McGill Smells

I don’t mean that metaphorically. I mean, when you walk in the gates and up the path toward the Art Building, it reeks of putrefaction. Julian, my TA, says that it’s just the melting snow and the grass interacting to give off some kind of nasty gas. He says Parc LaFontaine smells the same way.

I can’t say I’m too too upset. I mean, it would be better if it didn’t smell but since the snow’s melting, I shouldn’t complain.

Today, while we waited for our very lo-fi permanent residency photos to be developed, Carrie bought me a new ring. It should arrive in a couple weeks (of course they don’t have my size in stock). It’s actually a nice ring; shiny, gold and everything. But I figured I might as well since I’ll wear the thing every day (and not remove it in airplane bathrooms). I mean, I spent that kind of money on frames for my glasses, so what’s the point in resisting?

In Praise of Dave Noon and His Blog

I am going to start listing some of my favorite blogs here. Eventually I’ll get around to updating the blogroll, but for now this will have to do.

Some preliminary facts:

I pretty much only read blogs authored by friends. There are a couple exceptions, and I’ll always happily click a link. But I’m the opposite of the person who reads blogs for news or for some kind of alternative, free range culture. I read them because I find real people so much more interesting than fictional characters, even though everyone knows this blogging thing is at least 50% an act anyway — even (or especially) in its most confessional moments. So basically, I’m going to start introducing you to my friends who blog.

Exhibit A is Dave Noon, assistant professor of History at U of Alaska Fairbanks and all around supergenius. I met Dave online in like 1994 or something when he showed up on the now-defunct Bad Subjects listserv. He’d started grad school at the U of Minnesota right after I left for Illinois and we had friends in common. Next time I visited Minneapolis, we got together and that was that. Dave has a twisted sense of humor and a keep political sensibility. He is also one of the most unique writers I have ever encountered. You will notice his self-deprecating comments about drive and determination in his comments on my last post below. Do not be fooled. His blog is a work of great elegance and copiousness. And he’s had it in him for a long time. At one point, I requested and received the “Dave Noon collection” of bizarre email correspondences he’d had over the years. It was a literary masterpiece and I am hopeful he will post them one day on his blog.

Visit Axis of Evil Knievel at http://axisofevelknievel.blogspot.com/.

On deck for praise: Gone Feral.

The Best Advice Ever + a Music Gear Fish Story

As she was leaving the Art building on Thursday, our colleague Marc Raboy told Carrie to “take some time off, it’s a holiday weekend, you know.”

Sometimes, that’s all you need. We took yesterday off and had the luxury of sitting around and talking forever, and then going shopping around town. We started with Zone on St. Denis which was not as cool as we’d hoped. We then wandered down to cluster of vintage and furniture stores on Amherst, south of Ontario. They were amazing. Like museums of 60s and 70s fashion and design. Some of the stuff was quite beautiful and some of it was just plain weird, like the “videospheres” that looked like astronaut helmets. Unfortunately, they were all super overpriced. $55 for a rotary phone. Sorry! There’s tons of stores down there, though, so we got to explore a bit and walk around since it was so nice out. (NB non-locals: I could still see my breath).

The next stop was Henri-Henri, Canada’s largest men’s hat store! I’ve been wanting to go for months now and I was thrilled to get there. It’s pretty cool and I did score three hats for my oversized head (please check jokes at my expense at the door), but couldn’t quite bite for the $400 beaver felt one if though it fit just right and looked beautiful. It’s Canada. Beaver are a resource, you know.

Speaking of expensive things, on the way back, we stopped in at a Pawn Shop. As a home studio engineer and bassist, I always stick my head in pawn shops in case they have any cool old equipment or better yet have something good but don’t quite “know what they have.” As luck would have it, they had a device called the SWR Interstellar Overdrive (no relation to the Pink Floyd song), which is like a very low-wattage tube amplifier or a very complex and rich sounding distortion processor for bass, depending on how you look at it. it’s a rare, fancy and lovely sounding device. List on them new is something like $750 (US) and they routinely go for $350 (US) or so used on ebay. Between my broken French and his broken English, I managed to talk the guy down from $500 to $250 (Canadian) but I still wasn’t sure since I couldn’t test the thing out in the store. Today, I decided to go back and get the thing if the tubes lit up when I turned it on, since even if it’s broken at the price, I’d still break even if I had it fixed. And if it wasn’t broken, I would have the pawn shop score of a lifetime. Alas, the guy’s boss was there today. He was still about to sell it to me for $250 Canadian when his boss came over and said “no.” Their price today was $500 used, which is no bargain at all. I thanked them (in broken French) and left.

That’s the equivalent of a fish story for musicians. That Interstellar Overdrive is definitely the one that got away. If I’d just taken the plunge last night, I’d have the thing, AND the bragging rights to go with it.

At least when I saw the giant oversized stuffed cat-in-the-hat at a garage sale in Pittsburgh a few years ago for $5 (US, but like it matters!), I bought it. I’ve learned my lesson.

Yesterday concluded with a great home-cooked dinner and a bad movie on TV (Mr. 3000). I awoke this morning feeling rested and wrote four half-decent pages.

31 July 2007

Our new work permits arrived today and that is the day that they expire. I consider it a minor miracle that we got more that a year’s renewal (which is the normal amount of time) and that they came back this fast. By 31 July 2007, if all goes well, we will have found the holy grail of permanent residency.

Swimming Upstream

It’s that “I’m so busy I’m so busy I’m so busy” time of the semester again, so of course I’m blogging instead of writing. Actually procrastinating other work. I’m particularly pleased because one of my advisees just landed her first tenure-track job. Maybe Full Professors get jaded about this kind of thing, but I’m thrilled.

For all my complaining about being busy (and a big of bloglect), I’ve gotten tons of writing done in the past couple weeks. Current projects include:

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

Since I’m doing all of this at once while continuing to teach (mmm. new lectures!) and perform various service functions, each project feels like it is slowly moving along. I guess there is a virtue in serial project monogamy. At least I’m starting to have the good sense to turn things down.