1. For the first time since graduate school, I'm teaching MWF classes. Hello Friday. After three weeks, my sense is that Friday morning is great for freewriting and discussions, not as great for peer review and other more regimented tasks. Today, among other things, my two classes included: watching a youtube video of Patti Smith covering Adele, a discussion of Naomi Shihab Nye's poem "Arabic Coffee," and a discussion with a young woman about her name happening to be the name of a city in Lebanon and a tasty dish often eaten at funerals or during Ashura. Believe it or not, we were focused (mostly). For the first time this term, I wasn't wearing jeans nor slippers.
2. I love goodreads.com and wish I would've joined sooner. Great place to track books you have read, are reading, and plan to read.
3. Naomi Shihab Nye visited Ann Arbor this week and I had the pleasure of going to both a reading and a lecture. Also, got (another) autograph. [I love signed books!] She has such an amazing presence at readings in particular and she shared some of the poems from her new book, Transfer, that use lines from her late father's journals as titles and use her dad's point-of-view. Quite beautiful. Definitely one of my all-time favorite poets.
1/27/2012
1/22/2012
Hunger Games Trilogy
I would have loved these books even more if they existed in 1987. The fourteen-year-old me loved Stephen King's "Bachman books" which strike me as the most obvious antecedents. The best Bachman book, "The Long Walk," centers on a futuristic America where oppressed young citizens elect to take part in a marathon walk where the last person standing wins a lottery and all the losers face death by firing squad. Oh how I loved this story. The Hunger Games books have a similar conceit: dystopian society in which a reality tv competition pits teens against one another in a fight to the death. I don't want to say more about the plot because you should read these books before the first film adaptation comes out this March. They're quite compelling and I admired how damn dark they were too. Relentlessly dark at times. The third book, "Mockingjay," dragged a bit, but the first two--total page-turners.
1/17/2012
Tuesday Tuesday
So I'm thinking of joining Weight Watchers. We have a group on campus and it's cheap. One of the challenges (and they are legion!) is that a lot of good Lebanese food adds up quickly in terms of points despite all the health benefits. Olive oil and lebneh are examples. Both have calories and (good) fat so the point value is high. I just hate the idea of turning to food that's actually less healthful just because it's lower in points. But then I think of the health benefits of weighing less. I know that the answer here is to eat much less olive oil and lebneh, in addition to other healthy foods.
Have a rare morning today to work on my research/writing. (So why am I blogging then?) Then it's off to campus for a meeting, class prep, a panel discussion on All American Muslim, and a work-out. Livin' the dream.
Surely a post is coming about The Hunger Games. I'm mid-way through the third and final book in the series and I'm loving these novels in a big way.
Have a rare morning today to work on my research/writing. (So why am I blogging then?) Then it's off to campus for a meeting, class prep, a panel discussion on All American Muslim, and a work-out. Livin' the dream.
Surely a post is coming about The Hunger Games. I'm mid-way through the third and final book in the series and I'm loving these novels in a big way.
1/16/2012
youtube, archives, fandom
Did you know that users upload forty-eight hours of video per minute to youtube? This shouldn't amaze me given the fact that youtube has permeated nearly every facet of society. Still, think about that. Forty-eight hours of footage. Every minute.
This got me thinking about the volume and diversity of live music that is available. Putting aside music videos, promos, and other "professional" clips (if such a thing can even be said to exist), consider for a second the accessibility of live footage of your favorite band. You can't go to a rock show and not see dozens of people filming a song or two. I imagine this is true for most genres. Grateful Dead fans famously (audio) taped and traded shows for decades. Official live albums--again, were talking audio here--were especially trendy during the arena rock 70s (Kiss, J. Geils, Frampton, The Who, Cheap Trick, Bob Seger, and others created iconic road records) and attracted even casual fans who approached the live album as a kind of greatest hits. And of course bootleg live records also circulated, especially among hardcore fans.
But youtube provides aural and visual representations of live music, mostly fan created. I wonder if record companies, (some) bands, Live Nation, Ticketmaster, et al, will eventually create more corporate sanctioned "channels" and crack down on amateur bootlegs. For now at least, much of youtube belongs to fandom. Like live albums in the 70s, I see the live music on youtube as walking the line between appealing to casual and hardcore fans. The casual fan can search for a single track and find it in seconds. The hardcore fan can search for a particular song at a particular show or make note of different versions of the same song over some particular period of time. Jay-Z and Kanye West seemed to nod at this phenomenon when they performed multiple versions of "N****s in Paris" at shows on their recent tour.
Another parallel. Like those who bought a live album or bootleg in the 70s or 80s, fans today who surf youtube can appreciate the mythology a band creates by its choice of covers. Springsteen saluted 60s r&b and garage rock by covering Mitch Ryder, for instance, and buying a Springsteen bootleg a generation or two ago was an education in his influences. Want to see Weezer doing "Pumped Up Kicks" last year? Want to see Green Day do AC/DC? Youtube's got you covered. Have at it.
What's surprising, though, is how much pre-youtube and pre-camera phone live music is out there, and it's archived for our pleasure. I was too young to see The Clash in person but I can see them via youtube in their early days in London all the way up to when they opened for The Who in '82. I've always been fascinated by the infamous '72 tour where The Rolling Stones (with--sorry Ron Wood--the great Mick Taylor on second guitar, showing off cool new songs from "Exile on Main St," and supported by Stevie Wonder!) destroyed hotel rooms, did a lot of heroin, and reportedly blew minds on the stage. And now I can watch Keith play Happy a year before I was even born.
I can find clips of the night I saw Neil Young in Cleveland in '93 and ended up with a minor misdemeanor citation from Cuyahoga County. I can find clips of the first rock concert I ever attended (10,000 Maniacs). I don't mean the same band during the same tour, I mean the exact show. I can even find clips of local bands from Youngstown, Ohio, circa early 90s. And I don't remember anybody ever having a video camera at Cedar's or The Penguin Pub, but the clips are there. Couple that nostalgic ability to re-see with the archive that is setlist.fm, much less trafficked but in my mind an equally addictive site for the hardcore music fan, and you've got quite a record of your sordid past. If you haven't been to setlist.fm, it's function should be pretty self-explanatory. It's a wiki that houses the setlists performed by popular music performers. What exactly did Neil Young play that night I saw him twenty years ago? The answer's right here.
I know that Patton Oswalt and others have commented on the internet taking away the magic of the search by putting what used to be obscure right in front of us. But I like the idea of preservation of the minute details we obsess over. Accessibility doesn't take away the obsession, and it certainly doesn't take away the magic. (I don't see Oswalt liking comics any less.) In a way these archives keep us honest: The Stones didn't play a three-hour set of Motown covers in '72. And nobody claims it's the same as being there. I'd have loved to see The Clash opening up for the Pistols on the Anarchy Tour but I was three years old. Seeing it on youtube's not the same thing obviously. But I can access the archives, feed my fandom, and be honest (oh yeah, they didn't play very well).
This got me thinking about the volume and diversity of live music that is available. Putting aside music videos, promos, and other "professional" clips (if such a thing can even be said to exist), consider for a second the accessibility of live footage of your favorite band. You can't go to a rock show and not see dozens of people filming a song or two. I imagine this is true for most genres. Grateful Dead fans famously (audio) taped and traded shows for decades. Official live albums--again, were talking audio here--were especially trendy during the arena rock 70s (Kiss, J. Geils, Frampton, The Who, Cheap Trick, Bob Seger, and others created iconic road records) and attracted even casual fans who approached the live album as a kind of greatest hits. And of course bootleg live records also circulated, especially among hardcore fans.
But youtube provides aural and visual representations of live music, mostly fan created. I wonder if record companies, (some) bands, Live Nation, Ticketmaster, et al, will eventually create more corporate sanctioned "channels" and crack down on amateur bootlegs. For now at least, much of youtube belongs to fandom. Like live albums in the 70s, I see the live music on youtube as walking the line between appealing to casual and hardcore fans. The casual fan can search for a single track and find it in seconds. The hardcore fan can search for a particular song at a particular show or make note of different versions of the same song over some particular period of time. Jay-Z and Kanye West seemed to nod at this phenomenon when they performed multiple versions of "N****s in Paris" at shows on their recent tour.
Another parallel. Like those who bought a live album or bootleg in the 70s or 80s, fans today who surf youtube can appreciate the mythology a band creates by its choice of covers. Springsteen saluted 60s r&b and garage rock by covering Mitch Ryder, for instance, and buying a Springsteen bootleg a generation or two ago was an education in his influences. Want to see Weezer doing "Pumped Up Kicks" last year? Want to see Green Day do AC/DC? Youtube's got you covered. Have at it.
What's surprising, though, is how much pre-youtube and pre-camera phone live music is out there, and it's archived for our pleasure. I was too young to see The Clash in person but I can see them via youtube in their early days in London all the way up to when they opened for The Who in '82. I've always been fascinated by the infamous '72 tour where The Rolling Stones (with--sorry Ron Wood--the great Mick Taylor on second guitar, showing off cool new songs from "Exile on Main St," and supported by Stevie Wonder!) destroyed hotel rooms, did a lot of heroin, and reportedly blew minds on the stage. And now I can watch Keith play Happy a year before I was even born.
I can find clips of the night I saw Neil Young in Cleveland in '93 and ended up with a minor misdemeanor citation from Cuyahoga County. I can find clips of the first rock concert I ever attended (10,000 Maniacs). I don't mean the same band during the same tour, I mean the exact show. I can even find clips of local bands from Youngstown, Ohio, circa early 90s. And I don't remember anybody ever having a video camera at Cedar's or The Penguin Pub, but the clips are there. Couple that nostalgic ability to re-see with the archive that is setlist.fm, much less trafficked but in my mind an equally addictive site for the hardcore music fan, and you've got quite a record of your sordid past. If you haven't been to setlist.fm, it's function should be pretty self-explanatory. It's a wiki that houses the setlists performed by popular music performers. What exactly did Neil Young play that night I saw him twenty years ago? The answer's right here.
I know that Patton Oswalt and others have commented on the internet taking away the magic of the search by putting what used to be obscure right in front of us. But I like the idea of preservation of the minute details we obsess over. Accessibility doesn't take away the obsession, and it certainly doesn't take away the magic. (I don't see Oswalt liking comics any less.) In a way these archives keep us honest: The Stones didn't play a three-hour set of Motown covers in '72. And nobody claims it's the same as being there. I'd have loved to see The Clash opening up for the Pistols on the Anarchy Tour but I was three years old. Seeing it on youtube's not the same thing obviously. But I can access the archives, feed my fandom, and be honest (oh yeah, they didn't play very well).
1/02/2012
Recent Reading
The joys of break are the joys of reading for pleasure. I devoured Life, the Keith Richards memoir, and got a kick from not only the Brit dialect but also the lingo of swinging London. Richards tosses in plenty of instances of "baby" and groovy sounding sentence fragments too. He uses these fragments to underline, sometimes stating the obvious (a stand-alone like "Wild" might follow an anecdote that absolutely is) and sometime editorializing (often his comments critique Mick Jagger's ego and love of fame). You get the obligatory stories of heavy drug use, but you also get a sense of Keith's deep, deep love of music and musicians. Wild baby.
Also read the somewhat mediocre Geraldine Brooks novel People of the Book. I loved the premise--a researcher and rare-books expert tracing the history of a sacred, centuries-old Jewish text through Europe. Also loved the recurring theme of "conviviality," the togetherness invoked by stories of Christians, Jews, and Muslims interacting together (15th Century Spain! 20th Century Bosnia! Palestine! Australia!). It's a globetrotting, time-traveling narrative and the good, bad, lovely, and ugly of the interaction of Big Western Faiths comes up thematically and drives the plot too. While the historical chapters popped, the present action sometimes tried too hard to combine pulpy action and romance with the more heady themes. DaVinci Code for the New York Review of Books set. Good but not great.
Also read the somewhat mediocre Geraldine Brooks novel People of the Book. I loved the premise--a researcher and rare-books expert tracing the history of a sacred, centuries-old Jewish text through Europe. Also loved the recurring theme of "conviviality," the togetherness invoked by stories of Christians, Jews, and Muslims interacting together (15th Century Spain! 20th Century Bosnia! Palestine! Australia!). It's a globetrotting, time-traveling narrative and the good, bad, lovely, and ugly of the interaction of Big Western Faiths comes up thematically and drives the plot too. While the historical chapters popped, the present action sometimes tried too hard to combine pulpy action and romance with the more heady themes. DaVinci Code for the New York Review of Books set. Good but not great.
12/13/2011
grading playlist
Due in part to the fact that I spent over half of 2011 out of the country, I didn't listen to enough new music to compile any type of "best of" list. But I do have an enjoyable collection of (mostly) 2011 tunes to keep me company while I grade portfolios during the next few days. If you haven't heard any of these, download them from your favorite legal music source.
1. "East Harlem" by Beirut. Catchy, lilting melodies from a band I decided to sample because of the band name, although they aren't Lebanese. Their 2011 record is pretty good but this is the highlight.
2. "Lonely Boy" by The Black Keys. In 2002 or so, when The White Stripes and Strokes peaked in popularity, this would have been a HUGE hit. Bigger sound than their earlier stuff yet still loyal to that simple, garage aesthetic.
3. "Black Rabbit" by Pujol. Great rock and roll song that deserved to be bigger. Why didn't this get any buzz on avclub, pithfork, et al?
4. "Rolling in the Deep" by Adele. It says something about the lousy state of pop music that when "Rolling in the Deep" comes on the radio, you instantly notice what a beautifully written song it is. But Adele's not just great from a craft and composition perspective. Her voice is lovely and unique and she doesn't feel the need to turn every song into some octave exercise. She gives "Rolling in the Deep" subtlety and nuance.
5. "Otis" by Kanye West and Jay Z. I'll just pick one song from the awesome "Watch the Throne" collaboration. Why not make it the big single? The lyrics couldn't be shallower (gist: we are really, really rich), but the Otis Redding sample is brilliant.
6. "What Can I Do?" by Black Belles. This band killed at the inaugural MI-Fest in September. Band members all dress in black and wear witch hats yet their show somehow worked in the middle of the day (I'm reminded of seeing Ministry play an afternoon slot at Lollapalooza twenty years ago). 60's girl group sound meets riot girl punk.
7. "F*** You" by Cee Lo. I think this is technically from 2010, but I didn't pay attention until Motley Crue tossed in a cover (mashed up with their own, similarly themed "Don't Go Away Mad") at their Detroit show this past summer. Lyrics are completely over the top and the tune is totally addictive.
8. "Forget You" by the Muppets. An all-chicken version of the Cee Lo song from the new Muppet movie. Smartest part of the movie. Repeated listens do NOT get old. Love it.
9. "Future Starts Slow" and "DNA" by the Kills. One of my favorite bands. They get points for sheer consistency--all of their records have been good including the 2011 release "Blood Pressures" (which is getting no end-of-year love). These two tracks show off the drum machine / rock guitar / brooding vocals that form the trinity of the Kills' aesthetic. PS: the band put on an outstanding show in Columbus in July.
10. "Smells Like Teen Spirit" by the Muppets. Second greatest moment in the movie. A barbershop quarter version of the Nirvana classic, complete with Beeker deliving the "libido" line, among others. Also stays fresh upon repeated listens.
1. "East Harlem" by Beirut. Catchy, lilting melodies from a band I decided to sample because of the band name, although they aren't Lebanese. Their 2011 record is pretty good but this is the highlight.
2. "Lonely Boy" by The Black Keys. In 2002 or so, when The White Stripes and Strokes peaked in popularity, this would have been a HUGE hit. Bigger sound than their earlier stuff yet still loyal to that simple, garage aesthetic.
3. "Black Rabbit" by Pujol. Great rock and roll song that deserved to be bigger. Why didn't this get any buzz on avclub, pithfork, et al?
4. "Rolling in the Deep" by Adele. It says something about the lousy state of pop music that when "Rolling in the Deep" comes on the radio, you instantly notice what a beautifully written song it is. But Adele's not just great from a craft and composition perspective. Her voice is lovely and unique and she doesn't feel the need to turn every song into some octave exercise. She gives "Rolling in the Deep" subtlety and nuance.
5. "Otis" by Kanye West and Jay Z. I'll just pick one song from the awesome "Watch the Throne" collaboration. Why not make it the big single? The lyrics couldn't be shallower (gist: we are really, really rich), but the Otis Redding sample is brilliant.
6. "What Can I Do?" by Black Belles. This band killed at the inaugural MI-Fest in September. Band members all dress in black and wear witch hats yet their show somehow worked in the middle of the day (I'm reminded of seeing Ministry play an afternoon slot at Lollapalooza twenty years ago). 60's girl group sound meets riot girl punk.
7. "F*** You" by Cee Lo. I think this is technically from 2010, but I didn't pay attention until Motley Crue tossed in a cover (mashed up with their own, similarly themed "Don't Go Away Mad") at their Detroit show this past summer. Lyrics are completely over the top and the tune is totally addictive.
8. "Forget You" by the Muppets. An all-chicken version of the Cee Lo song from the new Muppet movie. Smartest part of the movie. Repeated listens do NOT get old. Love it.
9. "Future Starts Slow" and "DNA" by the Kills. One of my favorite bands. They get points for sheer consistency--all of their records have been good including the 2011 release "Blood Pressures" (which is getting no end-of-year love). These two tracks show off the drum machine / rock guitar / brooding vocals that form the trinity of the Kills' aesthetic. PS: the band put on an outstanding show in Columbus in July.
10. "Smells Like Teen Spirit" by the Muppets. Second greatest moment in the movie. A barbershop quarter version of the Nirvana classic, complete with Beeker deliving the "libido" line, among others. Also stays fresh upon repeated listens.
11/17/2011
what have I been reading?
Join the Club, by NYTimes' Tina Rosenberg, which I'm reading with my first-year comp students. Rosenberg posits the "social cure" as an effective strategy for social change, telling loads of stories of successful organizing where the success stemmed directly from the social capital gained by a sense of community. Rosenberg argues that peer pressure represents positive potential. Pretty good stuff.
Also reading various texts about Shi'a in Lebanon and Hezbollah specifically. The best has been Max Weiss' In the Shadow of Sectarianism, though I also made my way through Zahera Harb's Channels of Resistance in Lebanon and Eitan Azani's Hezbollah: The Story of the Party of God, the latter providing really useful context but succumbing to significant bias in its discussion of the contemporary situation in "the south." Been doing some extra reading to add to what I'm learning in the Lebanese history class I've been auditing and, ultimately, trying to contextualize my understanding of Mleeta (the "Hezbollah museum"), which I've been trying to write about (may turn into an article).
Also reading various texts about Shi'a in Lebanon and Hezbollah specifically. The best has been Max Weiss' In the Shadow of Sectarianism, though I also made my way through Zahera Harb's Channels of Resistance in Lebanon and Eitan Azani's Hezbollah: The Story of the Party of God, the latter providing really useful context but succumbing to significant bias in its discussion of the contemporary situation in "the south." Been doing some extra reading to add to what I'm learning in the Lebanese history class I've been auditing and, ultimately, trying to contextualize my understanding of Mleeta (the "Hezbollah museum"), which I've been trying to write about (may turn into an article).
Doc on Afghanistan
This film screened on campus yesterday. "Where Soldiers Come From" follows the lives of several young men from the U.P. who join the National Guard, deploy to Afghanistan, and then return to their civilian lives changed. Might be the best documentary I've ever seen. All I can say is please, please, please watch it. PBS is streaming the movie for free. Follow the link.
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