Crescent St.

Here I was thinking I had a pretty good mental map of the space between McGill and Concordia downtown. But last night, after watching the very mediocre Unleashed (yes, I will be acquiring the Massive Attack soundtrack), we are walking down St. Catherine with a friend looking for a place to have a drink. We walk east for awhile, and then come to Crescent. Walking north, the place is roaring on a Friday night. Teeming hoardes of young people in very tight clothing, sometimes club clothing, moving from club to club. We found an emptyish bar-cafe at the edge of the commotion where we could sit outside, watch the action and chat. It was quite a sight, and I think we were all a little surprised to find it there — during the day, it looks like just another cross street in the neighborhood.

-*-

I’ve been relatively silent here because this was — I sincerely hope it was — the last big week of meetings for year. At least that’s my excuse. The social life has also been starting to pick up for summer as people begin to feel the summerness of summer. For our part, we’ve been social almost every night since coming back, and I hope the trend continues when we return from Amsterdam. The range of awesome people is one of the perks of the place.

And Now, a Self-Indulgent Definitional Question

I don’t know how we got on the topic last night, but this seems like a story worth recounting in a blog, so here we go. Tuesday, during the set-up period for the radio show, the host asks what she should call me. For comparison’s sake, she will call Emily Thompson a cultural historian. This turns out to be a difficult question. My main training is best described as cultural studies and my PhD is in Communications, but neither field has an effective noun state to apply to its practitioners. i normally spend about zero minutes and zero seconds of my year thinking about how to define myself. It’s not a significant intellectual question. I have a faculty position and joint appointments and that’s that. My work is my work. But the question totally caught me off guard, and has caused me to reflect, if only for a moment.

In an otherwise lame and derisive essay (note that it could have been good and derisive but wasn’t), Todd Gitlin references people who do cultural studies as “cultural students,” which is actually brilliant. I quite like it. For a field that has displayed so much arrogance over the last couple decades, “cultural student” is a nicely modest monicker. However, to third parties, the term has no purchase. If we started using it, we’d just get a lot of confused looks.

Communications or Media Studies doesn’t fare any better. Communicationologist? Communicologist? Sounds like you’ve got a problem that I can fix. “Here, bend over and let me take a look. Ooo! Get me some gauze, nurse!” Mediaologist? Too close to meterologist. “Tonight’s weather is going to be sunny, with occasional tornadoes.”

This leaves other, older fields. I have been called an ethnomusicologist, a historian of technology, a cultural historian and an art historian. The last is laughable, but I guess people read “art history and communication studies” as my employement home and realize that only one of those fields has a noun state that can be applied to its practitioners. The others kind of fit (though not as well as cultural studies, media studies, or communications): I have training in all three areas, and I’ve published and been cited in all three areas. But to many historians employed in universities, anyway, “cultural historian” or even “historian of technology” means something slightly different, which is why I usually add “of a sort” to the end or “bizarre” to the beginning.

My deference in this respect comes from being on the other side of it, where guests speakers or others have claimed they do “cultural studies” or “media studies” and actually don’t do anything of the sort. It usually comes off as dismissive and condescending — for instance, as if to do “media studies” one merely needs to write a sentence about printing or television or whatever, and can skip the hard part where one does reading and research in the area. Now, I actually do know what history in history departments looks like and I read a whole lot of it, and I do bona fide archival research (though not for everything I write), so the analogy is not exact.

In any event, our friend, who will remain unnamed for reasons that will become immediately apparent, said that he calls himself a “cultural historian.” None of his degrees are in history and he does not work in a history department. I asked him whether he thought his work had any relationship to cultural history as done by historians, he said “probably not, but I don’t really care.”

Another Sweet Canadian Thing

Today’s Focus section in the Globe and Mail has a short piece about the relative health of journalism as a field. Two measures that appeared would never have clocked in the New York Times or any other mainstream US publication where blowhards go on about the state of journalism

1) whether it is possible to make a living as a freelancer. Freelancing is important because it fosters innovation.

2) how the alternative press is doing. The article mentioned The Walrus and Maissoneuve among others. Imagine the New York Times worrying about In These Times. Wouldn’t happen.

My Face was Made for Radio

or so the T-shirt says.

Today, I got to be on a Chicago Public Radio show about sound. For those of you who have slogged through The Audible Past, I don’t say anything new. But I do demonstrate remarkably self-restraint when during the call-in section I get a question about Walter Ong and the host turns it over to me.

My co-guest was Emily Thompson, whom I haven’t seen in a couple years. Turns out she’s from Pittsburgh and so we’d hang out when she came home to visit her parents. Emily is surpremely organized and the epitome of class. Carrie heard it and said I did not suck. So did one of Emily’s colleagues. We are inclined to believe them.

Anyway, it’s at http://www.chicagopublicradio.org/odyssey/. I don’t think the show’s up online yet but it will be.

The extra bonus for me was getting to go check out CBC/Radio Canada. The building is absolutely beautiful, and the studio I was in was really nice. My engineer preferred to speak in French and I swear I understood a good portion of what she said. I can’t tell you the French for “cough button” but I understood her perfectly.

The Library of Congress in New York City

File this one under “your cultural capital hard at work for you.”

Last Wednesday, Carrie and I are crossing the border into the U.S. When the agent asks us what we are going to do in the United States, I say “we are going to a lecture at the Library of Congress.” This was, naturally, the most American, most patriotic answer I could possibly muster. It was also true.

The agent looks at me with this blank stare. I look back at him. He finally says “in New York City?”

Now it’s my turn to face him with a blank stare. I am trying to figure out what to say. From the passenger seat, Carrie leans over and says “in Washington D.C.”

Now it’s really awkward. The guy doesn’t ask us any more questions. Instead, he mutters something about there being more than one Library of Congress. You know, the one in New York and in some other city. The thing is, there isn’t more than one Library of Congress.

Now, to be fair this was a total social class thing. It’s a bit asinine for the bourgeois professor to get all in a huff about the border guard not knowing where the Library of Congress is. On the other hand, we’re equally intimidated by the hard-ass and usually quite sour American guards who give us a tough time about going south over the border.

Bottom line: I thought I had an ace line and instead I wound up embarassing him. He let us go, but I was getting ready for the full body cavity search.

On the way back, Carrie and I tried to come up with a list of things definitely not to say to the Canadian border guard.

Q: Did you buy anything or receive any gifts while in the U.S.?

A: Nothing except this here leaky test-tube. Wanna have a sniff?

A: No, we left the radioactive materials in Washington.

A: Yes. We got this lovely small flying squirrel.

Misc.

I have to stop meeting like this

Another weekend, another conference: this time it’s the mobile digital commons network symposium. Lots of interesting people on the bill but I confess to doing that annoying thing where I go to the party and show up to my panel and maybe one other and the rest of the time tend to my own life. The fact that I even think to feel guilty about such a thing suggests the nature of my investment in the academic illusio and an item on the list of things to change about myself.

That said, the socializing last night was excellent between dinner and the conference party. That’s what I love about this town.

Also, our friend Ariel (Ducey, another American in her first year in Canada, though she’s at Calgary in Sociology) is in town for some bizarre fullbright conference. As I’ve been told before, you can quickly “make old friends” — so it’s good to have her around.

And Now for Something Completely Different

Here’s a brilliant commentary on the jurisprudence behind Montreal’s upcoming smoking ban.

Gearhead Update

The magical control surface arrived. But I seriously will never again believe in “plug and play.” I spent 5 hours — the 5 hours this week that I had to make music — configuring the thing and on the phone with tech support at two different companies. Of course it amounted to checking some little box and installing a driver that was supposed to come with the unit but didn’t. But now it works. It looks super cool and I think it will speed up the mixing process. I will provide an update later this month.

I Live in a Rogue Nation

I am, of course, talking about Canada’s rejection of the ridiculous provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright and the U.S.’s rejection of their rejection. The New York Times made it sound like Canada was a haven for pirates, thieves, and other nefarious figures would deprive U.S. capitalists of their rightful booty. Next thing you know, Canada will get compared to those countries where you can set up and offshore account and horde your money in a tax shelter. . . . Oh WAIT, the capitalists like that. Anyway, you can read more about it here, here, here and here. Bottom line, in my reading, is that Canada isn’t doing enough to support copy protection schemes on hardware and software (many of which ought to be illegal, since they move things like recordings from commodity law to contract law) and to coerce ISPs to give up their user lists. In other words, Canada is doing a good job. As the Geist column I link to points out, Canada’s doing better on the U.S. on privacy. Perhaps the U.S. should be on Canada’s watch list.

And While We’re on the Subject of Canadian Politics

I understand now what my Canadian friends mean when they say they watch U.S. politics as a spectator sport. Except of course the power relations are somewhat inverted, though it is true that the results of the next election — whenever it will be — will have an effect on me. Last night while watching a West Coast feed on TV, we saw an ad for the NDP in B.C., and it so savaged the liberals I thought it was the conservatives. That’s what’s cool — there’s something to the left of the government party. Of course the NDP is itself a conflicted thing, but I’m still sorting all that out. It’s a good thing it’ll take awhile to make citizenship, since I have no idea for whom I’d vote if I could actually participate in the election. All I know is that I love that the conservatives’ politics, where are somewhere on the right of the U.S. democratic party, are getting lambasted as too “extreme” for the Canadian electorate in the editorial pages. Cool.

And never mind what you heard about the poll for the sovereignty vote in my home province. The majority of sovereigntists want “continued economic partnership with Canada” which means, essentially, no sovereignty. That said, I am fascinated with the antifederalism that seems to cut across provinces. The “letters” sections in the last two issues of The Walrus both have hard-core argument for more provincial rights, as if they didn’t already have a whole boatload of rights.

And a Perplexing Situation

Is I were to substitute “us” and “them” for the “U.S.” and “Canada” in the above paragraphs, which should I use? You can see why I go easy on the pronouns.

Update on the “I’m So Busy” Rant

So awhile back I complained about how busy I was, posted a list of projects and then got a comment from Dave Noon about how I get so much done. Well, don’t get carried away. Here’s the update on that to-do list:

1. Proposal for sound studies reader (the proposal is done and it will have the best market research routledge ever saw for a cultural studies tome, but my god, it could easily have 80 chapters. how to cut the table of contents to a manageable size?)

*Almost done. Should go out before I leave for D.C. on the 11th. I’d hoped to be done before now, but you know how that goes.

2. Afterword (or is it “Afterward”) to an edited volume called Cybersounds that deals with music and the internet (forthcomign Peter Lang sometime late 2005 or 2006)

*Done and does not suck. Got me thinking about navigating my SSHRC grant over the next three years. Useful!

3. An essay for Bad Subjects called “My Canadian Confusion” that’s turned out to be quite, well, confusing to write (will be up later this month or early April).

*Done and it might suck. I can’t tell. If you’ve been reading this blog, you probably don’t need to read the essay, but it’s at the BS site if you want to find it. I’m too lazy to link. it’s in the current issue, and there’s a link to that on the front page.

4. An essay on digital timekeeping and the regulation of movement for a conference in April. I’m coauthoring with a student.

*Drafted. Does not suck. Though my verbal presentation of it at the Milwaukee conference kind of did. I still got tons of questions. The editors there only want a couple changes. I’ll be co-presenting it here next weekend at a conference for the Mobile Digital Commons project.

5. An essay on the circulation of Osama bin Laden’s voice in American broadcast media (which I presented at two different events on two consecutive days – Sunday and Monday. A couple more public presentations and revisions and it will get shipped off to a journal).

*Haven’t even come close to touching it. I have a nice file of comments, though. I’m parking it until fall.

Summer writing goals:

–Ship out the Sound Reader edited book proposal next week

–A couple short magazine-style articles for European publications

–Make any additional revisions to the timekeeping piece and send it along to conference organizers for inclusion in edited book or special journal issue.

–Full draft of mp3 book by September. It’s a short book. It’s on mp3s, but not really about file sharing. It’s about digital sound.