of glances--
tiny steps--
that finally cover worlds
of hard terrain.
cloud wisps and mists
gathered into slate blue
bolts of summer rain.

tea together in the purple starry eve;
new moon soon to set,
why does it take so
long to learn to
love,
we laugh
and grieve.

Venus in Fur

All the music blogs are talking about it:



------------
I think I need to explain to my non-musicological readers that "Venus in Fur" is a Velvet Underground song, which like most of the Velvet's stuff uses long drones. Like the kitten does, you see...nevermind.

------------
Second update: apparently, this video has removed from YouTube due to copyright violations. heh!

The Inevitable Dissertation Post

So, here's the thing about my dissertation. I would really like to write it in two years. This seems reasonable to me, and is in keeping with my department's time-to-degree expectations. Theoretically, this is supposed to be a five year program: two years of coursework leading to an MA, and one year of specialized coursework leading to a dissertation proposal and subsequent advancement to candidacy. I've managed to stick to this timeline, although the constant bureaucratic hurdles have not made it easy.

But that then leaves you two years to write your dissertation. Which sounds fine, but I have run into a complicating factor: ideally, one would like to have a fellowship for their last year of dissertation writing, so that you don't have to teach while you are finishing up and applying for jobs. For me, that would mean getting a fellowship for next year. However, fellowship applications are due in the fall and winter of the preceding year, i.e., now--the first one is due November 15. And these applications all require you to submit at least one completed chapter. To summarize, in my mind this means that if I want to finish in two years, I need to have completed a dissertation chapter by November 15, and it needs to be Good.

I am somewhat optimistic that I will be able to do this. I've done a lot of research, and have written a good chunk. I've given myself a November 1 deadline at which I need to have a fairly polished draft to distribute to committee members for revisions. I have two more research ends that need to be tied up, both of which will be hopefully solved next week with a quick trip to Chicago and a even quicker trip back to the Getty.

It means, though, that I need to write. A lot. And I am finding this difficult. The subject of this chapter is a topic that I have been working on since I was a junior in college. I wrote my undergraduate thesis on it. I have written several seminar papers on it. I have given several conference papers on it. I have published on it, I have been cited on it. I know this topic.

And yet, writing everything I know about this subject down, in the form of a dissertation chapter, is extraordinarily difficult. I am pulled in two different directions: on the one hand, I despair at fitting everything into one chapter, and mercilessly cut down excess points that seem tangential. On the other hand, I find myself questioning every single little point, checking every fact, re-thinking every argument, knowing that this time, above all, everything I write needs to be right in some fundamental way.

Phew. I can do this. I just need to stop thinking, and start writing. My goal is to write ten pages today. I'm hoping that by blogging this goal, I will have to stick to it!

In memorium

My family's cat, Timothy, passed away today. He was seventeen and a half years old.

Turtles and Puppies

I'm a little emo myself, having just dropped Mary off at the airport. But I have to say, this is indeed the saddest thing ever.

But if missing turtles make you sad, I have a solution. I was intending to show a cheer-inducing picture here of my family's dearly departed dog, Webster, as a puppy. But just as I was searching for a picture, I received an email from my father with the news that they just got a new puppy today!

Meet Cascade. Be sure to go to the second page of pictures, as there are some snapshots of Casey meeting our cat Timothy, who has outlived three dogs and is gunning for a fourth.

Poetry Friday-ish

Dr. Crazy has a tradition of posting a poem every Friday. I think I need more poetry in my life, so I'm going to to do that too, even though I'm already a day late!

This poem is by Frank O'Hara, and was written in 1958. I first read it as an undergraduate, having been assigned it by my favorite professor in a course on gay and lesbian history. It's a lovely poem, but also a beautiful political statement.

Ode: Salute to the French Negro Poets

from near the sea, like Whitman my great predecessor, I call
To the spirits of other lands to make fecund my existence

do not spare your wrath upon our shores, that trees may grow
upon the sea, mirror of our total mankind in the weather

one who no longer remembers dancing in the heat of the moon may call
across the shifting sands, trying to live in the terrible western world

here where to love at all’s to be a politician, as to love a poem
is pretentious, this may tendentious but it’s lyrical

which shows what lyricism has been brought to by our fables times
where cowards are shibboleths and one specific love’s traduced

by shame for what you love more generally and never would avoid
where reticence is paid for by a poet in his blood or ceasing to be

blood! Blood that we have mountains in our veins to stand off jackals
in the pillaging of our desires and allegiances, Aimé Césaire

for if there is fortuity it’s in the love we bear each other’s differences
in race which is the poetic ground on which we rear our smiles

standing in the sun of marshes as we wade slowly toward the culmination
of a gift which is categorically the most difficult relationship

and should be sought as such because it is our nature, nothing
inspires us but the love we want upon the frozen face of earth

and utter disparagement turns into praise as generations read the message
of our hearts in adolescent closets who once shot at us in doorways

or kept us from living freely because they were too young then to know what they would ultimately need from a barren and heart-sore life

the beauty of America, neither cool jazz nor devoured Egyptian heroes, lies in
lives in the darkness I inhabit in the midst of sterile millions

the only truth is face to face, the poem whose words become your mouth
and dying in black and white we fight for what we love, not are.

Judy and the Beach

According to my little Sitemeter widget, which tracks visitors to my blog, readership has blossomed to a whopping 33 unique visitors a day. Why is this? Is it the trenchant commentary on Beethoven, Kandinsky, and the perils of British horse farms? No, 90% of the visitors to my blog come here, apparently, by googling the phrase"What does Fergie's song London Bridge mean?", whereupon they are directed to my epic exegesis of said song, which unfortunately comes to no solid conclusions. Sorry kids. That, and a bunch of people doing image searches for Boston terriers are being directed here, for no reason I can fathom. Pablo does indeed look like a Boston terrier, but no pictures of Boston terriers are to be found here. Just one slightly loopy looking cat.

Anyways, today I tried to achieve the perfect day for an academic living in Los Angeles. That is, I attempted to combine, in one day, a trip to the beach, and a lecture by Judith Butler. The beach went great--we went to Will Rogers, and spent a happy two hours splashing around. Unfortunately, the equally important Judith Butler aspect of the day was unsuccessful, as the the lecture hall was so full we couldn't even get near the door. Apparently, the entire world is dying to hear Judy speak about "Sexual Politics, Torture, and the Secular." I did get up on my tip-toes and actually saw Butler (greyer hair than I expected), so I can at least now say that I've seen her. My friend who arrived earlier and made it inside the hall reported that the talk was great, even humorous. So I'm actually quite sorry to have missed it, especially given how awesome her recent work has been. Incidentally, did you know that Butler's first teaching job was at my alma mater? Forward-thinking institution that it was at the time, Wesleyan didn't think it prudent to offer the future Smartest Academic of the World a permanent position. But for a brief shining moment in the mid-eighties, it was possible to take her course "Philosophy of Sex" concurrently with Henry Abelove's course "History of Sex," with frequent campus visits from then-unknown Eve Sedgwick, who was up at UMass-Amherst adjuncting and finishing Between Men. My non-queer studies readers might not appreciate what that all means, but trust me--man, that would have been cool.

Finally, this evening, a trip to the theater. It's Mary's birthday in a week, so her mother got us tickets to see the LA production of Doubt as an early present (Thanks, Phoebe! Great seats!). I will let my more eloquent and theatrically-inclined roommate review the play when she goes to see it next week, but we both thought it was really terrific. Crisp and intense.

Enough for now. I've been a bad TA recently, so I need to go do the reading that I've been telling my kids to do. E.T.A. Hoffman on why Beethoven is his boyfriend. Tomorrow we're doing Ludwig's Piano Concerto No. 5, the "Emperor." Ironic footnote? I first performed this work when I was a last chair violist with the Oakland Youth Orchestra, circa 1996. The soloist was a young pianist in the area, who later went on to Juilliard, and is now... a classmate and friend of mine! Small world.

Goblins and Elephants

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wake Me Up, Before I Go-Go

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

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

London Bridge is Falling Down

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

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

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

and then,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ode to the Crab Tower

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

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

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

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

That is all.

Productivity of a Sort

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

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

Did anything turn up? Stay tuned for the dissertation!

Happiness is a Warm Laptop

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

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

Hegemony is Leaky, and So Are You

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

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

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

Sir Edward

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

Tragedy on the A1001

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

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

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

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

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

The Story of Catlips

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

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

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

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

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

Musicology in Action?

Who says musicology isn't relevant?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Barnet Thus Far

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

Newark Cat Blogging

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

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

Enjoy!



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

A Room with a View

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

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

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

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

Adirondack Bound

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

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

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

Hips Don't Lie

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Any other points to be drawn from this list?

The Gang

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

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