Super Bon!

Today we walked from our apartment to the Pullman Bar, which is on Parc just north of Sherbrooke. Took about an hour, which by extrapolation means that it would take about an hour an 20 minutes door to door to walk from the apartment to my office. At least if we go through Parc Lafontaine. It was, notably, the first “walk” of the season and of course Carrie and I loved it, saying things like “we should do this all the time during the summer.” Which is of course predicated on our forgetting what it’s like to take an hour long walk in 30 degree humid weather (that’s celsius for you kids below the border).

I also learned today that British soccer (ahem “football”) teams (are they even called teams?) don’t have a draft. They sign players as early as 14. How could it actually be worse than major American sports franchises? But it is.

Yesterday I learned that my knowledge of Canadian history has significantly surpassed that of my students after conversations with two particular smart and well-trained students during my office hours. For some reason, I thought that it was different here. In the U.S., I was always comfortable with the fact that I knew more American history than most of my students, since history is not taught often or well in public schools. But somehow, with all the projects around cultural preservation, promotion and protection here, I thought Canadian nationalism required a certain consciousness of Canadian history. Apparently, it does not. I’m still glad I know the history, though.

Coda: just now, I was sitting in the kitchen with Carrie as she was potting two new plants (she misses gardening). She turned to me and said “plants have balls.” It turns out they do. Some of them, at least.

On Friday night, I discovered the Freesound Archive while looking for various sound effects to include in a recording Carrie and I were making (which will eventually become part of the first installment of the podcast). It’s a pretty awesome resource, so I thought I’d post a link here. There has always been a small but steady market for sound effects records and CDs, but this one has a certain kind of DIY charm. For instance, a bunch of different people set up microphones in their bathrooms and recording the sound of their toilets flushing, so if you ever need a “toilet flush” you have a royalty-free range of sounds to choose from.

Somehow in that description is an allegory about what makes the internet great.

. . . Radio Super Bon for the podcast. By far the most popular by email and in the comments column. The first real installments will be up soon.

Here’s a description of what it actually takes for a speaker from another country to come to a campus in the U.S. and deliver a lecture for which he or she receives an honorarium. I avoid these inconveniences since I’m a U.S. citizen, but I have stories from colleagues. Just another way that the American academy is in danger of becoming more insular than it already is.

T.A. Spotted At Bar

V for Vendetta was a very entertaining movie. In its hit-you-over-the-head-with-message Hollywood way. It’s like the Wachowski Brothers knew they really screwed the pooch on the Matrix sequels and they were sorry. They wanted to show us they were really sorry. So they made a good movie.

It has the basic same theme as the original Matrix, where our protagonists live in a fascist state and through a number of trials come to consciousness to free themselves from the shackles of oppression. But there’s a little more of a collectivist and revolutionary take on this one. It’s been years since I read the comic book er, graphic novel but it seems to follow the novel closely enough. They resist the Hollywood temptation to unmask the male hero and all that, and he really is a bit of a crazy vengeful terrorist. For a fuller review, see KDD’s post on the matter.

As for me, I would like to say that more profound movies “make me think” like Clooney’s attempt to inspire press heroism in Good Night and Good Luck, which I just showed a bit of to my students to illustrate Lynn Spigel’s discussion of the difference between academic history and popular memory. But it’s V for Vendetta that gets me wondering what it would take for people to rise up against the Bush administration. Fascism is still our primary artistic and political vocabulary for representing evil on a national or global scale. Terrorism only works for some people as a trope, and it lacks the visual style of fascism for comic books and films (consider the clausterphobic world of Munich for instance against the lavish color and giant TV screens of V for Vendetta).

But the really frightening thing is what the Bush administration has turned the United States into — at least in the places where its military goes. All things considered, Americans themselves don’t live under anything approaching fascism, no matter how much we want to denounce the Bush administration’s trampling of civili liberties and human rights. No, their particular brand of evil is particularly acute off of American soil. And it lacks a good historical label like “fascism” or “terrorism.” The ironic inflection of “war on terror” only hints at what it is, what it ought to be named. We don’t have a word for the evil that comes when a sole superpower decides it can do whatever it wants on other coutries’ soil, and we don’t have a visual style for that, but I could imagine someday in the future, in some other country, where the visual vocabulary for evil, for terror, draws on the iconography of Bush’s executive branch.

I feel a Bad Subjects editorial coming on.

That title’s for my friends to the south. The flakes are big, fluffy and beautiful — they are drifing by the window as I type — and there isn’t much accumulation (at least not yet). Oh, and the snow means it’s getting warmer.

Today is a miscellaneous post.

Our car got vandalized last week. Someone came and smashed the hell out of the driver’s side mirror. Carrie thinks it was just to break it. I thought the damage looked like they wanted to take it. Yes, I know that rhymes. But given the number of people we know in the Plateau who’ve had their places or cars broken into, this seems relatively minor. We both found it more annoying than anything else, as long as there isn’t someone out there who’s got something in for our car, specifically. I guess we’ll see now that we just dropped $250 on getting the mirror replaced.

Missed Lectures

Here’s a link to the Mossman Lecture by Isabelle Stengers which I had really, honestly intended to attend. Note that the first few minutes are introduction, which you can skip. I’d arranged my travel schedule so as not to conflict with her visit, but unfortunately, the date of her visit got changed and I didn’t notice or something and so here I was all planning for it and instead my trip to Princeton coincided with her arrival. Happily, I can watch the video of the talk now, and so can you. I’ve missed too many lectures and parties this year due to travel. Of course, the trips have all been great, but I need to strike a different balance in coming years.

Twenty-Four Update

Carrie 19
Mystery Guest* 7
Me 6

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* NEW GAME! Who is the mystery guest? Clue #1: he’s not from Canada or the U.S.