“Being ‘in the True’ of Sound Studies” Music, Sound and the Moving Image 2:2 (Autumn 2008): 163-167.
I just used this in a seminar for grad students at Cornell’s Science and Technology Studies program. I wrote it in 2006, and feel less “stuck” about it than I did then, but the issue remains relevant.
Across from the Jean-Talon Market (you could throw things at Hamel) stand the Syrian restaurants Alep (more formal) and Petit-Alep (less formal, same kitchen). We’ve lived in Montreal for almost 5 years now and in our current place for almost two, and just made it there for the first time Thursday night to celebrate Carrie sending her book ms. back out.[1]
Anyway, the food was amazing. Syrian is like Lebanese (many similar dishes and names, though a few different ones) but I would say the spicing is somehow more elaborate. For instance, the muhammara was an almost shocking red and had an intense spicy-sour flavor that was very striking. The grape leaves also tasted different than I’m used to in a very good way. They also have a few house teas that are delicious (some of which don’t actually use any tea). We’d commented to our waitress that we felt like fools for not finding it sooner, and she said “that happens to us all that time. We’ve been here for over 30 years.”
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[1] We are fond of celebrating getting manuscripts out of the house, and not just acceptances and publications. Why not have more occasions to celebrate, more incentives to get things done? Might as well celebrate as much as possible: academic life is an experience of small, incremental achievements, apart from a few major milestones like the PhD and tenure, which many experience as anticlimactic, anyway.
In print I have had some harsh words to say about the so-called Toronto School’s treatment of sound (that’s so-called “Canadian School” to some Americans, but pretend I didn’t say that) in the concept of orality, and I shall have a few more in print shortly. But in preparation for that, I’ve taken a couple weeks’ leave from the book manuscript in order to go back through some material for the positive argument that I wish to present at the end of the paper, about what parts of the tradition might be worth recovering. I have been re-reading some Harold Innis (and also discovered Heyer and Crowley’s excellent 1991 introduction to The Bias of Communication, which I had never read–I also never bothered with McLuhan’s intro which I should clearly go back and read), and also working through Edmund Carpenter for the first time, really. I remember looking at his material in grad school.
To people not preoccupied with the “school,” Carpenter is relatively minor figure on communication theory, or at least his work is not widely cited in our field. Carpenter was an anthropologist and brief look through his oeuvre shows that his concerns were anthropological first and mediatic, second. My current preoccupation is his Oh, What a Blow That Phantom Dealt Me, which attempts to construct a transcultural theory of media through a series of almost aphoristic short sections. As a work of medium theory the book is in one way derivative, since Carpenter’s claims about media and the senses aren’t new or shocking. It is also very much of its period, with more than the requisite macho humanist references to sexual escapades (and the standard dated ideas about gender and race), the somewhat random substitution of “&” for “and”, and its episodic and disconnected character. At the same time, I find the book captivating. As Innis has an attention to historical detail even as he aimed for synthesis, Carpenter has an attention to ethnographic detail. There are many passages where if one substituted the right terms, his observations about television and telephony could pass for current scholarship on digital and mobile media.
As for Carpenter’s intellectual legacy, it is hard for me to judge, but he did teach Steven Feld, who brought a whole new level of sophistication to questions of media and sound in anthropology and music.
But I will say this: for all my criticisms of and problems with Toronto school authors and their basic assumptions, there is something very attractive in their expansive curiosity about communication, culture and consciousness. Even if I find their answers unsatisfying, the questions they posed more than a generation ago remain vital and engaging, and many of their formulations still resonate.
Oddly, I started this post in spring of 2008 and it has sat in my drafts folder for a year, but now I feel compelled to complete it. Don’t want to read about teeth? There are two awesome comments under the gentrification post.
Spring 2008 Part
A root canal procedure is not how I’d recommend spending half a day, however, it turns out that it is much less painful than the condition it treats. I went to the dentist 2-3 weeks ago with a cavity, but the filling didn’t fix the pain. After another attempt at desenitization, we finally gave up and did the procedure yesterday. I’d been chewing on the right side of my mouth for weeks. So I’d have to say that in the end I’d recommend it. The procedure has an undeservedly bad reputation. However, there are a couple slightly disturbing parts (stop reading here if you’re squeamish):
1. The point of a root canal is to remove the pulp from your tooth if that pulp becomes infected. When the dentist get to the pulp he used the word “gangrene” as there was no blood. There’s supposed to be blood. At least I know why it hurt.
2. I had no idea how far into my jaw my roots went. The feeling of some small dental instrument rooting around in my jaw was bizarre to say the least.
Spring 2009 Part
So everything was awesome until I got home from my various travels in March. On the way home from work I noticed a crack down the middle of the tooth. I looked at it and it looked disturbing. Carrie looked at it and it looked disturbing. I went to the dentist who didn’t even need to do much of anything to pull half my molar out of my mouth. That looked really disturbing. It turns out that about a year after a root canal, you’re supposed to get a crown. And they’re a little fragile so it’s good to avoid things like almonds and crusty French bread (items I had consumed in the day leading up to the broken tooth) until you have the crown. Oops.
So now it’s unclear what will happen. As it’s my last molar, no bridge is possible. And a visit to the oral surgeon today indicates that there is no way to reconstruct the tooth or give it some kind of elaborate crown. They are suggesting extraction, an implant and crown. I know the extraction will hurt the most. Now I must wait and see what my insurance says. . . .
The Moral of the Story: When you have a root canal done, it’s not really over till there’s a crown on top. Turns out the same thing happened to my mom, and she was similarly unaware. So consider yourself warned.
Many Canadian Internet Service Providers practice traffic shaping during high-usage periods, which means that while they may sell you a connection at a particular speed (e.g., 10mbps), they may actively slow down your connection if you are using peer to peer software or doing something else they don’t like. To be clear: the regulation issue here is not about what you think of file sharing practices online, but whether ISPs should be able to tell you what kinds of activities you can and can’t do online when the activities themselves are not illegal (to be clear: there is nothing illegal about using torrent software to move files).
“James Carey and Resistance to Cultural Studies in North America,” Cultural Studies 23:2 (March 2009): 283-286.
“Enemy Voice,” Social Text #96 25:3 (September 2008): 79-100. (this is the long-under-revision essay about recordings of Osama bin Laden; electronic copy not yet available on my end)
In comparing our building–a redone calendar factory–with the other dwellings in our neighborhood–more typical Montreal brick duplexes or triplexes–I often joke that we are the gentrifiers. But it’s actually not a joke at all. I knew this intellectually, but now it’s been driven home for me. We are now literally (in the literal sense of literally) a textbook case, or at least a journal article case.
In Jan Radway’s classic “Ethnography Among Elites,” an essay I had occasion to cite this weekend, she has a line about ethnographers studying people with “commensurate” means of representation. One of the results of such a state of affairs is that the ethnographer may come “upon a counter-representation–if not a full-fledged critique–of herself as the other of another’s discourse” (9).
The thing is, sometimes in cultural studies it’s not even that distance. Sometimes the means of representation are not commensurate but the same. Here is a long passage from Sharon Zukin’s “Consuming Authenticity” (Cultural Studies 22:5) on gentrification (a subject on which I think she is one of the best writers–if not the best)
In the East Village, consumption spaces swung dialectically between the populist culture of the commercial mainstream and the neighborhood’s cheap restaurants, bars, and photocopy shops, before developing entrepreneurial outposts of difference. So, too, in Wicker Park, Chicago, new residents at first liked the atmosphere of Sophie’s Busy Bee, a greasy spoon cafe whose ‘ambiance screamed authenticity.’ But old and new patrons harbored different expectations of the consumption experience. Waitresses at the Busy Bee grew impatient with young artists and musicians who wanted to linger all day over a single cup of coffee, and to these new patrons that coffee really was not very good. After a new arrival in the neighborhood opened the Urbis Orbis Cafe´ in a converted warehouse, new residents flocked to it. Just a few years later, the Busy Bee shut down, while Urbis Orbis earned praise from Rolling Stone as ‘the coolest place [in Chicago] to suck down a cappuccino.’ When housing in the neighborhood grew more expensive, the space above the cafe´ turned into a futon and furniture store, ‘an interesting contrast to the discount furniture outlets that . . . lined the commercial strip a block away on Milwaukee Avenue for decades.’ (730)
When I was in university, my friends Wayne and Lisa moved in to Wicker Park while she was at the U of Chicago Divinity School. I ate my first-ever pierogis at the Busy Bee, which I regarded as a quaint neighborhood joint. I remember the opening of Urbus Orbis and reading some alternative newspaper or something while drinking tea (as a non-coffee drinker I can’t comment on that part of her argument). And I remember being sad when the Busy Bee closed, since it was a regular part of our visits to our friends. If I’d thought about it, I should have understood the connection (I had read Loft Living as an undergrad and it is still one of my favorite books on cities) but there it is, by the same author who provided me with my first understanding of gentrification. Except this time my life and the lives of my friends are folded into the story.
The article continues and discusses food (and other kinds of) shopping and I see the same patterns she describes in how we exist in our neighborhood. We shop in the shoe store at the corner (though I am more likely to make a special order than get something off the wall), but we unlikely to frequent the bar with the older working class men, some of whom start drinking at 10am. We love the Lebanese, Greek, Haitian and Salvadoran grocers but wouldn’t think of buying consumer electronics from the discount place down the block. We are patrons of the new coffeeshop on Guizot and the new bakery on Liège, but not the greasy spoon breakfast joint down the block (though my stepdad tried it once). We enjoy the diversity and eclecticism of our neighborhood (hey, rent is cheap enough that one of Canada’s great luthiers is 2 blocks from me) but if enough people like us were to move it, it would eventually turn into chain stores and upscale boutiques (cf parts of the Plateau).
Zukin’s article is mostly about New York, and gentrification is not the same in Montreal to be sure, in part because global capital is slowed by language laws (hence no Whole Foods across from the Marché Jean-Talon) and the real estate market here is entwined with the politics and economics unique to Quebec. But I did not just see myself in her side-example of Chicago. When she discusses Brooklyn neighborhoods like Park Slope, I also visited friends who were part of that process, and indeed a colleague is now writing a book about parts of the new economy that more or less happened in her living room (I exaggerate, but still).
A dual income, no kids couple living in a loft, where we have home offices. I keep a list of restaurants I like* on this very blog. We are, by all measures, the gentrifiers.
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* an addition from last night: Robin des Bois
