Q&A on Being a Scholar and Musician

This is one of those blog entries from an email exchange. Someone asked:

Someday I’d love to hear anything you have to say about being a musician/scholar.

I’m probably the wrong person to ask since I’ve been doing serious admin for the last 2.5 years and at the same time I’ve been playing the jet-setting academic giving talks all over and as a result my music has really suffered. I’m not in a band — ironically, I have time to be in one but not to find one, since finding a band is a lot like dating, which is completely unappealing to me. I content myself with the home studio. I’m finishing about 2 songs or in 1 case a piece of audio art in a year. I’m very close on mixes of songs I recorded in 2004 with Mike Witmore, my lo-boy partner in crime, before I left Pittsburgh, so I guess I will have a record coming out after he makes it up here to visit. Plus the social life here is really intense.

Basically, I decided early on that I didn’t want to commoditize my art, I wanted it to be something I did for the love of it (same with my work for Bad Subjects), a free part of my life where I didn’t seek professional recognition. It appears on my CV in a very low-key manner, I don’t try to pass it off as equivalent to my scholarship and research, and I don’t ask to be professionally rewarded for it as an academic. In exchange, I don’t have to justify artistic choices intellectually or intellectualize my art. Since I started out as a rock musician, it’s probably better that way.

That said, until I started doing admin and getting flown all over, I always found time to make music and be involved in some kind of political or volunteer organization; if I had kids (not a baby, obviously), I could probably have done one of those two things in addition to being a prof.

If you want to get professional credit for your music, you need to get a job that involves some component of sound production (and maybe teaching sound) in a Comm Studies department — there aren’t many such positions but they exist. In Canada, there’s this whole research-creation thing where at some schools you can do theoretically informed art and get it treated as scholarship in departments other than art departments. There are a lot of issues in research-creation (which I will someday write about in public if I can find a way not to sound like a jerk doing it). For instance, as of yet, I don’t know of artists getting jobs meant for traditional scholars, but it’s a different way to address production.

My guess is that if you’re going into other fields besides music, art or a few Comm Studies programs, you should think more in terms of a double life and reserving time for music than getting credit as a scholar who makes records. That said, it’s nice when your colleagues like the idea of you being in a band. They did in Pittsburgh, and I’m sure they would here if I were in a band. Though they might not like the band. . . .

Chuck Norris in HD

One other thing. Strange as it may sound to those who don’t own HDTVs, HD sets have a feature that stretches the edges of a regular 4:3 image to fill the entire screen. Most viewers I know leave this on even though it can be shut off.

When Chuck Norris was standing next to Mike Huckabee, I said to Carrie “wow, Chuck Norris has a really wide head.” That’s when she reminded me that I was watching a stretched image.

Also, Huckabee is very scary.

and now for a few words on time. . .

(this is not a post about football, so stick with me)

As some of you know, last Saturday the New England Patriots won their 16th and final game of the regular season, making them the first team to go undefeated in the regular season since the 1972 Miami Dolphins. The ’72 Dolphins were the first team to do it since the ’42 Bears.

This got me thinking: why is it that 2007 seems closer somehow to 1972 than 1942? That’s 35 vs. 30 years, and yet the 40s and 70s seem much more different on some level than the 70s and the 00s. Now, of course some of that is perceptual. As a friend pointed out last night, if you’d turned on the TV in 1972 you would have seen lots of stars from the 40s, and certainly older adults in the 1970s might still feel quite connected to the music or cinema of the 1940s. Perhaps it’s that some transitions in history — like the baby boom — seem to be a bigger deal culturally than others. Perhaps it’s an observation that however unfashionable ideas about postmodernism have become, there is something about the current age (David Harvey placed it in 1973, which is odd to think in such exact terms) that is less forward looking than other recent eras. And of course it depends upon what you’re talking about. Popular culture is one thing; yet a professor’s job at McGill or another “R1” university was probably more similar in 1972 to 1942 (or at least 1945) than it is to today. . . .

Québec, Québec

We lived in Québec for about 3 years without visiting Québec City (or the wonderfully redundant Québec, Québec) but with plenty of good intentions. This summer, we finally managed to make the 3-hour drive for a much needed weeekend away shortly before our move. We stayed at the Auberge St. Antoine, which I mention only to point out that it’s quite possibly the nicest hotel I’ve ever stayed in (it’s expensive but we managed to score a cut rate).

The Aueberge — and most of the tourist attractions — are situated in the old town, which is like Old Montreal. I’m not a fan of Old Montreal. The streets are beautiful, the buildings light up nicely at night, but everything’s overpriced and the whole place just seems like an exercise in facadism in that the old buildings are intact only on the outside. On the inside, it’s basically a giant shopping mall with everything from kitch to upscale consumer goods. Of course, while facadism is messed up, so is its critique, since very old buildings quite often go through many different uses in their lifetimes. Anyway, Old Québec was at least new and worth a walk around and a ride up and down the funicular.

At the top of the hill we encountered the real Chateau Frontenac (for those not local, we’d given our old rental loft on Frontenac the nickname “Chateau Frontenac” for party invites and such). We didn’t stay at the Chateau Frontenac mostly because it was expensive and not well-reviewed on trip advisor, which is a site I read religiously.

and here’s “our” Chateau Frontenac (we lived on the 2nd floor):

One day was spent wandering around Québec City, the other was spent driving around the adjacent area, which includes ÃŽle d’Orléans, an island that remains mostly undeveloped and is also the source of a good bit of the produce we pick up in the summer at farmers’ markets. It has, of course, also been touristified, so we were able to drive around the island, sample some of the local food and see how maple syrup is made (the lecture was in French, which started out as intelligible because the guy kept it slow for us. Then he sped up . . . .).

On the way back, we visited Montmorency Falls, which locals like to point out is 30m higher than Niagara Falls — but not as big. There’s a footpath you can take to scale the top of the falls. I took the following two shots from directly over the falls. The first looks back at the placid-looking river which suddenly accelerates and the yellow warning rope, which basically says “if you’re floating by in a barrel, you might want to switch directions now.” The second shot is 180 degrees in the other direction, with me leaning over the handrail on the bridge over the falls looking straight down to watch the water plunge.


Outta Saskatoon

In May we visited Saskatoon, Saskatchewan for the annual conference of the Canadian Communication Association. As part of the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, the CCA moves from province to province each year, meaning that if you attend long enough, you eventually get to see a lot of Canada. That has a lot of pull for immigrants like us, but it kind of works in reverse. Usually, when the conference is in a place like Toronto or Vancouver, they get a high turnout but people only show up to their panels and then go and do touristy things. For us, the exotic places are places like Saskatoon, perhaps because more chic and cosmopolitain Canadians turn up their noses at the prairies. So I guess this is a way of saying that we were the lame people who didn’t go to many panels and instead explored the town and region. I intend to do the same when the conference visits other provinces I’ve never seen.

I think we were hoping that Saskatoon itself would remind us of Urbana-Champaign. It didn’t really, but the slow talking, friendly people and the big, wide streets did have a familiar feel to them. We did a bunch of touristy stuff while we were there, but most memorable for me were the long drives we took out of town. The landscape is flat and you can see for miles, but every so often, it’s dotted with a large structure of one of two types: a grain elevator or a church. Our first foray into the country was with Darin Barney, who’s working on a book that deals with rural technologies like grain elevators, so we felt we had a bit of an expert guide.

The first thing we saw was this cool old church. You could see the shiny dome miles away:

The church was near a few homes but nothing like a town. There were also some abandoned shacks that must have been for farm workers. On the grounds, we found a schnapps bottle (Carrie won a bet with Darin on that one — the nastiest possible alcohol that one could be drinking). And then there was the sign. The “town” we were in was called “Smutz” and even the church incorporated the name:

Cue the immature jokes. After the church, we drove around some more, catching a few grain elevators and an old Metis settlement and battleground (nothing was left except for a marker). This orange one was particularly striking.

The countryside is big, empty and peaceful, and the collectivism behind something as simple as a grain elevator hints at an explanation of why Saskatchewan was, historically, one of the roots of Canada’s great socialist projects.