Okay, it’s not in French and it’s not Quebec-specific. And yet, scenes from the new show Portlandia do remind me of Montreal. –You can go to clown school. Check. –Where young people go to retire. Check. –Obsession with where food came from. Check. –High hipster quotient. Check. We spent just over 24 hours in Portland …
Author Archives: Jonathan Sterne
A little cancer reading for you
S. Lochlann Jain, “Be Prepared,” in Jonathan Metzl and Anna Kirkland (eds.), Against Health, NYU Press, 2010. See also some of the other offerings on her page.
Shhh!
It turns out that sabbatical is not all that conducive to blogging. I’d left Montreal assuming I’d get so much done with all this time on my hands, and I’d be recounting all sorts of exciting things that have been happening in California, finishing the book in no time flat, undertaking several music projects and …
Profs and Students: Read Your Contracts!
I know I keep harping on this, but someone has to. I was just asked to sign a contract for something I’m doing which defined my work as “work for hire.” This is becoming more and more common not only in publication boilerplates, but in others kinds of things professors do in the normal course …
Incomplete Theses on Audio Aesthete-ism: Beginnings of a Rant
1. One or two generations ago refined taste in music meant familiarity with a fairly limited (and stable, learnable) Western concert music repertoire. Today that refinement is reflected through a carefully cultivated, willfully eclectic cosmopolitanism. The déclassé listener likes or understands only one genre of music or a limited genre of music. Even apprentice aesthetes …
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1111: we live in an era where dates have interesting numeric sequences
For the first time probably since childhood, I didn’t stay up to see the years turn over. There’s nothing spectacular about that decision — just a mix of jet lag, just getting back from Minnesota and that our main social event around the new year happens to be today instead of last night. Though I …
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Things you can’t do in the winter climates I’m used to:
Go swimming outdoors, after work, in the rain and in the dark. In the middle of December. Well, you could. But it might not be very safe.