Super Bon!

Today, I answered my first query letter in French without running it through an automatic translator.

POST EDIT FOR CLARIFICATION: I have no idea how to type in French. I answered in English.

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As of tomorrow evening, I’m off to North Carolina again for the second time this month. This time, it’s a podcasting conference. Somehow, they dropped the question mark from my title. It’s supposed to be “From Broad to Pod?” and the answer is “no” but not for the reasons you might think. . . .

So tonight Carrie’s wallet was stolen while we dined at Basha on St. Catherine. Her bag was literally right next to the table the whole time. Someone was very tricky. There were a couple charges one credit card, but that was dispatched quickly and there was only $10 in the wallet, so it’s more PITA than anything else. Except that she really loved the wallet itself. It was the perfect wallet for her. Oh well, back to Winners to dig through the pile of wallets. Things I learned helping Carrie replace her wallet:

1. Quebec is apparently used to this: they have a service where you can replace your driver’s licence and health card all at once.

2. It’s a good idea not to carry around your social insurance card.

3. It’s strangely satisfying to know the thief only got 10 bucks in cash out of the whole deal. Well, they also scored free metro rides for a week.

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In other news, what’s up with Hollywood scriptwriting? We went and saw the new Jodie Foster vehicle tonight (har har) and earlier in the week did the NIcolas Cage one. Granted, we’re talking B movies on A budgets, but good lord, they spend so much on special effects, you’d think they could afford a half decent script. You could chalk it up to the whole writing by committee thing, but then there are a LOT of well-written shows on TV now. I think that’s why I like television better than movies. Except at the movies it’s dark, loud and suffuses my visual field.

This blog entry is brought to you by my intense desire not to clean my workspace, which I badly need to do in order to make further progress on my talk for next week. It’s one of those things: I think I’m just getting on top of all these administativa and my seminar is going well, and then I take a look around my workspace and think “holy shit what a mess!”

The thing I hate about cleaning is paper. I have so much of it, and no matter how I try to organize it, it is never organized enough, there is never the right place for the right document. And so the paper accumulates and then eventually gets in the way. It’s well documented that the electronic fantasy of the paperless office has actually led to the proliferation of paper in knowledge-work work spaces, of which professors’ offices and home offices are a part.

Anyway, here’s the before picture. Take it as metonymic for my experience of September.

The Smoking Section, which I was reading just before I decided to break the silence here. Warning: it’s exquisitely written but also pretty raw. She’s having a rough life these days.

I’ll update with an “after” picture when there is one.

Saturday night, we got dinner with two friends, who’d taken the liberty of buying us tickets to the very entertaining Kiss My Cabaret for afterward. KMC turns out to be a lot funnier than the old performance art revue Balls that we attended several times long ago when we lived in Minneapolis. I remember Balls as occasionally brilliant and as taking itself very seriously. KMC was more, well, raucous. Of course it was bilingual and I got lost a few times, but when the two Catholic ladies described the priest’s sex ed class for boys, I got the idea.

Sorry to be so absent lately. September is the new February. By that I mean it is now the busiest month of the year for me, as February once was. A lot has to do with various fellowship and university deadlines, but some of it is also my fault. After all, I am inbetween the first and second of two trips to Durham.

I have much to report, a little time at the moment, but here are some highlights:

Those books I was going to read? If you like ethnographies, they’re awesome. Beautifully written and very interesting. I said this at the conference last week, and I really do believe it: we’re on the cusp of something big in music studies. A generation ago, people like Steve Feld, Simon Frith, John Shepherd, Larry Grossberg Richard Leppert, and Susan McClary (slightly later) were getting tenure and setting up their shops. Now, we’ve got a whole new set of people installed in positions where they can help shape music study from outside the establishment mentality of musicology. People at the conference were reticent about naming, but if “The New Musicology” got a name, I don’t see why a diverse group of music scholars now couldn’t also. Unfortunately, I don’t have a name. But there is some kind of ferment that is crossing ethnomusicology, anthropology (the two fields most heavily represented at the conference–I was perhaps the only person who didn’t use “ethnography” to describe how I understand my method), popular music studies, communication studies, literature, sociology, history, and several other fields. In addition to all the sound studies stuff (and perhaps that’s the topic for another blog), it seems that there’s a group of scholars now working on what I’ll call non-elite musics who are either bringing in fresh questions, or bringing fresh perspectives on questions that music studies people thought had been done to death (like authenticity, an issue I thought was dead and pointless until I read Aaron Fox’s book). All this is to say that my conference was great and very edifying. The Saturday night concert also featured the hardest rocking triangle playing I have ever seen. I am not being melodramatic.

On my way out of Durham on Sunday, I met up with my friend Jj who works part time at a music store in Chapel Hill. I wound up stopping by to “see” the store, specifically to get a demo of how you can use the control voltage on a Moogerfooger low-pass filter to control any of a number of parameters on the phaser. Which is, simply put, sweet. But while there, I happened by the instrument room and fell in love with a ukulele. Technically it’s a tenor, which makes it bigger, but I’m trying to learn a new chord a day. It’s a very modern instrument — plastic body, synthetic strings, polycarbonate neck. Wood front though. The tone is actually great. Mine looks like the green one in the picture below:

I’ve got to run now (this entry has been written in snippets all day) but the only way to get back into the posting thing is to post. To those of you whom I owe an email — sorry! I’ll write soon.