Super Bon!

is a movie about time travel. I love movies that mess with time, either in a science fiction way or even just in their narrative presentation. Primer is one of the best in the genre, and to top it all off, it was made for $7000 (of course, that figure doesn’t include the cost of prints), which just goes to show that it is still possible to make good science fiction without a lot of special effects. Last night, Carrie and I watched the movie for the second time in two nights. It has the virtue of being short, true, but the reason we watch is to figure out the time stuff. It is confusing and convoluted. I even went poking around the web for an explanation and the written explanations don’t make much sense. By the end of the second viewing, we were starting to get it, but we had to pause the DVD, backtrack and discuss a couple times. I would love to see the storyboard for it.

Or maybe just not blogging enough. After my big declarations about being a full time audio engineer, I’ve been back at work for “the man” for the past couple days to catch up with some promises I’d made long ago. Such is my lot. Mixing will resume on Thursday or Friday, by which time my permission codes for a tasty new reverb plugin should have arrived.

I have been trying to think of something profound to say about the London bombings, but I’ve got nothing. Here’s a Bad Subjects editorial on them, though.

Bienvenue a Quebec

or so said the post-it note on the letter we got from Quebec immigration last week. We have officially received our certificates of selection, which means that we probably are about halfway through the process or a little further. They didn’t even interview us, though we had to have a friend sign for us. All that’s left is for us to be fingerprinted, to write to the FBI and State Police, take a couple medical exams, and of course about $3000 later and we should have permanent residency by this time next year if not sooner. I’m psyched.

I also learned last week, and a cursory web search seems to confirm this, that it is no longer the case that becoming a Canadian citizen endangers one’s American citizenship, unless the person deliberately renounces his or her US citizenship (nb: this is a very bad idea and makes people at the consulate very angry). It would be nice to be able to vote here. . . .

Blogxiety, or a Meta-Note

It occasionally weighs on my mind that this blog is public, under my own name, and on my own professional website. A Friday op-ed in Chronicle of Higher Education(1) basically casts bloggers as shallow, unprofessional or out and out stupid (granted that yes, if you blog under your own name about your job search, maybe the search committee will be pissed off and maybe your are stupid). In general, I think a lot of academics, like a lot of people, have a hostility to the genre if they’re not particularly comfortable with the ‘net, or not familiar with the wide range of blogs out there.(2) It’s not unique to me — my friend Kim Dot Dammit expressed a similar anxiety earlier today. Granted, her blog is way more confessional than mine but I think we’re on the same continuum.(3) While I will cop to some personal foibles now and then, you won’t find me airing out my colleagues’ dirty laundry or disclosing personal secrets (like the real identity of “anonymous football fan”). And still, since I don’t fancy myself an amateur journalist (that’s amateur musician and engineer thankyouverymuch) , there’s going to be an element of banality to the writing, especially since I pretty much only read blogs by my friends. It is probably weird that such a blog appears on my professional website.

But then, I’m a real person. I guess that’s the whole point to the blog, to my (granted, sorely-in-need-of-updating) music page, and a variety of other parts of my site. It does suggest that something important is changing about self-presentation among academics in the humanities at least. I’ve tended to be against the neverending expansion of informality in the university that masks power relationships where they remain and where they are relevant. But this, this is something different again.

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1. The one publication that does more to profit off job market anxiety in the humanities than any other.

2. The notion of blogging as self-indulgence or aggrandisement, or worse, as existing in a zero-sum relationship with other writing, is particularly noxious.

3. Interestingly, Kim made the very conscious decision to blog under an alias awhile back and still has this concern. I also notice that most of the grad student bloggers in AHCS blog under aliases. Probably a good idea if you’re going to be confessional.

Not that we didn’t all know that, but as Carrie and I were driving east along the southern beltway today, we passed a train that had huge cars for transporting liquid — you know, the kind they use for oil — all labelled “corn syrup” or “corn sweetener.” The train just went on and on and on. It was definitely more corn syrup in one place than I’d ever seen before.

I am having some difficulty making sense of the experience.

Last night was my first foray to the jazzfest, to listen to the “jazz” of Toronto’s DoMakeSayThink. They put on a great show, playing mostly their rockers. It hit me at one point, when they had 10 people onstage at once, that the whole “huge band with hangersabout and friends” thing which has gotten so much press is basically what Parliament-Funkadelic has been doing for years. It looks very similar — lots of switching of instruments, different people coming along for different performances (I remember on P-Funk show at a parking garage where the sign said “Bootsy Collins will not be appearing tonight. No refund”). The point is that when it happens in rock, it’s hailed as revolutionary. I dunno. Maybe, ideologically speaking, rock is a more individualistic than funk or hip-hop so it’s a big deal that way — but I’m not ready to concede that.

Anyway, it was a great show and now I can say I went to the Jazz Fest. Which is important. I’ve had the following conversation with locals several times over the past few days:

Them: “Been to the jazzfest?”
Me: “No. [Insert excuse here.]”
Them: “Yeah, well, it’s not that great anyway. The free shows are usually kind of boring and really crowded. But the pay shows are great.”

and on and on.

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Why Engineers Don’t Go To Rock Concerts

Because their ears ring. Definitely taking today off from mixing.

1. The thing that makes it so much better than all the other disaster movies is that the disaster just keeps coming and coming until the end of the movie. Which means, practically speaking, that stuff keeps blowing up for the entire film. That’s so much better than the disaster movies where stuff only blows up for a little while.

2. Continuity editing is dead. They had shots of people with digital cameras and a digital video camera in use shortly after an EMP. A car starts. There’s no way it was an accident. They just didn’t care.

Bonus thought: the honking sound the alien ships make is priceless. And to their credit, they use it a lot.

Overall, a very pleasant surprise. I might see if it’s showing dubbed in French.

the title of Will Straw’s fall seminar, also sums up my weekend. Three nights of movies (tonight will be War of the Worlds) , and many hours logged in the studio.

One thing tthat sucks about doing it as a hobby is that you have to do all the maintenance stuff yourself. I’d been putting off a software update and then got a notice about a week ago from Waves (they make software plugins) that I had to do it in the next couple weeks or pay (you get a year to do free updates when you buy their software). Actually, if I didn’t LIKE some of the Waves stuff so much (both sonically and in terms of very well designed interfaces, as opposed to “fake” knobs on a screen), I would stay away from them like the plague. They have an elaborate copy-protection scheme on their software (based on the expectation — probably correct — that lots of people will try to pirate it) which means that, essentially, if they ever go out of business or if I update beyond a certain point (new machine, new OS), I will no longer have access to the plugins I have legally purchased. I don’t use Kracks mainly because I want everything to work as perfectly as possible and I want tech support when I have a problem (it’s a hobby — I’d prefer not to have to tinker more than necessary), but Waves just begs for it. Their copy protection scheme essentially punishes users for buying the product legally. You can imagine that I’m pretty hostile to Digital Rights Management in mp3s, but that’s another story. . . .

Anyway, after all the maintenance and learning a new secret-weapon plugin (it was complicated enough that I had to actually spend a few hours doing their tutorial), I have “finished” a song, and I’m now planning to focus on recording for the next week or two to try and get this lo-boy CD fully drafted. Then Mike can have a listen, I can make changes, go get it mastered (time to acquaint myself with the top mastering engineers within driving distance) and then we decide how to release it.

Moving/Canada Day Addendum

Walking in the neighborhood Friday night and Saturday, we saw lots of people in the process of setting up or taking down a new home. In several cases, it looked like new tenants had to throw out objects left by old tenants: chairs, couches, beds, and even a few appliances. There is a new tenant in our building, or at least evidence of one — a fragment of a cardboard box outside our door, and the doormat had been placed up against the wall, probably so someone didn’t slip while carrying a heavy object up to the 4th floor. Desperation, exhaustion, abandonment. That’s why it was almost exclusively large objects and little pieces of things, and almost nothing inbetween. As I know well from last year, moving is the time when you consider your relationship to objects.