Super Bon!

So I just got through watching my first ever debate among candidates for Prime Minister. After years of American debates, I noticed quite a few differences.

1. The candidates had books in front of them. They looked stuff up. They read. I’m sure it was mostly stuff for staying on message, but this was actually the most striking feature for me. One of the important implications is that they all know how to read. Better than the U.S. already.

2. The questions were pretty good and sometimes a bit confrontational.

3. None of the candidates is particularly charismatic or telegenic, despite John Doyle’s declaration that Steven Harper best understands TV. Despite the NDP’s left policies, Jack Layton is a-n-n-o-y-i-n-g.

4. I found myself agreeing with different parties at different times.

5. The liberal and conservative leaders started out the debate ignoring the NDP and the Bloc, but by the end, they were forced to engage.

When I’m more awake, I’d like to blog about how people discuss the 3rd and 4th parties here, which is interestingly different from the discourse around Nader (or Perot, for that matter) in the U.S.

—*—

In other news:

–a reprint of my Sounds Like the Mall of America essay just appeared in Jennifer Post, ed., Ethnomusicology: A Contemporary Reader (New York: routledge 2005).

–I’ve complained in this space about finding time to keep up on my reading of “finished” prose — ie published books and articles. Since school has started again, I’m getting in bed a little earlier and reading academic books. It sounds odd, but it’s really nice. My head is clear, I know I don’t have to do anything else, and I’m able to plow through lots of prose. Granted, I don’t plan to tackle the new translation of Being and Time while under the covers and enjoying some music, but for most books, it seems to work and I’m working through stuff at a faster clip. I’m dogearing pages and sections I like so I can go back to them, and I’m going to keep a small pad of paper by the bed. Plus, I’m tiring of my magazines. At least at bedtime.

Book of the moment: Mark Katz, Capturing Sound. It’s telescopic, but in a good way. I particularly like the chapter on violin vibrato, which is what I imagine everyone says. Recently digested: Aden Evans Sound Ideas and Cary Nelson and Stephen Watt Office Hours. Next up: Kamberelis and Dimitriadis On Qualitative Inquiry. I’m going to make a dent in that shelf.

—*—

Belated Props: I love the last two paragraphs of Darin Barney’s review of The Dance of Molecules

Furby Bending Tutorial – Circuit Bent Furbies.

It’s the redecorating that does it for me.

So here’s an article from yesterday in The Globe and Mail: An iPod can’t rock the house that starts out talking about how the iPod revolutionized “our” (1) lives except that it turns out that the iPod had nothing to do with it. Noting declining sales of stereo components, the author then goes on the make all sorts of generalizations about why it is that it’s o difficult to buy CD players anymore (and why sales of component stereo systems are declining). Except they’re not really. What’s hot in audio right now is the home theater concept. And so your local consumer electronics warehouse is going to have a gazillion different 5.1 systems to choose from, and the DVD player (which also plays CDs) is cheaper than the CD player which does not play DVDs. The author knows this. What fool would pay for a CD player when the DVD player, which is already hooked up to the stereo, also plays CDs? Don’t even get me started about the article’s coverage of audiophiles.

Now, the author is right that perhaps the experience of just sitting and paying attention to music is on decline, though it had been for a long time before iPod appeared. And yet, if someone wanted to do that today, his or her budget home system would probably sound better, more expansive, deeper, and more lush than a comparably-priced system at any prior moment in the history of hi-fi. The difference is that people who didn’t have hi-fi systems now sometimes want home theaters. The other difference is advances in speaker design since the 1970s thaks to readily-available computer modelling programs. People who couldn’t have huge speakers for a variety of reasons can now have good-sounding small speakers.

And so, once again, I find ephochal reflections on the iPod’s historical significance more than a bit overstated. It’s an artifact, not a cause. Though I’m sure the coverage is good for Apple’s stock price.

Before making New Year’s Resolutions, I find it useful to reflect on the things I wanted to accomplish in 2005 and didn’t. Sure, I got a lot done, but not always what I thought I wanted to get done.

1. Exercise

So a few years back we got this monster treadmill to make it easier to exercise. As in, you don’t have to leave home. It faces the TV and the stereo, so there’s the possibility of entertainment. And yet, somehow, once fall got serious, it was usually the first to go. Since my parents left, I’ve been on it every day. That’ll be a week tomorrow. Will give it a shot again for winter term.

2. Writing

Some scholars struggle to write. Not me. But I struggled to find time to write. And so the book, the book that I dreamed of finishing in summer 2004 (when I was moving) summer 2005 (when I was recovering from moving) is now entering 2006. I’d like to have a draft by the end of April, which means a strict regimen of writing for 30 minutes to an hour a day, 5 days a week, with more when I can. I kept waiting for days away from the office to get writing done last term, and it just didn’t happen after September. December I got to write a short essay, but it wasn’t for the book. Luckily, I have no other deadlines looming, apart from nonwriting obligations.

3. Reading

I think I’ve mentioned it in this blog before, but the ability to read finished, polished material appears to be inversely proportional to one’s level of success as a scholar. I read all the time, but it’s been a neverending stream of book manuscripts, journal article manuscripts, grant applications, letters of recommendation, student papers, theses, etc. etc. My new idea? Disappear to the library at least once a week. We’ll see if it happens, but it sure would be nice.

4. All sense of proportion

These are two tickets to a Canadiens/Florida hockey game scheduled for the 1st of November. We bought them in advance, along with tickets to a Canadiens/Leafs exhibition game, which was a blast. We were looking forward to the game. But we forgot to go. At some point on November 3rd or 4th, we are sitting, exhausted in front of TV and Carrie looks over at me from the couch. She’s sprawled there and I’m laid out on the recliner. She looks over and says “weren’t we supposed to go to a hockey game?” I look back at her in horror. We get out the tickets. I’d like to say there was much cursing and stomping of feet, but we were both resigned to it. OVer $100 down the tubes and no hockey game for us. We’ll do better next year.

—

So my New Year’s Resolutions?

1. Get a grip.

2. Go for that six weeks off thing I blogged about before. My hypothesis: I can take the extra time off with no noticeable drop in productivity (to the contrary, more headspace may mean more writing and reading gets done — I’m going to take books on vacation, after all), other than not being available for meetings at certain times during the summer. We’ll see how that goes, and if I actually manage to take six weeks off.

It’s been awhile, but yesterday’s firing of Mike Tice from the head coach position at Minnesota has been a long time coming. Yes, Tice was loved by the players and appeared to be a nice guy. Too bad he could never sustain winning through a whole season.

In other news, the fantasy football season is over, now that the NFL playoffs are beginning. Our handpicked team, the Chats Radioactifs, went 7-7 after being 7-4 and in second place. I’d fire myself except that wouldn’t make much sense, now would it? There were injuries, too, like Donovan McNabb, which dropped our QB numbers considerably. On the other hand, our team where the compute rhandled the draft, The Deterritorializers (cmon, don’t you think deterritorialization would hurt? anyway, it was an academic league) won us a championship, as the cheesey screenshot below demonstrates. Adding sweetness to the victory is that the team we beat in the championship was to that point undefeated and cocky, though there were many weeks where other teams scored more points than they did — just not whatever team they were playing.

Good lord there’s a lot of advertising on that site.

Today was supposed to be my last day of mixing over break, but I have finally freaked out and decided to start working again. I’ll do some music tonight, though. Sigh. The good news is that there are only two songs left.

Tomorrow, an assessment of 2005, plans for 2006, and a very brief photo essay.

Courtesy the Church Sign Generator. Apparently, they are getting a lot of complaints about offensive church signs. Shocking, really.

Now, I’m off to have some fun.

That was quite a week with my parents here. We didn’t really do internet stuff until the last couple days. I set up a blog for Phil on blogspot and showed him how to use it (lesson 2 will be blockquotes, links, and italics) and spent some time with my mom explaining how to browse (as opposed to searching through google), why she should use Firefox, and how to bookmark her favorite sites. So no time for a guest entry for her.

Mostly, though, we hung out and talked, which is what makes their visits so nice. Both of them were quite interested in the sovereignty question so we talked about that a lot (Phil, being from the south, immediately wanted to compare the local feeling with that of the confederacy), but we talked about all manner of things. Some other events of interest:

–We went to the Pointe-a-Calliere (sorry, still don’t know how to do accents on my Mac while in WordPress), which they loved. At one point, my mom sat down to rest on a bench next to the tour guide. They began chatting and he asked where they were staying. When she said on Frontenac, his got a serious look on his face and said something to the effect of “don’t worry, it’s not dangerous over there anymore.” And then proceeded to talk about how it used to be the worst neighborhood in Montreal, sex workers walking the streets, etc. Later, my mom said that any woman who was willing to walk our hill for the trade deserved whatever she could earn.

–We got to see our apartment in a different light as well, since my mom has had both knees replaced but still has trouble with one. Turns out that those steps in the bathroom make it not all that accessible. On the other hand, if you have joint pain, apparently our futons are great to sleep on. I think I’ll try it next time I throw out my back. Actually, many parts of the city aren’t very accessible. I was very glad that we didn’t rent a place with an outdoor staircase, for instance.

–On the same subject, my mom uses a cane and we jaywalked on St. Denis at one point. Drivers actually slowed down. I told her when I do that by myself, I could swear that the drivers speed up.

–Carrie got her Christmas dinner with a crowd (I think there is a guest post coming on the subject — we had a small ground of people over) and even got to go shopping on boxing day. I’d never been in the Bay before (Phil, my stepdad, was just interested in the fact that the Hudson’s Bay Company still existed) and, well, yes. It’s a big department store.

–On the museum front, we were both underwhelmed by the McCord, though again my parents liked it. There were some nice displays, but I was just looking for. . .well. . .more.

–Over the course of the visit, we watched three Quebec movies. Barbarian Invasions was, as everyone says, outstanding. Though after all that people have said about how it critiques the Quebec health system, I expected it to be a lot worse than it actually was. Decline of the American Empire seems like a warmup for Barbarian Invasions, but seeing them on consecutive nights and in reverse order takes the wind out a bit. All the conversation seemed like more of the same. Memoirs Affectivs was just lame. It tried to be all mystical and confusing, but it just wound up being mystical and cofusing, instead of cool and profound.

–I was reminded that I come by my love of dessert honestly.

–Last night, after dropping my parents off at the airport, we went to a Chanukah dinner, where in addition to learning all sorts of other wonderful local lore, I learned that the majority of synogogues in Montreal are Orthodox (apparently, this is fairly normal in Canada, whereas in Minneapolis where I grew up it was all Conservative and Reformed congregations, with just a few Orthodox) and that much of their membership is made up of nonpracticing Jews. No wonder the Jewish estabilshment is so politically conservative. All the money’s going to the right-wing elements of the religion. But that’s for another post sometime.