Super Bon!

Another couple weeks, another fix of Twenty-Four.

Carrie now leads 10-3-3.

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Most Winter Olympics Sports look silly to me. I’m sure it’s my own limitations.

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Cache is a very engaging and disturbing allegory about colonialism. It has some cliche to it, especially the idea that you can never get beyond certain traumas, but overall it’s amazingly well done. We tried to see it at the Ex Centris (love buying the tix there) but discovered that they don’t do English subtitles for French films. D’oh! A cabride later we caught it at the Forum. This movie was way beyond my French skills, though if you don’t know the French for “nothing” you will after you see this movie.

It also continues my streak of awesome mise-en-scene.

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Thought we’d pick up some Giorgio Agamben for vacation reading but everyone’s all out. I guess he’ll be waiting when I get back. The Open was great on my Netherlands trip. Now it’s time for States of Exception and Homo Sacer.

Someone just sent me a link to This is a record. Extremely cool.

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Tet’s home and more or less himself, all things considered. We’ll know more in a few days when the biopsy comes back.

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In the comments to the last post, Amy mentioned that with the recently Conservative victory, she misses Canada a little less. Perhaps, but they haven’t accomplished anything yet and Stephen Harper appears to be enjoying the shortest honeymoon in the world history of elected executives. At least I’m enjoying that it was so short!

Sorry it’s been so quiet here all week. Our cat Tetrys is very sick and the vet detected a lump on Tuesday (this has nothing to do with the whole “I’m radioactive” scenario last summer). He survived today’s exploratory surgery (we weren’t sure he would) but it’s now 5 days of waiting on a biopsy. He’ll be home sometime in the next few days. The whole thing’s very sad, emotionally draining really and contrary to appearance of confession on this blog (and the genre in general), I don’t feel like writing much about it. At least not now.

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I do feel like writing short takes on two other topics, so here we go.

–The cartoon scandal. I’d originally hoped to get together a Bad Subjects oped, but it’s not happening right now. The whole thing is a textbook case of the liberal free speech scenario presented in John Durham Peters’ Courting the Abyss. Peters writes that liberalism’s enchantment with free speech is essentially satanic in that liberalism derives its nobility from hanging out with objectionable characters. The moral crediblity comes from, essentially, “tolerating” morally in-credible speech in order to sanctify the virtue of free speech itself. So basically, you have a Danish* newspaper doing a very stupid thing by running cartoons of Mohammed for no good reason, and a bunch of people who are not hailed by the discourse of liberalism getting extremely pissed off. There has been some spectacularly bad editorializing in the Globe & Mail by Rex Murphy and others arguing that this proves how uncivilized and “different from us” the Muslim world is. Let’s see what happens when Danish newspapers start running caricatures of Jesus. Already, the Joint Chiefs of Staff are complaining about a cartoon featuring Donald Rumsfeld which might pass as a caricature, but from the sound of it stikes me as grounded in reality. None of this excuses violence around the world in response to the cartoons. That is inexcusable and I have no patience for religious absolutism of any kind. My point is simply that the same kinds of reactions are just as available in the “west” as they are elsewhere. And free speech for the sake of free speech is not very free at all.

–what’s up with nationalism here? It has been a topic on my mind lately (partly beause we’re doing the whole nations-and-media imagined communities thing in my undergrad class, or rather just did), but Canada is really the only place I’ve ever been where leftists put forward earnestly nationalist discourse — both Anglophones and Francophones. Maybe I don’t travel to the right places, but it’s just a bit weird. Of course, in the U.S., where nationalism is so clearly articulated to the slaughter of thousands and thousands of innocent people, the objection is more obvious. But still.

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* I am totally embarassed that I originally typed “Dutch” as Denmark and the Netherlands are REALLY different places. I’m going to chalk it up to sleep deprivation.

Yes, I know the homepage looks funny. It’s one of those things that happens when you’re trying to work out a content management system and upgrade the site’s capabilities. More anon.

Well, I’m back from a wonderful trip to NYU. My hosts were outstanding, the students were a lot of fun, and I always find it gratifying to give talks in music departments. I presented a section on the history of psychacoustics and people seem to really be getting it. I also find that presenting something 2-3 times really solidifies it in my mind.

Cliche time: while I wouldn’t want to live in New York, it sure is a nice place to visit. One of the things I noticed on this trip is the way that people refer to NY, especially to Manhatten as simply “The City.” No further designation is needed. This is classic NY parochialism, but it’s so effortless as to be kind of charming.

NYU is right in Greenwich Village, which means that there is an amazing amount of stuff going on there. I had several stupendous vegetarian meals, and also revelled in the book shopping. Not surprisingly, almost all the faculty I spoke with went on at great length about their love for the place. The NYU buildings I entered somehow fit with the mental image of “a building in New York” that I developed as a child when we’d visit my grandparents. Not too brightly lit but not exactly dark, smallish rooms, but also with a mild labyrinthine quality to them. The hotel was in the finance district and kind of lame, but it wasn’t NYU’s fault — the place was undergoing renovations so I’m sure the troubles were temporary.

In addition to book shopping at Shakespeare and St. Marc’s (I love Labyrinth most, but not on this trip), I went over Williamsburg, which I gather is a part of Brooklyn. There’s a store there called Main Drag Music. I was on a quest to experience this item:

which is a bizarre signal processor unlike any other ever heard. Unfortunately, the guy who makes them is burnt out and there’s a 6-9 month waiting list. On the phone, I was told I could come play with the floor model. When I got there, it turns out that this was a bigger issue than they originally let on. So no PLL for me on this trip. I did get to try some other pedals that the same guy made, and some other wonderful flavors of bass distortion. I am especially fond of this pedal:

which basically takes an already fuzzed-out sound and uses crossover distortion to make it sound like the world is slowly being ripped in half. On bass, anyway. The full explanation is here. Schumann and ZVex are IMO two of the most creative outfits in the business when it comes to designing new signal processors. They’re like luthiers who find whole new ways to build an instrument.

Anyway, I didn’t mean to get swept up in gear fetishism, but rather to tell you a bit about my walk through Williamsburg, which conveniently isn’t on any of the tourist maps of New York. It’s the kind of place that’s doing well enough for a bustling business district, but every single window has bars over it. And it also has the highest concentration of Hasidic Jews that I’ve ever seen. I actually felt like I was in some kind of video game — every time I came around a corner, Hasidic Jews would be stationed on one or another part of the street. Except I didn’t really want to shoot any of them. Anyway, I began to wonder if in some strange cosmic loop, I’d happened upon the geographical source of the crazy little boxes we’d get once a year in the Talmud Torah from the Lubavichers. I don’t even remember what was in them except that they were supposed to be a big deal and were always a disappointment. But hey, I was a kid.

Tucked away amongst signs of Hasidic life and working class commerce are the signs of gentrification — a “luxury condo” unit going up here, a boutique used furniture store there. It’s still more tacqueria and barber shop than fashion boutique and bistro, but it is definitely changing. I wish I’d had time to stick around and see more, but I had to get back to NYU for an afternoon lunch appointment.

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I am giddy with excitement about the Super Bowl tomorrow. It is an official holiday in our house. Though I’d better get that French homework done in the AM.

First, to a brilliant post by Dave Noon.

Second, to a History of the GEO. I was working on my opening lines for NYU this morning and went looking for my own grad union’s history and there is was. It took us 10 years from start to recognition, and I was involved Fall of 1993-Spring of 1999. So I left not Illinois not knowing whether our efforts would ever come to fruition. I should write something about that whole project, but for now, the official history will have to do.